It’s not about Greg Mortenson

I wrote this article originally as an installment in my twice-monthly column for Dawn, but I wrote it largely so that, from now on, when people ask me about Greg Mortenson, I can say, “Please read my article.” So I’ve also published it in full here. – Ethan Casey

Ever since April, when the U.S. newsmagazine show 60 Minutes and writer Jon Krakauer aggressively raised questions about Greg Mortenson and his bestselling book Three Cups of Tea, wherever I go someone inevitably asks me to comment on the situation. I’ve tried to be careful and judicious in my replies because I don’t actually know much, and I’m not directly or officially involved with Greg’s work, although I have been and remain an admirer. But now that it has been more than six months, I feel some things need to be said.

I don’t really mean that things need to be said about Greg himself. My understanding, from people I trust, is that Greg is very close to being able to speak for himself, publicly and forthrightly. Like many others, I look forward to that.

But I’m not waiting around for it, because there’s too much that needs to be done in the meantime. Pakistan’s burgeoning younger generation needs to be educated, for starters, and to do that requires sustained dedication and hard work from many, many people. Anyone who knows the situation in Pakistan knows that Greg’s Central Asia Institute is meeting only a tiny fraction of the need, and in very limited, distinct, and remote geographical areas. There’s a lot more to Pakistan than Baltistan. Anyone who knows the situation also knows that there are other excellent organizations working in education all around Pakistan, such as The Citizens Foundation, Developments in Literacy, the Human Development Foundation, and Zindagi Trust (to name only a few).

But well established, competent, Pakistani-run and ambitious though those groups are, they still are meeting only a fraction of the enormous need. If anything game-changing is ever going to be accomplished, it’s going to require a serious and large-scale engagement with the American public – yes, the American public – for two reasons. One is that the wider American public is a largely untapped reservoir of potential goodwill and funds to support the cause of a better education system in Pakistan. But, in truth, that goodwill and those funds might not even be necessary, if only Pakistan’s own substantial resources could be properly mobilized.

This is the second and much more important reason the American public must be engaged: The destructive and sinister geopolitical dance of death in which America and Pakistan have trapped themselves and each other is draining material resources, emotional energy, political wherewithal, and attention from urgent human needs. And if the two countries’ governments won’t take the lead in either extricating themselves or working together constructively and with mutual respect toward positive shared goals, then it’s up to private citizens to do that.

This means you and me. And this is where I believe Greg Mortenson has shown real leadership, almost regardless of the truth behind the 60 Minutes allegations. Before the scandal, Three Cups of Tea was more than a bestseller; it was almost a talisman for millions of Americans who wanted to believe not just that girls in remote parts of Pakistan could be educated, but that human beings – all of us – could be better than we apparently are. The last decade-plus has been such a dark time for Pakistanis, Americans, and everyone else, that we desperately crave a constructive and life-affirming project to believe in and support.

Three Cups of Tea met that emotional and spiritual need. And before you retort that Greg’s alleged falsifications undermine the book’s intentions, consider that the need is still just as real regardless. If it is the case that Greg – and his co-author David Oliver Relin, who to his shame has said nothing that I’m aware of since the scandal broke – made stuff up, one thing that most certainly does not imply is that the better world Greg helped us hope for is either impossible or unworthy of our effort. If you have ever heard Greg speak to a student audience, as I did at Texas Christian University in January 2011, then you know how desperately hungry young Americans are for something positive to believe in.

The catch is that reading a book or hearing an inspiring speech is only a first step, not an end in itself. Admiring Greg Mortenson, or anyone else, achieves exactly nothing unless it inspires us to do something ourselves. As Tracy Kidder puts it in Mountains Beyond Mountains, an analogous book about an analogous figure, Dr. Paul Farmer, such people force us to redefine the meaning of the phrase “doing one’s best.” (I addressed similar issues of how Farmer’s work is not the be-all and end-all of what needs to be done in Haiti at an October 15 fundraiser for the Colorado Haiti Project. You can read the text of that speech here.)

And just as it’s unfair and a cop-out to put all the pressure and responsibility on one person to do things we’re not willing to do ourselves, so to demonize that person for failing to be perfect is a corrosive avoidance of our own potential and duty to make ourselves useful. The question Greg’s failures and flaws should be forcing each of us to ask is: “What am I doing?”

Stay tuned for more from me on this topic, including an article about the Building Bridges of Peace conference held October 28 and 29 in Chicago. I moderated a panel at the conference that included Greg’s mother, Jerene Mortenson, and I saw there a rare mixed group of Muslims and non-Muslims, Pakistanis and Americans, meeting in nearly equal numbers, in an encouraging spirit of shared purpose.

Ethan Casey’s book Bearing the Bruise: A Life in the Context of Haiti will be published in March 2012. He is also the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip. He is currently planning a book of topical travel with the working title Home Free: An American Road Trip, for which he will travel around the United States during 2012. You can join his Facebook page or contact him directly.

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Home Free: In the Heart of the American Heartland

Martinsville, Indiana was minding its own business when I showed up there, and I’m sure that my having come and gone will make no difference whatsover in the lives and worries of its denizens. I came here looking for a typical Midwestern small town, and I guess I found one.

On my first pass through the quiet downtown on a pleasant autumn Sunday afternoon, I couldn’t find a diner that was open. I found a few diners around the courthouse square, but they weren’t open. Had they gone out of business, or were Martinsvillians still in church and/or at home watching football? I drove out of town and around on Highway 37, past the new Martinsville High School (“Home of the Artesians” – Martinsville bills itself as the “City of Mineral Water” as well as, charmingly, the “Gateway to Beautiful Southern Indiana”), the Wal-Mart, and the inevitable strip mall with the usual fast-food purveyers.

I thought I had left that sort of detritus behind in Indianapolis, but no such luck. So I came back through downtown and found The Olde Northside Bar & Grille, where I ordered the least unhealthy item on the limited menu, a breaded chicken sandwich, and a salad, from a very polite young man in a football jersey, backwards baseball cap, and blond pony tail. The TV in the bar was showing a NASCAR race somewhere in Florida.

I was in Indianapolis to take part in a panel discussion addressing the question “Is Pakistan a problem that needs to be solved?” The short version of my answer was that it depends on your premises and point of view – many Pakistanis, I suggested, see America as a problem – and I added something that I seek out opportunities to say: that security and freedom are antithetical, and that I prefer freedom. There’s a Pakistani community in almost every city in America, as well as well-meaning Americans who are concerned about the collision course the two countries seem to be on, and I have things to say about that, so I show up whenever I think I can add something useful to a necessary conversation.

But a side effect of the kind of traveling I’m doing too much of these days is that I get frustratingly brief glimpses of many different parts of America. And I want to emphasize that they are different. Bouncing around among airports, where only the kitsch versions of American cultures are available as you sit around waiting or rush to your gate, is a depressing and severely distorted way to see America. The real America, as distinct from the America you see on TV, is a vast and various country. In my books about Pakistan and Haiti I’ve made it a point of pride to experience and portray those societies at ground level, and I insist on doing the same in my planned American road trip book. As my colleague and friend Tony Davis memorably said to me years ago, on a hotel rooftop on the Thai-Burma border, “There’s no substitute for the sniff on the ground.” Surely that’s as true of America as of any other country.

Thus all I’m in a position to tell you so far about Martinsville, Indiana in particular is that I can’t tell you much about it, because I haven’t spent enough time there. Perhaps I’ll return next fall for my book and get to know it better. For now, I’m using Martinsville as a stand-in for thousands of similar towns all over the huge, ill-defined region known as the Midwest or the heartland. I grew up in such a town. I suppose such all-white towns (Martinsville’s official website says 98.62% of its 11,698 citizens are white) are what Sarah Palin meant when she coined the term “the real America” during the 2008 presidential campaign. I object to Sarah Palin’s definition of that phrase, but the demographic she was pandering to and exploiting must be respected and reckoned with, not scorned and dismissed.

It’s all too easy to be patronizing or dismissive of a place where the roadside signs read “Hall’s School of Gun Instruction and Shooting” and “Abounding Grace Worship Center” and “Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner” (this one courtesy of the Morgan County Beef Cattle Association). It’s easy, that is, if you live far from such a place, as I do. I also live far from Pakistan and Haiti, and I go out of my way to respect and try to understand those societies, so – baffling though much of their culture and worldview might be to me – I owe no less to the many Martinsvilles scattered around America. It helps that I do in fact come from more or less that culture; it’s familiar to me, though I’ve been far away from it for many years. It’s also helpful that I’m temperamentally disinclined to do anything that’s easy (“Why do you always have to do things the hard way?” my father once complained).

One of my favorite experiences in all my visits to Pakistan is when I sat in the general enclosure – the cheap seats – to watch a one-day cricket match between Pakistan and South Africa at Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore in 2003; I wrote about it in Alive and Well in Pakistan. A stern-looking and devout young man name Mohammed Faisal befriended me that day, explaining the niceties of cricket to me and protecting me from annoying rowdies. He had come that day from a village two hours away, with two dozen or so friends in the back of a Toyota pickup truck. “Maybe I will come to your village sometime, if that’s all right,” I said to him at the end of the match.

“Yes, of course,” he said. “We would be honored. You’re not afraid of coming to a village where almost everyone is Muslim?”

“No, I’m not afraid,” I told him. “Should I be?”

Mohammed Faisal and his friends all laughed good-naturedly when I said this. And it’s true that I shouldn’t be afraid, because living in fear is dreary and demoralizing and unworthy of human dignity. And most of the time, it turns out there’s nothing to fear anyway. I’m confident that this is as true of the rural American Midwest as of the rural Punjab in Pakistan.

You can support Ethan Casey’s book Home Free: An American Road Trip by pre-purchasing it for $19.95 per copy plus $3.95 shipping, and it will be shipped to you as soon as it’s published sometime in 2013:

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Pakistan, Palestine, and the USA: In search of common humanity

I woke up this morning to the news that Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, had directly accused Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of supporting the insurgents who attacked the U.S. Embassy in Kabul last week. The New York Times called it “the most serious charge that the United States has leveled against Pakistan in the decade that America has been at war in Afghanistan.”

The geopolitics of such matters are analyzed ad nauseum by Very Intelligent People in think tanks from Washington to Islamabad. The careerist participants in that debate are largely talking past each other, because each of them starts from the tendentious premise that the state that represents his or her society is the one that’s in the right. I don’t intend to contribute to that tedious and largely pointless conversation. I intend to do an end run around it, by reminding myself and anyone who might read this of our shared humanity.

Part of the problem is that both Pakistan and America are hyper-political cultures that, for historical and ideological reasons, both suffer from a damaging tendency to conflate the society with the state. Hence the unexamined terms “the United States” and “Pakistan” – the impoverished vocabulary of conventional journalism – in the quote above from the New York Times. What is “the United States”? What is “Pakistan”? To what version of these notional entities do I, as an American, or you, as a Pakistani, owe allegiance? Am I, as an American, or you, as a Pakistani, required or entitled to make excuses for things “the United States” or “Pakistan” do that we know to be wrong? Are we required always to support and excuse “us” against “them,” as though societies were necessarily rivals, like football teams?

This sort of thing has gotten much worse, and the stakes much higher, in recent years, but in truth it’s nothing new. Way back in 1767, Samuel Johnson observed that

In a time of war the nation is always of one mind, eager to hear something good of themselves, and ill of the enemy. At this time the task of news-writers is easy; they have nothing to do but to tell that the battle is expected, and afterwards that a battle has been fought, in which we and our friends, whether conquering or conquered, did all, and our enemies did nothing. Scarcely any thing awakens attention like a tale of cruelty. The writer of news never fails in the intermission of action to tell how the enemies murdered children and ravished virgins; and if the scene of action be somewhat distant, scalps half the inhabitants of a province.

In other words, don’t believe what you read in the papers. I began as a political journalist – a writer of news – like any other, but quickly became dissatisfied with the constraints and conventions of that kind of writing. It’s the opposite of poetry, in the sense that it systematically squeezes meaning out of language by resorting habitually to cant and to glib phrases like “poorest country in the Western Hemisphere” (Haiti), “Himalayan kingdom” (Nepal), “Muslim separatist insurgency” (Kashmir). George Orwell would have – did have – a lot to say about phrases like those, whose purpose is not to enhance understanding but to disable thinking and human sympathy by pushing emotive buttons.

My personal declaration of independence from the treadmill of such intellectually and morally impoverished language was my 2004 book Alive and Well in Pakistan, whose title as well as form – first-person nonfiction narrative, following role models like Graham Greene and Paul Theroux – are acts of intentional resistance. Resistance is anything but futile; it is hard but necessary work that we must do in order to maintain our humanity.

But resistance to the states that presume to represent our societies, and to the propaganda organs that presume to define the terms of our conversation, is only the first step. The long-term task is to maintain our use of language at a level that enhances understanding, in both the intellectual and the empathetic sense. The kindest review of Alive and Well in Pakistan was by Alex Spillius in The Daily Telegraph, who wrote that “The author’s real journey is a search for common humanity.” What “the media” would define for us as “the other” is not other at all; we’re all human beings, all in it together. We may not properly understand or agree with each other, but that only means that we need to work all the harder to find common ground, and then to hold it against the forces of division and enmity.

But just as it won’t do simply to blame the putative other side, blaming “the media” is an evasion and a cop-out. The ultimate responsibility lies in each and all of us. If you don’t like or believe what you’re told or what you see on television, do the work of reading and of joining the conversation. We can joke ruefully about how people don’t read books anymore, how we’re all too distracted to take the time to understand or care, but the solution is to make the time. There’s no more urgent task.

Is this post, then, a plug for my own books? Sure it is. I wouldn’t have written them if I didn’t believe that they do some of what needs to be done. And my occasional writings, my “blog” and my columns in Dawn, are a running addendum to my books. But my writings are only a starting point, and only one of many. If you’re an American and you want to understand Pakistan, read the novels of Bapsi Sidhwa or Mohsin Hamid. To understand what the most vulnerable immigrants to the United States endure, read the Haitian-American novelist Edwidge Danticat’s brilliant memoir Brother, I’m Dying.

Meanwhile, in New York, Palestine has formally requested membership in the United Nations, and starting today you’re going to be asked to acquiesce in what “the United States” thinks about that. As a very partial antidote, maybe a starting point to thinking about it differently, I ask you to read my article “Israel and the Distortion of American Politics,” which I wrote last May after the deadly attack on the flotilla that was trying to deliver relief supplies to the Gaza Strip.

Don’t excuse yourself. And, to begin with, refuse to accept at face value whatever you read in the New York Times or hear on TV about what “the United States” – the state – accuses “Pakistan” – the state – of doing or abetting. The stakes are too high, and we’re all responsible for the damage that results from misunderstanding and mutual suspicion.

ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) andOvertaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). His next book, Bearing the Bruise: A Life in the Context of Haiti, will be published in March 2012. He lives in Seattle. Web:www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans

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Terry Jones’s America: A Dangerous Place to Be

SEATTLE, April 3 – There are so many reasons to feel alarmed, worried, and/or confused at the moment – Japan, Libya, Obama, take your pick – that it seems almost quaint, “so last year,” to single out the Quran-burning pastor in Florida. But his latest antic, and the resulting deaths of innocent people in Afghanistan, leave me feeling angry and disgusted. When will we in America begin taking responsibility for our own extremists?

As the riots in Afghanistan show starkly, this is a matter of life and death. By the time you read this, the two days of riots I’m referring to might have swollen into a major crisis – or they might have been subsumed and forgotten in the din and onrush of mayhem in Libya and Syria, radiation in Japan, or whatever’s next. Either way, the people who died in them will remain just as dead. And it will remain the fault of Pastor Terry Jones of Gainesville, Florida.

It would be nice if we could ignore Jones and his ilk, but we can’t afford to. “The local strategy of everybody was to ignore this,” the Rev. Lawrence D. Reimer, pastor of the United Church of Gainesville, told the New York Times. “It’s just a horrible tragedy that this act triggered the deaths of more innocent people.” It’s understandable that well-meaning Gainesvillians would be embarrassed, and a tactic of declining to dignify Jones’s stunt with attention is defensible. But some of the comments responding to my article “Is America Any Different from Pakistan?” – published in January, just after the killing of Salmaan Taseer in Islamabad and the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson – are telling. One reader wrote (anonymously of course):

Yawn yet another typical leftie more than willing to jump on the bandwagon of blaming the right, America, and any other group he/she opposes for the actions of a mentally insane person. Jared Loughner appears to have been a psychotic, I suspect a schizophrenic. Please wait for the facts instead [of] falling into your own biases.

It’s plausible to dismiss Loughner and Jones as nuts, or me as “yet another typical leftie,” but I don’t buy it. Ever since Ronald Reagan’s henchmen coined the phrase “plausible deniability,” that’s become our national motto. Contrast the anonymous comment with this, from reader Arif Humayun:

Right-wing extremists are made of the same stuff; geography does not matter. This breed in the US is no different from that in Pakistan or the one in India. They exploit the religious sentiments for votes and refuse to take responsibility when their rhetoric causes extreme reactions like the killings in Tucson AZ or the murder of Governor Taseer in Pakistan or the Gujarat riots in India.

And this, from Tess Abidi:

The American rightwingers deny the shooting of a liberal politician had anything to do with their hate speech, and denounce anyone who dares even remotely suggest otherwise. The Pakistani rightwingers proudly acknowledge – nay, take credit for – their speeches that led to the shooting.

Admit there is a difference. But if things stay as is, it wouldn’t take much for the Americans to become more and more like Pakistanis. It doesn’t take much, you know. I left Pakistan during the 90’s. It’s a very different country now. Didn’t take that long.

Arif and Tess both are Americans who are Muslim and of Pakistani origin. In our national and international conversation, it’s important for their voices to be heard. Here’s another voice I’d like you to hear – my friend Todd Shea:

Right now many people’s reality is rooted in misconceptions on all sides, and that’s a dangerous place to be. And somebody somewhere has to take initiative in presenting information that people need to have in order to have a better understanding. In this case, educating Americans about the reality on the ground in Pakistan, the history that they don’t understand, our culpability, and our need to do something about it.

Huh? Our culpability? Here’s part of what Todd means:

If U.S. leaders had treated them as important in a human way [after our successful proxy war against the Soviet Union in the 1980s], then society in Pakistan and Afghanistan would be far further along today, because we would have helped them avoid all the things that are happening now. If you remember, at the time, we were loved. Both countries were in such a state of need, and then we just left. ‘We got rid of our big enemy, let’s get outta here,’ and boy, wasn’t that a strategic error.

Contrast Todd’s emphasis on historical context and self-examination with Pastor Terry Jones’s excuse for putting the Quran “on trial” and then burning it: “It’s time to hold Islam accountable.”

Is it also time to hold America, and Americans, accountable? It had better be. Accountability begins at home. It’s fine, and important, for people to write and read edifying primers like Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s recent Washington Post op-ed “Five Myths about Muslims in America.” But that’s not enough. As I told a right-wing friend of mine recently in a different context, I’m ready to fight for the America that I want to live in. More of us need to find the courage and strength of character that my fellow Wisconsinites have  been showing lately, or we’ll end up living in Terry Jones’s America. And that’s a dangerous place to be.

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). He is currently writing Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime of Learning from Haiti, to published in fall 2011, and collaborating with filmmaker Naeem Randhawa on a collection of stories by and about Muslims living in America. Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans

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What Does Egypt Mean for Pakistan?

One of the nicest compliments I’ve ever received for my work was when a Pakistani journalist, a young woman, told me I’m not afflicted by what she called “Have pen will write syndrome.” I write when I have something to say, or a story to tell, that I believe others will find helpful and worth reading. Lately I’ve been itching a little to write about Egypt, but so far I’ve concluded that the world doesn’t need my gratuitous drop in the ocean of commentary, particularly given that I’ve never been to Egypt.

But I have been to Pakistan, many times since 1995, and I’m going there again for three weeks starting February 18. And I can’t help wondering what kinds of conversations I might have there in the wake or context of the Egyptian revolution.

This will be my first trip to Pakistan since the visit almost exactly two years ago that resulted in my book Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip. I flatter myself that, whatever its other merits, my book has a well-chosen title. As Zaka Shafiq, a young man I met in Karachi, told me at the end of the trip and the start of the book: “It’ll be out of date by the time it’s published.” But I’m not worried about being overtaken by events, because I’ve resigned myself to it as a condition of being alive in this world, especially these days. I figure my job is to listen, pay attention, and take notes. There’s a lot to be learned about where we’re at and where we’re headed, if you stay alert.

My coming trip hasn’t even started, and it’s already been overtaken by events. When I began planning it several months ago, its purpose was to witness and write about the grossly under-reported effects of last summer’s historically severe flooding – and that remains an important goal. But then, in early January, Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer was assassinated and, in a shockingly parallel incident, US Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in Tucson. And, now, Egypt is in upheaval.

But what does Egypt have to do with Pakistan? Well, I’m hoping you can help me answer that question. Particularly if you’re Pakistani, but even if you’re not, I invite you to post a comment on this article or on my Facebook page or, if you prefer, to write to me privately with your thoughts. And please forward this article far and wide. I want to read and hear as many voices as you can help me gather about Pakistan’s future and the implications – for Pakistan, for the Muslim world, and for all of us – of the Egyptian revolution.

My starting point is that, in what I’ve been reading, Western writers are starting to speculate – ominously and/or hopefully, depending on their loyalties – on the wider implications of Egypt for the Arab world. Even factoring in the Western public’s fuzziness on the distinction between Arabs and Muslims, it’s striking to me that few seem to be wondering, in this context, about Pakistan. The American public has had a lot on its plate lately, what with Egypt, severe winter weather, and the Super Bowl all happening at the same time, but Frank Rich’s bracingly unsparing February 6 column acknowledges the stakes:

The consequence of a decade’s worth of indiscriminate demonization of Arabs in America — and of the low quotient of comprehensive adult news coverage that might have helped counter it — is the steady rise in Islamophobia. The “Ground Zero” mosque melee has given way to battles over mosques as far removed from Lower Manhattan as California. Soon to come is a national witch hunt — Congressional hearings called by Representative Peter King of New York — into the “radicalization of the American Muslim community.” Given the disconnect between America and the Arab world, it’s no wonder that Americans are invested in the fights for freedom in Egypt and its neighboring dictatorships only up to a point. We’ve been inculcated to assume that whoever comes out on top is ipso facto a jihadist.

Rich notes the release of Donald Rumsfeld’s memoir and remembers that, like the events in Cairo, the bombardments of Iraq that Rumsfeld ordered

were spectacular to watch from a safe distance — no Iraqi faces, voices or bodies cluttered up the shots. We [Americans] lulled ourselves into believing that democracy and other good things were soon to come. It took months, even years, for us to learn the hard way that in truth we really had no idea what was going on.

So there is a lot of work to do, to continue educating the American public – I include myself – on our steep learning curve about the Muslim world in general and Pakistan in particular. What do Americans need to know about Pakistan? And, most pressingly at the moment, what are the similarities and differences between Pakistan and Egypt? And what might the events in Egypt portend for Pakistan?

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). He is currently writing Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime of Learning from Haiti, to published in fall 2011, and collaborating with filmmaker Naeem Randhawa on a collection of stories by and about Muslims living in America. Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans

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Good Muslims and good Americans

By Ben Owen

Note: Ben Owen is my assistant and creative collaborator and a student at Seattle Central Community College. This piece is, I hope, the first of many by Ben that you’ll be reading on www.ethancasey.com. – Ethan

On December 2, I organized a small symposium at Seattle Central Community College on Haiti and Pakistan. The idea came about because of my recent trip to Haiti and the work I’ve been doing with Ethan Casey to help change Americans’ perceptions of Pakistan and Pakistanis. Through these experiences, and many conversations with Haitians and Pakistanis, I began to see how similar their struggles are. I wanted to recreate this experience for others. The symposium was a way to share these insights with a broader audience and allow others to make the connections themselves, and it was a huge success. We filled the Student Events Center to capacity, the speakers gave thoughtful, well-researched talks, and everyone walked away having had at least one “I didn’t know that!” moment.

The first speaker was Jafar “Jeff” Siddiqui, a real estate agent, former chairman of the Islamic School of Seattle, and founding member of American Muslims of Puget Sound. He was also one of the first Muslims to be a Presidential Elector, in the 2008 Presidential Elections. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer said of Jeff: “His mission is to counteract the image of Muslims as fanatical terrorists and extremists that, he believes, is propagated in the media, popular culture, and even the government.”

He gave a stirring and enlightening talk about Pakistan, discussing its political relationship with the United States and how it’s portrayed in our media. He put Pakistan in a historical and geopolitical context and, in doing so, opened the door for people to reexamine their beliefs and ideas about it.

Even with my recent involvement with Pakistan, I had many “I didn’t know that!” moments myself. I knew that the United States has had a vested interest in the region for some time now, but I had no idea the extent of it. In the late 1970s, Afghanistan had a coup. King Zahir Shah was overthrown, and his cousin took over in a pro-communist regime. Those were the days of the Cold War, and the United States was determined to stop the spread of communism and the Soviet Union, which was occupying Afghanistan at the time. So we went to war in Afghanistan, but we didn’t actually go to war. What we did instead was arm and fund Pakistan to go to war for us. We gave money and weapons to anyone with any political or opinion influence in Pakistan, in order to buy their favor. As Siddiqui put it:

We loaded Pakistan with so much weaponry that those weapons are still moving around in the streets of Pakistan today. They, in turn, quashed the public opinion in Pakistan, which did not want to get involved in a proxy war between the US and the Soviet Union. But the people of Pakistan were dragged into war anyways, kicking and screaming, by the generals, the CIA and the United States.

This was also when Osama bin Laden came to Afghanistan, also to fight the Soviets, but for different reasons. According to The Council on Foreign Affairs, Bin Laden became involved with Afghanistan “during the 1979-89 war against the Soviets. Bin Laden raised money and supplied heavy machinery for the anticommunist mujahadeen, or holy warriors, fighting the Soviet invasion. He also provided financing for the so-called Services Office, which recruited and trained a brigade of foreign Muslim militants that fought alongside the Afghan mujahadeen.” Soon after, more than 3 million Afghan refugees flooded into Pakistan, and the United States was there with all the money that Pakistan needed to support them. “We just asked for open access to channels of funding and weaponry to people in Afghanistan and training camps in Pakistan to train the Afghans to fight so they can go back and fight,” Siddiqui said. Hundreds of religious schools, called madrassas, were set up in Pakistan. They taught Afghan refugee children very intolerant versions of Islam, wrongly teaching that Islam directs you to kill unbelievers.

Siddiqui remembers that in those days people in Pakistan were saying, “For God’s sake! Don’t teach this to the kids! They’re going to grow up, you will be long gone, they will still be here, and we will have to deal with them.” But we had a mission to accomplish. Eventually, our plan worked. The Soviet Union pulled out, but we pulled out right behind them before the dust even had time to settle, leaving radicals like bin Laden behind with the rubble and destruction of a ten-year war. As Siddiqui said, “That was the worst thing the United States could have done. The easiest thing the United States could have done was invest $100 million to start industry, start schools, and start an infrastructure in Afghanistan. But as we’ve always insisted: we’re not into ‘nation construction.’ What we leave out is that we are into ‘nation destruction.’”

This stood out to me as an important point. Currently, we’re fighting a war in Afghanistan and another in Iraq. These two wars have cost our country hundreds of billions of dollars. And, as Siddiqui noted, “According to a poll taken just a year ago, public opinion about Muslims is worse today than it was on the one-year anniversary of 9/11.” There is no way to know how things would be different today had we invested in rebuilding Afghanistan after the Soviets left. But we can put ourselves in the shoes of the people there. Imagine that we lived in a country that was not the world superpower, and a proxy war between two foreign countries was fought on American soil, leaving thousands of innocent civilians dead and our infrastructure in shambles. Would that not create a bitterness and resentment within the heart of every American patriot? Radicals would spring up from the Atlantic to the Pacific, denouncing the entities that brought such suffering to our land. Why would we expect anything different from the people of Afghanistan?

Although I found all this profoundly interesting, I started to think, “Isn’t Jeff supposed to be talking about Pakistan?” And at that moment, as if he had read my mind, he said:

Now, all of this has a major impact on Pakistan. Afghanistan garnered its intolerant Muslims from the madrassa schools which also trained Pakistanis. The people who learned from them became even more intolerant and trained even more intolerance into Pakistan. Pakistan right now is a chaotic country. If I have the most weapons, then I am king. And nobody can say anything. And If I invoke Islam, then I can get away with anything I want.

What we have to remember is that violent people are often the ones who rise to power, especially in environments like Pakistan today. The “leaders” of a country, more often than not, are not representative of the people they rule over. Yet the media here in the US (and many of our citizens) demonize all Muslims and Pakistanis because of the actions of a few radicals that our government (not us) indirectly supported and helped to thrive. We must remember that it is Pakistani and Afghan citizens – people like you and me, with friends and families – who are suffering the most. By demonizing them and judging an entire people based on the actions of a few, we do an injustice not only to them, but to ourselves.

Siddiqui closed by showing how all this affects us here in America:

Since 9/11, the biggest industry in the world has been the fear industry. In the name of fear, in the name of security, we have given up our civil liberties. We have been deprived of our civil rights, but we are no closer to security. … In the name of security, in just the first year after 9/11, 14,000 Muslims in the US had been put in jail and were kept in jail – fourteen thousand! And when the question was brought up in the Senate, Senator John Ashcroft said, ‘Individually, these people are like pieces of a mosaic; they don’t show anything. But we’re trying to develop a pattern from this mosaic. That’s why we’re holding so many people.’ And people shut up, because it was a matter of national security.

I couldn’t believe that such a ridiculous justification was used for such a blatant violation of human rights and civil liberties that we hold so dear in the United States, so I looked it up. One of the first citations I found was a 2005 study in the Yale Law Journal titled “The Mosaic Theory, National Security, and the Freedom of Information Act,” which concluded: “Though essentially valid, the mosaic theory has been applied in ways that are unfalsifiable, in tension with the text and purpose of FOIA, and susceptible to abuse and overbreadth.” The paper discusses the many uses of this theory by our government – particularly the Bush Administration – to justify invasive and unconstitutional policies and actions.

We have all averted our eyes from injustice and discrimination against Muslims in our country. I have. I have listened to people make ignorant statements like, “Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims,” and I have kept my mouth shut. We cannot afford to keep our mouths closed or our eyes shut any more. We live in a diverse country that was founded on the principles of freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of the people to pursue happiness. And no one will be happy as long as we allow fear of Muslims to be perpetuated in our communities. We listen to the bigotry and single-sided perspectives spouted through the “news,” and we take it in and swallow it whole.

I was largely unaware of the mass detention of Muslims in the aftermath of 9/11 because, to my discredit, I simply did not know very many Muslims. But there are large Muslim communities all across the US, American citizens who are doing their best to be “good Muslims” and good Americans, just as others are doing their best to be “good Christians.” Now, I personally know of a group of several hundred Pakistani doctors who did relief work in Haiti after the earthquake there. We have no excuse to live in fear of all Muslims. We have no excuse to be ignorant. Most likely, you have a Muslim co-worker or classmate. Why not ask him or her out to lunch or coffee? I guarantee that you’ll have at least one “I didn’t know that!” moment.

Blindly ingesting popular culture’s representation of Islam and Muslims is a choice. Only by actively pursuing knowledge about what we do not understand will we be able to overcome the fear and misconceptions that have overtaken our culture. It’s time to build bridges.

Read Ben Owen’s bio

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Israel-Palestine bus ads controversy in Seattle

In Seattle, where I live, a flap is brewing about ads that have been purchased by a group critical of Israel, set to run on the sides of twelve King County Metro buses starting Dec. 27. I first learned of this on Dec. 17 when a local acquaintance sent me a link to an article on the website of a Seattle TV station. If you read the comments below that article, you’ll see that it has generated a dismayingly predictable range of responses. Here’s a passage from the article:

A group calling itself the Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign has paid King County $1,794 so that 12 buses will carry that message around town, starting two days after Christmas. That’s December 27: the two-year anniversary of Israeli attacks on Gaza, aimed at stopping rocket attacks and weapons smuggling.

Ed Mast, a Seattle man who is a spokesperson for the group, says it’s not meant to be an anti-Israel message, but a message designed to generate discussion and awareness.

This morning I got a broadcast email sent out by Jafar “Jeff” Siddiqui, a longtime Seattle-area real estate agent who served as one of the first-ever Muslim presidential electors in the 2008 election, about a campaign to pressure King County Metro to cancel the ad. I’m reproducing Jeff’s email in full below because, although I fear it might prompt the same tedious range of unimaginative and ungenerous comments as most writing on the subject does, I believe we Americans need to be discussing Israel and Palestine, rather than avoiding the subject or only attacking each other.

Although I long avoided the subject myself, the Israeli attack on the Gaza flotilla in late May compelled me to write an article prompted by a sense of responsibility, not as a Jew or Muslim (I’m neither), nor as a friend of Jews or Muslims (I’m both), but as an American concerned about the civic health of my own country. My article, titled ”Israel and the Distortion of American Politics,” and the comments it generated at the time, are published on this website.

The bus ads are what my friend Stephen Silha likes to call a “glocal” issue: local and global at the same time. We’re all in this together, right? And we all want what’s best for our species and the world, right?

Here is Jeff Siddiqui’s full message:

* * *

Greetings all,

It looks like King Co Metro is about to kill the ads on Israel’s war crimes in response to “outrage” by residents. Obviously the blindly pro-Israel groups are strong and can field a large number of calls when they need to “defend” Israel.

Unless you are okay with voices against Israel’s atrocities being stifled, it is time to drop the neutrality and make the call and send the e-mail (like mine below).

Your e-mail does not have to be long; it can simply be a few sentences saying that you support the right of organizations to criticize Israel’s atrocities in bus ads. You can also ask Kevin Desmond  (the general manager of Metro) to do nothing to stop the ads.

You also need to copy Dow Constantine, the County Executive, County Councilmember Pete von Reichbauer, who has objected to the ads in response to the “outrage,” as well as the Clerk of the County, so it may be shared with other members of the County Council.

Jeff Siddiqui
206.228.5732

We can have justice whenever those who have not been injured by injustice are as outraged by it, as those who have been. – Greek lawyer Solon, ca. 594 BC

P.O. Box 7002
Lynnwood, WA 98046

December 20th, 2010

Kevin Desmond, Gen. Mgr.
King County Metro Transit
206-684-1619
kevin.desmond@kingcounty.gov

Dear Mr. Desmond,

I am writing as a concerned citizen, resident of Washington State, and taxpayer in the City of Seattle.

Recently there has been a lot of excitement about a proposed bus ad noting Israeli war crimes, and I understand that Metro is re-thinking its advertising policy and I sincerely hope that this re-thinking is not going to lead to finding some way to ban ads that are perceived as “anti-Israel.”

There are many of us who do not support Israel’s occupation and who condemn Israel’s war crimes, for this is what they are. If some people pay to take out ads that highlight what our tax dollars are supporting in Israel, it should not be the concern of the transit service to seek to stifle such action.

Some may suggest that these ads promote hate and anti-Semitism, but I do not believe this is so. I can tell you personally, that while I hate what Israel is doing to Palestinians, I have no fear or hate towards Jews, either here or in Israel. I simply wish to have Israel stop its atrocities. Those who would seek to connect protest against Israel with “anti-Semitism” are not being honest either with themselves or with the public.

I understand that you have been landed in the midst of a fearsome debate that has been going on for years, but I suggest you keep from stopping these ads unless it is CLEAR that they are anti-Semitic. I further suggest that criticism of Israel is NOT, by any stretch of the imagination, “anti-Semitic.”

Please do not allow the right to place factual advertising to be abridged.

Sincerely,

Jafar Siddiqui
American Muslims of Puget Sound

cc: King County Executive Dow Constantine Dow.Constantine@kingcounty.gov
King County Councilmember Pete von Reichbauer Pete.Vonreichbauer@kingcounty.gov
King County Councilmembers c/o Clerk of the Council clerk.council@kingcounty.gov

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). He is currently writing a book about Haiti to be published in 2011 and collaborating with filmmaker Naeem Randhawa on a collection of stories by and about Muslims living in America. Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans

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What does Pakistan have to do with Haiti?

Port-au-Prince, September 2 – Haiti is, as a friend of mine put it years ago, a place for big questions. I’ve been trying to understand it for nearly thirty years, and its politics, history and culture have many twists and turns that are still opaque to me. At the same time, it’s a place whose truths and foibles are different from those of your country or mine only in being more obvious, more in your face. Anything that’s true of Haiti is true of the world as a whole – and that’s a truth that’s not complicated at all, only hard to swallow.

For me personally Haiti feels like home, because I was sixteen years old the first time I set foot here. It has taught me much, if not most, of whatever I now know about the world, and my early experience of Haiti suffused my later responses to very different countries, particularly during the five years I lived in Asia in the 1990s. I saw chronically desperate Cambodia, and tortured Burma, and deforested Thailand, with the eyes of one who had seen Haiti. In a phone conversation in 2004 Tracy Kidder, author of the celebrated book Mountains Beyond Mountains, told me something I implicitly understand and relate to: “I’ve learned so much about the world from Haiti – some of which I almost wish I hadn’t learned.”

Two things have been on my mind since Ben Owen, Pete Sabo and I arrived here on August 25. One is how, not quite eight months after the January 12 earthquake that killed perhaps 300,000 people, life here seems to have returned to something like normal. I hasten to add that that doesn’t mean everything’s fine – it’s not. Normal in Haiti is far from fine.

But my friend Gerald Oriol Jr., of Fondation J’Aime Haiti, notes how the tent cities that have taken over virtually all open spaces in Port-au-Prince have settled into a version of regular neighborhood life, with cyber cafes and hair salons. “It’s funny how an abnormal situation can be normal,” says Gerald, who belongs to Haiti’s elite class. “The only people who are truly shocked right now are people like me. But for the poor, things were so hard for them already that it’s just another way to organize themselves. Maybe it’s even better for them now.”

“The other difference is that many of them lost family and friends,” I pointed out.

“Yes, of course,” agreed Gerald. “I know a guy who lost his five children and his wife. But materially they are no worse off.”

The other thing I’ve been thinking about is the disturbingly weird coincidence of the two countries that are most important to me personally being struck in the same year by appalling disasters. The outpouring of generosity towards Haiti after the earthquake was extraordinary and welcome, but it will remain meaningful only if Americans continue noticing Haiti and, beyond giving money, make the effort to understand its situation. The earthquake was a natural disaster, but it didn’t happen in a geopolitical vacuum. This country, these people, that we cared so deeply about circa January and February – who are they, and what are they all about? Haitians are more and other than charity cases. They’re human beings with a culture and a politics and a national history closely intertwined with our own. We owe it to them and to ourselves to know them.

I came here because I share the human tendency to forget, and I want to do my part to work against it. But just as I was preparing for this trip in late July and early August, I was distracted by the floods in Pakistan, about which suffice it to say that they’re proving as devastating in every way as the Haitian earthquake, with the difference that Pakistan is a nation of not 8 million but 170 million people. It’s also a Muslim nation with nuclear weapons, but that’s not the point. The point – which I fear many Americans have ignored or denied – is that Pakistanis are people who are suffering and will continue to suffer, as food shortages caused by the destruction of crops ramify through Pakistani society over the coming months and beyond.

My question for Americans is: If we failed or refused to understand at the time it happened that the flooding was not some divine comeuppance safely distant from us, but an immense human tragedy, will we understand a year from now when, God forbid, the ricochets from it hit us closer to home?

Many Pakistani friends of mine responded immediately and with real sympathy, concretely expressed, after the Haitian earthquake. Todd Shea claims that, of the 200 or so physicians from North America who volunteered with him in Haiti, most were Pakistani. We have a golden opportunity to show similar human concern for Pakistanis, now and later.

An August 23 note from Uzma Shah is typical of the many messages I’ve received since publishing my previous article “Pakistan Floods: Why Should We Care?”: “It’s hard to see pictures from Pakistan, and I can’t help but choke back tears when I see all that desperation. And amidst all the furor about all things bad and hard about Pakistan and ‘Islam,’ it’s comforting to read your article. Because at the end of the day, we are all human, living in one world, sharing the same life.”

It’s dismaying to me that I’ve gotten very few such messages from non-Muslims.

ETHAN CASEY is the author of the travel books Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). He is currently writing Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime in Haiti for publication in spring 2011. He can be emailed at ethan@ethancasey.com and his books and articles are available online at www.ethancasey.com/books/ and www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans. Until further notice, he is donating 20% of profits from sales of his Pakistan books to flood relief in Pakistan, and from his Haiti book to Fondation J’Aime Haiti and the Colorado Haiti Project.

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Seattle TV interview on Pakistan floods

This morning at 7:30 I went to the studios of KIRO 7 TV in downtown Seattle to be interviewed by satellite by BBC World about the floods in Pakistan. The KIRO producer, Bridget Turrell – whom I’d like to thank and congratulate for her initiative in helping bring awareness of the floods to Americans – asked me to give them an interview too. Anchor Chris Egert did the 6 1/2-minute interview, and they played a short part of it on the TV news at noon. The full interview is online here.

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A Mosque Maligned

A very good, thoughtful essay by Robert Wright of the New America Foundation, someone I’d love to meet and recommend Pakistani-Americans seek out and cultivate:

“No doubt Osama bin Laden, if apprised of the situation, would hope that Rauf will cave in to these demands and ritually denounce Hamas. Because the Muslims who are most vulnerable to bin Laden’s recruiting pitch are, it’s safe to say, at least somewhat sympathetic to Hamas. And if moderate Muslims like Rauf can be pressured into adopting Israel’s position, and thus be depicted by truly radical Muslims as Zionist tools, that will make them less effective in their tug of war with bin Laden for the hearts and minds of the vulnerable.”

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