Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Is Stephen Harper saving us from Islamophobia?

Pauline Marois’s proposed “secular charter” that would restrict hijabs while tolerating crucifixes falls into a range of phobic reactions in the West to the “Muslim tide” of immigration, which runs from the truly atrocious to the merely vexatious.

Anders Breivik has been convicted of murdering 77 people in pursuit of his crusade against multiculturalism. In New York City, a court has ordered the transit system to accept an ad that describes Arabs as “savages”. And in recent years here in Canada, we have had a rather silly controversy about whether veiled Muslim women should be allowed to vote, despite the lack of evidence that this has ever been a source of election fraud.

The Globe and Mail journalist, Doug Saunders, has an elegantly written and important new book called The Myth of the Muslim Tide: Do Immigrants Threaten the West? Saunders traces the intellectual roots of Islamophobia in the West, including writers such as Pamela Geller, who is behind the New York bus ads, the controversialist/academic Niall Ferguson, and Canada’s Mark Steyn.

Saunders pays them the compliment of taking them seriously, exploring their arguments and judiciously examining the evidence. Then he demolishes their claims one by one.

    Myth: That Muslim immigrants will swamp some European countries with their higher birth rates. Saunders shows that Muslim immigrants’ fertility falls fairly quickly after arrival.
    Myth: That Muslim immigrants are driven by their religious identity. Saunders shows that in most countries they are only about as religious as their host population. Although British Muslims are an exception, they are also more likely than other Britons to identify strongly with the country and its institutions.
    Myth: That Muslim immigrants are more difficult to assimilate than previous waves of newcomers. Saunders demonstrates that Catholics and Jews who emigrated west in the 19th and 20th centuries were initially despised and condemned in almost identical terms to today’s Muslim immigrants.

Saunders’ book is not particularly focused on Canada; it takes the entire Western world as its canvas. I think that English Canadians reading it may be struck that our experience with Muslim immigration has been less troubled than, say, that of the United States, Britain or France.

Many will disagree, but I think part of the credit goes to Stephen Harper and Jason Kenney. I know, I know. The Harper Conservatives have slaved Canada’s Middle East policy to Israel’s rightist government. And Kenney has not hesitated to fan the veiled-voter nonsense.

But it is worth remembering that the Reform party from which the modern Conservatives sprang was frankly anti-immigration. It was born at a time when the issue of turbans on Mounties was a live one, particularly in rural areas and in Western Canada. And this was very much an element in Reform’s appeal in its breakthrough election in 1993. Although its founder, Preston Manning, was not personally racist, he positioned Reform to appeal to those who were – and overtly racist supporters, like his Toronto candidate John Beck, caused him considerable embarrassment.

In terms of pure politics, Harper obviously recognized that this was an electoral dead end. It closed the party off from huge and growing communities of new Canadians. As Saunders points out in a footnote, Canada is the only Western society in which a majority of both immigrants and the general population support the concept of “multiculturalism” – whatever exactly it may mean.

And so the Conservative party under Harper took a gigantic U-turn on immigration, and Jason Kenney was dispatched to wear all those funny hats that Reform supporters once found so objectionable. He also seems to have consumed a lot of strange smelling food.

It has paid off. In a massive poll taken after the last election, Ipsos Reid found that the Conservatives made a substantial breakthrough among foreign-born Canadians who had been in the country more than a decade.

The Conservatives have not, perhaps needless to say, targeted Muslim Canadians, concentrating rather on recruiting more prosperous Chinese- and Indo- Canadians and members of other longer-established communities. However, by embracing a multi-ethnic society, Harper has reduced the political space within which Islamophobic sentiments flourish.

Contrast Canada’s experience with that of the United States. President George W. Bush was, in Republican terms, a comparative moderate on immigration. Moreover, after September 11, he was always careful to distinguish between the al Qaeda terrorists and the beliefs of ordinary Muslim citizens in the United States.

Once he passed from the scene, however, the Republicans felt license to become a much more openly anti-immigrant party, and with that came a new bolus of Islamophobia. In 2010, there was the ginned up controversy about the so-called Ground Zero mosque (which was neither at Ground Zero, nor a mosque).

During the campaign for this year’s Republican presidential nomination, Herman Cain, at the time the front-runner in the polls, said that most American Muslims were “extremists” and that he would not be comfortable having a Muslim in his cabinet.

More recently, Michele Bachmann, who was also on the carousel of Republican presidential front-runners for a time, has claimed that there is a Muslim Brotherhood conspiracy infiltrating the U.S. government. She has specifically named among her suspects, Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s closest personal aide at the State Department, an Indo-American Muslim born in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Among her other travails, Abedin is married to disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner – who resigned after tweeting pictures of his package to women he didn’t know. Weiner is Jewish and a fierce supporter of Israel. The couple lives in a $3.3 million New York City apartment owned by Jack Rosen, chairman of the Jewish American Congress. The market rent for Abedin and her unemployed husband would reportedly roughly equal her annual salary.  She is obviously in deep cover – and it is not a burka.

That such hysterical talk is not part of our normal political discourse in English Canada is at least in part due to Harper’s pro-immigration and culturally pluralist policies, and of course, his famously disciplined message control.

That is what has empowered English Canadian commentators on the right and the left self-righteously to pour opprobrium onto the head of Pauline Marois, and implicitly on the Quebecers to whom she appeals. From one perspective, that may be a good thing. From another, it may look like a form of hypocrisy in which English Canadians hide from themselves the darker angels of their own society.

Original Article
Source: ipolitics
Author: Paul Adams

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