[PHOTO] Alley behind Chester TTC station, Toronto

[URBAN NOTE] "‘A Nice Little Place With Cheap Beer’: Where ISIS Attacked"

At The Atlantic, Feargus O'Sullivan writes about the neighbourhoods in Paris attacked on Friday. They actually sound a lot like the neighbourhoods I regularly inhabit here in Toronto, like Bloor Street West and The Annex and Queen Street West and Parkdale.

[V]isiting the attack sites, what was striking was their normality. Except for the Bataclan, with its gaudy paint job, the cafés and restaurants the terrorists struck are places you might walk past without giving a second glance. They were still unquestionably places at the heart of a community. Asking my Parisian friends if they knew of or ever visited the places that were attacked, the answer was clear: Yes, we knew them all. Yes, we went to them all the time.

The Petit Cambodge’s reputation for good, affordable food regularly had people queuing out the door on Friday nights. The Carillon, the bar opposite, was a nice little place with cheap beer, one friend told me. It attracted everyone from neighborhood old-timers to hipsters, who would spill out to smoke in front. A 15-odd-minute walk south, the Belle Équipe, another attack site, is a pretty but unremarkable café on a nice street—France’s Prime Minister Manuel Valls lives round the corner—run by three women. The Bataclan, site of the worst of Friday’s carnage, is a charming old theater that’s long been run as a club and concert venue. Hosting parties and gay nights as well as live music, it’s known locally for having a great program—one whose quality arguably exceeds that of its sound system.

“Why here?” everyone is asking themselves, looking around at places that were the unremarked backdrop of so many lives. It is a horribly surreal experience to see bullet holes riddling shop windows around somewhere as ordinary-looking as the Casa Nostra pizzeria; the sidewalk where at least five people were killed is now strewn with sand. Daesh, as the terrorist group ISIS is being referred to here, claims that it has struck at symbols of French perversity, but as you would expect from murderous zealots, their definition of the perverse (pizza?) seems preposterously broad.

The zone where the attacks took place is nonetheless a highly distinctive, specific one. This fast-changing part of Paris is a sort of unofficial buffer area, wedged between the long-expensive, gay-friendly Marais district and the poorer Chinese and North African communities of Belleville. It’s at the forefront of what the Libération newspaper calls hipsterisation avancée, but it doesn’t necessarily appear so to an outsider’s eye. Certainly there are expensive little boutiques and gluten-free bakeries sneaking in here and there, and attractive youngish people hanging around. But the overall feeling is nonetheless still that of a quartier populaire—a working-class neighborhood with shabby but likable corner cafés, laundromats, cheap grocery stores, and a crowd on the streets that’s as diverse as anywhere in in the city. Like much of Paris, it doesn’t have the best reputation for street safety, but it feels great. Alive, authentic, dense. It’s everything you might hope Paris to be.

[URBAN NOTE] "Millennials left to cope with aftermath of Paris attacks"

At the Toronto Star, Marco Chown Oved reports how young people in Paris are coping with the idea that they were the explicit targets.

Julien was supposed to go to the concert at the Bataclan, but got turned away at the door because it was sold out.

Emma got a text from her friend sent seconds before the shooting started: “I’m at Le Carillon.” Then for the next hour, with all the cell networks jammed, she couldn’t get through to him.

Eva was supposed to go out on the Canal St. Martin and would have walked right by La Bonne Bière Café, but decided to finish a bottle of wine at home before heading out.

The bars, cafés and restaurants attacked in Friday night’s massacre were all popular hangouts for young people in Paris’ gentrifying north east end, places where people of all cultures and backgrounds intermingle over a beer or a glass of wine. And two days after the carnage, those who narrowly escaped death now firmly believe these locations were carefully chosen for the kinds of victims that would be found there: millennials.

“This is where all people our age go out,” said Eva Frye, one of the few people who consented to have their last name used. The brand strategist from San Francisco arrived in Paris two days before the attacks for a month-long “work-cation.”

[LINK] "Author and artist Douglas Coupland reflects on our loss of freedom"

From The Globe and Mail, Marsha Lederman reports on Douglas Coupland's reaction to the recent terrorist attacks in Paris.

During our conversation, we also discussed his current appointment as artist-in-residence at the Google Cultural Institute in Paris. The author and visual artist arrived in Paris last February, shortly after the attacks at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a kosher grocery store.

He will return to complete the residency in Paris, likely in January.

It’s a city he loves. Mr. Coupland received the Legion of Honour earlier this year, and in the notes for his acceptance speech, he called Paris “possibly the most futuristic city in the world.” He added that the time he has been spending in France thus far had been the most interesting and productive time of his life – rivalled only by art school in Vancouver decades ago. “My Parisian co-workers have become close friends, and the city itself has also become a cherished friend.”

He also commended the way French society had handled recent events.

“French culture needs to remember that the world now looks to France as a critical political and social navigator of our new century,” he wrote in his speech.

What we didn’t know during our shopping mall interview Friday was that as we were speaking, Paris was under attack again.

More, including a short interview, via the link.

[LINK] "Calais refugees grieve for Paris while dreading Islamophobic backlash"

Al Jazeera America's Colette Davidson reports on what seems to me to be the increasingly untenable situation of the refugees in the Calais camp.

Dulbar Karem sits cross-legged in her trailer in the Iraqi section of a refugee camp on the outskirts of Calais which holds thousands of people, many of whom mourned Friday’s attacks in Paris while also fearing that they would lead to an Islamophobic backlash.

“We cried for France that night,” she said, bouncing her 11-month-old daughter, Chawy, on her lap. “We didn’t sleep.”

[. . .]

This sentiment was shared yesterday when about 200 people gathered in the camp’s activities tent to hold a vigil for the victims of the Paris attacks. Camp residents of all nationalities met, holding hands in two circles for three minutes of silence before participants were given the floor to express themselves.

“There were mostly messages of peace and hope, but there were also a lot of apologies from Muslim members of the community,” said Abby Evans, who runs the Hands International vaccinations clinic next door and attended the vigil.

“They weren’t apologizing for themselves,” said Joe Murphy, whose Good Chance theater helped organize the commemoration. “They really wanted to stress that ‘we are not those people — this is not Islam.’”

[LINK] "ISIS wants to destroy the 'grey zone'. Here's how we defend it"

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed's Open Democracy essay makes very important points about how to, and how not to, respond to the threat of ISIS.

ISIS’s choice of targets reveal a range of ideological motives – sectarian targeting of minorities like Shi’as, Kurds and Yazidis; striking in the heart of Muslim regimes that have joined the anti-ISIS coalition; as well as demonstrating the punitive consequences of attacking ISIS to western publics by hitting them at their most vulnerable, in bars, restaurants and music venues.

The goal, of course, is to inflict trauma, fear, paranoia, suspicion, panic and terror – but there is a particularly twisted logic as part of this continuum of violence, which is to draw the western world into an apocalyptic civilizational Armageddon with ‘Islam.’

ISIS recognizes that it has only marginal support amongst Muslims around the world. The only way it can accelerate recruitment and strengthen its territorial ambitions is twofold: firstly, demonstrating to Islamist jihadist networks that there is now only one credible terror game in town capable of pulling off spectacular terrorist attacks in the heart of the west, and two, by deteriorating conditions of life for Muslims all over the world to draw them into joining or supporting ISIS.

Both these goals depend on two constructs: the ‘crusader’ civilisation of the ‘kuffar’ (disbelievers) pitted against the authentic ‘Islamic’ utopia of ISIS.

In their own literature shortly after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, ISIS shamelessly drew on the late Osama bin Laden’s endorsement of the words of President George W. Bush, to justify this apocalyptic vision: “The world today is divided into two camps. Bush spoke the truth when he said, ‘either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.’ Meaning either you are with the crusade or you are with Islam.”

[LINK] "Angry neighbours, other faith groups reach out to help after Ontario mosque torched"

The National Post's Richard Warnica writes about the heartwarming response from Peterborough following the mosque arson there.

Members of other church groups have already reached out to offer what help they can.

Larry Gillman, president of the local Beth Israel Synagogue, heard about the attack Sunday night while attending an interfaith dinner to raise money for Syrian refugees.

“I’m angry. I’m absolutely angry,” he said. “This is a hate crime.”

Gillman, who knows Abdella, offered him space Sunday in the synagogue for next Friday’s prayers. As it turned out, he was too late.

The Muslim congregation had already accepted an offer from the Mark Street United Church downtown to use its friendship room for the Friday gathering.

More, including more about the community reaction, there.

[LINK] Bloomberg on students from Africa in China

Bloomberg's Sarah McGregor writes about African student migration to China.

Prudentia Pefok, a Zambian nanny in Washington, couldn’t afford a college education in the U.S. for her daughter. So she sent her to China.

While not cheap, the $4,000 annual tuition at the Jiangxi University of Traditional Chinese Medicine fits her budget. Pefok says it also allows her 19-year-old daughter to pursue her dream of becoming a surgeon, while discovering the world outside Zambia.

"I was looking at what I can afford," Pefok said in an interview. "I wanted her to experience a different culture and to give her an opportunity to have broader knowledge of the things I didn't have."

Pefok's daughter is a part of the growing body of Africans studying in China, where the cost of living is in most cases cheaper than big cities in the U.S. and Europe. The Chinese government often sweetens the deal with perks like scholarships, living allowances and round-trip airfare.

The number of African students attending Chinese higher-learning institutes jumped an annual average of 35 percent over the past decade, reaching a record 41,677 in 2014, according to Ministry of Education data. That compares with the U.S., where the enrollment of sub-Saharan African students rose to 33,593 in 2014-15 but remains below levels reached before the financial crisis. Britain last year granted the lowest number of student visas to Africans—20,937—in eight years, government data show.

[LINK] The New Republic on tourism in the Jewish Catskills

Jason Diamond's "Magic Mountains" does a great job introducing, to a non-Jewish reader like me, the story of the largely Jewish tourism resorts in New York's Catskill mountains.

Although there had been Jews living and owning property in the region since 1773, when a lessee known as “Jacob the Jew” took control of land near Woodstock, it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that those who had escaped the shtetls of Eastern Europe made their way first from Ellis Island, then through crowded New York City streets, and finally to the region’s peaceful farms, an area similar to their homeland. In 1883, the Hungarian-born Charles Fleischmann, founder of Fleischmann’s Yeast, (“the present-day equivalent of an industrial, biotech empire,” explains a Fleischmann descendant) purchased 60 acres of land, thinking the mountain air would be good for his respiratory problems. While the Catskills boasted plenty of mountaintop hotels that were popular among people of means, they were reserved for “the Wall Street and Tammany Hall power brokers who partook of the rarefied Victorian elegance at the Christian resorts.” The gentile hotel owners banded together, producing a sort of gentleman’s agreement summed up in 1877 by the owner of the Grand Union Hotel, Judge Henry Hilton (no relation to the hotelier), instituting the rule that “no Israelites should be permitted to stop at this hotel.” Several more hotels followed suit with similar slogans: “No Hebrews Need Apply” and “Jews and Dogs Are Not Welcome.”

By the turn of the century, a new sign would start to appear outside of up-and-coming hotels: “Dietary Laws Observed.” As Jews slowly started to buy up inexpensive property in the area, families realized they could make a living by entertaining fellow Jews who couldn’t afford to move out of the city, but who wanted a little time to relax in the country. The Grossingers owned a popular Lower East Side restaurant that served kosher food, and like Fleischmann before him, Selig Grossinger, suffered from fatigue living and working in the city and saw the Catskills as the perfect place to resettle. Grossinger was of more modest means than the wealthy Fleischmann, and he purchased 35 acres of land in the town of Ferndale, moving his entire family to a landscape that looked just like his birthplace in the Austrian Empire.

When Prohibition ended in 1933, the Catskills had been developed in large part by a number of Jewish gangsters and bootleggers, some of whom, like Waxey Gordon, filtered the money they made into new resorts and hotels. During the World War II, Grossinger’s would become the gold standard, other resorts, including The Concord, Hotel Brickman, and many others, prospered as a playground for upwardly-mobile Jews who came to enjoy fresh air, golf, dancing, great food, and most of all, entertainment. The list of comedians who tested their material out on the notoriously tough crowds is like a who’s who of twentieth-century American comedy: Jack Benny, Joan Rivers, Shecky Greene, Woody Allen, Phyllis Diller, and nearly every big name from the vaudeville circuit, radio, the early days of television, and the Yiddish theater.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• blogTO notes the plans to build a large park under the western Gardiner.


• Centauri Dreams looks at Pluto.


• The Dragon's Tales goes to Syria.


• Far Outliers reports from a despairing Siberian village.


• Geocurrents notes that most Moravians live in Tanzania.


• Joe. My. God. notes Ireland's marriage laws have gone into effect.


• Language Log looks at the spread of the shawm, a musical instrument, across Asia.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes David Frum's proposal to ethnically cleanse Muslims from Europe.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer considers the prospects for a widened French war in Syria, noting that despite the popularity of intervention France cannot do much more.


• The Volokh Conspiracy is critical of the European Union's policy requiring the labeling of goods made in the West Bank.


• Window on Eurasia notes the growth of barriers hindering the departure of Russians and looks at Stalin's rivalry with Hitler in the Balkans and elsewhere.

[DM] "On the ineffective and immoral proposal of David Frum"

At Demography Matters, I note how fundamentally wrong, on multiple levels, David Frum's plan to fight terrorism in the European Union by engaging in mass deportations is.