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'The reality is, this kind of mindset results in death we've seen it in London, Quebec City and Toronto'

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Anti-hate activists say there are troubling indications that some of those accused of a murder conspiracy linked to the Coutts border blockade are white supremacist extremists who pose a growing threat to Canadians.

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Those comments come after four Albertans were charged with conspiracy to commit murder, and a host of others with firearms and mischief offences after more than a dozen rifles and handguns and body armour were seized from three trailers in Coutts on Monday.

What grabbed the attention of anti-racism activists were patches attached to the two sets of body armour seized by Mounties and displayed in a photo supplied to journalists.

One of them displayed the word infidel with Arabic script translating to kaffir a logo worn by white supremacists and Islamophobes, said Mustafa Farooq, CEO of the National Council of Canadian Muslims.

Its used by white supremacists who believe therell be an apocalyptic war . . . for many years theres been a growth of these kinds of groups, said Alberta native Farooq.

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The reality is, this kind of mindset results in death weve seen it in London, Quebec City and Toronto.

One of those murders was of Mohammed Aslim Zafis, 58, who was stabbed outside an Etobicoke, Ont., mosque in September 2020.

Farooq said he rushed to that scene and saw the mans almost decapitated body soon after the slaying.

Were certainly not suggesting all the protesters are racist but its hard to deny some of the organizers are Islamophobic or white supremacist, he said.

A patch on another armoured vest sports the so-called diagolon crest thats been linked to extreme right-wing anti-government groups, said Peter Smith, a researcher with the Canadian Anti-Hate Network.

If you see this, it tells you that you belong to a network of people who believe in this broad web of conspiracy theories, and theyve all been very supportive of the blockade, said Smith.

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I was (initially) surprised to see it, but then it all made sense so it wasnt shocking.

The day after charges were laid, the Coutts protesters, who said they werent associated with those arrested, ended the blockade in opposition to COVID-19 restrictions that had lasted more than two weeks.

Charged with conspiracy to commit murder, possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose and mischief are Christopher Lysak of Lethbridge, Anthony Olienick of Claresholm, Chris Carbert of Lethbridge and Jerry Morin of Olds.

Lysak is also charged with uttering threats.

Charged with mischief and the same weapons offence are Joanne Person, 62, of Coutts, Raymond residents Justin Martin, Eastin Oler, Janx Zaremba and Evan Colenutt, Calgarian Johnson Chichow Law, Luke Berk of Red Deer, Ursula Allred of Magrath and Jaclyne Martin.

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Police said an example of the militant mindset of a small segment of the protest arose Sunday night around 8 p.m. when a semi and a large tractor attempted to ram a police vehicle. The officer was able to manoeuvre his vehicle out of the way.

Mounties allege the armed group planned to target them if they moved to break up the blockade.

In a Feb. 5 Facebook post, suspect Carbert urged material support for the Coutts blockaders and expressed his pride in being one of them.

We need to remember that this isnt only for Canada and our families but for the whole world. I dont know about you but I have never been so proud to be Canadian, lets never give up and be the example for the world, he stated.

He also posted a photo Feb. 5 of a huge Canadian flag hung at a Coutts bar signed by protesters and their supporters, among them Justin Martin, Eastin Oler and Evan Colenutt, the same names as three of the Raymond men charged.

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Another signed pureblood.

Also scrawled on the flag was SlyFox Lethbridge, a social media handle for Lysak of Lethbridge, said a spokesman for the Canadian Anti-Hate Network who said Lysak is well-known to the watchdog group.

The trailers containing the seized firearms were parked on the Coutts property of Person, who was described as very nice by a neighbour who declined to give her name.

Im guessing she didnt know they had any firearms, said the woman.

Coutts Mayor Jim Willett said he, too, was shocked by the discovery on Persons property and by all of the charges.

There was a singular jaw-dropping people here had to pick their teeth off the floor, said Willett, adding he picked up a COVID-19 infection, presumably from mingling with the border protesters.

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But he said the presence of an allegedly armed group attached to or attracted by the protest was more likely as the standoff dragged on, adding its probably untrue many of them were unknown to the main body of blockaders.

The idea that they were all strangers to everybody in the convoy probably isnt true, said Willett, noting most of those charged were from south of Calgary.

Its pretty easy to imagine thered be a nodding acquaintance.

On his Facebook page, Berk posted numerous photos and a video of the Coutts blockade dating to the end of January.

Very glad to be part of something I strongly believe in . . . the best event Ive ever been part of, wrote Berk.

He also castigated COVID-19 public health restrictions as government oppression.

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We are all outraged if someone does this, its domestic abuse but when the government does it, its not? he said.

A Calgary pastor who prominently resisted COVID-19 restrictions at his church lauded the protest as a stand against oppression, a message he delivered in person to the blockaders at Coutts.

I can say that all the people I met there were people of honour, integrity, and character. They are fathers serving their own families and all the citizens of this country, Tim Stephens, pastor at the Fairview Baptist Church, said in an email Wednesday.

The RCMP was clear that there was a small group unrelated to the main protest that neither I nor the protesters at Coutts want any association.

On Wednesday, federal Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino said invoking the Emergencies Act two days earlier was partly in response to the threat posed by extremists at Coutts.

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We need to be clear-eyed about the seriousness of these incidents and, indeed, several of the individuals at Coutts have strong ties to a far-right extreme organization with leaders who are in Ottawa, he said.

Meanwhile, in Lethbridge provincial court, the last of 13 people charged by Mounties in connection with the seizure of a large cache of ammunition and firearms at the protest had his first appearance dealt with.

Eight of the protesters have been granted bail, while Carbert, Lysak, Olienick and Colenutt are due back in court Friday.

With files from Kevin Martin and The Canadian Press

BKaufmann@postmedia.com

Twitter: @BillKaufmannjrn

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Activists say some suspects arrested at Coutts have white supremacist links - Calgary Herald

The political world is mired in must-watch political theater in Canada, where the government announced this week that banks could freeze the personal and corporate accounts of those who they believe to be involved in the trucker protest without due process.

In Washington, the Senate is debating whether to impose sanctions against Russia due to a potential Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Senate is also gearing up for another U.S. Supreme Court nomination process. And in San Francisco, three school board members were recalled.

But with these sideshows going, the world continues to spin. People get up and go to work; students go to school; mothers and fathers care for their children; people go to church and volunteer in their communities. This has led me to think about the incredible resilience of our government, and how thankful I am that I was born in our great nation.

I love the freedom we have to travel between states, to speak our minds, to bear arms, to practice religion, to work whatever job we want in whatever location we want. I love the freedom to vote for our government and to protest when we disagree with those who are in power. I love that we are the most welcoming country in the world, that we stand up for human rights violations and that we desire to be the shining light upon the hill.

We are a nation of adventure seekers, creators and entrepreneurs. We work best as a nation when our citizens are working, and today we have a booming economy that brings with it business opportunity.

But the freedoms we enjoy were earned through the American Revolution, the American Civil War, World Wars I and II and the numerous other conflicts our military engages in on an ongoing basis to keep us free. It takes only a cursory look at international news to understand that our freedoms are not enjoyed by many. The crackdown in Hong Kong, the Chinese government's human rights violations against Uyghurs, the suppression of women in Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrawal and the dictatorship in North Korea all are examples of government structures that lead to oppression and loss of freedom.

So, too, today we must ensure that our freedoms are not encroached. Mask mandates should be removed from schools; people should be able to travel and gather freely; and we should work hard to ensure that every voter's vote is counted. We have to remember that we have been through much worse before.

George Washington led us through the Revolutionary War and survived the French and Indian War, even though two horses were shot out from under him and four bullets pierced his clothes. It is doubtful that we could have won our freedom without Washington.

President Abraham Lincoln, who shepherded our nation through the Civil War, understood that he was an instrument in the hand of God. He delivered the Gettysburg Address on Nov. 19, 1863, to dedicate the battlefield where over 50,000 soldiers had been killed, wounded, captured or reported missing.

In the speech, which runs about 272 words, Lincoln never said "I" or "me." Instead, he took his audience from the past to the present and lay down a challenge: "that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

We withstood the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and still work today to secure our individual freedoms through the political process. While we are not a perfect nation, we are the best nation on earth. However, Lincoln had it right, as did President John F. Kennedy, who said, "And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."

This is not only a request to simply show up and vote but also a challenge for us to get involved in our local communities, to work together to solve problems and to speak highly of our nation. While this requires extra work, it's worth it.

I've been involved in nonprofit community groups for over two decades. This experience "has framed my belief that limited government is most effective and that solutions emerge when people, communities, corporations, and foundations come together and work together," I wrote in my 2019 book "Our Broken America: Why Both Sides Need to Stop Ranting and Start Listening."

Yes, political drama surrounds us. We would do well to ignore it. I am still incredibly grateful to be an American. Now, let's get to work in our communities to make a difference.

To find out more about Jackie Gingrich Cushman, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit http://www.creators.com.

Photo credit: Ronile at Pixabay

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Freedom Is Worth the Effort, by Jackie Cushman - Creators Syndicate

The Muslim woman is simultaneously hyper-present and absolutely invisible from Indian politics. She is at once nowhere to be seen in the parliament, and she is also the one who fills the discussions of all political spaces. She has been declared invisible for her choice of clothing and yet she is the only one they can see when there is a question on autonomy.

Hundreds of young boys and girls marched on the streets of Karnataka with saffron shawls on their shoulders to protest against the entry of hijab-clad students into classrooms and yet there was no debate on their agency. No one is worried about their conditioning, and no one is asking who is brainwashing them.

Also read:As Muslim Women Fight for Justice, Time for the Republic to Speak

A young woman named Muskan drives on her two-wheeler to her school by herself and faces a mob of saffron-clad men who are marching towards her chanting Jai Sri Ram. A slogan that has been repeatedly used during anti-Muslim violence. Allah hu Akbar, she shouts back, courageously standing her ground and asserting her religious identity fearlessly, and yet it is her agency that becomes the topic of prime-time debates.

A lazy and a dishonest debate

The rational faculties of Indian intellectuals have been violently shaken after this incident who seem very uncomfortably divided on how to emancipate the Muslim woman now.

The Muslim woman, after all, remains the most favourite emancipation project of people across the political spectrum. The nationalist man wants to emancipate her, by taking her hijab off her while the progressive man is busy writing the words that she should utter when she is faced with an intimidating mob.

How is it so that every time there is an orchestrated attack on the Muslim body for its religious symbols, the progressive society stays entangled in debating the validity of that symbol itself?

Not so long ago, it was the meat in Akhlaqs fridge that became the subject of debates, and not the fact that he was lynched in a broad daylight. Years later, today it is the choice of words that were uttered by Muskaan in her protest, which has confused the civil society. One wonders if there was anything learned, ever.

Somehow it is always the Muslim who has to prove her perfect victimhood. The perpetrator enjoys impunity not just from his own ilk but also from a confused civil society, which refuses to join the dots to see the larger patterns of approaching apartheid.

Also read:Indias Left Liberals Need an Urgent Mid-Stream Correction

We are stuck on a debate of conditioning versus choice in the matter of hijab. For a nation that has been under a very clear majoritarian communal fever, this debate seems just as lazy as dishonest. I wonder if the progressive section does anything more than justifying a comfort zone that it has built for itself.

Are we even at a point in history where we can afford to look at this attack in isolation?

This is not the first instance when a religious marker of Muslims has been used against them to exclude them from a larger social structure. From eating habits to beard, skull caps, and now hijab, it is clear that these are attempts to criminalise and racialise an entire community. As Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley have written, anti-semitism always involved a process in which cultural attributes were racialised, seen as encompassing everything for which the Jews stood.

One only has to see the fragmented Indian cities to witness the reality of this. Religious markers have constantly been used to segregate Muslims and isolate them in their ghettos, the story of which later gets to be told as self-segregation practiced by conservative/unsociable Muslims. The rule of division has always been central to the functioning of cruel regimes.

Protest against the NRC-CAA in Mumbra, Thane. Photo: PTI

In a country where Muslim women as a social group have abysmally low levels of education, the lowest work participation rate among all categories of work in the economy and a marginal presence in salaried jobs, such a move (hijab ban in this case) does raise question on the intentions of a government that has worked so hard on advertising itself as the saviour of the Muslim woman.

It is the same government that declared August 1 as Muslim womens rights day corresponding to the day when parliament passed the triple talaq law. It is also the same government that abrogated Article 370 in Kashmir and celebrated it as a victory for Kashmiri women who could finally now pass property to their children if they wished to marry men of non-Kashmiri origin.

When the perpetrator of Bulli Bai was caught, there was an active attempt to dissociate the acts of the criminal from the wider ideological structure to show that it was an act of a disturbed pervert, one rotten apple from the lot.

An article in The Hindu described the mastermind behind the Bulli bai app as an online troll and a lone wolf. The article also expanded on the political affiliation of the people in his family, who happen to be Congress supporters.

How is it that even after being a criminal, his identity is given a free pass and his ideological leaning is still given a benefit of doubt, but the faintest assertion of identity by a Muslim is thrown under a microscope for evaluation of the validity of her victimhood?

Confused civil society

Islamophobia, like other forms of racism, cannot be seen only as a problem of hate crimes committed by lone extremists. The acts of individual perpetrators can only be made sense of if they are seen as the product of a wider culture, in which glorifying racial violence is acceptable.

Is it really the hijab of the Muslim that should be under scrutiny or the value system of this society where progressiveness has an aesthetic criterion? Civil society should be critically asking itself: Who designed the ideal outfit of the progressive woman? and Who are they unconsciously answering to when they are scared to stand with a minority community facing such segregation?

There are two definitions that exist for the Indian Muslim. While the nationalists adhere to a rigid definition of a Muslim who cannot escape the fate of ultimately becoming a disloyal traitor, the more progressive section gives a pass to a certain category of Muslim a Muslim who does not associate herself with her faith.

Also read:Dear Prime Minister, If You Really Stand With Muslim Women, Dont Tell Us What To Wear

In either case, Islamophobia remains a completely unexplored territory of their unconscious selves. In neither of the cases, the Muslim subject has the permission to assert her protest with anything that resembles her religious background.

For ages, the protests of Muslims have been more apologetic than honest, in the hope of appearing more moderate than antagonistic. Perhaps because the rules of belonging and alienation differ across the religious borders. If it is always the Muslim who has to bear the weight of secularism on her shoulder, then do we even qualify for a secular nation?

An oppressive regime can never function without the consent of its majority. If constant attacks by the right-wing on the Muslim body still confuse civil society, then it should mean there is an implicit resignation of protest in the majority.

It should indicate there is something shared between the sensibilities of the right-wing and the progressive society of India that blinds them to the overall pattern of majoritarian domination. Oppression is not just outright denial of rights, it is also constant suspicion and it is also constant denial of agency.

Sara Ather is an architect based in Germany and India.

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Make No Mistake, Progressive Indians Too Have Problems With Overt Muslimness - The Wire

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During the Great Depression, impoverished First World War veterans came to Washington desperate for help. Instead, the president turned the troops on them. In Ottawa, protesters with little to justify their acts, occupy the centre of the capital. Compare and contrast the reaction.

In the teeth of the Great Depression, thousands of demonstrators descended on Washington. They wanted the federal government to honour a promise and they vowed to stay until it did.

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In May 1932, they occupied abandoned federal buildings around Pennsylvania Avenue. Most made camp on the expansive flats across the Anacostia River. They remained there two months until Herbert Hoover, the embattled president running for re-election against Franklin Roosevelt, ordered in the military.

It was called the Bonus March. The marchers veterans, sympathizers and their families were known as the Bonus Army. Without work or means, the veterans demanded early payment of a bonus they had been promised in 1924 for serving in the First World War.

This was a mass protest in the seat of government that was put down violently. Given the occupation of Ottawa 90 years later, its useful to see how Americans handled things then. Compare and contrast, as our venerable grade three teacher, Miss Aphrodite Christie, used to say.

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The Bonus March is a challenge to self-righteous American conservatives Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham among them who see only dictatorship in Stalinist Canada. When the U.S. faced a challenge to its authority by protesters with a strong grievance, it showed no tolerance.

The Bonus Army came to Washington from across the country on train, truck and foot. The veterans wanted Congress to pay them a bonus that would not come due until 1945; they needed it now. The House agreed on June 15, but the Senate said no. They were offered money to go home.

The veterans had created makeshift shanty towns, an orderly encampment with prohibitions against panhandling, unruliness and drinking. Sympathetic folks provided food and cigarettes. Among them were radicals who saw a chance to exploit the situation.

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The police and marchers treated each other respectfully. In a devastated country, veterans wanted a break. They were not revolutionaries overthrowing the government, though that was how Hoover conveniently painted them.

On July 28, Hoover sent in a force led by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, aided by Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton. Wearing full dress uniform, on horseback, leading soldiers wielding swords and tear gas, MacArthur moved on the camps. He was accompanied by something ominous: tanks armed with machine guns.

The soldiers turned on the veterans, beating and burning. Two died; scores were injured. Smoke hung over the city.

Worried the assault was getting out of hand, Hoover sent word to stop. MacArthur ignored the order, as he ignored Harry Truman years later in the Korean War.

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The point is that authorities saw in the Bonus Army only insurrection and revolution. Hoover called them Communists and criminals. In the 1960s, this is how worried whites in the South saw civil rights activists: outsiders, agitators, Commies.

So, what do we conclude today? The Bonus Marchers were overwhelmingly honourable veterans seeking a measure of compassion. The government didnt have to pay them their money early, but it could have. Instead, it turned on them.

In Ottawa, we see protesters who claim their freedom has been denied, as if theyre forced to get a vaccine. Theyre not. Truckers are told, as a public health measure, they cannot cross the border if they dont. They say their freedom to protect themselves with no basis in science is greater than the freedom of society to protect itself.

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For three weeks they have occupied the centre of our national capital. Rest assured, the Freedom Convoyers are not the Freedom Riders.

Weaponizing their trucks, they create unbearable noise, spew exhaust, set off fireworks. Amid their bouncy castles and hot tubs, they intimidate residents and journalists. Many are menacing.

And now that the agents of the federal government prepare to evict them, expect the protesters to call themselves martyrs and patriots, crying oppression and injustice. Its theatre.

Note to crowing American conservatives: These are not the proud foot soldiers of the Bonus Army of 1932, smeared and suppressed by MacArthurs soldiers, turning on their own. They are Canadas misguided, mistaken brigade of 2022.

Andrew Cohen is a journalist, professor at Carleton University, and author of Two Days in June: John F. Kennedy and the 48 Hours That Made History.

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Cohen: When America used the army against the peaceful protesters of the 1932 'Bonus March' - Ottawa Citizen

A conservative report critiquing Tennessee universities emphasis on diversity, equity and inclusion is circulating the state Legislature, and some lawmakers believe it is the impetus for a bill blocking critical race theory in state colleges.

House Bill 2670 sponsored by House Speaker Cameron Sexton and backed by Lt. Gov. Randy McNally is similar to the critical race theory law passed in 2021, a measure that caused an uproar in the Legislature and hard feelings over the teaching of historical horrors such as the Holocaust and American slavery.

The higher education bill is designed to protect students and staff who disagree with so-called divisive concepts and ideologies and enables them to challenge universities in court for trying to indoctrinate them in views that the white race should feel bad for oppressing the Black race for centuries.

The legislation isnt necessarily based on the report being passed around by lawmakers, Critical Social Justice in Tennessee Higher Education: An Overview. But it provides insight into the mindset lawmakers are developing after receiving the information.

The report calls for lawmakers to take several steps against universities, including reducing funding to those that emphasize diversity, equity and inclusion, saying those words are now used to divide the world into aggrieved minorities and oppressive majorities.

This narrow ideological view is diverting universities away from their core mission toward a mission of leftist activism, the report states.

It contends many Tennessee public universities are dedicating themselves to the ideology and points toward the University of Tennessee-Knoxville as the primary offender, reporting it has more administrators working on critical social justice than the rest of the UT system combined.

UT-K has a strategic plan for diversity, equity and inclusion and nine administrators in 11 colleges whose main role is handling those parts of critical social justice, according to the report.

The report is written by Arthur Milikh, executive director of The Claremont Institutes Center for the American Way of Life, Anna Miller, education policy director at the Idaho Freedom Foundation, and Susan Kaestner of Middle Tennessee, founding director of Velocity Convergence and president of the Tennessee Forum, which has lobbied for school choice, collective bargaining reform and transparency for the Tennessee School Board Association.

House Bill 2670 would prohibit universities from taking action against students and staff who disagree with professors or colleges over divisive concepts and ideologies or political viewpoints.

The bill also would revise the duties of university employees whose primary duties involve diversity and require institutions to publish surveys of students and employees to assess the campus climate on the diversity of thought and comfort with speaking freely on campus.

State Rep. Ron Gant, a Fayette County Republican carrying the legislation for Sexton, passed the bill Tuesday through the House Higher Education Subcommittee.

Gant explained the measure is designed to increase freedom of speech on campuses. At the same time, it prohibits adverse treatment of students or employees for refusing to consent to a certain ideology, he said.

Some lawmakers consider it a higher education version of legislation the General Assembly passed in 2021 prohibiting critical race theory in K-12 schools. That theory, which has been taught mainly in law schools, deals with systemic racism in America, such as redlining, which for decades stopped Black families from buying homes in predominantly white neighborhoods.

State Rep. Antonio Parkinson, a Memphis Democrat who voted against the bill Tuesday, said he believes it is part of the whole push to get rid of critical race theory, which he calls a dog whistle for Republicans because the concept wasnt being taught in K-12 schools when it was outlawed.

It gives our colleagues across the aisle a rallying cry. Initially we looked at it as youre trying to oppress the true history that has occurred and the problems that have occurred in the U.S., and youre not going to be able to suppress that. Historys stories have already told that, Parkinson says.

He contends the report that appears to be helping fuel the legislation is more information from conservative think tanks designed to create some energy for conservative legislators to pass legislation and use this as the basis for their facts.

The legislation defines divisive concepts as those that exacerbate and inflame divisions based on sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, national origin or other ways contrary to the unity of the country.

The list of divisive concepts is similar to the list of prohibited teachings spelled out in the critical race theory law. The legislation mainly prohibits blaming the white race for the oppression of Black Americans over the past 400-plus years through slavery or segregationist laws.

For instance, students couldnt be taught that a person is inherently privileged, racist, sexist or oppressive because of race or sex; or, that a person bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex; or Tennessee and the United States are fundamentally or irredeemably racist or sexist.

The bill also prohibits teaching that promotes or advocates the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, as well as race or sex scapegoating, in which members of a race or sex would be considered inherently racist.

State universities would not be allowed to penalize, discriminate against or mistreat a student or employee for refusal to support or believe in any of those divisive concepts. In addition, a student or employee could not be required to endorse a specific ideology or viewpoint to be eligible for hiring, tenure, promotion or graduation.

Anyone who believes theyve been mistreated could file a lawsuit against the university, according to the bill.

During debate Tuesday, Parkinson asked how the legislation would mesh with Gov. Bill Lees plan for Michigan-based Hillsdale College, a private, Christian institution, to come up with a UT civics program based on informed patriotism.

Gant responded that he didnt want to intersect the two pieces of legislation but noted he would answer those questions when he introduces Lees bill on the Hillsdale College civics plan.

Speaker Sextons office did not respond immediately Wednesday to questions about the legislation.

Sen. Mike Bell, a Riceville Republican, said Wednesday he is carrying the measure for Lt. Gov. McNally.

Bell referred questions to McNally and declined to give specific incidents within Tennessee universities that spurred the bill.

I think its just the general atmosphere were seeing in education right now, Bell said.

University of Tennessee spokeswoman Melissa Tindell said Wednesday the university doesnt mandate or advocate the divisive concepts identified in the legislation. She noted issues of diversity and divisive concepts have been widely conflated and are not the same.

We support diversity and engagement, and we do not mandate or promote any ideology, she said in a statement to Tennessee Lookout.

Tindell did point out the the bill recognizes academic freedom and First Amendment rights, mainly freedom of speech, as well as state and federal requirements to train students and employees on non-discrimination and the need to comply with academic accreditation standards.

The Critical Social Justice report contends the definitions of diversity, equity and inclusion have changed in universities. For instance, diversity now means more members of oppressed groups than members of supposedly oppressive groups. In a curriculum, diversity means replacing books written by while males with authors of historically underrepresented groups, the report says.

The word equity once meant fairness before the law, but now it stands for statistical group parity, according to the report. In other words, since blacks make up 13% of the population, they should be 13% of engineers, it says.

Inclusion, meanwhile, is defined as elevating the well-being of aggrieved minorities at the expense of the supposed privileged.The report contends UT-Knoxville went from almost no diversity, equity and inclusion infrastructure in 2018 to a fully built-out DEI infrastructure in the span of four years. It has significant plans to spread this narrow ideology into all corners of the university.

It also claims the report shows how UT-K went woke as a cautionary tale for what is happening at other Tennessee universities.

In response, UTs Tindell calls the report inaccurate, saying the university is not catering to oppressed groups as the study claims.

The conclusions seem to be based on subjective criteria, made-up definitions, and the opinions of the authors she says. It draws conclusions from information received through records requests or online, and the authors made no attempt to understand the context of the information through questions or interviews.

The goal of UTs diversity, equity and inclusion program is to provide quality educational opportunities for all people of this state, Tindell says.

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Conservative report affects higher education anti-diversity bill Tennessee Lookout - Tennessee Lookout

Nobody cares about whats happening to the Uyghurs, Chamath Palihapitiya, a billionaire part owner of the Golden State Warriors, said last month on a podcast. Im telling you a very hard, ugly truth, okay. Of all the things I care about, yes, it is below my line. Supply chains are above this venture capitalists line, but any concern for human rights abroad is a luxury belief. In a statement, the Warriors tried to disown Palihapitiya, who then tried to disown himself, with the transparently false self-criticism that public figures issue when their views get them in trouble. In re-listening to this weeks podcast, I recognize that I come across as lacking empathy, he said, betraying that his main concern was for his own image. To be clear, my belief is that human rights matter, whether in China, the United States, or elsewhere. Full stop.

Of course, Palihapitiya was telling the truth the first time. He doesnt care about the Uyghurs. Nor does Golden State, which didnt mention them in the teams statement. Nor does the NBA, which avoids and even suppresses criticism of China because of the billions of dollars that the league makes from Chinese contracts. Nor do most NBA players, whose silence is bought by lucrative endorsement deals with companies doing business in China, including ones whose sportswear is made with cotton produced by Uyghur slave labor. Tucker Carlson likes to attack NBA stars such as LeBron James for speaking out about racial injustice in America while avoiding any mention of mass rape and torture in Xinjiang province. But Carlson doesnt care about human rights, either, or he would stop mouthing Russian propaganda while the countrys dictator, Vladimir Putin, prepares to invade its democratic neighbor, Ukraine.

Read: One by one, my friends were sent to the camps

Ted Cruz and Mike Pompeo hammer China for its mistreatment of Uyghurs, but they also supported Trump-administration policies that kept desperate Muslim refugees out of this country; they champion democracy in Hong Kong, but they degrade it in the U.S. by challenging the results of the 2020 election. President Joe Biden and his aides often talk about putting human rights at the center of American foreign policy, but when this approach encountered its first real test last summer in Afghanistan, it failed. Other than banning the import of Chinese products made with forced Uyghur labor, and refusing to send an official delegation to the Beijing Olympics, the administration has done little to punish China for its brutal suppression of human rights in Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong. The whole world has sent its athletes to celebrate a festival of youth and peace in the global capital of totalitarianism. And although these games must be the grimmest since 1972, if not 1936ubiquitous surveillance, depopulated arenas, muzzled athletes, a hostage-video interview with a disappeared Chinese tennis player, that industrial backdrop of concrete cooling towers behind the freestyle-ski eventsIm still watching.

The field of human rights is littered with hypocrisy. No individual or organization possesses a scale of judgment that carefully matches the condemnation to the crime and then applies it consistently across a globe of oppression; personal and political biases always skew the calculation. Governments never separate human rights from national interests and domestic politics. Jimmy Carter, who first made human rights an explicit part of American foreign policy, criticized the Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos but had very little to say about the genocidal Khmer Rouge. Ronald Reagan preached freedom to people behind the Iron Curtain but cozied up to brutal military leaders in this hemisphere. Even if double standards werent routine, theres the question of how much good external pressure ever does. For every success (South African apartheid fell in part because of foreign sanctions and international isolation), there have been many more disappointments (China after Tiananmen Square). Nonetheless, the idea that oppression abroad matters to Americans was a prominent feature of U.S. foreign policy through the last years of the Cold War and during the postCold War period, used or misused by every president from Carter and Reagan to Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

But in the past decade or so, human rights have pretty much disappeared from our politics. Throughout the 9/11 wars, the grotesque contradiction between the rhetoric of freedom and the reality of tortured prisoners, civilian casualties, and grinding conflict corrupted the cause beyond remedy. After Iraq and Afghanistan, no president can send young men and women to war by invoking human rights. When Barack Obama refrained from punishing Bashar al-Assad of Syria for murdering thousands of innocent people with poison gas, there was no outcry from the general public. Privately, Obama told his aide Ben Rhodes that not even the 1994 Rwandan genocide merited a strong U.S. response. Without announcing a new era of foreign-policy realism, Obama brought it into being. Donald Trump made a point of showing utter indifference to the suffering of Syrians, Afghans, Chinese, or anyone else, and his callousness never cost him a thing.

Conor Friedersdorf: Do Uyghur lives matter to Americans?

With the eclipse of U.S. prestige and power, the decay of liberal democracy, and the rising appeal of authoritarian regimes, theres no longer any mechanismneither military force nor threat of sanctions and isolation, nor global pressure campaigns by civil-society groupsto make the worlds dictators hesitate before they throw people into concentration camps. Whats striking is how the demise of these mechanisms has soured Americans on the idea of human rights itself. Because we no longer think we can change the behavior of the worlds oppressorsbecause the cost of trying will be too highwe no longer think much about human rights at all. When they come up as a policy issue, we look for ways to justify doing nothing. We are all realists now.

Its almost a given today that the welfare of unknown peoples like the Uyghurs in far-off places like Xinjiang province is none of our business. As a result, the mind stops seeking and absorbing news of them, and so, in a sense, they cease to exist. Their nonexistence stems from and reinforces the profound self-absorption into which Americans have sunk in the past decade. The recent Joe RoganNeil YoungSpotify outrage ginned up far more passion and interest than the fact that Russia is poised to extinguish the independent state of Ukraine. When Chamath Palihapitiya said that Americans should take care of our own backyard before pointing fingers at other countries, he was voicing a widespread belief.

LeBron James expressed it in 2019, when he rebuked the Houston Rockets general manager, Daryl Morey, for tweeting in support of prodemocracy demonstrators in Hong Kong. James argued that people in the NBA should keep quiet about China, that he and others didnt know enough about Hong Kong to have an opinion on the Chinese governments assault on the demonstrators. He said hed speak out about something that hits home for me, about places and causes he knows; that is, American ones. If James had wanted to learn how the Chinese government snuffed out the remaining flickers of democracy in Hong Kong, he could have. But no one suffers reputational damage for saying, in effect, that oppressed people in China matter less than those in this country. Saying so can even be a kind of virtue signalingthe human-rights version of the old anti-foreign-aid line Charity begins at home.

The idea that solidarity with the oppressed here should naturally extend to the oppressed everywherean internationalist idea that long ago defined the lefthas died, along with the global system in which the U.S. played an intermittent, usually two-faced, often incompetent, occasionally effective role as the self-proclaimed upholder of human rights as a universal value.

But instincts have a way of outlasting ideas. Within most Americans lies a buried feeling that they should care about the torment of the Uyghurs. If by some accident an account of torture in a Chinese reeducation camp forces itself on our attention, were troubled, as if we should be doing something about it; and if a public figure says that nobody cares, we denounce himout of shame, because his indifference recalls our own. Theres no institutional mechanism for addressing human rights, no public discussion, no living ideajust an atavistic feeling that can sometimes be awakened.

Into this empty space Enes Kanter Freedom comes barging with his big, aggressive strides. Born Enes Kanter and raised in Turkey, he was the NBAs third draft choice in 2011 and has spent a decade bouncing around the league as a journeyman center. He told me the story of his awakening to human rights as a series of revelations. After he arrived in the U.S. in 2009 as a high-school basketball recruit, he heard a teammate criticize Obama. Dude, what are you doing? Kanter rebuked him. They might put you in jail. The teammate laughed: This is America. The first revelation was freedom of speech, and Kanter used it to criticize the repressive government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoan. The regime pursued Kanters family, took their passports, imprisoned his father, and forced his parents to renounce their son; he hasnt spoken to them in years. The Turkish government also went after Kanter himselfstripped his citizenship, put out an Interpol warrant for his arrest, and just missed snatching him in Indonesia. Kanter became more and more outspoken against the Erdoan regime. As long as Turkey was his target, the NBA left him alone.

Last summer came the second revelation. Kanter recently told me that he was shooting hoops with Brooklyn kids and posing for pictures at one of the basketball camps he hosts around the country when a parent accosted him: How can you call yourself a human-rights activist when your Muslim brothers and sisters are getting tortured and raped in Chinese concentration camps? Kanter knew little about Chinas mass oppression of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang province. He had focused his activism on the country he knew best. I promise Im going to get back to you, he told the parent.

Read: Saving Uighur culture from genocide

Kanter canceled the rest of the days events. He went back to his hotel, closed the curtains, lay down on his bed, took out his phone, and Googled Uyghurs. He stayed up most of the night reading. He woke up puffy-eyed and ashamed.

Find me a concentration-camp survivor, Kanter said to his manager. A Uyghur woman in Washington told him her story of gang rape and torture. She wept for half an hour. When Kanter asked what he could do to help her, she told him, I am safe. There are millions of people suffering in those camps. Forget about me. Put your awareness on them.

On October 20, just before the season opener of Kanters Boston Celtics against the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden, he released a video on social media. He stood against a blank white wall wearing a black T-shirt with an image of the Dalai Lama in prayer. (He wanted to speak about Tibet before Xinjiang so that people wouldnt think he was just supporting fellow Muslims.) Brutal dictator of China, Xi Jinping, I have a message for you and your henchmen, he said, jabbing a finger at the camera. Free Tibet. Free Tibet. Free Tibet.

This is Kanters style of activismits personal. He gets in a dictators face, nose to nose, chest to chest, as if Xi Jinping is a bully throwing cheap shots and committing flagrant fouls and everyone else is afraid to call him out. Someone had to do it, Kanter told me.

Twenty minutes before the Knicks game, in the visitors locker room, Kanter put on his wildly colorful new shoes, designed by a dissident Chinese artist, with the yellow, blue, and red of the Tibetan flag; a roaring lion; a man in flames; and the words FREE TIBET. His teammates were intrigued and confusedWhat kind of shoes are those?but he had no time to explain. After warm-ups, Kanter was sitting on the bench when, he told me, two league officialsfriends of hisapproached. Listen, man, your shoes have been getting lots of attention, one of them said. You have to take them off.

Amid COVID and the social-justice protests of 2020, the league had encouraged self-expression, and NBA players had written various messages on their shoes in Sharpie: Black Lives Matter, Say Their Names, Wash Your Hands. Kanter, who spoke at a Black Lives Matter rally in Boston, was thrilled with the players new social awareness. But now two officials were pleading with him to change his shoes. Kanter was preparing for his U.S. citizenship test, and he reminded them of his First Amendment rights. I dont care if Im fined, he said.

Not fined, one of them said. Banned.

Kanter refused. Go tell your boss Im not taking my shoes off. Their boss was the NBAs commissioner, Adam Silver.

Kanter sat on the bench the entire first half. In the locker room at halftime, he checked his phone: It was swarming with messages. One of them, from his manager, informed him that Chinese media had stopped streaming the game. The Chinese ban on the Celtics would continue all year.

A senior official with the National Basketball Players Association, Kanters own union, kept calling and asking him not to wear anti-China shoes. I talked about Turkey 10 years, not one phone call, Kanter told me. I talked about China one day, Im getting phone calls every hour. He told the union rep not to call again. When Kanter reached Adam Silver, they spoke for half an hour. Silver told him that he was free to say whatever he wanted with his shoes; nonetheless, at the end of the conversation, according to Kanter, Silver remarked, Everyone knows its business. Kanter took this to mean: Youre free to talk about China, but you, your team, and the NBA might face consequences.

On October 22, for the Celtics home opener against Toronto, Kanter wore red, black, and blue Free Uyghur shoes that also said, Stop Genocide Torture Rape Slave Labor. He turned the 202122 season into a running face-off with the worlds leading dictators and their enablers. One pair of shoes targeted Venezuelas dictatorship; another featured a lineup of tyrants faces, including Kim Jong Un, Bashar al-Assad, and Mohammed bin Salman. Kanter even searched for an image to protest the Talibans abuse of women. He didnt hesitate to use tactics that were provocative to the point of rudeness. Against the Lakers, he wore shoes that mocked LeBron James for kneeling to the gold of Xi Jinping (James, questioned by reporters, refused to be drawn). When the Celtics played the Charlotte Hornets, owned by Michael Jordan, Kanter wore red-spattered Nike Air Jordan 11s that declared, Made with Slave Labor. (Nikes factories in China have been accused of using Uyghur forced labor.) On November 29, Kanter became an American citizen. He took the oath with a new name: Enes Kanter Freedom.

Freedoms playing time dwindled to the lowest of his career; in some games, he didnt even see action during garbage time, the last minutes of a blowout. He accused the Celtics of benching him for his anti-China activism; the Celtics pointed to his difficulties defending the pick-and-roll. Friends around the league advised him to enjoy the season because it was going to be his last. Freedom claims that he hasnt been shunned by teammates, that he gets quiet support. Once, he told me, as he was getting ready to shoot a free throw, a Lakers player murmured: Listen, man, what youre doing is so brave, keep speaking upbut I cant talk about it. These teams got us. But some players asked him to unfollow them on social media, and not one has spoken out on his behalf. Maybe they dont know enough about it, he told me. But I feel like the fear of losing money, the fear of losing business, the fear of losing endorsement deals He didnt complete the obvious thought. And also, sometimes they do not care enough about whats going on outside America.

This indifference, and not the pervasive influence of Chinese contracts and sneaker endorsements, is the most interesting thing about the leagues unfriendly response to Freedoms campaign for global human rights. Of course young players want to win lucrative deals while they can, but most people in the league dont even experience a conflict between money and principle. The latter has disappeared. Its as if Freedom is putting all that money in jeopardy for a self-indulgent whimas if hes taken a tactless interest in matters that dont concern him.

His shoes match his viewsboth are unsubtle and unsparing. And the shoes can be more eloquent than the man. Freedom told me that he believes pure human rights have nothing to do with politics. It should be separated, he said. I dont even like politics. This is naive: Theres a short, straight line connecting the behavior of American companies in China to U.S. foreign-policy decisions and how theyre exploited in domestic politics. Freedom is well within his rights to charge LeBron James with hypocrisy, but his illusion that human rights can be kept separate from politics has made him a mark for right-wing commentators such as Tucker Carlson, who baited him into telling his fellow NBA players, mostly Black Americans, to stop criticizing the greatest nation in the world.

Freedom plans to speak to the Conservative Political Action Committee later this month. He might intend to go as an advocate for pure human rights, but at CPAC hell identify himself with a political camp whose interest in human rights is utterly opportunistic. Hes entangled himself with Turkish politics as well, as a close associate of the exiled religious leader Fethullah Glen, who has an extensive network of supporters inside Turkey. (Freedom was at Glens heavily guarded compound in rural Pennsylvania on the night of the 2016 failed coup attempt in Turkey, which Erdoan blamed on Glen, and for which Glen denied responsibility.)

A symbol as rough and blunt and improvised as a painted pair of sneakers, worn by an athlete in the brief interlude of his fame, is just what we should expect in a time when nobody cares about whats happening to the Uyghurs. With no high-level debate to enter in this country, no established institution to join, nothing in which to fit his lonely campaign, Freedom has to figure it out by himself, one game at a time.

Read: I never thought China could be this dark

We spoke last week when he was in Brooklyn to play the Nets. The NBAs trade deadline was just a few days off, and I asked if he thought the Celtics would try to unload him. I dont think they will, Freedom said. They will get a lot of backlash; they will be in a very uncomfortable situation. Theyre hoping Lets finish the year like this and see what happens.

Freedom was having a busy week. During NBCs prime-time Olympic broadcast (which he refused to watch), he appeared in an ad for free speech by FIREthe Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. A member of the Norwegian Parliament put his name up for the Nobel Peace Prize. Last Thursday, 30 Nobel laureates released a letter calling on the Celtics to stand with Freedom on the right side of history and not to drop him as a player.

Thursday was the trade deadline. In the late afternoon, the Celtics sent Freedom to the Houston Rocketsthe team that had forced its general manager to retract his tweet in support of Hong Kongs prodemocracy protesters in 2019. Within minutes the Rockets waived Freedom, and no other team picked him up. Now the NBA has him where it wants himout of sight, out of mind, like the Uyghurs themselves. If Freedom, whos already sacrificed his family and his career, is in it for the long haul, hell have to find some other way to make Americans care than by wearing painted sneakers.

Read the original here:

We Are All Realists Now - The Atlantic

Noncombatant evacuation operations (NEOs) are among the most complex non-lethal operations the United States carries out. They call on US military, diplomatic, humanitarian, and homeland-security capabilities to swiftly get civilians away from an active war zone or natural disaster to safetyprioritizing US citizens and those of allies.

Scenes of displaced Americans, allies, and refugees fleeing a possible further Russian invasion of Ukraine will cause outrage and heartbreak. As we saw with the US withdrawal from Afghanistan last August, some in the news media and political partisans will cast blame on their favorite political punching bags.

This would be wrong.

The Biden administration has been planning for the consequences of an offensive since November. But as a national security professional who was involved in most US NEOs over the past twenty years, I can confidently state: Even with the best planning in the world, a Russian invasion of Ukraine, if it happens, will result in images of chaos on cable news and social media. But its crucial to keep in mind that this chaos is the responsibility of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Somewhere between seven thousand and thirty thousand Americans are currently in Ukraine, and although theyve been told to leave immediatelybecause US forces will not evacuate them if Russia moves inmany will likely stay until the tanks start rolling, if previous NEOs are a guide. The United States has sent six thousand troops to Poland to help receive Americans and others who make it that far.

Within hours of any Russian missiles landing and tanks crossing the border, a mass migration will begin. Many Ukrainians will head west, likely in harsh winter weather, toward western Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania. Most people will have only the clothes they wear and what they can carry or fit into a car. Airports will shut down, roads will be jammed, and supplies of gasoline and diesel will dry up. Some drivers will have no choice but to abandon their vehicles by the roadside, and food deliveries will stop.

None of this chaos is unique to an evacuation from Ukraine. But it will be more challenging than previous evacuations for five reasons.

First, a Russian military operation will shut down Ukraines airports, especially if it includes, as Atlantic Council experts predict, precision long-range missile attacks. If any airports remain open, Putin would probably be unwilling to shoot down a US evacuation flight during a Russian offensive, but recklessness cannot be ruled out. Therefore, most people will try to travel overland.

Second, winter weather complicates humanitarian operations. Snow and mud cause civilian vehicles to get bogged down more than military ones. Most previous NEOs happened in desert countries or in the summer, such as during Russias 2008 invasion of Georgia. If temperatures stay below freezing, those fleeing outdoors face health hazards which people in temperate climates do not. That not only endangers peoples health but also threatens deliveries of water and other necessities.

Third, Russian cyberattacks, which will occur in concert with a ground offensive, are likely to shut down much, if not almost all, of Ukraines critical infrastructure. Water treatment plants could falter, electricity could be cut, and millions of people would be forced to shelter in place if they dont head west.

Fourth, Russias clearly documented disinformation campaign could sow disunity among Western partners in an effort to slow or limit the Western response. In the United States, Russian disinformation could force the administration to spend time getting sufficient congressional support for assistance efforts. Meanwhile, the reluctance of some European countries to help Ukrainian refugees could leave many in dire straitsor force the Ukrainian government to expend scarce resources on internally displaced people instead of defending Ukrainian territory from invading Russian troops.

Fifth, the United States has suffered a brain drain of expertise when it comes to NEOs. Operations of the scale required to get thousands of Americans out of eastern Poland are relatively rare. Many of the most experienced US diplomats and planners left during the Trump administration, when their expertise was disparaged, and many felt pressured to quit.

Theres still much the United States can do to take care of its citizens and reduce the widespread suffering of a potential Russian invasion. Humanitarian aid will need to flow generously to millions of Ukrainians whose livelihoods will be torn away until they can re-establish themselves. The worlds refugee assistance funds are already low as a result of addressing the needs of refugees from Syria and Afghanistan, as well as war-torn Yemen. Any parts of Ukraine not under Russian assault or occupationfor example, around the western city of Lvivcould serve as Ukrainian government distribution points for that aid.

Otherwise, we are looking at the prospect of tent cities in eastern Poland until thousands of refugees can be assimilated elsewhere. Those populations should be relocated as quickly as possible, because while a Russian occupation of Ukraine can be reversed, it will not be reversed overnight.

For its part, United States will need to accept its own share of refugees, as it has done many times before. Indeed, history shows that the American experience is enriched by refugees escaping oppression to find freedom.

Another vital step for the United States and the West is to show unity against Russian aggression. Astonishingly, some current and former US officials and media figures seem unaware that by blaming anyone other than Putin for this chaos, theyre actually playing into Russias disinformation campaign. Somewhat ironically, Vladimir Lenin himself is believed to have written about Westerners who will close their eyes to reality and will thus transform themselves into men who are deaf, dumb and blind.

A Russian invasion of Ukraine will test Western resolve and values, including the coordination of a necessary humanitarian response. But the Russian disinformation campaign is an equally important test: Western leaders and the public need to understand that in a further invasion of Ukraine, Putinand no one elsewould be to blame for any chaos that follows.

Thomas S. Warrick is a senior advisor with the Atlantic Councils Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative and a nonresident senior fellow at the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Securitys Forward Defense practice. Prior to joining the Council, he was the deputy assistant secretary for counterterrorism policy at the US Department of Homeland Security.

Mon, Dec 13, 2021

New AtlanticistByJohn F. Campbell, Ryan Crocker, James Cunningham, James Dobbins, Hugo Llorens, P. Michael McKinley, John Nicholson, Ronald E. Neumann, Richard Olson, David Petraeus, and Earl Anthony Wayne

Eleven former US ambassadors and commanders issue an urgent warning to Washington and its allies.

Image: A Ukrainian service member stands guard on the Ukrainian-Russian border in the Kharkiv region on February 16, 2022. Photo by Vyacheslav Madiyevskyy/REUTERS

Original post:

Evacuating noncombatants from Ukraine will be a mess. The West needs to ditch the blame game this time. - Atlantic Council

B.C. Nagesh, who was recently named Karnataka's minister for education, is in the thick of things surrounding the hijab row. He has been strongly propagating the idea of uniform minus hijab. In an interaction with IANS, the minister explained his perspectives on the raging controversy.

speaking to the minister, he was aked how he saw the developments unfolding in the state over the hijab issue.

BC Nagesh: It is not a good development that young minds are getting polluted. Common man is observing how society is behaving. They are also seeing how the young ones, who have been normal students these days have changed suddenly. What has filled up the minds of these boys and girls? It is okay that they have approached the court. But, they forced the court to issue an interim order on that very day and reject the government circular. And even as three-judge bench of Karnataka High Court gave the interim order, the way that order was being challenged in the Supreme Court and how the transfer of case was sought, the attitude of their requirements are to be fulfilled at any cost and the way how court is being pressurized, I am taken aback. I am sad that schools were closed.

Q: Do you think the hijab row which has been discussed at international level has brought disrepute to the state?

A: When it becomes an international issue, it is the duty of each one to bring clarity about the issue. We have to put out the truth. Many people have attempted to bring out the truth. Falsehoods can prevail for a temporary period. Ultimately, the truth will come out. We have been making an honest attempt to address hijab row. The true colours of the elements involved in creating this controversy. There may be multiple layers of lies, but truth will emerge. It is not possible to uphold what is false.

Q: The developments surrounding the hijab row have deeply hurt student mindset. How are you going to address the issue?

A: It will take many days to bring mindsets back on the right track. The students who remained friends till yesterday have developed the psyche that one is a Muslim and another is a Hindu. This is not good. If the norm of Uniform is practiced without any hindrances of religious practices it is possible to heal these divided mindsets. They will continue to have bitter memories but somehow they will come to the right track after sometime. But, it is a difficult process and it takes time.

What does it mean when a girl from Mandya can raise the slogan of Allah Hu Akbar? Where the mindsets have reached? I am not talking about what is right and what is wrong here. Everyone will have their emotions and they react to certain things. But, the reactive mindset has been developed already. How tenable is it for such developments to take place in college campuses?

Q: You have been saying hijab row is the result of international conspiracy, can you elaborate on that?

A: There are three things. Firstly, when it was not even known to the state that students wearing hijab were not sent to schools. No news was covered in this regard. Before the local media could pick up, few international media took it up. Secondly, ruling that hijab is not a part of uniform was not new at all. Karnataka was not the first state to make this rule. In 2015, Bombay High Court gave a ruling and banned hijab. No international agency spoke about it... so called secular leaders from New Delhi have also remained tight lipped. In 2018, the order was given in Kerala in this regard, but that did not emerge as an international issue. There, Muslim Education Society had approached court, the court said hijab is not allowed and students have to wear prescribed uniform by the institution. Thirdly, Delhi Apex Court and the Supreme Court stated the same, however, these did not make into international news. How come it has become an issue now? How can making uniform compulsory in one of the colleges of Karnataka become an international issue? Many nations have banned hijab. Muslim nations have banned hijab. Why didn't it become an international issue?

The country is making progress under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The country is being respected. The country is overcoming the Corona crisis, no one expected it. Why did Pakistan, which has not reacted till date, react on the issue? Every day that country faces such problems on a daily basis. Asking six students not to wear hijab as per rules is a major international issue? We have just asked students to maintain prescribed uniforms, why can't students just follow?

Malala Yousafzai, a Nobel laureate herself, said that these things are holding back women, and these are the instruments which take away their freedom. They (protesting students) open Twitter accounts on the same day, tweet on the same day? These are matters of investigation, I should not go deep into it. If the act of making uniform compulsory for six students is being portrayed as oppression of Muslims, in a large country like ours which has a huge Muslim population, what else is this?

I do not have the capacity to depute a senior lawyer in the High Court for arguing my case. How can these children afford them? Three senior counsel in the Supreme Court are arguing for them. Honourable Chief Justice when assures that the case will be taken up on an everyday basis and give ruling, what is the meaning of them approaching the Supreme Court?

The media propagated falsely that the rule on hijab was not there all these days, if you observe this, one group must be working behind all this. It is natural to get suspicious about it and people are observing it.

Q: RSS and Sangh Parivar are squarely blamed for the hijab crisis. What do you have to say about the allegation?

A: Initially what they thought was there was no rule on uniform in the state. They were under the illusion that there is no uniform for PUC. They initially questioned it first. The government gave clarification about the act and rule. After that they went to the court. In court also they did not get relief. Slowly, they are realizing that the issue is boomeranging on them. People are also against them, the media by and large in general except for few national televisions are realizing that it is wrong. They are blaming RSS to get an escape route. From where does RSS come in the issue? Students wearing saffron shawls is a natural reaction, like how the girl (college student in Mandya PES College) spontaneously shouted 'Allah hu Akbar' slogan in front of the crowd. She is now being felicitated by Mumbai MLA, Karnataka leader C.M. Ibrahim visits her, why do they go?

Q: First it was Covid crisis, now it is the hijab. How are you managing?

A: I am getting cooperation from everyone. It's a team decision, all are involved. Our teachers responded and conducted classes, we boosted their morale. I have chosen good officers.

Q: What is your message to students and parents?

A: Please come to classes in uniform like before in a disciplined manner. Examinations have been declared, I request them to focus on studies and build their career. For those girls who took up agitation, no one has a fixed opinion on you... If you start coming to classes, everything will be alright in sometime. Please leave the ego behind and attend classes. Their parents should also give good guidance to their wards and send them to schools.

I am very happy to see concern for education among Muslim girls who are not wearing hijabs and attending classes. In spite of all this crisis, they are not bothered about anything, they are with their friends and showed the nation and the world that we are all one and proved that they will follow discipline. I appreciate those girls. There are 9 colleges in Udupi, among them barring these 6 girls, no other students took part in the matters like this

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Making uniform compulsory being displayed as oppression of Muslims, says Karnataka Education Minister - Free Press Journal

On Friday, Feb. 4, my world was shaken. It hit me as though it were a fresh wound: My father, Elie Wiesel, was really gone.

It hurt terribly when he died over five years ago, on July 2, 2016. But I also found peace and awakening as I grieved. I had this sense from the very moment he passed that he would be with me always. Through his dreams for me, I felt that as long as I lived, he would too as would my ancestors.

This feeling deepened over the years that followed. My year of Mourners Kaddish ended and I still found myself drawn to Shabbat peace, to morning tefillin, to the intentionality of a minyan gathered to pray, to the stories of our people in ancient texts. I felt the wholeness of history, of the chain of which he had always wanted me to feel a crucial part, which he so keenly felt himself. And although I miss him daily, I unfailingly find that thinking of him makes my footsteps feel sure.But on Feb. 4 I had to stop and catch my breath as I realized the depth of my loss, our loss.

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Because that day was the opening of the Beijing Winter Olympics, and millions were tuning in to the opening ceremony. Most of the world didnt seem to know, or care, that the host country is hosting a pageant of peace and friendship while simultaneously terrorizing its Uyghur minority.

The Chinese governments systematic oppression of the Uyghurs, a Muslim group in northwest China, is not the Holocaust. But although we may not have seen this particular movie, we know the genre.

I have heard the painful testimony of Uyghur dissidents, who manage to get the word out despite a media clampdown that makes it almost impossible for the Western press to report on the facts. Forced internment camps target people for thought crimes and racial affiliation. Medical data suggests that forced sterilizations are taking place among this targeted racial group. Families have been forcibly separated and threatened into silence.

Just like in 1936, the International Olympic Committee is unwilling to push the issue. And our community is mostly silent.I saw 100 or 200 brave souls rally on a rainy Thursday in Times Square. In the gray neon light, the young leaders called on each other and passersby via megaphones whose batteries could not keep up with the urgency of the message: Turn off the Olympics, and close the concentration camps in Xinjiang.

It should have been the whole city turning up to honor their message.

I know now that we have failed my father in this regard. He did not fail us. He spoke of how he always felt he had to answer to the dead: Did he do enough? And yes. He did.

He was there to speak up against atrocities in Darfur, Bosnia, Cambodia, Rwanda. He tried with everything he had to tell us. And all the words he spoke and wrote could not change the fact that five years after his death, 1 million people are reportedly in concentration camps, because of their race and religion, in the grip of a totalitarian regime a regime honored to host the worlds nations, on a global television platform that packages sports with advertising.

Todays culture of workplace activism is highly developed. In corporations and small businesses across the United States, Black Americans and their allies, for one, showed with emotion how cries against police brutality could be heard in board rooms and executive suites.

But are men and women of conscience reaching out to their managers at the corporations that sponsor the Olympics? Are voices inside corporate America respectfully but insistently calling for company conversations about their responsibility when they hear survivors reports of genocide on the part of the Chinese government? If they are, they are not making themselves heard.There are brave leaders, like Steve Simon of the Womens Tennis Association, who canceled a lucrative tournament in China when the WTAs demands for player Peng Shuais safety and freedom went unanswered. Natan Sharansky and Bernard-Henri Lvy, two leading Jewish intellectuals, signed an ad in The New York Times, organized by me and paid for by the Elie Wiesel Foundation, urging a protest of the Beijing Olympics; Jewish organizations across the denominational spectrum have spoken up for the Uyghurs; and Jewish World Watch is trying to generate widespread action around the issue.

But they are still too few. I fear that Chinas state-sponsored capitalism has silenced us through our greed.

My father believed passionately that speaking up mattered, especially to the victims.

Have I, blessed to live in this country which stands for freedom, done enough?

Shame on Xi Jinping, shouted the determined young people in Times Square on Thursday night.And I think: Shame on me, if we cant find some way to help. Shame on us.PJC

Elisha Wiesel is the son of Marion and Elie Wiesel. This piece first appeared on JTA.

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When I recall my father Elie Wiesel, my shame about these Olympics only deepens - thejewishchronicle.net

In the summer of 1990, I stood where the wall had been and wondered at what had happened to Europe. I wasnt alone: the rest of the city, the rest of the continent, was wondering too.

I was 18 years old, interrailing around Europe with a friend to see what the world looked like beyond our provincial English town, and I had accidentally wandered into a pivot point in history. In the divided German capital, less than a year before, World War Two had finally come to an end, with no shots fired.

The joy was palpable everywhere. By the time my friend and I got to the Brandenburg Gate, half of the wall had already been chipped into bite-sized pieces, which were being sold to tourists by enterprising locals, along with suddenly useless Soviet army uniforms, military passbooks and the helmets of East German border guards. Marxism hadnt been dead a year, and the market economy was already booming.The world, or the little part of it that I knew, had suddenly changed shape entirely.

Everyone of my generation grew up with the Cold War hanging over them. The possibility of nuclear armageddon was as ever-present for teenagers then as climate change is today: we didnt think about it much, but it was the background hum of our lives. Nobody thought the Russians would invade, really, but there didnt seem much chance of them going away either. There was always a chance of their tanks rolling across some border somewhere, or so the Americans kept telling us. Plus a change.

This was just the way the world was: the free West and the unfree East. If you didnt believe that story, then one look at the wall, the barbed wire, the machine gun towers and the fate of those who tried to cross the death strip from East to West would make you think again.

And then, just like that, communism fell. This system that was supposed to free the people from exploitation and oppression, but had quickly become a monster itself. We didnt know what was coming next. But from todays perspective we can see that the fall of the East ushered in a new era.

After the wall would come a unipolar world, dominated by finance capital, overseen by the United States of America, the last empire standing. Its architects told us we were entering a long age of benign globalisation, in which free markets, human rights and democracy would spread around the world as naturally as the sun rose in the morning. The future would be free, open, liberal, prosperous and, well, American.

30 years later, we live in a world in which most Russians have apositive view of Stalin, and their current leader is mustering the biggest army since Soviet times on the border of a neighbouring state. The once-free-ish West is boiling in a stew of hate speech laws, vaccine mandates and ever-accelerating censorship and intolerance. Populists continue to barrack and harass its leaders, who still have no idea what to do about it: witness Justin Trudeau running away from the big scary men in their lorries. The last global empire is led by a confused octogenarian, and within a few years the biggest economy in the world will be a communist dictatorship. We didnt see that one coming back in 1990.

Remembering the rubble strewn across Potsdamer Platz, its hard not to miss the End of History. In those halcyon days, I thought I lived in something called the free world. The liberal West was supposed to be the point on which the arc of history converged. We wanted it to be true, that story, but history has a habit of rolling on, and people dont change, not really. Im just grateful to have been there.

Looking back, we can see that what happened when the wall fell was not the triumph of freedom over oppression so much as the defeat of one Western ideology by another. The one that came through was the oldest, subtlest and longest-lasting, one which disguised itself so well that we didnt know it was an ideology at all: liberalism.

This was the thesis of Patrick Deneens 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed, written before the populist wave of 2016, and perhaps the most reliable guide to the world we live in now. In his telling, liberalism was one of three ideologies that dominated the world over the last three centuries. The other two communism and fascism were shorter lived, and died in the West in the twentieth century. Liberalism the elder brother is only dying now. One reason for its comparatively long life is that it piggybacked on older stories, presenting itself as the inheritor of established traditions of liberty when in fact it was something quite different.

The ideology of liberalism has, since it emerged from the Enlightenment, claimed to liberate the individual from oppression. In practice it has manifested as the process of breaking all borders, limits and structures: of bringing down walls. The societies we have built around this way of seeing claim freedomforthe individualfromsociety itself, and proffer a radical notion of human nature. Rather than seeing humans as hefted creatures, rooted in time and place, liberalism offered a new conception: detached, sovereign personhood. Humans were now rights-bearing individuals who could fashion and pursue for themselves their own version of the good life.

What is crucial to understand and this is what makes liberalism an ideology is that in order for the liberal world to come into being, it needed to becreated. Just as Marxist regimes attempted to destroy the traditional family, the church and private land ownership so that communism could materialise, so liberalism did not naturally evolve from previously existing arrangements. It needed to artificially create the sovereign individual from new cloth.

After the trauma of the Reformation, the Western nation-state took over the functions of the ailing Church, colonising for itself the sense of sacredness and obedience once demanded by religion. In thismigration of the holyour religious sensibility was redirected from its proper focus towards worldly political constructions, and this in turn laid the ground for the revolutions of the modern age.

Each of these upheavals, whether inJacobin France, Marxist Russia or Nazi Germany, failed to create the promised utopias. But they did have the effect of clearing away the traditional structures of the pre-modern era. And into the void rushed industrial capitalism the system which G. K. Chesterton called themonster that grows in deserts with its sensibility of control, measurement, utility and profit. Liberalism was, and remains, its nursemaid and press officer.

Liberalism, like its competitor ideologies, is in this waytotalitarian: ruthless and all-encompassing. But it outlasted its rivals because it promised not tyranny and order, but the messiness of a certain kind of freedom. At the height of the liberal age, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, individual human freedom was indeed possible in the West as it had never been before. Humans, or some of them, could detach themselves from their backgrounds and origins and seek something new, and plenty of us did. Openly tyrannical government became harder to sustain, oligarchies were required to subject themselves to regular plebiscites to sustain their power, previously ignored groups in society clamoured for access to its heartlands, the rule of law protected the poor as well as the rich, and capitalisms Luciferic power created previously unheard of levels of wealth, as well as grinding poverty.

But in liberalisms very success lay the seeds of its failure. The project of liberating the individual from his or her networks of loyalty, locality, family and culture, and the unleashing of the vast destabilising engine of capitalism, created a social instability which could only be controlled or directed by the last institution standing: the State.

An ideology premised on protecting and promoting the freedom of the individual led to the era of unprecedented state power we live in today. Governments now claim the right to direct our speech patterns, regulate our lives and businesses to increasingly radical degrees, shut down whole societies in the name of public health, and even legislate for acceptable and unacceptable attitudes and opinions.

The cultural ructions of todays West the cancellations and contradictions, the screaming matches over race, gender, history and identity all of this is the manifestation not of liberalisms failure but of its success. The progressives who are aggressively cramming identity politics into every crevice of society have met with resistance from many self-professed liberals.These woke radicals,they cry,are destroying our culture with their fanaticism! We need to return to classical liberalism! But culture wars happen when no real culture remains; and 200 years of classical liberalism, manifested in the economic and the cultural spheres, have seen to that.

This is the legacy of an ideology which has been championed for centuries by both Left and Right. We have all become islands of self-definition, and we see now where that leads. A society premised on freedom becomes daily more fearful and closed. A society which boasts of its diversity becomes daily more homogenous. We can invent our own gender at will, and yet genuine individuals are in short supply, old-fashioned eccentricity is positively persecuted and originality has become career-ending. The Internet has enabled self-expression on a previously unimagined scale, and the result has been violent groupthink. The self, it turns out, mostly doesnt have much to say.

But theres more. Liberal ideology, as well as redesigning culture, must also redesign nature. In all the discussions of liberalism and its discontents that weve seen in the last few years, few seriously consider the power source that allowed the liberal age to conquer all before it: fossil fuels.

Without steamships, cars, planes, factories, supermarkets, modern roads, the Internet, the smartphone, the project of liberation would have been much less far-reaching. Fossil-fuelled liberalism allowed people to abandon place-based community, and to create for themselves an individual identity in an isolated but free kingdom of the self. But as the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it, the mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil fuel use. Everything from mass democracy to feminism to multiculturalism to human rights floats on a vast bubble of fossil energy: . Nothing about the modern West could exist at all without vast concentrations of fossil energy: a fact of which Mr Putin is well aware.

Liberalism, like modernity itself, requires a war against nature; but it is a war that can never be won. As the climate shifts in response, the excesses of liberalism, and the project of self-creation it enabled, will not be possible. We will no longer be able to outsource our muscles or our minds to technology. We will need each other again whether we like it or not.

So what comes after liberalism? The question has filled plenty of column inches in recent years, but the Covid years have brought into sharp relief the likely future we face. In Why Liberalism Failed, Deneen predicts that two post-liberal worlds are on offer: a future of self-limitation, in which people choose to practice self-governance in local communities, or a future in which extreme licence coexists with extreme oppression.

I know which Id prefer, but I also know which looks most likely. As extreme individualism deepens, and an all-powerful state intervenes ever more deeply and widely to manage the resulting fragmentation, Western democracies show every sign of transforming openly into authoritarian oligarchies in which dissent especially dissent aimed at liberalism itself is ruthlessly suppressed by politicians who claim to represent the people. The vast bulks of those stationary Canadian trucks are currently the perfect symbol of this process.

The immediate future looks to me like the grinding down of what previous norms remain, and the parallel expansion of the State-corporate leviathan to both mop up the resulting mess and profit from it. That in turn will generate more populist (i.e. anti-liberal) reaction from both Left and Right and neither, and a consequent deepening of repression and propaganda from the besieged minority defending the remains of the liberal order. All of this will take place in the context of a planet with nearly ten billion people on it, hitting economic and ecological limits on all sides.

It seems likely to me that the liberal era will end much as the communist one did: flailing and corrupt, hiding behind walls of its own making, its leaders in denial but its people increasingly open-eyed. Perhaps the Russians wont roll into Ukraine and spell the end of the vaunted liberal order, but its end seems to have been baked in from the beginning. All ideologies are based on a view of human nature that looks better on paper than in the confusing mess of the world, and the one we grew up with was no exception. No man, as John Donne had it, is an island. Now we see how right he was.

A version of this essay was first published at The Abbey of Misrule.

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The liberal order is already dead - UnHerd