Pakistan and America Both Need APPNA’s Leadership

The following article was commissioned for the APPNA Journal (Vol. 13 No. 1, Summer 2011, pp. 20-21), by its editor, Dr. Mahmood Alam:

This is a very difficult time for Pakistan, for Pakistanis and other Muslims living in America, indeed for all friends of Pakistan and of humanity and peace. Drone attacks, Osama bin Laden, Raymond Davis, the long-term damage from last summer’s severe flooding – which I saw for myself in February and March in the Swat valley and in rural areas of Punjab province – there’s no rest from the litany of crises Pakistan faces.

The Pakistani-American community, led by APPNA and other organizations I admire and support, is remarkably steadfast in addressing the acute and chronic humanitarian needs of Pakistani society. Year after year, crisis after crisis, fundraiser after fundraiser, my Pakistani-American friends walk the walk. I admire you enormously for knowing and doing what needs to be done for the men, women and, above all, children of Pakistan, regardless of the constantly changing and increasingly alarming geopolitical situation. And I want you to know that I will continue walking the walk with you.

One way I think I’m positioned to help is by educating the American public about the Pakistan I’ve come to know and love, since I first went there in 1995. We all know Pakistan is far from perfect, but the point I try to get across to mainstream America is that the real Pakistan is very different, and much more interesting and likeable, than the Pakistan they see on TV. That’s an easy and enjoyable thing to do if you know and like Pakistan as I do, and it needs to be done, because the American public’s attitude toward Pakistan greatly affects our ability to support all the urgently needed humanitarian work that must be done. This is so because, as I and others have diagnosed, the Pakistani-American community suffers from chronic and worsening donor fatigue, and the wider American public represents a largely untapped source of funds for nonprofits working in Pakistan. But even prior to that, we need to elicit the positive interest and human sympathy of non-Pakistani, non-Muslim Americans, for everyone’s sake.

And more than that, I believe the very future of Pakistan itself depends on the Pakistani diaspora’s ability and willingness to reach out assertively to mainstream America. I believe that the best defense is a good offense, and that if you want something done right – in this case, if you want Americans to have a correct impression of Pakistan and of Muslims – you’ve got to do it yourself. This is where I believe APPNA and its chapters and individual members can play a powerful leading role on behalf of the Pakistani-American community as a whole – and thus, by extension, on behalf of Pakistan.

To mainstream America, APPNA members are potentially the human faces of Pakistan and of Islam. I say potentially, because unfortunately the faces that the words “Pakistan” and “Islam” still conjure up to many Americans are those of people like Osama bin Laden and Faisal Shahzad, the disturbed young man who planted a bomb in Times Square in New York last year. This will change only if we make a concerted effort to change it – but we can change it. What’s called for is a very assertive public diplomacy initiative, to replace those faces with the faces of accomplished professionals, good neighbors, and active citizens – people like you. Each of you lives and works somewhere in America, many of you in very provincial and even remote cities and towns. And it’s exactly in those places that the need is greatest.

APPNA has the membership and institutional infrastructure to make a big difference throughout American society. What if APPNA were to do this systematically, encouraging and supporting members and chapters who take initiative locally by reaching out to churches, schools, civic groups like Rotary, and universities? And even if this were not feasible on an APPNA-wide scale, there’s no reason it can’t be done by regional or state chapters or individual members. It just takes initiative, resourcefulness, and imagination, all of which I know Pakistanis possess. Pakistanis are among the most resourceful people I know; you’ve had to be, because for 64 years your country has faced one enormous challenge after another. As author Emma Duncan pointed out more than 20 years ago, nothing is ever settled in Pakistan. That’s chronically frustrating, but it has also been good practice for our current and coming crises, both in Pakistan and in America. The Pakistani-American community, led by APPNA members, has a lot to teach other Americans about how to rise to a challenge.

I want to continue rising to our shared challenges with you, because I believe we’re all in this together. On June 1, I gave a speech at a prestigious TEDx event sponsored by the Princeton Public Library in Princeton, New Jersey. In it I pointed out, to a mostly non-Pakistani audience, that many Pakistani friends of mine – many of them physicians who volunteered their time and lifesaving skills – responded immediately and with real sympathy, concretely expressed, after the earthquake in Haiti. I also said that I felt American society had missed the opportunity to show similar human concern for Pakistanis last summer, when 20 percent of Pakistan was under water. And I quoted from a message I received from Dr. Uzma Shah of Boston, after I had published an article titled “Pakistan Floods: Why Should We Care?” on the Huffington Post and on my website. “It’s hard to see pictures from Pakistan,” Uzma wrote, “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.”

This is the point we must keep making, as often as necessary. It’s easy to explain away America’s failure to respond adequately to the floods: Americans suffered from “compassion fatigue” after Haiti; Pakistan is farther from the U.S. than Haiti is; a flood is a slow-moving disaster whose effects are less immediately dramatic than an earthquake. But it’s also hard to avoid facing the effects of a decade-long national climate that has made Muslims the only group in America against whom it’s considered permissible, sometimes even fashionable, to be bigoted. I believe, though, that – like all people – Americans are capable of responding to what Abraham Lincoln called the better angels of our nature, if they’re invited and given the opportunity to do so. Many of you know this from your own experience. As my friend Dr. Shahnaz Khan of Zephyrhills, Florida told me, “It becomes personal. [My patients] actually tell me they think of me when they listen to the news. In fact, a lot of them probably didn’t know I was from Pakistan before 9/11, or didn’t even care. They say, ‘Be careful, Dr. Khan. Come back safely. Don’t get lost, don’t get hurt.’ It’s a good feeling, a lot of goodwill.” Just as the real Pakistan is better and more interesting than the Pakistan we see on TV, so is the real America.

So how can we effectively engage with and influence the real America? One thing I do is give away copies of my book, Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip, to students, libraries, religious and political leaders, and others in positions of influence in American society. The Pakistani novelist Bapsi Sidhwa understands what I’m trying to achieve; she says its “personal perspective … lends the book much of its charm and veracity and makes Overtaken By Events so compulsively readable.” The program’s potential is well illustrated by an email I received from Texas Christian University student Paul Jorden in January, just after I spoke to his World Religions class taught by Professor Mark Dennis. “Dear Mr. Casey,” Paul wrote,

Thank you very much for the copy of your book. I am thoroughly looking forward to learning more about life and the hardships of those in Pakistan and how terrorism shapes our (Americans’) perception of Muslims. Thank you for taking the time to speak to our class. I sincerely appreciate the importance of issues such as this, especially during times when it seems that our lives are permeated by a constant fear of terrorism via the news. Best of luck with promoting awareness.

The American mainstream media isn’t going to do the task for us, because – as Paul Jorden shows he understands in the quote above – the media is a major source of the problem. By all means, let’s try to influence politicians, policymakers, media moguls, and celebrities, but let’s not be seduced by the polite hearings and photo-ops that they offer us from time to time. We need to go over the heads of the American media and establishment, by reaching out directly to the American public. My public and classroom speaking and book sponsorship program are among the ways I’ve thought of to do this. I’m able to give away books thanks to the support of Pakistani-Americans like you, who sponsor multiple copies of Overtaken By Events. The more books are sponsored, the more I can give away. For example, I have an opportunity to give away 300 copies when I’ll be the keynote speaker at the annual Region III convention of NAFSA: Association of International Educators in Oklahoma City in October. I will also be at this year’s APPNA convention in St. Louis, speaking at the Fatima Jinnah Medical College alumni dinner on Friday evening and at the Social Welfare and Disaster Relief meeting on Saturday. Please find me there, or contact me any time on my cell phone (206-226-0509) or by email (ethan@ethancasey.com).

I’m finding young Americans the most receptive to learning about the Pakistan I know and love, and this brings to mind another asset we have to work with: your own community’s younger generation. When I spoke at the Islamic Association of Greater Detroit in January 2010, I was so moved by the efforts and accomplishments of the young volunteers there that I felt compelled to include in my speech this line: “We all know that America is a nation of immigrants. As an American whose ancestors came here in the 19th century from Ireland and Germany and France, I want to thank you for contributing not only your talents and material resources, but also your impressive children, to help build a new, improved America in the 21st century.” I’ve re-used that line many times since then. On this important level, America’s gain doesn’t have to be Pakistan’s loss. In my observation, Pakistani and other Muslim families give their children precisely the confidence, moral education, and sense of purpose and direction that are sorely lacking in all too many other American families. Your children are poised to become real leaders of American society, and that bodes well for all of us. And they are already in positions of influence with their peers at many of this country’s greatest universities. Congratulations – and let’s continue enlisting and empowering them.

And let’s continue working together to reach out to mainstream America, with the confidence that this country is in great need of your visible and vocal presence and leadership. I say that as an American who worries about my own country at least as much as I worry about Pakistan. By virtue of your profession, you enjoy a position of prestige and trust in American society, in cities and towns from coast to coast. If you invite me to your city, I’ll do my best to visit. And I invite you to make use of me, as a gora who enjoys sharing his friendship and appreciation for Pakistan and Pakistanis with other goras. Together we can change the relationship between Pakistan and America – one church or synagogue, one Rotary Club, one high school class at a time.

Ethan Casey is the author of the books Alive and Well in Pakistan and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip. He is currently writing a new chapter, “After the Flood,” to be added to the next edition of Overtaken By Events. He is also writing Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime in Haiti for publication in 2012. He is on the Web at www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans and www.ethancasey.com.

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Capturing Osama: The urgent importance of mutual respect

I wrote the following article overnight on May 1-2 for the Pakistani daily newspaper Dawn. It’s republished here with permission.

FORT WORTH – As I begin writing this it’s 2 am where I am and 3 am in New York and Washington, where exuberant crowds have gathered at Ground Zero and the White House, belligerently chanting “USA! USA!” and singing the national anthem and an ugly country-western song called “God Bless the USA.” By the time you read this, you surely will have seen and heard some of that on television. It bodes ill.

The fact that Osama bin Laden was killed well inside Pakistan, by US Navy SEALs, is dangerously embarrassing to the Pakistani state and military. “He was right under the noses of the Pakistani military there,” said Fox News correspondent Jennifer Griffin, who noted that Abbottabad is a “well-known military town.” Lt-Gen Thomas McInerney, also on Fox, was even more ominously to the point: “We’ve got enough problems with Pakistan that if we had talked to anybody in that government, Osama would have gotten away. We have a problem with Pakistan. Everybody’s talking about it. This will highlight it.”

Equally worrying is the attitude Americans are expressing toward the US military. It’s one thing to be respectful, another to be worshipful, and Americans seem frighteningly oblivious to the cost to our society of its reverence toward the youngsters glibly known here as “our men and women in uniform.” Debra Burlingame, sister of the pilot whose plane hit the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, said: “Thanks again to our wonderful military; a big hats-off to the CIA.” A US Marine in uniform told the buffoonish Fox correspondent Geraldo Rivera, “I know for the military, we’re motivated as hell right now.” A Republican former Congressman called the US military “the most important profession that anyone can be in” and said, “I think that this is one for the team.”

That phrase calls to mind the in-your-face symbolism of American football as a metaphor for war, and Noam Chomsky’s apt description of sports as “training in irrational jingoism.” Rivera gushed about the “patriotism worn on their sleeves” of the shockingly young crowd hooting it up outside the White House, but it’s more than ever important to reclaim that word from the right wing and to highlight the distinction that George Orwell insisted on way back in 1945: “Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. … Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power.”

By Orwell’s definition, I’m happy to call myself a patriotic American. And such a sentiment is consistent with the Holy Quran: “O mankind! We have created you from a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that you may know one another.” Patriotism implies respect for others who are differently patriotic, and that should be fine with everyone. But the young Americans that Geraldo Rivera is celebrating, the children of 9/11, have spent the past decade being trained in irrational jingoism and are blithely unaware of the impression our country has left on the rest of the world. I recall something a thoughtful American friend said to me in Haiti in 2004, a year when that country was more than usually brutalized by American power: “When you see other people waving their countries’ flags you think, ‘That’s nice, they love their country.’ When you see the American flag, you know people are going to die.”

“Too many people still believe in the state, and war is the health of the state,” wrote Ernest Hemingway in 1934. Sixty-four years after its founding, and for explicable reasons, Pakistan is still in state-building mode, and the military is an effective and patriotic national institution. I visited Swat in March, and since then I’ve been praising what I perceive as its restraint and benevolence there to audiences around the US. But the fact that bin Laden was killed, by US forces, just down the road from a Pakistani military school in Abbottabad is a severe black eye to the Pakistani state. Pakistani citizens and media will be doing their country a patriotic service if, far from excusing it, they continue to hold the state’s feet to the fire for what clearly was either its incompetence or its complicity with bin Laden. Such assertion of Pakistani society’s independence from the Pakistani state will count for a lot in coming days and weeks as friends of Pakistan like myself, and others of goodwill, do our best to resist another surge of militaristic American nationalism.

As I watch over and over the mobs in New York and Washington, I fear two things. One is that too many Pakistanis are too traumatised to lay aside their anger and frustration. “WE HATE AMERICANS!!!” a Pakistani I don’t know personally told me on Facebook, just as I was finishing this piece. When I pointed out that I’m American and asked if he hated me, he replied, “I hate all of u!!”

The other thing I fear is that too few Americans appreciate the difference between global war and a giant football game. Football players have no more individuality than cogs in a machine, and the role of the crowd in a football stadium is to channel the emotions of vindictive triumphalism and hatred. That’s what I’m seeing on US television as I write this. The legendary populist politician Huey Long is reputed to have said, prophetically, “When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the American flag.” Or, as CNN quoted someone as asking pithily if pathetically on Twitter, “If Osama bin Laden is dead, can we please have our rights back?”

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). His account of his February-March 2011 trip to Pakistan, titled “After the Flood,” will be published as a stand-alone electronic book and as a chapter added to the next printing of Overtaken By Events. He is currently writing Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime in Haiti, to be 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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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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Is America Any Different from Pakistan?

Postscript, January 13: By all accounts, President Obama rose to the occasion in his speech in Tucson. Garry Wills is calling it Obama’s finest hour. Maybe, just maybe, this will be remembered as the moment Sarah Palin overreached, like Joe McCarthy, and America suddenly became sane again.

SEATTLE, JANUARY 12 – So now we know: The American right wing knows no shame and apparently will stop at nothing to bully the rest of us into shutting up and taking whatever they dish out.

On the sound principle – understood by right-wingers but not by liberals – that the best defense is a good offense, Sarah Palin has released a self-exonerating video statement asserting that “acts of monstrous criminality stand on their own.” The right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin has coined the phrase “Tucson massacre opportunists.” And the tendentiously “moderate” New York Times columnist David Brooks – whose previous low point, a year ago just after the earthquake, was blaming the victims in “places like Haiti” for lacking “middle-class values” – writes of “vicious charges made by people who claimed to be criticizing viciousness.” Meanwhile, a CBS News poll tells us that 57% of Americans reject any connection between the attack and the country’s political atmosphere. That’s the problem with democracy: sometimes the majority can be dead wrong.

And, as I said in my last article, if we Americans are going to dish it out to countries like Pakistan about how they should keep their radical elements in check, we need to be able to take it too. “The best way to forestall the development of a scenario is to keep your events episodic,” wrote Norman Mailer in his book Oswald’s Tale. This is what the American establishment and its media machine are masterful at: chopping the world up into distinct “stories” and doling them out severally, semi-intentionally creating what Ronald Reagan’s people called plausible deniability. But, as someone who grew up deep within white America and who knows Pakistan well enough to have written two books about it, I see all too many parallels.

What brings these into stark relief is the spooky coincidence of the assassination of Salmaan Taseer in Islamabad and, days later, the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson. In an analysis in The Times of India to which I contributed a comment, Atul Sethi wrote:

The slow death of outspoken liberalism out in public [in Pakistan] has meant that clerics refused to lead the prayers at Taseer’s funeral, fearing reprisal from Islamist hardliners. The mood, says an observer, is one of extreme caution and “even moderate groups do not want to appear to be supporting Taseer’s cause.” The murder was not mentioned at all in the many sermons delivered after Friday prayers in mosques across Islamabad. [G Parthasarthy, former Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan], for one, is not surprised. “When it comes to the blasphemy law, nobody is going to question its premise after Taseer’s killing.”

The analogy in America is to the right wing’s systematic encroachment on all public discourse, appropriation of all patriotic symbols and words (including “tea party”), and brazen aggression in accusing others of playing politics with a tragedy, when that is exactly what they themselves are doing. Those of us who instantly noted the Tucson attack’s political context were correct in doing so, and Paul Krugman was absolutely right to say this:

It’s true that the shooter in Arizona appears to have been mentally troubled. But that doesn’t mean that his act can or should be treated as an isolated event, having nothing to do with the national climate.

That should go without saying, and the fact that it needs to be said at all is an indicator of the national climate. What’s even worse is that America’s radical elements, led by Sarah Palin and her ilk, are trying to stigmatize stating the obvious and enforce a corrosive, de-politicized national piety, whose effect would be to leave them dictating the terms of any conversation. Within 48 hours of the shooting, Krugman had predicted precisely such a move:

So will the Arizona massacre make our discourse less toxic? It’s really up to G.O.P. leaders. Will they accept the reality of what’s happening to America, and take a stand against eliminationist rhetoric? Or will they try to dismiss the massacre as the mere act of a deranged individual, and go on as before?

One more thing needs to be said. An American friend of mine, of Pakistani origin, asks why, in all the commentary that’s spewed forth since Saturday, no one has used the word “terrorism.” What is it that allows us to consider Jared Loughner a mentally troubled young man acting alone and Faisal Shahzad, the mentally troubled young U.S. citizen who tried to blow up Times Square last May, a terrorist “Made in Pakistan” (as he was portrayed in breathless TV reports at the time)? We need to accept responsibility for the fact that Jared Loughner was made in America.

This is why it’s especially important – as I’ve been tub-thumping for a while now – for Pakistanis and other Muslims who are members of American society to continue becoming more visibly active, not only in civic affairs but in this country’s political life. If you lie low, you will continue to find yourselves silenced, caricatured and scapegoated. And America needs your involvement, because this society urgently needs to rediscover its conscience and its soul.

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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Will the Real America Please Stand Up?

SEATTLE, JANUARY 8 – Those of us who are concerned about the fate of Pakistan were still reeling from the January 4 assassination of Punjab governor and liberal newspaper publisher Salmaan Taseer in Islamabad, when we heard about the shooting of U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson. What does one have to do with the other? All too much.

On Friday I responded to a query from a Times of India reporter by calling the Taseer killing “extremely ominous.” I followed that statement of the obvious with this sentence: “An aggressive, self-righteous and over-confident radical element, a feckless and compromised central government, and a brave but besieged liberal class add up to a country in severe crisis.” That’s accurate enough as a description of Pakistan, but Americans who can dish out this sort of thing need to be able to take it too (and I’m not sure I’m so generous as to call my own country’s liberal class “brave”). What kind of society are we willing to allow ourselves to live in? At the very least, it’s high time we Americans knocked off the self-righteousness that permits us to judge Pakistan and took a long, hard look in the mirror.

In April 1995, I was in Lahore when I learned about the bombing in Oklahoma City. You’ll remember that the widespread initial assumption was that it must have been the doing of Islamic fundamentalists – and it wasn’t, was it? In Delhi a few days later, a Kashmiri friend exclaimed to me: “There was bomb blast in America!” What struck me was that he was surprised not that there had been a bomb blast per se, but that there had been one in America, of all places. In my travels to that point, I had come to know that bomb blasts happen all the time around the subcontinent. Now they happened in America too. This was why I had left Wisconsin: to learn that the serene small-town world I came from was of a piece with the world at large. Oddly, I found my new awareness comforting.

Why comforting? Because it’s better to know the truth than to live in a fictionalized world where everything’s all right. Why is that better? Because wishing doesn’t make it so. We’re all in this together, and everything is very far from all right. And the truth is that America isn’t any different, after all, from the rest of the world. We’re just another Third World country – only bigger. And the bigger they are, the harder they fall.

These are truths Americans have been learning the hard way in the long years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. When a radicalized lumpen member of American society’s mainstream blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, I thought of something Norman Mailer had written in 1962: that ”so long as there is a cold war, there are no politics of consequence in America.” Not to put too fine a point on it but, since we stopped having the Russians to kick around, American politics have become all too consequential. We now kick each other around instead – as well as, of course, vulnerable minorities like Latinos and Muslims.

Just the other day, the New York Review of Books blog published an item by Christian Caryl titled “Pakistan: When the State Loses Control”:

It has become extremely hard to see how anyone can pull the country’s political culture back from the brink. … No, what’s particularly worrisome about this [Salmaan Taseer] case is the failure of the Pakistani political system to protect one of its own. When the state surrenders its monopoly on violence to those who stand outside of it, it can no longer be described as a functioning state. Pakistan’s political institutions are supposed to represent the many different parties and groups that participate in the country’s civic life, yet now state power is succumbing to the demands of an exclusionist view of the world that can benefit only a particular few. In the weeks and months preceding his assassination, Taseer had been courageously campaigning—in the face of direct threats—to overturn an anti-blasphemy law that had been frequently abused to condemn people of minority faiths.

Substitute “America” for “Pakistan,” read that passage again, and recall that Congresswoman Giffords has been an outspoken opponent of Arizona’s new immigration law and received death threats and attacks on her office after voting for the Obama administration’s health-care bill.

Sarah Palin, whose publication of a map depicting crosshairs targeting Democratic members of Congress, including Giffords, has been noted since the shooting, infamously spoke during the 2008 campaign of “the real America.” I don’t concede Sarah Palin’s right to identify or speak for the real America. In fact, I insist that she does not. But will the real America please stand up?

Those of us who would speak for the real America need to bear in mind, though, that this isn’t cold war-era armchair politics anymore. Are we prepared to show as much physical, moral and political courage as Gabrielle Giffords and Salmaan Taseer did? And the next time we go to Safeway to buy groceries, will we remember to feel compassion for the millions of innocent Pakistanis who put themselves in harm’s way from suicide bombers every time they do the same?

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:

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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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Muslims in America: Time for a Movement?

COLORADO SPRINGS – I spend much of my time veering between the worlds of Muslims and non-Muslims in America, and sometimes I wonder if ever the twain shall meet. Recently in Monmouth Junction, New Jersey they did meet, in a moving and encouraging way. They need to meet like this more often.

On October 8, after Friday prayers at the Islamic Society of Central Jersey mosque, fifty or so invited members of the wider community arrived to take part in a conversation with teenagers from the Noor-ul-Iman school (whose students, incidentally, have a 100% college acceptance rate and average 1920 on their SAT scores).

“What it is, is an Islamic education along with our other education,” one student explained. “Being an American Muslim is something that’s very easy to do. The laws in America are very similar to the laws in sharia.”

“We’re Americans,” said another. “We all want the common good of this country.”

“We want our voices to be heard more,” said a third student. “It is our job to go out and educate both Muslims and non-Muslims about what Islam is all about.”

It sure is. In a country brimming with urgent needs and wake-up calls, I can’t think of any task more urgent, or anyone better equipped to take it on than the young Muslims I know who are already helping build a new, improved America for the twenty-first century.

But the most moving moment that day came from a voice of historical memory. A 67-year-old woman in the audience – she later told me her name was Rita – raised her hand to tell the young people that she knew what it must be like for them, as members of a misunderstood and suspect religious minority. Growing up Jewish in America half a century ago, she told them, she had endured “Christ-killer” and other slurs from her classmates. And she wanted to share with the young Muslims what her father had always told her: “Hold your head up high and be proud of who you are.”

In the past month I’ve walked in a walkathon for Pakistan flood relief in San Ramon, California (put on by the wonderful Pakistani-American organization Mashal); heard the all too typical story of a Muslim girl who grew up post-9/11 in small-town Texas; attended prayers at what is provocatively and inaccurately called the “Ground Zero mosque” in lower Manhattan; and had many public and private conversations with both Muslims and non-Muslims in New Jersey, New York, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Colorado. And what I’m seeing are the seeds of a much-needed movement.

It’s time for Muslims in America to hold their heads up high and be proud of who they are. I say this cautiously, because I’m not Muslim and thus not vulnerable in the ways Muslims are. But I’m vulnerable enough; after speaking at a Pakistan flood relief fundraiser at Gettysburg College, I received hate mail (anonymous, of course). And it’s high time all of us who remember and/or hope for an America governed by the better angels of our nature stopped apologizing and reacting to bullies and started assertively changing the conversation.

The ugly truth is that Muslims are the people against whom, in today’s America, it’s considered not only okay but, somehow, even laudable to be bigoted. But it’s not okay. As my late grandmother would have put it, that’s just plain wrong. What’s dismaying to me, as an American, is that I thought we had learned that lesson. But we don’t seem to have learned much from the Vietnam War, so I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that we’ve also failed to learn – or are willfully unlearning – the lessons of the civil rights movement. Most disturbing is that anti-Muslim bigotry and moral recklessness cut across the American ideological spectrum, from the Quran-burning pastor in Florida to the young woman in Seattle, whose silliness does not excuse her irresponsibility, who now lives in hiding because of the cartoon she published. I drafted this paragraph before the Juan Williams fiasco erupted, and that sorry episode only underscores my point.

What would be the shape and goals of the movement I’m positing? For starters, the civil rights movement offers a model in terms of both moral and political urgency and methods. The parallels are not exact, but it’s not far-fetched to hope that one day places like San Ramon and Monmouth Junction might be remembered the way Greensboro and Selma are (or should be) today. (To learn the relevant history, read the three volumes by Taylor Branch, starting with Parting the Waters.)

One thing the example of the civil rights movement ought to motivate us to do is to get off our rear ends and out from in front of our laptop screens. “Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice,” writes Malcolm Gladwell in an excellent recent New Yorker article, “but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice. We are a long way from the lunch counters of Greensboro.” In other words, you can’t make a better America simply by “liking” it. Gladwell drives home the point:

Enthusiasts for social media would no doubt have us believe that King’s task in Birmingham would have been made infinitely easier had he been able to communicate with his followers through Facebook, and contented himself with tweets from a Birmingham jail. … If Martin Luther King, Jr., had tried to do a wiki-boycott in Montgomery, he would have been steamrollered by the white power structure. And of what use would a digital communication tool be in a town where ninety-eight per cent of the black community could be reached every Sunday morning at church? The things that King needed in Birmingham—discipline and strategy—were things that online social media cannot provide.

What is to be done, specifically? I have a few suggestions. It’s time we Americans re-learned how to make genuine political statements. For example, how about an assertively nonviolent Million Muslim March on Washington? If Glenn Beck can dishonor King’s legacy by filling the National Mall with Tea Partiers on the anniversary of the “I Have a Dream” speech, surely we can – and should, and must – honor and reclaim it.

Here’s another idea: National Wear Muslim Garb on Airplanes Day. I’ll do it if you will, and I’m not joking. As any student of King or Gandhi knows, nonviolent resistance is anything but passive. The point is to flush out and shame bullies and bigots, by confronting them. What if thousands of ordinary Americans wore “Muslim garb” through airport security and on planes, all on the same day? Some of the reactions might not be any prettier than Bull Connor’s dogs and water cannons, but they sure would get across the point about who’s violent and who isn’t.

In the August 31 issue of The New York Review of Books R. Scott Appleby and John T. McGreevy, historians of the Roman Catholic experience in America, published a helpful and encouraging article titled “Catholics, Muslims, and the Mosque.” In it they wrote:

Must Muslims unequivocally reject all forms of terrorism—especially those Muslims who wish to promote full Muslim participation in American society? Of course. But if the Catholic experience in the United States holds any lesson it is that becoming American also means asserting one’s constitutional rights, fully and forcefully, even if that assertion is occasionally taken to be insulting.

Such assertion, by Muslims and the rest of us, is long overdue. This is what I mean when I say, as I’ve found myself saying many times in public recently, that I believe Muslims have a historic opportunity to play an important leadership role in American society today.

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 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.

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CA events: The least we can do for Pakistan

Dear friends,

Having just returned home to Seattle from an arduous but fascinating and encouraging three-week trip to Haiti, I’ll be taking part in several events over the next week-plus in California, in support of Pakistani groups and flood relief. One is a fundraiser for Greg Mortenson’s Central Asia Institute, where I’ve been asked to host a table. If you’d like to sit at my table, let me know.

The ongoing misery in the aftermath of Haiti’s earthquake, and now the flooding in Pakistan, have me remembering the plenary talk I had the honor to give at a previous CAI fundraiser, in Chicago in April 2008. I saw parallels between Greg Mortenson and Dr. Paul Farmer and quoted from a conversation I had with Farmer in Haiti in 2004:

“If you’ve been working on poverty and hunger issues for twenty-something years [Farmer said], and you’re not making progress on some fronts, I think it does keep you humble. Knowing that the world is so dented and damaged must be humiliating, if not humbling – one or the other. If you cocoon yourself away from misery, then you can be delusional about how great and praiseworthy you are.”

From Farmer’s words and my own reflections, I drew this conclusion:

“One thing we all know darn well is that it’s just plain wrong for children in Baltistan or anywhere else to be without schools. Greg Mortenson allowed his experience of Baltistan, filtered through the personal character his parents had instilled in him in Tanzania and Minnesota, and refracted by human sympathy, gratitude, and friendship, to influence the choices he made about how and where to deploy his talents and effort during his time in this world. The choices he made have directly and demonstrably made the world a better place. What the rest of us are doing here tonight in support of his work is the least we can do.”

The full text of that talk is online here:
http://www.ethancasey.com/speaking/the-least-we-can-do/

See below for events details. Hope to see you there!

Best regards, Ethan

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
Website: http://www.ethancasey.com

Events in California:

Inside Pakistan and Palestine: Viewpoints from Humanitarian Workers – CodePink: Women for Peace
Wed, Sept 22, 7:15-9:00 p.m., First Unitarian Universalist Society
1187 Franklin Street (at Geary), San Francisco, CA 94109
$5-10 sliding scale, contact Nancy Mancias 415-355-0300 (www.codepink.org)

Fundraising dinner with Greg Mortenson
Sat, Sept 25, 5:30 p.m., Hyatt Regency Santa Clara
5101 Great America Parkway, Santa Clara, CA 95054
http://www.ikat.org/bayarea/

Zindagi Trust event feat. Shehzad Roy and Bushra Ansari
Sun, Sept. 26, 6 p.m., Doubletree Guest Suites Anaheim Resort/Convention Center
2085 South Harbor Boulevard, Anaheim, CA 92802
http://zindagitrustoc10.eventbrite.com/

Walkathon for Children of the Pakistan Flood
Sat, Oct 2, 8 a.m.-noon
Central Park Amphitheater, San Ramon, CA
contact Jafar Safdar, 510-409-9758
http://www.mymashal.org

My two recent articles on the flooding in Pakistan:

Pakistan Floods: Why Should We Care?
http://www.ethancasey.com/2010/08/pakistan-floods-why-should-we-care/

What does Pakistan have to do with Haiti?
http://www.ethancasey.com/2010/09/what-does-pakistan-have-to-do-with-haiti/

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