Have you read Overtaken By Events?
My new book, Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip, has been published for a couple of months now. It has been selling well at public speaking events – mostly in California, which is where I’ve been able to travel so far – and bringing in some nice comments from early readers. For example:
“Loved your book! Must read again because I am finally understanding some of the headlines I’ve read in recent years. Very interesting, and again the personal reads like a novel. It is great!!!!!!” - Kathy Sheetz, Richmond, California
“It was great meeting you. I am really enjoying the books! They will be a great asset to the multi-cultural reading assignments I give out!” - Seema Gul, Mission Viejo, California
Overtaken By Events is an independent project, and its sales support my livelihood and my continued travel and speaking on behalf of a better human relationship between Pakistanis and Americans. Word of mouth is the most effective way to market books – and you can help. If you’ve read Overtaken By Events, post a comment on this page – and of course tell your family and friends, or even better buy copies for them.
I’ll be returning to Southern California and the Bay Area in the fall, and between September and November I also have trips scheduled to Colorado and the Southwest, the Northwest, Detroit, and the East Coast. See my calendar online, and consider inviting me to your city. I’m also working to make Overtaken By Events available in stores and other venues in Pakistan, hopefully before the end of this year.
I’m going to be offline until just after the July 4 holiday, then home in Seattle for the rest of the summer writing my new book with the working title Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime in Haiti. I’m planning to publish Bearing the Bruise in late spring 2011. You can support it the way many of you supported Overtaken By Events - by pre-purchasing copies. It will include stories of Pakistani-American friends of mine who visited Haiti after the earthquake there this January, as well as stories from my own many visits to Haiti since 1982. I visited Haiti for five days this March and am planning a longer follow-up trip there in September.
So – I’ll be back in touch in early July. In the meantime, please post a comment here about Overtaken By Events, and continue helping me spread the word. I still need to send out some copies to people who purchased multiple copies – thank you for your patience; it’s been a very busy spring for me!
And here are links to two articles. One is my own short article about the May visit to Seattle by Todd Shea of SHINE Humanity. Todd and I will be doing some speaking together this fall in Colorado and elsewhere around the US:
Pakistan-Based “Go-to Guy for Disaster Relief” Visits UW
And here’s Ras Siddiqui’s very nice article in Pakistan Link about the May 28 fundraiser in Fremont, California for The Citizens Foundation, at which I spoke:
As a traveler who likes to learn from the people he meets, Casey adds himself in their lives and does not appear to be the detached foreigner in his writings. “I am not an expert on Pakistan,” he said. “I am a friend of Pakistan.” He added that he was the guy that keeps coming back. His recent article “Some of My Best Friends are Pakistanis” was widely read and appreciated by Pakistani-Americans during a very troubled time when the Times Square, New York attempted bombing associated with someone from within the community. He said that this kind of message needed to be sent to the mainstream community here in America by a non-Pakistani-American.
TCF Fundraiser in the San Francisco Bay Area, by Ras H. Siddiqui
Don’t forget to leave a comment below!
Thanks,
Ethan
Gulzar Ahmed: Peace starts with me
Better late than never, I want to share this op-ed written by my friend Gulzar Ahmed, who lives in Oregon:
“Peace starts with me,” OregonLive.com, May 7, 2010
“For the many American citizens of Pakistani origin living in the Portland metropolitan area, it’s incumbent upon us to come forward and condemn acts of terror in the strongest possible way. Our communities have to be willing to criticize ourselves and quit putting the blame on others. Let us not remain silent. A silent majority cannot allow an ideological minority to hijack the religion of Islam, which promotes peaceful coexistence among people of all faiths.”
Sentient beings in Pakistan
From filmmaker Mahera Omer in Karachi, who features prominently in Chapter 5 of my book Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip:
“All creatures on earth are sentient beings. There is not an animal on earth, nor a bird that flies on its wings – but they are communities like you.” The Quran 6:38
Swiss animal rights lawyer Antoine Goetschel recently made international news when he defended a dead pike in a case of cruelty by a local fisherman who was overheard boasting about landing the fish after a ten-minute-long struggle. The basis of his argument was that fish are sentient beings and that the fisherman had caused the pike needless pain. Islam is a religion where the sentience of all animals has been declared in the Quran. However, the expected application of such a belief is sadly amiss in Pakistani society. In fact, many of the most vocal advocates for animal rights in the history of Pakistan have been non-Muslim.
Read more from Mahera on the website of the Pakistan Animal Welfare Society (PAWS Pakistan).
Israel without Cliches, by Tony Judt
A bracingly clear-eyed and helpful New York Times op-ed by one of my favorite writers, NYU professor Tony Judt, himself Jewish:
“Terrorism is the weapon of the weak — bombing civilian targets was not invented by Arabs (nor by the Jews who engaged in it before 1948). Morally indefensible, it has characterized resistance movements of all colors for at least a century. Israelis are right to insist that any talks or settlements will depend upon Hamas’s foreswearing it.
“But Palestinians face the same conundrum as every other oppressed people: all they have with which to oppose an established state with a monopoly of power is rejection and protest. If they pre-concede every Israeli demand — abjurance of violence, acceptance of Israel, acknowledgment of all their losses — what do they bring to the negotiating table? Israel has the initiative: it should exercise it.”
Ahmadiyyas and the Lahore mosque attacks, by Tahmena Bokhari
Click here to read the full comment from a friend of mine in Toronto, currently serving as Mrs. Pakistan World:
“As a social worker I have worked with hundreds of members of the Ahmadiyya community in Toronto to help them seek asylum and settle in Canada along with other social work issues. I was extremely passionate about this work but it did come with some criticism from a few members of the wider Muslim community. This criticism was mainly that Sunnis (dominant Muslim sect) should not be helping the ‘anti-Islamic’ Ahmadiyyas. My specific faith label is not the issue here, my values of social justice are, and I would claim that social justice are the very values my personal faith has taught me.”
Obama’s misplaced trust in elites
New York Times columnist Frank Rich is one of my regular weekly reads:
“It’s this misplaced trust in elites both outside the White House and within it that seems to prevent Obama from realizing the moment that history has handed to him. Americans are still seething at the bonus-grabbing titans of the bubble and at the public and private institutions that failed to police them. But rather than embrace a unifying vision that could ignite his presidency, Obama shies away from connecting the dots as forcefully and relentlessly as the facts and Americans’ anger demand.”
Israel and the Distortion of American Politics
SEATTLE, June 5 – “This is a moment,” my friend Todd Shea said over lunch here, two days after Israel attacked the flotilla trying to enter Gaza with relief supplies. “And if he blows this moment, he’s not going to get it back again.”
“I just hate it when he tries to be bipartisan,” said another friend.
“There’s times to be bipartisan,” said Todd, “and there’s times when right is right and wrong is wrong.”
President Obama’s credibility was already wounded before the Gaza incident, and his failure to condemn it personally and forcefully is only the latest in a string of disappointments for many of us who voted for him. But the killings in international waters, in the context of Israel’s longstanding centrality to the entire planet’s fate, bring all actions and evasions into sharp relief. And the moment’s urgency compels us to acknowledge that if we continue to look for leadership to the President of the United States, the failure will no longer be his but our own.
This isn’t about Obama. We get the leaders we deserve, and what we’re willing to tolerate is a measure of our character. And what we should no longer tolerate is politics as usual – especially given how influential Israel is on politics as usual in America.
I’ve never been to Israel, and I’ve long made a point of not writing about it. It’s too far from my own bailiwicks, and too close to the bone. (I did co-edit a collection of writings narrating events in the Middle East between September 2000 and mid-2002, in a range of voices including right-wing settlers, trainee suicide bombers, Jewish and Arab Americans, and Desmond Tutu, among many others.) But as the author of two books that emphasize the human dimension of a self-consciously Muslim country, I’ve come to see Israel as the elephant in the global living room that it is. And I’ve come to see that, as an American, I do have a dog in this fight.
The first reason any of us should care about Palestine is that we are human beings. “Her primary concern is that the 1.5 million people of Gaza get their humanitarian needs,” Jennifer Sheetz, the daughter of my friend Kathy Sheetz, told me on Thursday, when Kathy herself was still unreachable because the Israelis had confiscated her cell phone. Kathy is a registered nurse who lives in Richmond, California and was on the flotilla. “She feels that the situation has to change, and it’s in Israel’s best interests too,” said Jennifer.
Muslims have views on Israel that are both predictable and understandable. “The Jews are doing to the Palestinians what Hitler did to them,” a woman told me last year in Hyderabad, India. “I have no personal thing with Jews. I admire them, I know some of them. They made the desert bloom and this and that. But how did they do this to people? My aunt went to the Gaza Strip. She said every day people are being taken away, people are dying.”
Jews who choose to criticize Israel have a certain standing. That is what makes Peter Beinart’s extremely timely New York Review of Books article “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment” so powerful. “In the American Jewish establishment today the language of liberal Zionism – with its idioms of human rights, equal citizenship, and territorial compromise – has been drained of meaning,” Beinart wrote, before the attack on the flotilla. “… Of course, Israel – like the United States – must sometimes take morally difficult actions in its own defense. But they are morally difficult only if you allow yourself some human connection to the other side. Otherwise, security justifies everything. The heads of AIPAC and the Presidents Conference should ask themselves what Israel’s leaders would have to do or say to make them scream ‘no.’ … If the line has not yet been crossed, where is the line?”
I’m grateful to Beinart for the use he’s making of his standing as an American Jew. I couldn’t have written the article he wrote. What I can write is an article that claims my own standing, as an American who is neither Jewish nor Muslim.
Being human should be enough, but I want to emphasize the specificity of what I’m claiming. I object, as an American, to the severe distortion that Israel’s behavior and presumption have inflicted for far too long on the politics of my country. And I decline to be bullied by the claim, whether implicit or overt, that Jewish suffering is somehow unique. If you want power, then you sacrifice the moral high ground; it’s not feasible to hold both. Taboos are inevitable in every society, but there are moments when we must allow or even force ourselves to see the truth. This is such a moment.
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010) and co-editor, with Paul Hilder, of Peace Fire: Fragments from the Israel-Palestine Story (2002). Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans Email: ethan@ethancasey.com
