Neil Bissoondath

Transcription

Steve Paikin: This gentleman here deserves some applause because he's the first brave soul to get in line to ask a question! [applause] S?: Is the microphone... So you can hear me? It's clear? Hello, Mr. Saunders. I'm very grateful for your very candid endorsement of indictment and making very clear that you don't have... You're not endorsing Islam or you're not endorsing any particular religious dogma. The concern I have, the only concern I guess I do have, is that I feel that you have made a category mistake and by that, what I mean is something that Mr. Jonathan Kay brought up earlier about comparing the Muslim immigrants to Western World to Canada or France or Italy or Norway in the past 15 to 20 years with the immigrants that came in 1960s perhaps from India or perhaps, the immigrants even before that from, Jewish people or the Catholics that came to North America. S?: Now, the landscape Mr. Johnathan Kay mentioned is very different than it was in 1950s because of the Internet. You could be an immigrant in Toronto from Pakistan or Bangladesh or Somalia and you have five or six children, and for you, now, there isn't that much incentive. It's more easier for you to hold on. SP: Sir, I love the fact that you went first, but you got to get a question going here. We've got a line up behind you. Let's go. S?: Twenty seconds, sorry. That non-Internet, you could sort of have a imam or senator sort of teacher from Islamabad or Lahore teaching your child how to recite the Koran or rather teachings of whatever Sunni Islam from Islamabad or Lahore is being broadcasted. How can you weigh that in your calculation, in your extrapolation, that the immigrants in Canada or the West, from Pakistan or Bangladesh, will also assimilate as the Indians did in 1960s and '70s and Catholics did before that and Jewish people before that? Steve Paikin: Okay. Doug, you know how... S?: How do you account for that? Doug Saunders: All I'm asking is whether... I'm not trying to project too much because I'm not a great believer in projections of the future, but I am looking at whether these groups are integrating, and I don't use the world "assimilate" I use the word "integrate" 'cause I have a feeling that I haven't assimilated into Canadian culture yet and... But by integration, I mean inclusion in the educational and economic systems of the country and some evidence of support and loyalty to the core values of the secular state and the laws and the values of equality and secularism and so on. DS: And on the balance, I find that they are, with some alarming exceptions. There are things that you allude to that are side effects of this communications problem that are a worry. It is a problem that people from the more, shall we say gentle practices of Islam from the Mughal and Turkish practices are often finding themselves going to mosques where the Imam is Saudi or Egyptian and is practicing a much more acidic version of the faith and are becoming more conservative in that sense. That often has to do with some complicated things involving who's paying the salaries and so on as well as communications networks. So there are issues within the communities. There are tides of beliefs and tides of different practices. I mean, Islam is as very a gated a religion worldwide as Christianity. SP: I'm jumping in here, Doug. I'm going to urge both of you to be more economical with your answers. We've got a long line of people here. DS: Anyway, I am looking at the average across for a reason because I'm combating people who do also look at an average. SP: Yes, sir? S?: I'm wondering if you can comment briefly on the shift in Canadian foreign policy and the impact it's having on public attitudes in Canada. You might recall that... I think it was a year ago, a little over a year ago, the Prime Minister was interviewed by Peter Mansbridge on CBC and he said that the biggest threat to Canadian national security was Islamism and I'm quoting there. And I want to congratulate you, Mr. Saunders, for your excellent piece in The Globe two weeks ago on Canada's decision to sever diplomatic ties with Iran. But I'm wondering in the context of that recent decision, comments by The Prime Minister on national television as he made a year ago, and if you could give me your sense on how this is affecting public attitudes in Canada, and does this mean we need more of what Doug Saunders has to say? DS: Thank you. This can be a little unpopular to say, but I actually think Steven Harper deserves a certain amount of credit for keeping that sort of language and those sort of ideas basically out of his party and out of his government. And I know that there is some set of words during a CBC interview that led... Set people off and so on, but nowhere in policy, including immigration policy, has there been any suggestion of a distrust of Muslims in Canada. We do not have a vocal corner of the conservative party who rail on in the Houses of Parliament about government officials being agents of the Muslim brotherhood and so on, as we do in the United States in the House of Representatives and so on. DS: We do not have prominent leadership candidates in the conservative party who will talk about stealth Sharia as Newt Gingrich and probably four other candidates did during this leadership race, not Mitt Romney fortunately. So, I think you may politically disagree with them and so on and you may suspect that they are backbenchers who harbour some of these intolerant ideas, but really in Canada across the political spectrum these stuff has been kept out. I would make an exception to the provincial politics of Quebec, to be frank, where there has been some of that language lately where the idea and so on. SP: Next question, please. S?: On the topic of parents trying to teach their children traditional values. I work in education innovation and support very diverse schools with very diverse curricula. Is there any fear that that would lead to parents imposing very traditional curricula in schools on their kids and not assimilating? DS: I'm a new Canadian. I've just arrived fresh off the boat and... SP: How long are you away for? DS: Eight years. SP: You were away for eight years? And now you're back? DS: Yes and very good country. [laughter] I'm going to hell. [laughter] Jon, you've written about this, the schools and integration stuff, more than I have and what do you think? Jonathan Kay: One thing is, we live in a jurisdiction Ontario where there's... In terms of public education, there's a larger degree of centralization of curricula and stuff like that and it is very tightly controlled what you can teach and what you can't teach. Also, the limiting factor for a lot of parents, in terms of, sending their kids to private schools religious or not is money. It has nothing to do with religious doctrine because there is no tax credit for sending your kids. And it's actually interesting, the one time I've had meetings in the last few years, where I have had Jewish and Muslims representatives arguing exactly the same cases on the subject of education because I met a Jewish parent who had four kids in private school. He is spending $100,000 in after tax income and you could have a Muslim parent in exactly the same situation, so a lot of people just for purely economic reasons end up sending their kids to public schools. JK: On the other hand, I've also had correspondence with public school teachers in Brampton, for instance, who say that there is this sort of cold war in their school between Muslim and Sikh and Hindu children and a lot of them, despite their young age, are highly knowledgeable in the propaganda originating from their respective communities about stuff that is going on 10,000 miles away. However, I go back to the baseline, it's a very crude measure but the greatest measure of, do we have an integration problem in our society is are people are blowing stuff up? And in Canada and United States the answer is no. JK: If you go on social media, you have this very shrill discussions. You have all kinds of arguments. You listen to Punjabi... I don't speak Punjabi, but every time I read an article about Khalistani Sikhs, my Sikh friends, they're like, "Oh! My God they were talking about you on Punjabi radio." But they talk about me on Punjabi radio, but that's a great thing but I still... Everybody knows where I work, everybody... S?: For not blowing things up, does that mean it's okay. Can we add more diversity to the public school curricula, have more different types of public school... JK: Very skeptically of politically correct heavy-handed efforts at imposing diversity. I think students are very cynical about it. I'm not sure that's the way to go. It has a bad odour about it because of political correctness efforts in the 1990s and such, but maybe Doug has a different feeling on it. DS: I'd rather not have diversity in schools. I grew up in that sort of Helvetica age when Canadian institutions were all sort of like white concrete buildings with signs and the same sort of Swiss tight face, sort of that clean neutral, this building was an example, that I grew up with everyone went to the same school and so on. And I do think, quite fundamentally, that everyone should go to the same schools and that people can develop cultural differences on their own, day by day or week by week or generation by generation, but if it's the official efforts to define and create cultural differences are never a good idea. Strangely working on this book, I almost became against multiculturalism. But not in the way that Anders Behring Breivik and people like that that I read about are they were against the multi and I'm against the culturalism. SP: Let's get to the next one. Thank you, sir. Next question please. S?: Hi! My name is Sean Dalton and I'm writing a book about the three myths of Canadian immigration and you mentioned that the kids of immigrant parents assimilate and do better than the parents. However, Diane Francis wrote a book in 2002 called "'Immigration, the economic case" and there were schools all over Toronto and in parts of Peel where 16 out of the 25 kids in the school didn't speak English whatsoever and the teachers are just so overwhelmed. They didn't know what to do and they felt paralysed, so I'd like to point that out. The second thing I'd like to point out is Canada creates ethnic enclaves of people who segregate from the main stream. S?: Your own newspaper did a poll and they asked the readers, "Is multiculturalism a failed policy?" and 66% of the respondents said it was. Over Europe, Germany, France, the UK and last year Holland declared the multicultural experiment a failure going with the US melting pot model. And the best-selling author from Trinidad who came to Canada in 1973, sold the book called, "Selling illusions, the cult of multiculturalism," it was re-published in 2002. And I wanna know, based on next year's immigration policy, they're gonna assess people for language to give them a job offer. Is that the right direction that Canada's headed in? SP: Thank you. Who wants to... Go head, Jon. JK: Yeah, well, it's interesting you mentioned Neil Bissoondath's book, Selling Illusions, which I read. It came out in the mid '90s and at the time I think it was a very necessary book. Neil Bissoondath lived in Montreal at the time and I think he was writing a corrective to the doctrinaire multiculturalism at the time. And that was what I call hard multiculturalism. It is a multiculturalism that says that all cultural practises are of equal value, regardless of how barbaric we may consider them. So for instance, there were people who were actually arguing that things like female genital mutilation was okay because in the cultures that they originated from, they considered it okay. That was hardcore culture relativism. JK: And Neil Bissoondath's book was in part a corrective to that but we don't have that anymore. I don't know anybody who still embraces full scale cultural relativism in that way, so I agree with you that those books were valuable. Diane Francis has done some valuable journalism but that cultural moment has passed and now to my mind, I'm more concerned about the other... The folks like Breivik and stuff, who're arguing the other side of the coin, which is such a violent argument against multiculturalism that will swing the cultural pendulum to the other side. S?: Thank you, I agree with that. I think people that move to a country should learn about that country's history and embrace the culture completely and speak the language of the majority of the citizens and that way. JK: Have you seen the citizenship test that Jason Kenny's put in place? It so happens that my nanny has actually taken the citizenship test and she became a citizen last year. I'm being very bourgeois talking about my nanny I realize but I've actually learnt an extraordinary amount about the citizenship process and I was delighted to go with her when she became a citizen. It was an extremely proud moment for her and for her family. And the oath she took and the speech that the judge gave, this is out in Scarborough, was actually the sort of speech that would make a 1950s Canadian proud. JK It was all about leaving your ancestral struggles back at home in the old country, it's about being a Canadian, it's about being inclusive, it was given by a judge who was half Ontarian and half Métis. It was a very inspiring speech. The citizenship test that Jason Kenny's put in place is full of all those sorts of things that it sounds like, you will be well disposed toward. The idea that we're living in a society where we don't expect new Canadians to adopt the language is a fantasy from conservative track from the 1990s. We don't live in that Canada anymore, but then thanks in large part to Jason Kenny but... SP: Sir, you're gonna forgive me. You got a long line of people who still want to get out of... You've had a supplementary already. S?: My kick-boxing teacher came from China and all his students went back there because they never spoke English and they felt alienated. He had to move his dojo twice in five years, so that's what happens when people don't... S?: I look forward to your book. SP: Thank you. Next question. S?: Hi there, thank you both very much for coming over tonight. It's an interesting feeling to learn a little more listening to you two than in two weeks of classes. And I promise I will ask you an actual question. Here is my question, do you find the term 'honour killing' creates an artificial divide between Muslims and non-Muslims in Western society? Why is it, if my father killed my mother, it would be termed domestic violence, but in the Islamic community, it would be termed an honour killing? Where do you two personally draw the line between those two things? DS: I think it's I'm not bothered by the term 'honour killing'. Because there is a specific... Look this is extremely rare, and it makes the front page when it happens because of its rarity and not in spite of it. But there is a specific thing where people with extremely intolerant cultural beliefs will actually kill a member of their family because their honour has been besmirched in some religious way. And yeah, of course its domestic violence, when a father kills his daughter, the crime is known as domestic violence and it's just plain murder and so on. But certainly if religion is a factor in it, I don't mind it being described that way and so on. Yeah, you could point out that more Christians were killed in Ontario by botched exorcisms during the last 10 years than Muslims killed by honour killings and so on but that does not mitigate the problem with that and it should be punished simply as a crime and so on. DS: I don't think whether your motives were secular or religious is much of a mitigating factor if you kill a member of your family and so on. But I don't mind it being discussed that way. I do mind when there's a suggestion that this is something coming out of the mainstream beliefs of a lot of people though, and so on. I think the people who do that are probably crazy and the cases that I've read about tend to be people who've come in as refugees from very troubled places, and so on, not through the immigration system. And I would say probably what ever they went through that made them to go insane and religion becomes an excuse for insanity sometimes. SP: Jon? JK: The book to read on this subject, from my opinion, from a Canadian perspective is by a woman named Aruna Papp, who is a Canadian activist here in Toronto. She's of Indian extraction and it's very interesting because she herself comes from the Seventh-day Adventist background and she writes about honour killings that took place in India in the Seventh-day Adventist community. It is not strictly a Muslim phenomenon, although statistically it is primarily Muslim because of the regions of the world where it takes place. It takes place in Christian communities. It sometimes takes in Hindu communities. JK: However, I do think there's an important distinction to be made between garden variety domestic violence killings and honour killings. Garden variety domestic violence killings typically take place in mutually violent domestic relationships where there's alcohol abuse, where there's a long standing pattern of battery, man against woman, sometimes there's mental health issues, joblessness. There's the whole cocktail of these sort of things. And it usually involves one person, usually involves a man beating a woman. JK: Honour killings are completely different. They typically involve a conspiracy well planned by people who aren't drunk or have serious mental health issues. It usually involves in-laws. It involves multiple family members. We saw this in the Aqsa Parvez case. And the factors involved are completely different from those involving garden variety domestic abuse. It's not dysfunctionality and substance abuse. It is a conspiracy that is based on the cultural idea that a family's honour can be safeguarded by killing a woman who breaches an honour code. And I don't think these people are crazy because they have made a rational calculation that the preservation of their family's honour is a form of capital that they need to retain and the best way to retain it is by exterminating the woman. And it is completely different from ordinary domestic violence. SP: Thank you. Next question. S?: Yeah. I read this piece in the Economist, it was a couple months ago and I apologize for quoting stats that I vaguely remember from a couple of months ago. But what it looked at was that in America, when you exclude 9/11, that more acts of terrorism had been committed in the name of right wing extremism, however you wanna define that, than had been done in the name of Islam. And of course the article said, "Well, we should address that more." And it seems to me and this is somewhat opinion-y, when Anders Breivik kills a bunch of people, we talked about how insane Anders Breivik is and less about his ideology. And it turned out, according to the courts, he's not insane. S?: But there is a lot of right wing extremism. People like Timothy McVeigh, a guy that killed a bunch of Sikhs recently. This happens but it seems, again this is... I apologize, this is a question mixed with opinion, but it seems that with other forms of extremism, we put it on the individual when the question is what's wrong with this individual? Whereas if it happens with Islam it's treated like a homogeneous thing. Why, assuming you agree with my assertions, when it's Islam it's a homogeneous issue and when it's other forms of extremism, it's always focused on the individual? SP: Do you agree with this premise, do we do that? DS: Jihadist or whatever you wanna call it, terrorism, Islamic extremist terrorism is a pretty rare phenomenon in both Europe and in North America compared to other forms of extremist terrorism. In Europe, most terrorism is of the nationalist or domestic political variety. In the United States, there've been so few cases that it's hard to measure it against background noise of other forms of terrorism. That doesn't mean it isn't a very specific threat and problem that needs to be faced by law enforcement agencies and so on. Do we treat it differently? I think one of the things I'm addressing is that there is a belief that it's arising out of ordinary religious beliefs rather than being a very separate political movement. DS: One thing we know from all of the statements made by every Islamic extremist terrorist from Osama bin Laden downward is that they're not really religious proselytizers who are using their violence to try to convert people which would be a particularly ineffective technique by the way. They are people who believe in a land of Islam and in the honour of this geographical space and believe it's been besmirched or invaded in some way and believe that there is a civilizational war and that it's worthwhile to commit violence against civilians in order to further this. So, it's a fringe thing. I think because it's new and because it's alarming it does get more attention and probably deserves to in certain ways. And I think they were right not to judge Breivik as being insane but as being... Look, anyone who commits this is insane in some ways. I mean... I think John and I are using the word "insane" slightly differently. But... [chuckle] JK: We're in the same place. DS: In the criminal court's definition to be judged criminally insane you have to show that you are not able to recognize the law essentially, that you're not cognisant of that. Anyone able to carry out an act of terrorism usually has enough mental function going on to know what the law is. SP: Part of my job here this evening is to make sure we stay on time. So we've got time for two more questions. The gentleman and then the lady behind him, and then I'm afraid I'm gonna have to pull the plug at that point. So go ahead, sir. S?: Thanks for coming out. I'm a big fan of both you guys. You talked a little bit earlier about how failure for integration often is the fault of the host country. You point out examples such as Turks in Germany versus in Britain. What sort of policies do you think that governments can promote either in terms of citizenship, immigration, economic policies, criminal policies that positively promote integration? DS: This is a crucial question, right? And... I think generally, immigrant communities vaguely want to integrate in some ways. People do not like being excluded outsiders. People do not really come to a country thinking, "I'm going to ghettoize myself off to the side and be much poorer than everyone else, and live in a bad neighbourhood." That's generally not the aspiration. Sometimes people don't because they really don't know how to work the system, and the system doesn't help them work it and they get stuck. Sometimes they come because they're expecting an economic opportunity that doesn't exist and so on. Sometimes, in ways that I've written about elsewhere, because the physical spaces of cities, mean that the places where immigrants first arrive are disconnected physically and economically in ways that leave them stuck and so on. DS: There's ways to overcome that. The barriers in the way of integration are physical sometimes. If you're stuck up in an apartment block neighbourhood, 12 bus rides away from the city, it can be bad for you. And I actually say the kids who were in that Al-Qaeda cell based out of Meadowvale were subject a little bit to that. There are citizenship problems that we discussed before. If you do not... The most dangerous thing for a country is to have a group of people living in a long-term basis in your midst who have no pathway to full legal citizenship because that prevents them from investing in their communities, from buying houses, going to university, doing all the things that we call integration. SP: Jon, you want a word on this one? DS: And there are educational things as well. JK: I think that sums it up. SP: Okay. S?: Thanks. SP: Thanks for the question. Last one, thank you. S?: My question isn't very different from that one actually. I was just wondering what type of policies do you think... Have you seen work in other areas of the world that you think that Canada should potentially model? And the other question is, I'm an urban planner, so I'm interested in this relationship between your first book and this book, and how we can actually use space to promote integration? DS: I've spent a good amount of time looking at the European cities that are so often described as being no-go zones and so on. And some of them are, some of them are troubled neighbourhoods and so on. One of the things I look at toward the end of this book is a neighbourhood where I spent several months last year in, just north of the train station, in Antwerp, that had become a troubled place. I mean a lot of the Moroccan and Turkish youth had fallen into crime, sometimes into religious extremism, and it was a failed place. DS: And just to cut to the quick on this. I realized after spending a while there, what it reminded me of, and it reminded me of the part of East London known as Tower Hamlets or Brick Lane in the popular imagination now. When I first lived there briefly in the 1980s for a couple of years when I was 19 and 20 years old, and that was a dangerous neighbourhood that you didn't go to at night very much that had gangs, it had riots, it had people protesting in-favour of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, all this. Like very alarming, isolated civilization sort of stuff going on, as well as poverty and disease and all that. DS: And somehow yet, over 25 years, it changed. It became the place where everybody wants to go. It became what's widely regarded as a successful integration story and so on. It turned around, partly because of time and economic growth, frankly, but also partly because of some smart policies in... Particularly education. I mean, the putting of expensive charter schools in those neighbourhoods that the business community invested in and that were better than the schools. Not just better than the schools in immigrant neighbourhoods, but were better than the schools in the rich neighbourhoods, so that the kids, the immigrant kids in the neighbourhood were no longer competing to get out of school quickly enough, but actually had to compete to get into their own neighbourhood school. It was very good. DS: There were a bunch of policies that worked very well. And I'd say that we have a suite of ideas coming from the more successful cities that should be examined sort of in terms of best practises by those places that think that they're just stuck with bad immigrants. SP: Jon, you want a final word tonight? JK: I live in Broadview and Danforth. 50 years ago if you went to Broadview and Danforth, you'd hear a lot of Greek. And the area, I think, was mostly Greek at that time. The churches were Greek Orthodox. And, it was a ghetto as we would now define the term. Now, if you go there, I think the Greek population is something like 10%. A lot of these people have migrated out to the suburbs. They cashed out ridiculous prices. [laughter] Yeah. And they are just laughing all the way to the bank. [laughter] But you still see... You see a residue of the Greek there. You see the restaurants and you do see some Greek residents there. But if Doug is right, 20 or 30 years from now, I will be seeing the same pattern in areas of Europe, Canada, United States, which are now primarily Muslim. And I think for rational analysis of that, I think his book is a very good place to start. SP: As I invite Tina to come up and close it off tonight, I thought these guys for a couple of nerdy newspaper guys, did pretty well here. What do you think? [laughter] [applause] SP: Very good. Thank you. Well done, well done.