On Syrian Refugees: An Open Letter to the Prime Minister

November 24, 2015

ON SYRIAN REFUGEES: AN OPEN LETTER TO THE PRIME MINISTER

Prime Minister Trudeau,

Your government's emerging policy toward Syrian refugees is a moral catastrophe and a crime against humanity.

Your decision to exclude "unaccompanied" Syrian men from refuge in our country, on security grounds, is a blatant violation of Canada's commitments under numerous international conventions and declarations that guarantee non-discrimination on the basis of gender.

Moreover, your policy specifically excludes refugees drawn from the most persecuted and genocided sector of the Syrian population: younger men. From the beginning of the uprising against the Assad regime in 2011, younger men overwhelmingly have been the ones targeted for extrajudicial killing, arbitrary detention, torture, and "disappearance". The ISIS terrorist group has pursued similar gendercidal strategies.

Yet instead of viewing these men as the most vulnerable of refugees, or at least as meriting fair and equal consideration, you choose to demonize them as security risks. You pile onto their collective trauma and persecution a further stigmatization and denial of elementary human and civil rights. (You also, ironically, insult women when you pretend that they are passive angels who could never pose a security risk. Apparently you have not been reading the news.)

Shame on you, Prime Minister. Your sexist policy – which is also, let us face it, a racist one – directly injures and anathematizes hundreds of thousands of innocent people, on no other grounds than their gender and marital/family status.

Surely, if your government announced that we would accept Syrian women as refugees only if they were married and/or mothers, the political consequences would be severe. You can pursue your present policy because you know that men, especially younger men, are easily demonized and discarded. In this respect, your attitude is quite comparable to that of the murderous Assad regime and the ISIS terrorists. Indeed, leaving these young men stranded and hopeless is exactly what ISIS wants.

Prime Minister, I believe you and your government are better than this. I call on you to abandon this misguided measure immediately, and to bring Canadian refugee policy in line with basic civilized norms.

Sincerely,

Adam Jones, Ph.D.
Professor, Political Science
University of British Columbia
Kelowna, BC, Canada

Petition: For a Gender-Inclusive Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Aboriginal Canadians

[Posted to Change.org and now open for signature/circulation: November 13, 2015]

We, the undersigned, call for a gender-inclusive inquiry into missing and murdered Aboriginal Canadians, and the crisis of violence that afflicts Aboriginal communities nationwide.

The issue of murdered and missing Aboriginal women and girls is a matter of the highest national urgency. It should be a focal point of any inquiry. We applaud the efforts of women activists, especially in Aboriginal communities, to press this issue in the face of considerable resistance from the dominant society, and to establish it as a prominent social and political concern.

In our view, though, it is unacceptable to limit an inquiry or investgation of murdered and missing Aboriginals to Native women and girls alone. Men and boys account for over 70 percent of total Aboriginal murder victims in Canada. We cannot state with certainty what proportion of missing Aboriginal Canadians they compose, as the RCMP refuses to share the relevant data. Nonetheless, it is highly likely that the proportion of men and boys among missing Aboriginals is comparable to their overrepresentation in homicide (and suicide) statistics.

We protest the arbitrary exclusion of the majority of Aboriginal murder victims, and at least a substantial proportion of the missing, from the universe of ethical and political concern. We call for a rigorously gender-inclusive inquiry into the issue of murdered and missing Aboriginal Canadians, and into broader patterns of violence within and against Aboriginal communities, including structural violence and the legacy of Canada’s dispossession of Native peoples, domestic and partner violence, child abuse (including in the residential school system), suicide, homelessness, and addiction issues. Any such inquiry must respond above all to the wishes, perspectives, and priorities of Aboriginal communities, families, and citizens. It should also be sensitive to factors and variables beyond indigeneity and gender, and the intersections among them.

Aboriginal signatories to this petition call for reconsideration and broadening of the limited, gender-exclusive campaign for an inquiry into murdered and missing Native Canadians. Those from the dominant society and abroad express their solidarity with First Nations peoples, and call for the generalized crisis of violence against them to be placed at the forefront of the national agenda.

[SIGN THE PETITION]

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Supporting Documentation:

"Are We Ignoring Missing and Murdered Indigenous Men?", CBC Unreserved, 25 October 2015.

Adam Jones, "Aboriginal Men are Murdered and Missing ...", National Post, 27 April 2015.

Seized of Sorrow -- my new essay in Advancing Genocide Studies

Just published: Advancing Genocide Studies: Personal Accounts and Insights from Scholars in the Field (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2015), edited by Samuel Totten. It includes my autobiographical essay, Seized of Sorrow.

Are We Ignoring Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Men?

CBC Unreserved radio show, Sunday, October 25, 2015.

"It was a campaign issue in the recent federal election. There's even an #MMIWG hashtag. After decades of activism, the issue of missing and murdered indigenous women is finally on the radar of the public. But what about indigenous men and boys? Aboriginal men account for approximately 71 per cent of aboriginal homicide victims in Canada, but rates of violence against indigenous men don't seem to mobilize the same kind of support or interest -- and haven't been studied to the same extent. Dr. Adam Jones, a professor of political science at UBC Okanagan, wants to change that."

Link to podcast interview (13 mins.)

The Crisis of Murdered and Missing Aboriginal Men in Canada

An audio version of my public talk at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver on October 8, 2015. Many thanks to Theryn Meyer and Philip Johnston of SFU Advocacy for Men & Boys for organizing, sponsoring, and recording this talk.

Genocide Scholar Remains an Optimist in the Face of Inhumanity (UA Article)

Vivian Smith, "Genocide Scholar Remains an Optimist in the Face of Inhumanity"

University Affairs, September 2015

Cover of the third edition of my GENOCIDE textbook

The third edition of Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction
will be published by Routledge in 2016. The cover image, taken by
the author, shows a burnt-out schoolroom and children's desks
at the Kabgayi cathedral and hospital complex in Rwanda. Tens of
thousands of Tutsis were murdered at Kabgayi in the genocide of 1994.

My article: Why we need a gender-inclusive inquiry into violence against Aboriginal Canadians

Published in Canada's National Post newspaper today. Click on the image below for the online version of the article.

Women on Bikes

My students, and viewers of my photo galleries, know that I have always had a thing for women on motorbikes in the Global South. I hate the damn machines as public nuisances, but the gender symbolism -- women's growing consumer power, occupational status/entrepreneurial activity, mobility/independence, public presence, and yes, appropriation of phallic power and traditionally masculine noise, velocity, and competitiveness -- is all fascinating and encouraging. Click on the photo above or the link below for the article in The Guardian (UK) that evoked these thoughts, a profile of Behnaz Shafiei, Roaring to Go: The Female Motorbike Rider Who Wants to Race for Iran.

In Praise of e-Reading

by Adam Jones, Ph.D.
adam.jones@ubc.ca

The Web and social media, in particular, have been filled in recent months with jeremiads against e-reading. The ScienceNordic article, “Paper beats computer screens”, exemplifies the trend. “Neo-Luddites rejoice,” writes Arnfinn Christensen, “numerous studies show that when you read a text on paper your understanding is deeper and longer lasting than if you read that same text on a computer.” According to joint Norwegian-Canadian research, “Comprehension is not the only thing that suffers. Paper also seems to communicate more to our emotions than a screen does.” Oh, also if you read from a screen before sleep, you’ll shrivel and die.

This is certainly worrisome. But I find it intriguing, and ironic, that nearly all these screeds against digital books and readers were originally composed on screens. If a screen truly renders reading comprehension more difficult, shouldn't it also stunt written clarity and coherence?

In fact, we know it does -- the ascent of textspeak, and so on. But that doesn't deter you, right? Your own carefully-crafted words and phrases and texts (in the broader sense) flow perfectly naturally on your computer or laptop. Ever been tempted to revert to a typewriter, or even better, to handwriting for the additional warmth and intimacy it allows? I thought not.

Moreover, if you saw those anti-digital manifestos on Facebook, or a blog, or a website, then you also read them on screens. Did you fail to catch their drift? Did the authors fear you’d miss their message? I doubt it.

For the past thirteen months, I've been on academic sabbatical, travelling around the world and then some. I've carried a cheap netbook with me, but also a Google Nexus 7 tablet, the first such device I've owned.

It's proved to be a revelation. After decades of struggling along with bags full of books, I was able to keep the paper-and-glue versions to a minimum. On my tablet resided hundreds of great-looking works waiting to be read. Total weight? Maybe a physicist could tell me.

When I delved into them, I discovered some of the many joys of digital reading. Dim light in that hotel room, or none at all on the late-night bus? Fear not, you're backlit. Text on that book too small, or large? Adjust the size to your liking, together with the font and the background colour. My Nexus screen isn’t great in bright sunlight, but many specialized e-readers are, and anyway, I don't spend a lot of time reading in bright sunlight.

Need to highlight a passage? Instead of fumbling for your yellow marker (let alone trying to draw a reasonably level line on moving transport), just touch and drag on the lines in question, and click the yellow button. (Or perhaps you prefer green?) Voilà – no childishly jagged lines from reading on a bumpy bus; no more discarded plastic pens to foul our environment.

Want to take notes afterward? No need to lay your book flat to read your ink-marked pages. My app keeps a file of all my highlighted passages. I'm sure I could export them somehow, but I prefer to sit down and re-enter them on my laptop, the better to ponder and reprocess them.

A few other advantages, from my point of view:

• Portability – my Nexus fits snugly in a well-protected interior pocket of my man-purse, or my jeans pocket for a quick stroll. That’s hundreds of books and articles close to my hip, as I mentioned, but the unit is lighter and easier to store, transfer, and manipulate than most of the lightest paperbacks.

• Footnotes – consulted at the touch of a finger or stylus, rather than by laboriously leafing through the tail-end of the volume.

• Searchable text in lieu of “Where did s/he say that?”

• Colour images when a publisher may lack the funds for colour plates in the printed version.

• I don’t use the dictionary feature when I’m reading, but it seems useful. Likewise, I don’t own the Kobo Aura H2O, but if I did, my books would be waterproof.

• Embedded hyperlinks. Let me digress here. When I wrote my first e-book a couple of years ago, In Iran: Text and Photos, I wondered how I should approach the hundreds of colour photos I had taken on my Persian journey. Clearly, there were far too many to include in an e-book that simply mimicked a print volume’s format, and the weight of the photos would have produced an ungainly file size for download purposes.

Eventually, I hit on a solution: I would post my photos to my Flickr page, and hotlink the relevant passages in my text, so that a reader would only have to tap the highlighted text to launch the relevant online photo. I don’t know how user-friendly are the results, but they’re a creative exploration of the new possibilities.

In Iran sells online for $5.99, which is approximately a tenth of my latest paperback published by an academic press. And may I say how lustrous those photos look online, viewed backlit on screens rather than printed on paper? May I mention the miracle of posting photos for a global audience and having them viewed by millions, as opposed to rounding up friends and family for slide shows?

I experienced another epiphany on a visit to Rio de Janeiro several years back, to give talks at a local university. Students approached me bearing copies of my 650-page textbook, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction. But for the most part, they were bearing them on their iPads. The logistics and cost of shipping a book that big and heavy to Brazil from overseas, and the hassle of carrying it around all day, were trumped – obliterated – by the process of purchasing it online and downloading it more or less instantly as a PDF copy. Surely this democratization of access to information, and the greatly increased ease and flow of communication between Global North and South, is worth acknowledging and appreciating.

I remember unpacking some of the first printed copies of that textbook, weighing one in my hand, and thinking: Uh-oh. Likewise, when I read traditional books during my recent sabbatical, I confess that for the first time in my life, they felt … clunky. Heavy. Ungainly. Was it my imagination, or did they suddenly smell musty?

My indispensable magazine subscription is to The Economist. This can be a hard publication to find in far corners of the world, and it’s generally very expensive, up to $10 a copy. It also gets frayed when you carry around multiple issues, as you probably will – The Onion’s joke was that this densely-packed weekly was ceasing publication for a month so that readers could catch up.

With my digital subscription, new issues download automatically to my tablet whenever I have a stable wi-fi connection, at a price of about $2 each. I use the Pocket app to store articles from this and other publications. The piles of physical magazines awaiting me when I returned to British Columbia were a poignant sight. They suddenly seemed … superfluous. Was it my imagination, or did they just take up space and slaughter trees?

Of course, it was wonderfully cozy to get home to my two rooms full of physical books, shelved floor to ceiling. Perhaps my access to them isn’t as instant as with the digital files on my tablet. But it’s close, and it’s fun to pull and flip and browse. I don’t deny this.

Nor do I deny that reading a book on a smartphone, for example, seems a barren experience, as does viewing video on one. I haven’t dug through the various scientific studies on reading comprehension to see if page/screen size is controlled for. But you’d expect comprehension and coherence to be reduced by a prohibitively small viewing area. My Nexus’s 7-inch screen is about as small as I want to go for reading, or any but the most functional activity like a call or quick text. (My smartphone, incidentally, can sit idle for weeks; about three people have the number, and I still cling to a landline.) I keep a Samsung Galaxy Tab S on hand, with a 10.5” screen, for visually dense magazines like Vanity Fair and for reading PDF books, where text reformatting and resizing are more awkward than with the EPUB format.

As a university professor, I also recognize the reality of a hyperactive and hypervisual media age. Students these days are the great multi-taskers, and I consider it a positive obligation on my part to compete for their gaze with the minimum two other screens they’re usually carrying (rather than, for instance, banning the use of phones and tablets and laptops in my classroom). I don’t always compete successfully, though, and there’s a general sense among my colleagues that students’ patience for reams of class readings has waned significantly over the past decade or two.

But there’s a beauty in this instant access to humankind’s intellectual and civilizational heritage: I often call on my students to fact-check something that comes up in class; while they compete to come up with the information on the spot, I have a chance to sip my coffee.

Indeed, with the galaxies opened to us by the World Wide Web, and more shelved collections being added to the digital realm all the time, the sheer wealth of data available to us is leagues beyond anything humanity has known. It is overwhelming. But it is reality, and I think it is irreversible. It won’t last – it’s as protean a media culture as we’ve ever witnessed. But wherever it leads, it won’t retreat.

Physical book-reading will probably become a minority or even marginal taste, like vinyl records, during the next couple of decades. And that shift, in my view, won’t leave us at a notable disadvantage. The move to writing on screens that began in the early ‘80s was a paradigm shift that no longer excites comment or controversy. A few curmudgeons may still prefer their Olivettis or ballpoints, and more power to them. But writing culture has moved on, and reading culture will too.

[The author is a professor of political science at the University of British Columbia in Kelowna, Canada. He is the author of Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (3rd edition forthcoming), and author or editor of over a dozen other books. This article may be freely circulated and reposted if credit is given.]