Culinary racism?

By Emma Teitel - Wednesday, August 24, 2011 at 9:55 AM - 1 Comment

Sajjad Hussain/AFP/Getty Images

The walls surrounding Cittadella were erected to protect the northern Italian city amid violent, 13th-century wars. The fighting has long since ended, but another, more bizarre war is under way: Mayor Massimo Botocci has taken aim at the kebab, a Turkish meat sold at streetside stands. “They aren’t part of our tradition,” the mayor explained, adding that “the smell it gives off” doesn’t fit with the city’s rich, Italian heritage. “If someone wants to eat a kebab, he can do it at home or outside of the historic centre,” he said, citing health and sanitation regulations.

Botocci, a deputy with the populist, anti-immigrant Northern League, part of Silvio Berlusconi’s ruling, centre-right coalition, is not alone in taking umbrage with the kebab: in 2010, the mayors of Lucca in Tuscany and Milan imposed similar bans, which were widely interpreted as an attack aimed at the country’s Middle Eastern and Indian immigrants. But Botocci is facing a tough fight in Cittadella: Italy’s north boasts the country’s best kebab. He may find that the city’s medieval walls are better at keeping out foreign invaders than foreign foods.

Tribal politics

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, February 4, 2011 at 1:48 PM - 48 Comments

Shankar Vedantam argues that partisanship is the new racism.

When partisanship is seen as a form of social identity—I’m a Democrat because people like me are Democrats, or I’m a Republican because people like me are Republicans—we can understand why so many blue-collar Kansans are Republicans and why so many Silicon Valley billionaires are Democrats, even though each group’s rational interests might be better served by the other party. Partisanship as social identity helps explain why, if you’re a black man in America, it’s really, really difficult to be a Republican. Same goes if you are a white, male, evangelical Christian in rural Texas who supports Barack Obama. Social identities are not deterministic—there will always be some black Republicans and some born-again Christians who are liberals—but most of us stick with our social tribes. Any liberal who supported George W. Bush’s adventure in Iraq would have been ostracized by his friends. A conservative who feels Barack Obama is a cool president will be made to feel like a traitor at church.

Is 'Outsourced' really that offensive?

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, December 1, 2010 at 9:40 AM - 11 Comments

Lewis Jacobs/NBCU Photo Bank/CP

From the reaction to Outsourced, you’d think it was the most offensive portrayal of India since Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The half-hour comedy, which airs on Global at 9:30 p.m. on Thursdays, is about an American (Ben Rappaport) who is forced to take over a call centre in India—or at least a Hollywood sound-stage version of it. Rizwan Manji, the Canadian actor who plays the hero’s scheming assistant Rajiv, says he thought the show would be criticized for making light of outsourcing and “the unemployment rate in the United States.” Instead, critical reaction to the pilot mostly ignored economic issues and focused on racial ones; Joshua Ostroff in the Toronto alternative newspaper Eye Weekly wrote that it “pushes the offensive line toward out-and-out racism,” while zap2it.com declared that the jokes about “timid women” and Indian food are familiar to “people with senile, racist grandparents.”

Most of the complaints have been about the mocking of Indian customs and names. There are jokes about the name “Manmeet,” and Manji’s character tricks his boss into thinking that vindaloo is a god as well as a food. In response, the writers have argued that comedy is based on exaggeration, and that the Americans are also treated stereotypically. “It’s a comedy first,” Manji says, while head writer Robert Borden told the Kansas City Star that “we have to have the right to make the Indian characters out to be as silly as the white ones.”

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They spent it on what?!

By Sarah Boesveld - Thursday, November 18, 2010 at 10:40 AM - 2 Comments

Christinne Muschi/Reuters

The story made headlines everywhere: it was Feb. 11, 2009, and Daniel Ferman was a member of Drop YFS, a group dedicated to overthrowing the York Federation of Students. Drop YFS was presenting a petition with 5,000 signatures—enough to stage a coup of sorts. They were protesting the student union’s support for a teachers’ strike, which would potentially leave students on the hook for missed class time. They were also against the union backing the Israeli Apartheid Week, which many pro-Israel students despised. As the press conference began, Ferman and his fellow Drop YFS members were faced with a crush of student union members who came in to denounce the petition rally. After a volley of shouting, the crowd moved to the Hillel student lounge where some of the Drop YFS members took refuge. “Students were barricaded in the lounge,” says Ferman, who was Hillel @ York’s president at the time and helped organize the Drop YFS effort. “It got very nasty. Police were called. There were racist slurs.”

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A racist sniper on the loose

By Peeter Kopvillem - Thursday, November 4, 2010 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments

Scanpix Sweden/Reuters

The success of the far right, anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats party in the recent elections shocked many Swedes, and brought thousands out to protest against the policies the party espouses. Now it appears someone has been taking racist sentiment to a new level, further eroding what was once a proud tradition of tolerance in this Nordic country. Last week in Malmö, Sweden’s third largest city, two female migrants from eastern Europe were shot and wounded through their apartment window. Two more shootings quickly followed, the latest in a long string of attacks over the past year that police fear is the work of a single sniper motivated by racism. Indeed, just prior to last week’s shooting, the authorities had issued a grim warning: “If you have dark skin you should be extra cautious,” said a police spokesman. “If you are in the risk group you should avoid lonely places like bus stops at night.”

Malmö police have solicited the aid of a veteran detective who played a major role in the apprehension of another anti-immigrant sniper who terrorized the Stockholm area. Those attacks took place in the early 1990s—when the far right had also been making political inroads.

Telling us all about his friend Stieg Larsson

By Brian Bethune - Monday, October 4, 2010 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Andrew Tolson

Kurdo Baksi is 45 now, and taking better care of his health than in his youth, eating his vegetables, exercising, even quitting smoking. It’s the sort of thing you do when one of your closest friends—a 60-cigarettes, 20-cups-of-coffee-a-day man—drops dead of a heart attack at age 50. The death of Stieg Larsson in 2004, just as the publishing phenomenon known as the Millennium trilogy—The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and its successors—began building steam, also provoked another response in Baksi.

The Kurdish-born Swedish author and anti-racism activist decided to write Stieg Larsson, My Friend.
The new book is Baksi’s attempt to capture for the record Larsson as he was when they campaigned together for racial equality, long before Larsson’s novels sold 23 million copies worldwide, including one million in Canada. My Friend is eye-opening for any foreigner who still thinks of Sweden as a sublimely tolerant, feminist-ruled egalitarian state, and contentious at home, where Baksi is not the only one of Larsson’s intimates to lay claim to his legacy, or to a piece of a posthumous fortune worth $50 million. (So far: that’s just the print profits to date. The Swedish-language film versions have generated over $160 million in worldwide box office—even though the third has yet to be released in North America—with the Hollywood remakes still to come. In December, Penguin Canada will issue a $110 boxed set of the novels plus On Stieg Larsson, a volume of commentary.)

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The secret shame of Maclean’s

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, September 23, 2010 at 5:52 AM - 0 Comments

A couple of weeks ago I ordered a copy of Emily Murphy’s The Black Candle (1922), the notorious, influential book that first defined drugs as a social problem in Canada, introduced the public to their varieties and effects, and led directly to the addition of marijuana to the Restricted List in 1923. I placed the order after reading the Sept. 3 Seattle Times op-ed by John McKay, the former U.S. attorney who (in connivance with our federal ministry) had Marc Emery extradited and jailed. McKay, forced out of his job because of political controversies and tergiversations you’d need a scorecard to comprehend, is now a professor of law. His editorial was a tub of ordure hurled backwards at his own career: in it, he characterized U.S. marijuana law as a parade of blind idiocies that enriches criminals and gets cops killed unnecessarily.

Having left law enforcement, McKay had the chutzpah to add that prohibition survives partly because “no one in law enforcement is talking about it.” Apparently they like to wait until they have tenure. I’d say his belated gesture of courage deserves something like the reward given to the naval gunner in Victor Hugo’s Quatrevingt-treize who leaves a cannon unsecured below decks and heroically brings it under control. In the book, the commander pins the Cross of St. Louis on the man’s breast—and immediately orders him shot.

One thing that struck me about McKay’s article, though, is how he admits that “our 1930s-era marijuana prohibition was overkill from the beginning”. How much more so was Canada’s? Few states outlawed cannabis as early as Canada did; the pretext was provided by Judge Murphy. It was in a fit of consciousness of original sin that I ordered the book, having written about it years ago. The judge would understand, for we come from the same fanatical Presbyterian stock and dwell upon the same unforgiving spot on the map; and now, as it happens, I have joined the staff of Maclean’s, the organ primarily responsible for promoting moral panic on her behalf back in the day.

The guilt ought to lie heavy upon us, for Murphy’s reflections on “Marijuana—A New Menace” are, as McKay’s remark suggests, nonsense—lurid, racist, sexually pathological, self-contradicting old-lady balderdash that openly pre-empts the whole notion of evidentiary support. “There are plenty of folk,” writes Murphy, “who pretend to themselves that they yield to narcotic enchantment in a desire for research and not for sensual gratification…but, however kindly in judgment, one finds these statements hard to credit, and even if credited, only demonstrates these persons as rascals-manifest.” (Gotta love that hyphen.)

We thus ought to trust other authorities, Murphy suggests: one such is the Chief of Police of Los Angeles, California, who tells her that “Persons using this narcotic smoke the dried leaves of the plant, which has the effect of driving them completely insane. The addict loses all sense of moral responsibility. Addicts to this drug, while under its influence, are immune to pain, and could be severely injured without having any realization of their condition. While in this condition they become raving maniacs and are liable to kill or indulge in any form of violence to other persons, using the most savage methods of cruelty…If this drug is indulged in to any great extent, it ends in the untimely death of its addict.” A medical informant adds that the drug is used to induce “hallucinations which are commonly sexual in character among Eastern races.” Murphy, having double-checked this information in the Encyclopedia Britannica, expresses skepticism but does attest that “It is…a peculiarity of hasheesh that its fantasia almost invariably takes Oriental form.”

In summary—says a magistrate who decided the fates of poor and miserable people in my city within the memory of persons still living—”there are three ways out from the regency of this addiction: 1st—Insanity. 2nd—Death. 3rd—Abandonment.” We must beware of judging Murphy by the standards of our own time, of course. She was almost totally unfamiliar with marijuana, so she formed a view of it using the cognitive tools available to her—a strong education, a wide correspondence, and a practical knowledge of the social effects of drugs in general.

But that view was substantially influenced, if not determined, by Murphy’s white-supremacist race-hygiene ideology. And she was not merely typical of her time in that regard: she was an unrelenting extremist, someone who could hardly write twenty consecutive words without expressing fear of Anglo-Celtic “degeneration” or remarking defensively upon “the superiority of the Northmen”. It may be timely to observe that new laws are normally midwived by terrors such as these, and that, in general, we have to live with those laws long after the terrors are dispersed and forgotten.

The rise of the far right

By Michael Petrou - Thursday, September 9, 2010 at 2:20 PM - 0 Comments

Matthew Lloyd Getty Images/ Phil Noble Reuters/ Sand Tan AP

“We’re expecting a nice peaceful protest, and we’ll all be home for tea time.”

The police officer in the northern British city of Bradford was speaking in advance of a planned rally by the English Defence League, a far-right group that, since its launch less than two years ago, has grown into a street movement capable of mobilizing hundreds or thousands of supporters at demonstrations across Britain. The EDL says it is non-racist and opposed only to Muslim extremism and the “stealthy introduction of sharia law” into Britain. “We are a grassroots social movement who represent every walk of life, every race, every creed and every colour, from the working class to Middle England,” the EDL’s website claims. “Our unity and diversity is our strength.” Their opponents say they are fascists and racists, and hate Muslims of all types.
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A slow-burn bonfire of liberties

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, May 13, 2010 at 8:00 AM - 285 Comments

Suzanne Plunkett/ Reuters

At the time of writing, I have no idea who’s won the British general election. At the time of reading, you probably have. But, whatever the result, I doubt it will make much difference to the fate of the United Kingdom, which is in the fast lane of the not-so-slow-burn bonfire of the liberties consuming much of the Western world.

The official “defining moment” of the campaign was Gordon Brown’s unguarded post-photo-op dismissal of Gillian Duffy as a “bigoted woman.” Mrs. Duffy, a plain-spoken working-class granny and lifelong Labour voter, had made the mistake of asking Mr. Brown, her party leader, a very mild question about immigrants from eastern Europe. He got back in his car and wrote her off, forgetting he was still miked. So she’s a “bigot.” He’s not. That’s why he makes all the decisions for her, and she just makes the best of them. What part of that don’t you understand?

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Hockey and minstrel shows—together at last!

By Philippe Gohier - Friday, March 12, 2010 at 5:56 PM - 63 Comments

I hate to admit how much time I spent trying to get this photo today, but Deadspin finally beat me to it. I saw this last night while watching the Habs’ game on RDS and had to pick my jaw up off the floor afterwards.

For those of you who aren’t hockey fans, first things first: What’s wrong with you? Second, here’s what went down: Sometime around the middle of the game, the camera inexplicably cut to these two doofuses in the crowd at the Bell Centre. The announcers initially seemed a little dumbfounded—not by the fact there were two Al Jolson wannabes taking in the game, but by why they’d be dressed up at all. When one of them noticed their t-shirts say “Subbanator” everything became crystal clear and perfectly reasonable.

P.K. Subban, you see, is a highly-touted prospect plying his trade in the Canadiens’ minor-league system and he’s already a bit of a fan favourite. He’s also black and, for some reason, no one involved in broadcasting (or attending) the game appeared to think this was a problematic way of feting Subban. Certainly not the dude in the truck, who left the shot up for a good 7-8 seconds; certainly not the announcers, who seemed to see it as “just a couple o’ guys havin’ fun at the game”; and certainly not Bell Centre security, who appear to be more concerned with preventing folks from sneaking beer into games than suggesting minstrel theatre should, at the very least, be confined to a different venue.

Ugh. Quebec just leaves me speechless sometimes.

The hidden message in fried chicken

By Cameron Ainsworth-Vincze - Wednesday, February 3, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 40 Comments

UPDATE: Since the publication of this story, Australian authorities have charged Jaspreet Singh with lodging a false report for financial gain. Police allege that Singh was not set on fire in a racially motivated attack, but that he instead accidentally burned himself while torching his car for an insurance claim.

*****

When it was reported last spring that dozens of Indian students attending university in Melbourne and Sydney had been attacked, Australian authorities dismissed racism as a motivating factor. Instead, they suggested the students were “soft targets” because they often travelled alone and carried valuable items, such as laptops. That response sparked Indian-led rallies in Melbourne and Sydney to raise awareness and promote greater safety measures, yet the attacks continue and India is now accusing Australia of sitting idly by as they occur.

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Return of a troubling nativist

By Rachel Mendleson - Thursday, October 29, 2009 at 5:20 PM - 6 Comments

One of South Africa’s most notorious white supremacists has resurfaced—and he has ambitious plans. On Oct. 10, Eugene Terre’Blanche, who founded the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB) in the ’70s, held a rally with 300 supporters in a hall outside of Johannesburg. His goal: to fight for an independent Afrikaner republic. Against the backdrop of the AWB’s swastika-style flag, Terre’Blanche told the crowd, which reportedly included representatives from some 23 far-right groups, “Our land is being run by criminals who murder and rob. This land was the best, and they ruined it all.”

Terre’Blanche’s return has caught many by surprise. During the ’80s and ’90s, he was well known for his fiery oratory and violent demonstrations against the end of apartheid. But after he was jailed for two 1996 incidents—the assault of a black gas station attendant and attempted murder of a black security guard—he fell off the political map. Since his release from prison in 2004, he had been maintaining a low profile, and is now taking a less militant approach. “There are other options we have to exercise first,” he said recently. “We have a strong case to take to the United Nations.” Continue…

Second-rate citizens

By Anna Porter - Monday, October 26, 2009 at 3:20 PM - 48 Comments

On Aug. 25, 2006, an ethnic Hungarian student named Hedvig Malina was severely beaten and robbed in the city of Nitra, Slovakia, after she spoke Hungarian on her cellphone. “Slovakia without parasites” was written on her clothes when she first reported her injuries to authorities. A two-week-long police investigation ended without charges, while at the same time the minister of the interior stepped in front of TV cameras to announce that Malina’s claims were baseless and accused her of making up the whole incident. In May 2007, Malina was indicted for perjury. Amid cries of outrage and charges of political interference, Malina appealed her case at the Constitutional Court. And in 2008, she took her case to the European Court of Human Rights.

On Sept. 12, 2009, ignoring the laws about presumptions of innocence, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, a former stalwart of the pre-’89 Communist party who now heads the Smer (Direction) party, accused Hedvig Malina of inflicting her own injuries in order to create an anti-Slovak atmosphere. (Oddly enough, from 1994 till 2000, Fico represented Slovakia at the European Court of Human Rights, a fact that says as much about that judicial body as it does about the task of monitoring human rights offences by member states.) But Fico’s comment should come as no surprise—the bad blood goes back centuries. The Hungarian monarchy ruled the Slovaks for a millenium until the end of the First World War, while the Hungarian minority that was left in what became Czechoslovakia suffered discrimination throughout the last century. “We are victims of an accident of history,” says one Hungarian member of the Slovak parliament. “For about 1,000 years, until 1919, this was all part of the kingdom of Hungary, and since then Slovaks have been seeking new ways to deal with that fact.” Continue…

Hungary’s Roma protect themselves

By Patricia Treble - Thursday, September 10, 2009 at 3:40 PM - 7 Comments

Hungary’s Roma population is so afraid of attacks by right-wing groups that they have started protecting their neighbourhoods through nighttime patrols. Their fear is justified: six Roma have been murdered in violent assaults since last November. After a huge police investigation, four men, alleged Roma haters who carefully planned their crimes, were detained for the deadly attacks in late August.

One of the worst attacks occurred in Tatárszentgyörgy last February. Erzsebet Csorba woke up to the sound of gunfire outside her house. She discovered her mortally wounded son not far from his firebombed house. Her grandson was nearby. “His whole small body was full with holes from the bullets,” she told Voice of America. The child soon died. Continue…

Obama’s beer diplomacy

By John Parisella - Monday, July 27, 2009 at 3:06 PM - 24 Comments

An African-American president and a high-profile case involving allegations of racial profiling certainly make for a powerful mix. The arrest of Henry Louis Gates  should have been a regrettable one-day news story. But Barack Obama’s intervention at last week’s press conference helped escalate it into a matter only a meeting between the parties at the White House over beer—with the president himself as conciliator—could be expected to resolve. Talk about over-dramatization!

Obama was right to meet the national press on Friday afternoon to bring the temperature down and correct the trajectory of his earlier remarks. After all, his comment rendering a judgment on the Cambridge police actions (“[they] acted stupidly”), prefaced by an admission that “he did not have all the facts” was sure to send shockwaves. Conservative commentators, led by Rush Limbaugh, quickly pounced and condemned Obama’s remarks, while the local police union adding that an apology would be appropriate in the circumstances. The so-called bully pulpit evidently has its advantages, but it also comes with constraints.

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America and race in the Obama age

By John Parisella - Friday, July 24, 2009 at 4:40 PM - 51 Comments

In what should have been a press conference on the status of his healthcare reform package, Barack Obama strayed from his usual habit of staying on message and waded in on the controversy surrounding renowned Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and his arrest by the Cambridge, Massachusetts, police outside his own home last week. No one was surprised that the question came up in the hour-long media conference and the president evidently had a point of view. Obama’s statement that the police acted “stupidly” in handcuffing the professor, a 57 year old man with a cane, has done much more than anything else to give the story legs.

One week after Gates’s arrest, the facts related to the incident remain incomplete and ambiguous. The arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley, was originally portrayed as an overzealous policeman falling prey to racial profiling. But photos relating to the incident show the presence of an African-American policeman and quite possibly an Hispanic officer as well. And we have since found out that Crowley teaches a class at the police academy in how to avoid racial profiling. Crowley argues that the arrest was prompted by disorderly conduct and the fact the call was related to a possible burglary in progress. However, it is still not clear why Gates was handcuffed once it was established he was indeed at his home.

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Australia confronts racism

By Katie Engelhart - Thursday, July 9, 2009 at 4:20 PM - 5 Comments

After weeks of refuting allegations of Australian racism, PM Kevin Rudd may be pulling an about-face. In response to a spate of violent attacks against Indian students, Rudd announced Thursday that he would consider a new set of federal laws aimed at curbing violence against overseas students. The amendment would strengthen the powers of police to respond to attacks, and also make “inciting violence” against an individual, on the basis of race, a federal offence.

It’s a move that was slow in coming. The first of the assaults—which left a 21-year-old student in a coma after he was stabbed with a screwdriver—took place over a month ago. Since then, over a dozen such incidents have been reported. But Australian officials have steadfastly denied that the attacks were racially motivated. Police said the violence was nothing but pedestrian street crime; Indian students were “soft” targets because they were walking alone at night. Rudd similarly dismissed race as a motive, calling the violence “just a regrettable fact of urban life.” Continue…

Maclean's Interview: Bill Russell

By Kenneth Whyte - Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 9:40 AM - 6 Comments

Q: I read that your grandchild once asked you if you were as good a basketball player as Michael Jordan, but I never read your answer.

A: I told him, that’s the wrong question. The question is, was Michael Jordan as good as me.

Q: Wayne Embry, who’s been in Canada with the Toronto Raptors, said that you were not the greatest player to play basketball but you would be the first player that he would want if he was going to start a team. That makes no sense to me.

A: Aha! Well, there’s my whole history, okay? The reason is that when people talk about great players they’re always talking about the offence, there are no real adequate stats for defence. When I was in college, my junior year in college we were 28-and-1. I was MVP at the Final Four. We won it, okay? I was first team all-American, my team was the number one defensive team in the nation. At the end of the season they picked another centre as player of the year. And my second year in the NBA the players voted me MVP, and the writers voted me second team all-league. So I’m used to that. But by my way of thinking, individual stats are great for golf, tennis, and most track and field [events].

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Some Hon. Racists

By Andrew Potter - Saturday, May 30, 2009 at 10:26 AM - 42 Comments

This is the final week of the spring session of the House of Commons. Apart from all the responsible-government business left to wrap up, it is the last chance before the summer break for our parliamentarians to accuse one another of being racist.

Ahh, parliament, where nothing ever changes. The above passage is the lede to a column I wrote three years ago.  

Is Pierre Poilievre a racist, some are asking?

Pierre shouldn’t be too concerned — if history is any guide, getting called a racist by your colleagues is more or less a rite of passage in parliament; everyone gets accused of it eventually. 

Anyway, I’m with Kady – Pierre is probably guilty of nothing more than being an ignoramus.  But when it comes to being a member in good standing in the House of Commons, that’s clearly no serious impediment. 

Tamil questions that can't be asked

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 10:20 AM - 179 Comments

The other day, one of the least soft-headed of Canadian columnists, Lorrie Goldstein, wrote a piece in the Toronto Sun called “Protest backlash unearths racism”:

“Let’s not pretend that much of the condemnation of Tamils in Canada for protesting the plight of Tamil civilians in Sri Lanka isn’t racist.

“Any journalist who’s been around knows what’s going on and we have an obligation to speak up.”

I’ve been around. Well, okay, I’ve been nearby, as Mary Tyler Moore liked to say. And, insofar as I feel an obligation to speak up, it’s only to wonder at how far even the remarkably tensile concept of “racism” can be stretched.

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Baggy Trousers Update

By Andrew Potter - Monday, April 13, 2009 at 11:09 PM - 2 Comments

The legal challenge to the ban on baggy trousers in Riviera Beach has finally made it to court, with the public defenders representing three of the men charged arguing “that the ordinance and its enforcement violated principles of freedom of expression and the right to due process.” It is also probably relevant that the only people charged under the ordinance have been young black men. 

According to the Times, the “star witness” was Chelsea Rousso, a former New York fashion designer:

Ms. Rousso, 48, looking uptown chic on the witness stand in a three-quarter-length embroidered jacket and a knit black dress by Ellen Tracy, conceded that sagging pants were not for her. They look “uncomfortable,” she said, and “comfort is very important in the things I wear.”

Still, the principle is the thing, and Ms. Rousso pointed out that everyone from Prince Harry to Zac Efron have sported the look. 

I’ve written about these bans twice for the magazine, here and here. Thanks to Chris MacDonald for the pointer.

Russia’s hate crime epidemic

By Rachel Mendleson - Thursday, December 18, 2008 at 4:00 PM - 4 Comments

With their tousled hair, button-down shirts and V-neck sweaters, the young men sentenced this week in Moscow for 20 murders and 12 attempted murders don’t look like traditional skinheads. But the group of seven, who received between six and 20 years each, apparently targeted non-Slavic migrants in the 2006 and 2007 attacks, confronting Central Asians, Caucasians—as one correspondent put it, “people who did not look white”—in streets and pedestrian tunnels, often videotaping and posting the events online.

Though the brutality of the hate crimes perpetrated by this gang is remarkable, their existence is anything but. In Russia, xenophobic violence is becoming increasingly commonplace, and ultra-nationalist organizations are often to blame. According to the Moscow Bureau of Human Rights, between January and October 2008 there were 113 racist murders nationwide, up from 74 for all of 2007. Just last week, the severed head of a Tajik worker was found in a dumpster outside a council building in western Moscow. A group calling itself the Militant Organization of Russian Nationalists took responsibility for the crime in an email, reportedly billing it as “a warning to officials that the same will happen to them if they do not stop the flow of immigration.”

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Trust him. He's Bob Rae.

By selley - Friday, November 21, 2008 at 2:27 PM - 13 Comments

Must-reads: Dan Gardner on the McMurtry/Curling report; Colby Cosh on bailing out the oil patch; Don Martin on Bob Rae.

A long, bumpy ride
And so dawns the new age of economic consensus…

“Maybe I should simply be happy no one’s yet suggesting we rekindle inflation and see if it helps,” a predictably outraged John Robson writes in the Ottawa Citizen. “But I’m not.” Indeed, he’s borderline apoplectic at the speed and obtuseness with which governments abandon solid economic principles—balanced budgets, not “picking winners and losers” in the corporate world, etc.—when the economy goes south. In fact, he observes, most people pushing for some kind of Detroit Three bailout on the basis that allowing them to fail would be untenable have abandoned even the “pretence that GM, Ford and Chrysler are winners,” and yet they still want to throw good billions after bad. But alas, Robson laments, we are at these people’s mercy. Just stay the hell away from the stock market until it’s over, he advises.

Colby Cosh returns to the pages of the National Post in fine form, observing that lots of potential jobs are being lost in the Alberta oil patch thanks to “purely temporary business-cycle conditions,” and yet Tony Clement’s nowhere to be seen with a bailout proposal. What gives? Partly, Cosh argues, it’s the old political truth that the visible (i.e., existing jobs at crap Detroit-based automakers) trumps the invisible (i.e., potential jobs at viable but not-yet-built oilsands facilities) no matter how illogically. And partly, he suggests, it’s because Ontarians’ “understanding of the world remains heavily influenced by the opening credits of The Beverly Hillbilies.”

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Megapundit: Where's our Obama?

By selley - Monday, November 17, 2008 at 1:25 PM - 15 Comments

Must-reads: Rosie DiManno on race statistics; Lawrence Martin on finding a new Speaker; Doug Saunders on waiting for a European Obama; Greg Weston on Jim Prentice’s new job; Jeffrey Simpson on bailing out the Detroit Three; David Frum on the GOP’s bleak future; Don Martin on Elizabeth May.

Change we don’t believe in
Sure, the Liberal party will soon “change.” But neither it nor Canada, the pundits lament, will Change.

Ignatieff vs. Rae vs. LeBlanc is precisely the leadership race the Liberals needed, L. Ian MacDonald opines in the Montreal Gazette. For one thing, he says, “it will keep costs down at a time when the party is broke.” But more to the point, it means “amateur hour is over.” The only two legitimate candidates understand their goal is to “unite the party, fill its campaign coffers, and win the next election,” and nothing else. No young people; no new ideas; no funny business.

The Gazette‘s Don Macpherson also handicaps the race for the leadership, suggesting—weirdly, in our view—that “because of the unfortunate timing of the current leadership race, Ignatieff starts off his second run risking unfavourable comparison with the charismatic [Barack] Obama.” This is particularly true in Quebec, he argues, where election fatigue has set in and there’s nothing remotely novel about Charest vs. Marois vs. Dumont. Fair enough, but who’s Ignatieff up against? Rae and LeBlanc, and then Harper? Which of those three juggernauts is going to out-Obama Iggy?

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