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The Current Transcript for October 31, 2023

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

I do see my role as helping with a kind of underground railroad of refugees.

MATT GALLOWAY: They were refugees who had fled Afghanistan, stuck in limbo in Indonesia for almost a decade, and then three strangers came together to help. In 30 minutes, Alisa Siegel's documentary on the unlikely collaboration that helped give those refugees a new life here in Canada. Also this morning. Remember when the Internet was fun? That seems like a long time ago.

SOUNDCLIP

So we're just like more surrounded by noise and less meaningful content. And it's harder to find the people we use to hear.

MG: Your Facebook and Instagram feeds are filled with ads and the shouting on the site formerly known as Twitter is getting even louder. Kyle Chayka misses the days when time online was time well wasted in an hour. The New Yorker writer on how the Internet's Internet lost its spontaneity and whether it is actually possible to get that back. But we begin with tension in Israel as the war with Hamas escalates. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway. This is The Current.

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The view from inside Israel; how three strangers are helping

Guests: Ronen Bergman, Yossi Alpher

SOUNDCLIP

Many family members have been scattered around different homes and households, and we cannot get in touch together except through WhatsApp messages or Facebook messages.

MG: Ghada Alhaddad works with Oxfam in Gaza. Today, Israeli forces are continuing to fight there after moving in over the weekend while Gaza was cut off from the rest of the world by a phone and Internet blackout.

SOUNDCLIP

When the communication was disrupted, we weren't able to know what is the news and what is going on and how my other family members are doing. I'm really glad that the communication and Internet returned, but I hope also a swift cease fire happens because what we've seen so far is really too much.

MG: Calls are also growing outside of Gaza for an immediate cease fire after Hamas killed 1400 people in Israel. Israel's retaliatory strikes have killed more than 8500 Palestinians. The U.N. says the lack of clean water and safe sanitation in Gaza could be catastrophic and that more aid is desperately needed. Israel's Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, addressed the calls for a cease fire yesterday.

SOUNDCLIP

I want to make clear Israel's position regarding the cease fire, just as the United States would not agree to a cease fire after the bombing of Pearl Harbour or after the terrorist attack of 911. Israel will not agree to a cessation of hostilities with Hamas after the horrific attacks of October 7th. Calls for a cease fire are calls for Israel to surrender to Hamas, to surrender to terrorism, to surrender to barbarism. That will not happen. The Bible says that there is a time for peace and a time for war. This is a time for war, a war for a common future.

MG: Inside Israel, tensions are growing because some people blame Netanyahu for failing to stop the October 7th massacre by Hamas. Ronen Bergman is a staff writer based in Israel for The New York Times. His investigation this week looked at the security failures inside Israel leading up to that attack. Ronen is in Tel Aviv. Ronen, hello.

RONEN BERGMAN: Hi.

MG: How was Benjamin Netanyahu's speech and his rejection of a cease fire received in Israel yesterday?

RONEN BERGMAN: Well, I think that for the time being, we see. A consensus in most of the Israeli public is of course, I'm only speaking in general terms that are not based on both sides understand the votes. There's a consensus among Israelis that and I'm not just the Likud Party or the coalition that Benjamin Netanyahu leads. But also among the politicians, the general FBI and the military intelligence leaders that there's a need to address or to follow the horrific attacks of October seven with a much stronger, aggressive and decisive action against us. Because of two main reasons. One is the very simple natural urge to retaliate. But there's something more there. I think that both leaders of Israel and as far as I could judge most of the Israeli public and I'm not saying if it's right or wrong, I'm just reflecting the mindset I that if Israel does not, if they eradicate Hamas, is that movement, the social, religious religion, but it will be eradicated. It'll be destroyed. It'll be racist in the minds of the hearts of people. But if there's no move that would dismantle the entire political infrastructure of Hamas, that Israel would be seen as losing any kind of whatever it left of its deterrence. And we'll just welcome the next attacks by other forms, other members of the so-called axis of resistance or Iran. So it's it's reflected the need to do something, something much more decisive with all of the previous rounds of hostilities, because is reflected as an existential need, not just as a retaliatory urge.

MG: This weekend, this extraordinary series of things unfolded on social media where Benjamin Netanyahu in the middle of night tweeted that he wasn't warned by Israeli security chiefs about the attack on the 7th of October, then deleted that tweet, then later apologised. As you understand it from your investigation, how many warnings had he received in the lead up to the 7th of October?

RONEN BERGMAN: He received four written, detailed warnings from the military intelligence classified top secret intel detailing the way that the Israeli enemies see the what they believe was the type of weakness maybe a time to attack Israel. He saw what he wanted. There was one time that the chief of staff wanted to show it, and he refused to see it. But he saw that the chiefs of the intelligence warned him that if this kind of crisis, political, internal social crises, it's also had an enormous effect on the military. He understood from them or maybe didn't listen, but they told him that if this political crisis with details and the enemies of Israel will understand that it's just getting weaker, as they say, maybe this is the time to hit.

MG: You're amazing detail in your story about how Israeli agencies, intelligence agencies, had stopped monitoring the radio communications of Hamas. What did that say about how Israel perceived Hamas at the time of the attacks in general?

RONEN BERGMAN: The Israeli intelligence blunder is first and foremost about misunderstanding the intentions of Hamas. Leaders of Israeli intelligence all thought that they understand what Hamas wants and doesn't want. They believe that Hamas is declared as the national security adviser to be someone very close to Netanyahu said just five days before the attack on an interview with Israeli radio, said that at the start of the meeting go further defiance. They are deterred. They want to govern Gaza. They don't want all out war. They decided not to join the last two rounds of hostilities. The Israelis believe that Hamas may join another war with some other member of the axis of resistance, but not that they will initiate war. They also completely underestimated the capabilities of Hamas. They thought maybe following some bits and pieces of intelligence the last night before the attack, they thought maybe Hamas will be able to hit us to hit Israel. Would they be too overt to try to cross the fence and kidnap some Israelis, some Jews, some military precedent? They never thought that Hamas is capable of crossing the fence in between 30 and 40 places, disassemble, paralysed all the electronic and automatic machine guns, electronic cameras, surveillance, everything at the same time. And they never figured. The extensive training that hundreds of Hamas perpetrators were going for more than a year. They thought that someone could take it. We see the results.

MG: In the face of that, in the face of those those results, but also the war that's unfolding right now. I mean, Netanyahu was was, you know, already facing these huge protests on the streets of Israel because of his judicial reforms. How popular is he now among the Israeli public?

RONEN BERGMAN: He is facing by far the worst of his types, though they are like I think this is not the updated that they deserve, of course, but they are 75% of the Israelis who believe that he's either the main Israeli to be blamed for what happened or at least sharing part of like major part of part of the blame. At least half of the Likud voters that voted for him last time said that they are not going to vote for it. Now, the the last polls, I think, ordered by the Likud is five. One source told me said that they are going to wait only 12 mandates of 120. I think this is a sign, though, Benjamin Netanyahu. Like the Phoenix rises from the ashes. He was buried by commentators, politicians and analysts so many times. So I'm not going to do the again. But I think it's safe to say that by far he is facing the worst time of his political career and the closest to be outcast, not just by the opposition, but also by some of his comrades to the Likud, because they think some of them think, at least now in closed doors, that if he's not expelled from Likud, they will just lose in a humiliating terms the next the next elections.

MG: Ronen Bergman, we'll leave it there. I'm really glad to talk to you. Thank you very much.

RONEN BERGMAN: Thank you.

MG: Ronen Bergman is a staff writer for The New York Times. He was in Tel Aviv. Well, for an insider's look at the intelligence and leadership failures leading up to the October 7th attack. I'm joined by Yossi Alpher. He is a former director of the Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, former senior official with the Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency, and a former IDF intelligence officer. He is near Tel Aviv. Yossi. Hello to you.

YOSSI ALPHER: Good morning.

MG: How divided is Israeli society going into this war compared to compared to other conflicts, other wars and past.

YOSSI ALPHER: Going into the war? Israeli society was seriously divided. Ronen Bergman just described to you the warnings of the intelligence establishment to the prime minister before the war, that the divisions in Israeli society sparked by the Prime Minister's so-called judicial reform were encouraging our enemies to think about attacking us. I don't recall this degree of schism within Israeli society and any time in the last 50 years.

MG: How would you describe his leadership since the 7th of October?

YOSSI ALPHER: Since the 7th of October? A Regardless of the shrinking popularity of the prime minister, I think Israelis are broadly united in backing the military campaign in Gaza. It's rather striking that on the 7th of October, those who still had faith in Netanyahu and his government lost it. We also lost faith in the military and the Shin Bet because of their incredible failure to prepare for any kind of incursion whatsoever, any kind of attack by Hamas in the the many hours lost while 1400 people were being murdered before anybody from the military even showed up. If that's your starting point, then today, what do you see and hear on the street? Is that a confidence in the prime minister has not picked up? If anything, it has dropped because his performance since the 7th of October has been so erratic and poor. And his government's performance in just in providing basic services at war time has been pathetic. But on the other hand, the military and the intelligence establishment, who were quick, unlike Netanyahu, to acknowledge their responsibility for the disaster of October 7th, there is, I think, a huge rise in popular confidence in them, in the intelligence establishment, in the military. It has picked up dramatically despite their failings on October 7th and the difference between the way they dealt with their failures on October 7th by acknowledging them and the way Netanyahu has dealt by refusing to acknowledge his own failures, explains a lot of this.

MG: What is this attack done to the Israeli peace movement in the wake of the 7th of October attack? Where is that movement now? A movement that that that many people believe was on being undercut by Netanyahu's government but still existed and existed in many ways in the kibbutz is that were attacked right along that border with Gaza. What has happened to that Israeli peace movement?

YOSSI ALPHER: So the peace movement has been in decline for virtually 20 years. Interestingly, where it was still alive was in places like the kibbutzim around the Gaza periphery, who traditionally are left wing labour oriented, and where you had quite a few individuals who went out of their way to reach out to Palestinians in Gaza, for example, by arranging medical treatment for them in Israel, leading them at the areas crossing, accompanying them, driving them, driving them back. And these people suffered a blow because some were murdered and some were taken as hostages by Hamas. And they're sitting now hopefully alive somewhere underground in the Gaza Strip. Now, contrast this with the fact that the Biden administration in backing Israel to an astonishing degree that has moved many Israelis, including including Israelis from the right, have been very moved by this support. But the Biden administration says we're sending you all the weapons you need. But we expect, in addition to lots of humanitarian aid and the Biden administration has made a real difference in obliging Israel to deliver humanitarian aid or to permit it. But we expect that when this is over there, we are going back to the two state solution. We're going back to a peace process. That's our conclusion from the disaster of October 7th. Now, the Netanyahu government is hardly a candidate for a two state solution peace process, because while we're busy in Gaza are members of that government from the messianic colonies, far right are busy grabbing land in the West Bank and and provoking Palestinian resistance, which could degenerate into a third intifada any minute. This government is not a candidate for a two state solution for a two state process. Not only that, on the Palestinian side, there are no candidates. The Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah, 87 year old years old, is barely in control of a corrupt administration. It was kicked out of Gaza in 2007. Hamas has never been a candidate for any kind of peace process. Hamas has always refused to even speak to us. So if you're going to go to a two state solution, something that would rally the Israeli peace camp, without a doubt, once this is over, there's a great deal of rebuilding and a rebuilding of of confidence, of leadership and political change on both sides. Under the best circumstances, that could take years.

MG: There has been a catastrophic humanitarian crisis that has been unfolding in Gaza. Upwards of 8500 Palestinians killed, according to the health ministry in Gaza. There have been, in the wake of that, external calls for a cease fire. We heard Benjamin Netanyahu reject that out of hand. What about more broadly in Israel? Is there any purchase? Is there any take up of the idea of a cease fire?

YOSSI ALPHER: Frankly, no. I think here Netanyahu read the Israeli public. Right. And the Israeli public will buy into his rejection of a cease fire. A ceasefire now would be disastrous in terms of the the basic objective of Israel's military in this war, which is to sufficiently destroy Hamas and its infrastructure so as to restore Israeli deterrence.

MG: Is that possible? We heard Ronen Bergman say and we've heard other people as well, Ehud Barak and others who have said that it's impossible to destroy to destroy Hamas.

YOSSI ALPHER: You heard me say sufficiently destroyed exactly how you measure this. I don't know. But for my money, the test of whether we've succeeded in this war is not quite how many Hamas guys we've killed and how much of the infrastructure we destroyed but have we restored Israeli deterrence. In other words, have we made Hezbollah in the north, in southern Lebanon, on our northern border? Have we caused them to back up and say, oh, we're not going to attack these guys? Have we caused Iran to think twice about this? Have we caused those who did these in Yemen, 2000 miles south of Israel, to no longer accept Iran's demands to send missiles and pilotless aircraft? At this? We shot one down just today. Have we caused the Palestinians in the West Bank to think twice about another intifada? This is the fear. The fear is that this will spread. And of course, the attack of October 7th was caused precisely because we a our domestic crisis caused by Netanyahu and his policies sent our neighbours, our Islamist neighbours, a message of Israeli disunity and weakness and invited attack. All of this has to be fixed now. And because it's Hamas that attacked us from Gaza. The way to fix it is to defeat them decisively. How you want to define decisive defeat? Well, my definition is restoring deterrence.

MG: Yossi Alpher, we'll leave it there. Glad to talk to you. Thank you very much.

YOSSI ALPHER: Thank you.

MG: Yossi Alpher is the former director of the Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, a former senior official with the Mossad and a former IDF intelligence officer. The CBC News with the latest on this story is coming up next. And then,

SOUNDCLIP

There was a moment where I was like, Who is this person you are funding? What? That's a lot of people. This is generosity I've never seen.

MG: Canadian refugee advocate Stephen White, and he's describing an unlikely crew formed across cultures and countries in order to help refugees in Indonesian migrant camps make their way to Canada. It is an incredible story and you will hear it. Coming up in six minutes. I'm Matt Galloway. This is the Current on CBC Radio and the CBC Listen app. Stay with us. 1

Refugees start new lives in Canada

MG: Hello, I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current. They were three strangers from vastly different worlds, united in a single mission to rescue Hazara refugees from Afghanistan trapped in Indonesia. Some had been living in limbo for as much as a decade. This is the story of that remarkable collaboration between a former refugee from Afghanistan, desperate to bring others like himself to Canada.

SOUNDCLIP

I found sponsors for a number of refugees in Indonesia, but we did not have money. So I reached out to Myriam.

MG: A retired Australian academic.

SOUNDCLIP

I do see my role as helping with a kind of underground railroad of refugees. What I can do is help with money and make life easier for people. Say, yes.

MG: Say Yes and a Canadian refugee advocate.

SOUNDCLIP

There was a moment where I was like, Who is this person? You are funding what? That's a lot of people. This is generosity I've never seen.

MG: Alisa Siegel’s documentary is called Say Yes and Just a Warning. It does include a description of suicide.

SOUNDCLIP

SHAMS: My name is Shams Irfan. I am 24 years old.

ALISA SIEGEL: Shams. His name means son.

SHAMS: I was born and raised in a very remote village in eastern part of Afghanistan.

ALISA SIEGEL: In 2014, Shams was just 15 years old and worked at a school that taught English. On a trip to Kabul to buy school supplies. Members of the Taliban pulled him off a bus, accused him of being a traitor.

SHAMS: The Taliban started slapping me on the face and calling me infidel. They were calling me the servant of Westerners. They were calling me apostate and traitor. I was shaking in fear and I became speechless. And I was 100% convinced that I was about to be shot dead.

ALISA SIEGEL: A stranger, a woman seated beside him stood up and yelled that they were mistaken, that he was her son. She saved his life. Shams knew he could never go home. He went into hiding. His family sent money, and with the help of paid smugglers, he fled from Afghanistan to India to Malaysia. From Malaysia. He sailed by boat to Indonesia. There, he hoped to find refugee status and a safe haven. Instead, he spent a year on the streets of Jakarta.

SHAMS: I slept under the tent and I did not have access to water, to food. I would wash the plates of the vendors who were selling local food on their carts, and at the end of the night they would give me some food to eat.

ALISA SIEGEL: It was 2015. He had no choice but to surrender himself to a refugee detention centre.

SHAMS: They confiscated all my belongings, my clothes, my cell phone, and they checked all my body and gave me a pairs of slippers.

ALISA SIEGEL: Shams quickly understood that detention meant prison, surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards.

SHAMS: When I walked in the prison, when I walked through those massive solid iron gates, I found myself among over 300 people detained there.

ALISA SIEGEL: Most had been there for years.

SHAMS: I was shocked.

ALISA SIEGEL: Indonesian refugee detention centres were established as holding tanks to prevent asylum seekers from reaching Australia and other countries. Shams slept in a cramped cell on a concrete floor. There was little food or water.

SHAMS: We had only one toilet in the block for 180 people. We had only one public washroom. There was no running water. We would receive running water for an hour a day and each person had 5 minutes, sometimes 3 minutes.

ALISA SIEGEL: Refugees were not allowed to go to school, not allowed to work. Shams taught English to fellow inmates. He smuggled in cell phones for himself and others by bribing guards with sugar. And he wrote With a vengeance.

SHAMS: Writing became my skip.

ALISA SIEGEL: Sharps became increasingly politically active. He fought for refugee rights and organised demonstrations.

SHAMS: For the first time in many years.

ALISA SIEGEL: In 2017, when a group of Indonesian journalists came to report on conditions inside the camp.

SHAMS: Living conditions.

ALISA SIEGEL: Of some spoke openly about the long list of injustices.

SHAMS: So that day I spoke with this journalists.

ALISA SIEGEL: Prison authorities were furious.

SHAMS: One of the senior officers of the prison guards grabbed my hand and slapped my face for telling the journalists the truth. He took me to his office. With his friends. They beat me up.

ALISA SIEGEL: Shams was placed in solitary confinement. He lost track of time.

SHAMS: I thought there was no way to escape. I lost all my hope. I thought I would. I would be in the prison forever. I felt that I don't belong to this world. The level of hopelessness was mounting every day, and I felt that I was left behind.

ALISA SIEGEL: In September 2018, after more than three years in detention, Shams was transferred to the Tom Refugee Shelter. Conditions were better, but he still wasn't free to come and go as he wished.

SHAMS: It was time for me to go to school and complete my high school. But I was in the prison camp counting every second.

ALISA SIEGEL: On his cell phone. Shams scoured the earth for any country that would take him.

SHAMS: And praying for an end to my imprisonment.

ALISA SIEGEL: He tried Australia and New Zealand and he used social media to establish contacts with potential sponsors in other countries, including Canada.

STEPHEN WHITE: My name is Stephen White. I work at the University of Toronto and I have a not for profit called Northern Lights Canada.

ALISA SIEGEL: By day, Stephen What works in communications? But since 2016, he has devoted himself to refugees. He connects those hoping to enter Canada with potential Canadian private sponsors. He then guides both parties through the application process.

SHAMS: I was communicating with Stephen on Facebook on Messenger.

STEPHEN WHITE: The tone was polite, but with an edge of need. He knew that if he didn't connect with Canadians, he was probably going to be stuck there for another decade.

SHAMS: He didn't know me. He never saw my picture. He never met me.

STEPHEN WHITE: For a long time. He, like a lot of refugees in Indonesia with sort of betting on Australia taking them in. And then 2018, I think the realisation as years passed, people there for five years. By that point, realisation started to dawn that it wasn't happening. That was a real low point for refugees and probably a low point for Shams as well when refugees realised. I don't think Australia's taking us. I think we're stuck here. And you actually had a whole spate of suicides, young kids hanging themselves in washrooms.

SHAMS: It was around 2:00 a.m. in the morning. A friend rushed into my room and told me that our friend committed suicide with bare feet. I walked into the refugee yard. I found my friend hanging from the rope. And I held him up so he could breath in my arms. But he was so heavy. A friend brought a knife and he cut the rope. And I fell down together with him.

STEPHEN WHITE: I think it was kind of a year of awakening in the refugee community that they weren't going anywhere. And it happened to time with this same time that we started getting involved in sponsoring people from Indonesia. So I would like to think that there were some suicides that were averted because there is now a hope of coming to Canada. At least it's a hope. At least there's something.

SHAMS: He encouraged me to continue writing and expose to the way that refugees were being treated.

ALISA SIEGEL: As Shams searched for a sponsor. He wrote and wrote letters to refugee advocates in Australia and around the world. Posts On his Facebook page, he wrote for international publications and for The Archipelago, an online literary magazine he co-founded with other refugees in Indonesia. He always used a pseudonym. You're fun, Dana. It took two and a half more years. But finally, a woman in Burlington, Ontario, moved by Shams' storey agreed to sponsor him in March of 2022, more than eight years after he arrived in Indonesia. His application was approved.

SHAMS: When the plane was coming to land. I could not believe my eyes that I see Toronto, that I am here. When a Canadian immigration officer stamped my permanent residency paper and told me, Welcome to Canada. I felt human. I felt I was reborn. And eight years of detention, eight years of loneliness, eight years of hopelessness and eight years of physical and mental torment comes to an end. For the first time, like in eight years, I was not scared of telling my real name, and everybody was now calling me by my name Shams. Welcome Shams. That was a beautiful moment. It helped me feel protected there that I would not be hurt any longer.

ALISA SIEGEL: Sharma spent his first ten months in Canada with his sponsor family. He earned a coveted position as a pen Canada writer in residence at Toronto's George Brown College, and he began to advocate alongside Stephen on behalf of other refugees hoping to come to Canada.

SHAMS: All I needed now was to form more groups of sponsorships. I talked to a few people in our neighbourhood and they said We can sign their application, we can be sponsors, but we don't have money.

ALISA SIEGEL: Enter Miriam Faine in Australia.

MIRIAM FAINE: My name's Miriam Faine. I'm a retired English language teacher and academic and I've been supporting or working with immigrants and refugees all my life, basically. My mother was a Jewish refugee from Germany who came to New Zealand in 1939 with her extended family. And I've known all my life how lucky I am. To me, it goes without saying that we need to support people who are fleeing with their lives. And I feel a compulsion to do what I can to support refugees.

ALISA SIEGEL: So currently in 2021, Miriam's elderly parents died. They left their home in Melbourne to Miriam and her two siblings.

MIRIAM FAINE: Honestly, at this stage in my life, I don't need the money. And there was really no reason for me to to bank this money. I needed to find something worthwhile to do with it, and it was just fortuitous that it was at that moment that I began to find out about the people in Indonesia and became aware that one of the issues in sponsoring people is that people were stuck, that people in Canada were willing to sponsor them, but they were finding it hard to raise all the money. So at some moment I thought, Righto, I'll give the money for sponsorships, and that's what I've done.

ALISA SIEGEL: A three way partnership was born.

STEPHEN WHITE: It is kind of weirdly like a three way romance between, you know, in this case a gay Canadian, a very young, accomplished Hazara writer and a Jewish retired professor from Australia.

MIRIAM FAINE: Why Canada? Because Canada, for better or worse, has been the country that has been most welcoming.

ALISA SIEGEL: And Canada has a private sponsorship agreement program that allows this to happen.

MIRIAM FAINE: I'm just checking my spreadsheet. I think I've helped about 190 individuals or families. So I've given a $10,000 to the individuals and $20,000 mostly to the families. The reason I do that is because I don't want to be in the business of judging who's more worthy than others. And I wanted the money to go as far as I could. So I figured the 10,000 Australian was enough to give people a leg up on, and I'll run online fundraisers for people to find the balance, but I don't want to contribute it directly myself.

STEPHEN WHITE: Miriam's generosity is definitely a game changer because six years ago you could just sort of start a go fund me.

ALISA SIEGEL: And raising money through online fundraising drives isn't as easy as it used to be.

STEPHEN WHITE: It's a big family. We can be talking 60, $70,000. Where does that money come from? It can't come from the refugee. That's a rule. So this is where somebody like Miriam Fein is a game changer. I haven't seen a donor ever do what she's done.

MIRIAM FAINE: It is deeply personal for me, and it always has been. My mother never got over her experience, really, of growing up as a Jewish child in Hitler's Germany and of coming to New Zealand as a 12 year old. She always felt alienated. And so, you know, in many ways I have taken on my mother's feeling of responsibility for other people in that situation. There's another factor I want to mention, which is that my own identity as a Jewish person working with Muslim people. And I've been very clear to people that that's my own background. And it's been important to me, too, to establish the commonalities, not the differences. And I also feel a desire to make the world a better place. I was brought up to believe that if you see something bad happened and you stand by and you don't respond to it, then you know you are to some degree implicated. And so I feel that what's happening in Indonesia as an Australian, I feel deeply compromised. By the way successive Australian governments have acted over 20 years towards refugees. So it is the personal is political. I'm a child of the sixties.

ALISA SIEGEL: The money Miriam sends through shams and Stephen is a fraction of her support. She sends money to many other refugees directly. Some are destined for Canada, Australia and the United States. Others have found their way to Europe and Turkey.

MIRIAM FAINE: The press are often overwhelming and, you know, not everybody's honest. One thing that happens is that everybody's incredibly urgent and the Taliban's go to catch their relatives and kill them if they don't get sponsored immediately or their mother's got cancer or this week everybody's sister's been kidnapped by the Taliban. And I'm very careful with those. I think I grapple with the expectations people have and their own anxieties and their desire to protect their anxiety onto me. So it's the sort of, you know, you've got to do something today. You got to do something today to do something today. Then it's very hard regulating that. But most of the people are honest. I know I've been scammed once or twice, but I'm pretty confident the majority of that money has gone to people who need it.

SHAMS: When I send out a note and say, okay, there is another guy and we he has a sponsors and everything is ready and we are waiting for money. Can you help? She never said no.

MIRIAM FAINE: As long as I can find the money and as long as there's someone who wants to get out of Indonesia, I'm happy to help them with that. That's my priority. I'm not setting myself up to be some kind of saint. I like handing out the money. It's a way, as Steven and I both agree, it's a very good way of making a difference very quickly. So as long as we can, we will.

SHAMS: So much hatred in the world is happening now. So much pain is unfolding in the world. And when I reach out to Miriam and say this refugee needs money, she says, yes, I will send. I was shocked. Governments and big organisations with a lot of money do not do what she does.

ALISA SIEGEL: And Miriam asks only that those she helps send photos of themselves in their new countries. What some who've made it to Australia have come to thank her in person. Gifts in hand.

MIRIAM FAINE: I love a lot of the young refugees in a motherly way and I feel like I want to protect them like a sort of mother hen. In Hazara culture, you call people by a title, not by their name. So I get called Auntie, but mostly I get called mother or Mum and it's lovely to have one child. I love being a mother, so being able to extend my mothering to a whole bunch of people who need me is is fantastic.

ALISA SIEGEL: And she relishes the videos that Steven posts online of new arrivals at Toronto's Pearson Airport.

MIRIAM FAINE: One of the things I said at the beginning was people said to me, Oh, you want to be anonymous, don't you? And when I thought about it, I thought, No, I don't want to be anonymous. It's very important to me that I get to know the people that I'm helping and that they get to know me. So I don't want to be seen as a crazy old lady with too much money. And I want to see the refugees as poor, benighted victims. It's important to me that I see them in terms of their capabilities. And that's one of the things I see in chums is someone who has developed a strong sense of agency in very, very negative situations. As you can hear, it's very complicated. It's not just a matter of writing a cheque, writing a cheque, writing a check. The complications involved are to do with who has the money, who has the agency, who has the voice, who makes the decisions. I'm the one who decides who's worthy. And that's one of the reasons why I enjoy working with people like Shams and Steven, because they helped take that responsibility off me.

SHAMS: I reached out to many organisations and they turned down my request to sponsor my family.

ALISA SIEGEL: Shams, his own siblings and their families, fled Afghanistan shortly after the Taliban returned to power in 2021. They have been stuck in limbo in Pakistan since a local Toronto church agreed to sponsor them, but shops needed close to $70,000. He hesitated and then approached Miriam.

MIRIAM FAINE: So when he said to me, Do you think you could help my family? And he was very tentative. I said, Of course.

SHAMS: She said, You know, you help other people. I want to help you as well.

ALISA SIEGEL: Their application has now been approved. Shams hopes to finally be reunited with them in Canada next spring.

Speaker 5: If I don't, I don't follow the rules. So last time you didn't come to that.

ALISA SIEGEL: On Friday evenings, Shams and a group of other former refugees, mostly young men who made it to Toronto, gather in Stephen's backyard.

STEPHEN WHITE: But at that same time, you had a lot of fun.

ALISA SIEGEL: Over pizza and drinks. They talk about who will arrive when, where to look for sponsors, how to raise money.

STEPHEN WHITE: By the way, my picture of the world looking at it. So I said.

SHAMS: I hope that one.

ALISA SIEGEL: Day Shams is now studying part time at the University of Toronto. He hopes to one day become a human rights lawyer.

SHAMS: Every day that I can save somebody. I make up the time that I lost if.

MIRIAM FAINE: I have no idea how long this is going to continue. I finished the house money last month. I'll have to keep trying to find more money. And if I can't, then I'll have to stop. I mean, I'm find money where I can. Another friend of mine died, and he divided his house among 12 friends. So I will get another 100 and something thousand dollars. And I said to him before he died, you know, I'm going to give it to the Afghans and these are you. And I said, Too bad. Can you leave it to me? I'll do with it what I want. So I squared it with him to some degree and that'll help. But, I mean, 200,000 doesn't go very far. That's ten people.

SHAMS: One thing I want to say to Miriam that one day one of these pupils that you have helped. And that you will help. We'll do exactly what you do. It could be me. It could be somebody else. And that her legacy of helping will live on.

MIRIAM FAINE: To many people in the world go around saying no for all sorts of reasons. And to be able to say yes to someone is one of the nicest things in the world to be able to say to someone, Yes, we can help.

MG: The documentary was produced by Alisa Swiful with the CBC audio documentary unit and the current documentary editor, Liz Hoff. Well, coming up after your regional update, The New Yorker's technology and culture writer on why the Internet just isn't any fun anymore. Carl Chaker joins me in 90 seconds. I'm Matt Galloway. This is The Current. Stay with us.

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Remembering when the internet was fun; and why schools are more likely to call moms when a kid gets sick

Guests: Kyle Chayka, Kristy Buzard

MG: Hello again. I'm Matt Galloway and you're listening to The Current.

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Welcome to the internet. Have a look around. Anything that brain of yours can think of can be found. We've got mountains of content, some better, some worse. If none of it's of interest to you, you'd be the first. Welcome to the Internet. Come and take a seat. Would you like to see the news or any famous women's feeds? There's no need to panic. This isn't a test. Just shake your head and we'll do the rest.

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MG: Comedian Bo Burnham singing Welcome to the Internet in his pandemic special called Inside on Netflix. The Internet is something that Kyke Chayka also thinks a lot about, specifically a time when the Internet used to be fun. He doesn't think it's fun anymore. Kyle Chayka is the technology and culture editor at The New Yorker magazine. Kyle, good morning.

KYLE CHAYKA: Hey, yeah, thanks for having me.

MG: Thanks for being here. Why is the Internet no fun anymore?

KYLE CHAYKA: I mean, I think it's something we're all experiencing at the moment. Like, it just feels much less violent than it used to. And I kind of put that up to two things. The first is the dominance of algorithmic feeds on the Internet now. So this is like the feuds of Twitter and Facebook and Spotify and TikTok that just kind of force feed you content that you're supposed to be interested in that you may actually not be. And then there's just the looming threat of AI generated content, which we cannot even tell if it's made by a human or not. So with those two things, I think things feel quite hollow at the moment.

MG: I want to ask you about both of those things, but go back to what I said earlier, which is if you are online and this is something that you write about in the piece, the Internet is filled with more content than ever before, but it feels empty in some ways. What do you mean by that? That it feels empty despite all of the stuff that we can scroll through?

KYLE CHAYKA: Yeah, there's there's a profusion of everything you could think of as that Bo Burnham song referenced, but I think it just feels less valuable and also less personal than it used to. I mean, I think the rise of social media in the 20 tens was so much about connecting to other people through our friends on Facebook or kind of your professional colleagues on Twitter, the people you wanted to hear from. And now it kind of feels like we've lost those connections or they're harder to find. So we're just more surrounded by noise and less meaningful content. And it's harder to find the people we used to hear. For example, on Twitter, like, the feed has just become so much more algorithmic and chaotic and like, I don't hear from the same people that I used to.

MG: I'm old enough to remember the days before the internet and then when the Internet launched, and now perhaps the dark days of the Internet for you when you were growing up. What what was life online like?

KYLE CHAYKA: I mean, it was it felt very special, I think, at the beginning. I think I really formed a lot of my sense of self and my identity and maybe personality on the Internet, for better or worse.

MG: How so?

KYLE CHAYKA: I mean, it was a space that I could kind of experiment and be who I wanted to be and find things that were interesting to me that I couldn't find in real life. I mean, I grew up in the suburbs of New England, very little access to cities or museums or galleries or concerts, but all of that stuff I could find online and connect with other people who are also interested in it.

MG: How do you think that shaped who you are now?

KYLE CHAYKA: Hmm. I mean, I think it gave me a chance to try out different areas of interest, even try on different personalities and, like, ways of talking to people. I think back to being on AOL Instant Messenger in the late nineties and just being able to interact with my school friends without having to be in front of them, like without having to perform that social, socially anxious version of a school self. And I could just like chat and a pseudonym and kind of empty space of the Internet. And that just allowed me to figure out who I was. I think.

MG: That social web that you referred to in the piece, right?

KYLE CHAYKA: Mm hmm. I mean, I think the social Web is really about other people who are also on the Internet. So that has existed for a long time, like through AOL Instant Messenger, through MySpace, through Facebook, and then through these, like, larger feeds of Twitter and Instagram and TikTok. But I think lately, like where we used to talk to other people and have this wide ranging conversations, now it's more about consuming the broadcast, sort of like a few celebrities or influencers who really dominate.

MG: When did that change? When did you start to know the web that you were immersed in that that was changing?

KYLE CHAYKA: Hmm. I mean, I think over the course of the 20 times, things really changed. I mean, I think in the early 20 tens, you could see the hopefulness of Twitter and Facebook and this new sense of connecting with people. And I think circa 2015, 2016, not coincidentally, with the kind of Trump election era, things started to feel worse.

MG: What do you think that election era had to do with it?

KYLE CHAYKA: I mean, I think what happened in 2015, 2016 was a lot of these platforms became more driven by algorithmic recommendations. So they started trying to guess what you were interested in and more aggressively target you with ads. And that was something that Trump took advantage of in terms of like targeting voters on Facebook and taking advantage of Facebook's new algorithmic targeting system. So I think just in that era, we started to have less of a grip on what we were seeing on the Internet. And it started to be more about like predicting what we were looking for.

MG: I think for a lot of people, algorithms are still a bit of a black box. I mean, they know, people know they exist and they help determine what you see, perhaps what you listen to the people who turn up on your feeds. But explain as best you understand it, how the algorithms shape the way that we socialise and share content, particularly on social media.

KYLE CHAYKA: Yeah, I mean, almost every social media feed is driven by an algorithm. So this is an equation that just takes into account all the data produced on the platform and all the data that you've produced as a user and crunches that down to figure out what you might want to see or listen to or read or who you want to connect with. So essentially they're just equations. They they take in all this input and then their output is the next piece of content that you see. But I think the scale of that and the acceleration of that and the way that it just produces more and more and more content and shoves the next thing in front of you. That's really turned us into worse consumers and made our lives worse on the Internet.

MG: Twitter seems to be or X or whatever we're calling it now seems to be for many people. Kind of a great example of that needs to be we used to call it like the world's largest sports bar in some ways, because something would happen. It felt like everybody would pile on and you would have everybody talking about that same thing in that moment. And it didn't matter whether you knew the person, whether the person was in a place that you knew of, but you could have some kind of shared conversation. How would you describe what it's like now on X? Is it the health site that people today you describe?

KYLE CHAYKA: You know, for me, it is certainly I mean, I think you've lost that sense of cohesion and like your grip on the conversation that's happening. So you don't know when something was posted. You don't know what the latest information is, which is a huge problem when it comes to like the conflict in Israel, for example. It's just become so much more fragmented and like incoherent, I would say. I wonder what a good metaphor for it is. I mean, maybe like a loud sports stadium or something where there's like warring factions who are going at each other all the time or maybe more like, you know, a crowded marketplace or everyone's trying to shout louder than the other person. And there's just no incentive to have like an ongoing conversation.

MG: You could imagine that there are people who would say, So what? Like go out into the real world and have conversations with people. In the piece you write about, about a Twitter friend's grief over what's happened in the platform. Right. Tell me about that grief. That's an interesting word to use.

KYLE CHAYKA: And I was really struck with that. And I mean, I feel that myself because I think we've lost the space that we once had. I mean, like I use Twitter since 2009 or something, a lot of my adult life has been on it. A lot of. Professional life has been on. I have many friends on it and because of that. So to lose that space, to lose that home that we've had for a decade plus, that is cause for mourning. I think like we're missing in our lives. We don't have it anymore and there's nothing really to replace it.

MG: What are we missing in our lives if we don't have that, do you thin?

KYLE CHAYKA: I mean, what I miss personally is just the ambience, sense of connection that I get with people who aren't in my geographical location, who aren't my friends and the city I live in, or the family that I see. I have this whole community of just thinkers and talkers and writers and readers who kind of existed in this digital platform who I connected with and relied on for stimulus, for conversation, for like entertainment. And I just don't feel like I have that anymore.

MG: Where do you get that now? Because and part of it is ideas as well, right? Somebody passing you something. That's what I used to love about Twitter is I would read something that I didn't know anything about. Somebody had posted up an article or something that I wouldn't have found on my own, and that led me down a different path. Where are you getting that now?

KYLE CHAYKA: Right. I think it's so much about where do we get new ideas? And Twitter was once that and now I think I mean, I've turned to some smaller digital platforms like the chat app Discord. I read Reddit more off and I open my New York Times app more often. So I'm looking to create those connections again. But it's really difficult because I think the incentives right now are just not there for these smaller scale like conversational digital spaces.

MG: In this country. Meta, which is the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is blocking Canadian news content on their platforms. There's this suggestion that perhaps Google may go down the same route as a retaliation for a bill that the Canadian government has in place. What do you think about that? What does that say to you about the power of of those mega companies to control exactly what you're talking about, what we what we see and what we learn?

KYLE CHAYKA: Yeah, I mean, I think that decision is terrifying. Like, I think it shows just how much we've come to rely on these digital platforms for our news consumption, for our kind of digital lives. And they have such control over that that they can just decide that you're no longer allowed to consume news content because it might wreck their business model. I mean, the whole cause of that was media companies were supposed to get more or better compensated for supplying so much content to these platforms. And instead Facebook was like, No, what if we just didn't have any news content? What if we, you know, wrecks the media companies even more? And I just think it shows the necessity, like the vital right now, necessity of alternatives to these systems.

MG: Especially, I mean, you have wars that are unfolding right now where people are looking for verifiable information. They're looking for the truth. Social media is filled with Twitters, filled with half truths and, you know, outright lies. Where are they supposed to go?

KYLE CHAYKA: It's a really hard question. I mean, Twitter is so bad for it because there's more incentive now to post misinformation because you get rewarded for engagement on threads, which is matters. Twitter clone posts aren't even shown in real time often. And I don't know where we go. I mean, I think it shows that social media was not the answer that we were looking for in terms of real time information consumption, though it was better maybe in the mid 20 times. But it shows the importance of media companies like The Times, like my employer, The New Yorker, and just the necessity of like sustainable information creation, I suppose, which is the media.

MG: You have a book that is coming out which is about I mean, it's called Filter World How Algorithms Flattened Culture. We've talked a little bit about that, but is there a way to end flatten the culture while those algorithms remain?

KYLE CHAYKA: I think so. I mean, there is space that is not algorithmic where you can escape the algorithms. And I tried to do that for about three months for the book, but I could do an algorithm cleanse. And I did find plenty of space like and cultural terms. I really liked the streaming service Criterion Collection, which curates art films for you and gives you all this great context for why and how they fare on the platform. And there's this classical music streaming service called Adagio, which curates everything and gives you all this great information and lets you browse by composers and orchestras and musicians. So I think there's ways to consume this kind of content without algorithmic feeds, but I think it's the worst right now for news and information and kind of like the the conversation that we desire.

MG: In the piece that you wrote for The New Yorker, you talk about. A site that you found that kind of takes you back to when the Internet was fun? What is this site?

KYLE CHAYKA: I'd say it is called Arsenal. And when the piece came out, I got a bunch of readers emailing me saying, Thank you so much for reminding me of the existence and the site and arrest, and always this little site of Flash games, which was the kind of software that made little interactive, you know, modules that used to dominate the Internet. But arresting all was a series of very twee, cutesy, pastel coloured mini games where you would like help a mouse make a cup of tea or like help a rabbit jump into the night sky. And it was super beautiful and fun and just chill. And that took me back to a time when the Internet was not about scoring likes or fighting someone else in arguments about something or like increasing your follower count. And it was just kind of about having fun in this new space that existed online.

MG: Are those days toast? I mean, is that over and done with now? Do we need to? I don't know. What do you have to create a new Internet? Do you have to create a separate place or do we just kind of remember? Oh, that's what it used to be like back in the old days. And we move on.

KYLE CHAYKA: Yeah, there's there's a nostalgia for it, for sure. But I think the nostalgic Internet is coming back in some ways where we want to connect with fewer people and have more separate or independent or like small scale experiences. But I think it's like fundamentally, it's up to us as users to stop being an addictive Twitter feed to like, stop giving our attention to Instagram and instead and seek out independent voices or like more sustainable ways of consuming things. So like, find someone you like, find an artist you like. Pay them five bucks a month on substack or something. And that will create a better culture than what we've had.

MG: I'm glad to talk to you about this. This is a really a thoughtful piece, but I think a lot of people will connect with it because of of what their experiences in the past may have been. It's not just nostalgia. It's also just thinking about how good it was back then. Well, thank you very much.

KYLE CHAYKA: Thank you.

MG: Kyle Chayka is a staff writer with The New Yorker. His new book coming out in January is called Filter World How Algorithms Flattened Culture.

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MG: This is The Current on CBC Radio and the CBC Listen app. My name is Matt Galloway with the school year in full swing. The pressure is on for working parents forms that need to be filled out. Parent teacher meetings need to happen. And of course, it's flu season, so you're getting that dreaded call. Hello? Your child is sick. Come pick them up now, please. The demands can be relentless. And a recent study suggests that one parent is bearing the brunt of those school calls. It is the mother. Kristy Buzard is a co-author of that study and associate professor of economics at Syracuse University. Christi, good morning.

KRISTY BUZARD: Good morning.

MG: Your study is titled Who You Gonna Call?, which is fantastic. Where did the idea for it come from?

KRISTY BUZARD: So my co-authors, Olga Stoddard and Laura Gee, would just be chatting about these things, you know, at conferences when they met up and kind of commiserating about how frustrated they were that so many of the calls come to them, even though they're in kind of very demanding jobs. They've told the schools to call their children's fathers. And at some point they said, 'Yeah, there's got to be research on this.' They looked around, there really wasn't. So they decided to, you know, do something about it, fill the gap, and help us understand better what's going on here.

MG: Part of the story here is how the study was done, because you have a few different takes at this. Tell me what you did.

KRISTY BUZARD: So we sent emails to the large majority of school principals, kindergarten through high school principals in the United States from a fictitious parent asking for some information. You know, [saying], 'We want to learn about schools for our child, could you give one of us a call?' So we would send the email from one parent or the other. We would CC the other parent, and then we would provide both phone numbers. And then we just recorded who they called.

MG: And what did you find?

KRISTY BUZARD: We found that they called back the mother about 1.4 times more than they called back the father.

MG: Now that in itself could have been an answer, but you wanted to complicate things a little bit more. So you did variations on the study, right?

KRISTY BUZARD: Yes, we did. First, we sent signals about which parent had more or less availability and tracked whether whether the schools would listen and follow the signals that were being given. And we found that in general they do but the responses were kind of asymmetric. They were more willing to respond to the mother when she was saying that she wanted more of the calls and a little bit less to the fathers.

MG: When you said that both the parents are working full time, what was happening?

KRISTY BUZARD: So we were We were thinking that they would, you know, part of what might be driving the asymmetry would be beliefs about, you know, maybe there are more stay-at-home mothers. But, you know, we sent a version of this that said, you know, we both work full time just so we knew that that wasn't going on. And we saw virtually no change in the proportion of phone calls that mothers were getting versus fathers.

MG: The last variation or complication that you make is saying in the letter, 'We want to make this decision together,' you know, suggesting that both parents are equally involved in this. What did you hear then?

KRISTY BUZARD: Virtually the same thing. Not really much difference.

MG: Why do you think that is? Why do you think that the schools were tending to call the mother first?

KRISTY BUZARD: So we are able to go through a kind of theoretical model that we build. We're able to disentangle a little bit of what's going on here to get at the mechanisms. But it looks like, well, there's a big effect of who sends the emails, which I think is is pretty reasonable. But if we put that aside, it's about 50 per cent of what's left over is about the beliefs about the value of the response from each parent. And what we see is that on average, these school decision makers believe that a mother is either going to be more likely to answer or call back or is going to maybe be better suited to answering the questions and having that conversation. But we also see that there's a big chunk left over that may have to do with other aspects, maybe of social norms that, it's just like kind of the mother's job to do this. Or there would be something weird about calling a dad when you're used to calling moms. Or maybe moms are easier to talk to. You know, we can't get super fine detail there, but this is coming from multiple areas. It's not one very simple story.

MG: Were you surprised by the findings? I would imagine there are a lot of people who are listening across the country who would say, Aha! But were you surprised by this?

KRISTY BUZARD: So I don't think that. I think actually One thing I was surprised about was that it wasn't more extreme than it was, given all of the anecdotal evidence that we have. But what we did is we sent half of the emails from the mom and half of the emails from the dad. And as I said, that seems to play a big role. So we think in real life, this is really kind of a lower bound on what's really happening in families because there's going to be some asymmetry in who sends the messages in the first place. And yeah, we were trying to get kind of the cleanest measurement of this we can, but there are going to be all kinds of other things going on once those relationships are already established between the parents and the schools. Right. There's going to be other considerations that come into these decisions. And most of those, it seems like from from like I said, anecdotal evidence, other surveys that we've run, it seems like moms are really, really bearing the large brunt of this, even more than what we found in our study.

MG: If you step back from this, why do you think this matters? Why do you think learning about this matters?

KRISTY BUZARD: So we are interested in this because of the fact that there's still a significant wage gap in the labour force. You know, at least in the US, there's still, you know, almost 20% difference in earnings between men and women. And it seems to be concentrated among parents, you know, parents, people who have children. And some of this, you know, we hypothesize comes down to the extra burden on the mothers of taking care of children. We also see some evidence that women who anticipate having children may select into more flexible jobs in the first place, which are, you know, kind of on average, lower paying. So we're kind of losing out on some of the the best productivity of women because they have to make plans, because they're punished in the workplace for dealing with this extra burden.

MG: So last question in the last minute that we have, how do you change this? How do you ensure that that burden is more equitably shared?

KRISTY BUZARD: So we think there are things that can change both within the household and in kind of the larger systems. So our I think our study that shows really strongly that schools do tend to respond to the person who reaches out to them. So if we if we switch who does that initial contact, that will help. It doesn't go all the way. What we're really more concerned about is the fact that the school systems that record the phone numbers and who you should call, etc. are not very flexible. The standard is, 'Here's the primary contact. If that person doesn't answer, then you call a secondary person.' But we're seeing that parents today on average, really want to share the burden of rearing their children equally. And that kind of a system pushes you all towards one person or the other. It doesn't allow people to achieve the balance that they're looking for in being equal partners.

MG: So your sense just finally, your sense is that parents want to get that call and make sure that those calls aren't just directed at one person, that the dads want to get the call as well, for example.

KRISTY BUZARD: Absolutely. And I think we can be more efficient too. Different people have different schedules at different times. All right. If we could have just a little bit better information systems, which I know is a big expense and it is really hard for schools to switch to. we could get answers more quickly. Right. The parents, the teachers, the kids could all get what they need better if we could just kind of match a little bit better, you know, who's getting that outreach at which times.

MG: Kristy, thank you very much. This is fascinating.

KRISTY BUZARD: Thank you.

MG: Kristy Buzard, an associate professor of economics at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York. She's the co-author of the study. Who are You Going to Call Gender; Inequality and External Demands for Parental Involvement. Thoughts. Welcome. Email us thecurrent@cbc.ca. That's the current for this Tuesday, the 31st of October. It is, of course, Halloween, the day of casting spells and of ghosts and ghouls and goblins and candy as well. We're going to leave you with this. I'm Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. Happy Halloween.

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A young man I was talking about has a great blues style. Plus, one of the wildest singing gimmicks I've ever heard. And it may not scare you, but I guarantee you, when he's performing, you won't be going to the refrigerator. Welcome on his debut with us to sing I Put a Spell on You, Screamin Jay Hawkins.

[Song]

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