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
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.
Ethan Casey, Ben Owen, and Haitian friends at Saut Mathurin waterfall, southern Haiti, August 2010. Photo by Pete Sabo.
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.”
Saut Mathurin waterfall, southern Haiti. Photo by Pete Sabo.
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?
On the road outside Les Cayes, Haiti, August 2010. Photo by Pete Sabo.
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.
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.
Some of My Best Friends Are Pakistanis
by Ethan Casey
SAN DIEGO, May 4 – As I write this, the news that the man arrested for trying to blow up Times Square is a U.S. citizen of Pakistani origin has only begun to sink in. What is this going to mean for other U.S. citizens of Pakistani origin – and for me, as their friend?
This article’s headline is an ironic allusion to something people used to say to disavow bigotry: “Some of my best friends are Jews.” It’s also a straight statement of fact: some of my best friends are Pakistanis. And I want the world to know that, especially in these times and at this moment, because I think it’s very important for us to remember that not all U.S. citizens of Pakistani origin blow stuff up.
Assuming we’re being told the truth about 30-year-old Faisal Shahzad of Bridgeport, Connecticut, it might be fair to ask: With friends like these, who needs enemies? But it’s precisely because of the horrific misguidedness of a dangerous few that we need to stay calm and remind ourselves and each other that we’re all in this together. I said exactly this, in fact, on Sunday when I spoke in support of The Citizens Foundation at the South Asian American Arts Festival put on by Zanbeel Art at the Santa Monica Art Studios. I’ll say it again tonight, when I speak to the Pakistani Students Association at UC-San Diego.
The Citizens Foundation is one of several well-run nonprofits supported by the largely very suburban and middle-class Pakistani-American community that are quietly doing the most urgently necessary work: providing education, and thereby hope and self-respect, to the burgeoning young generation of the Pakistani poor. Too quietly: groups like TCF-USA must start tooting their own horns more assertively to the American public. I would go so far as to say that countering the impression of Pakistanis conveyed by the likes of Faisal Shahzad is not only an opportunity for the Pakistani-American community, but an obligation.
I’m not saying that Pakistani Americans have to prove that they’re not terrorists. The rest of us must remember that there is no such thing as collective guilt, and that the presumption of innocence is a basic American principle. I am saying that the existing institutions of Pakistani America need to move – now – beyond inviting each other to the existing endless round of charity fundraisers, worthy and useful as those are. Pakistani Americans are a remarkably talented and resourceful community who pay a lot of money to the U.S. Treasury in taxes and contribute very substantially to American society as physicians, engineers, teachers and business people. For better or worse, Americans listen to people who insist on being heard, and if you don’t toot your own horn, nobody else is gonna toot it for you.
My writing and public speaking are all about emphasizing to Americans the humanity of Pakistanis, their experience of and views on contemporary history, the complexity of their political and geographical situation, and the enjoyable and interesting apects of my own experience of Pakistan, dating back to 1995. As my friend Todd Shea likes to say, Americans hear 2% of Pakistan’s story 98% of the time. I feel very fortunate to have experienced Pakistan directly at a relatively innocent time both in history and in my own life, before the country’s name became a dirty word in the West. We can’t go back to that time, but we can remember it – and we can and should take a deep breath, reach out to each other as allies, and work together to do what needs to be done.
What needs to be done? Young Pakistanis need to be given hope and self-respect by way of education and jobs. This is already being done by The Citizens Foundation, by Developments in Literacy – at whose San Diego fundraiser I’ll be speaking this Saturday, May 8 – by the Human Development Foundation, by Pakistani pop star Shehzad Roy’s Zindagi Trust, and famously by Greg Mortenson.
But why is Greg Mortenson’s the only one of these efforts that’s well known? Part of the answer, of course, is that he’s white: church ladies and Oprah watchers can relate to him as a virtual nephew or brother-in-law. This is fine. But we need to get beyond the toxic supposition that America is primarily a “white” and/or Christian country. It’s not, anymore, and that’s a good thing.
So the other thing that needs to be done is that the Pakistani community needs to ratchet up both its involvement in American society and politics and its visibility. Call up your local schools and churches, invite your neighbors to your home, all that good stuff, and by all means enlist me, Todd Shea, and Greg Mortenson as envoys. But also support Pakistani-American and other Muslim candidates for public office; insist on meetings with existing officeholders, not only but especially those you consider hostile to Muslims or Pakistan; and support and expand the lobbying work of groups like the Pakistani American Leadership Center and the Council of Pakistan American Affairs. Get in the American public’s face, as fellow Americans, and help us all begin having a more honest conversation about Pakistan, America, terrorism, and where our countries and world are headed.
And I ask two things of my fellow non-Pakistani Americans: Go to the trouble of educating yourselves about Pakistan – my books and inviting me to speak are, indeed, good places to start. And, when you see pictures of Faisal Shahzad over the coming days, keep in mind that, except for the buzz cut, Tim McVeigh looked a lot like me.
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).
Pakistani-led group returns from Haiti
Ethan Casey with Todd Shea, Dr. Farzana Naqvi (front row, second from left), Dr. Salman Naqvi (back row, next to Todd), and other members of a Pakistani-led group that provided medical relief after the earthquake in Haiti, at a reunion in Irvine, California, February 28, 2010.
If I haven’t posted a blog entry in more than two weeks, it’s because – as usual – I’ve been busy with other things. I spent a successful week in Colorado in early February, speaking at two churches and three colleges, including the Air Force Academy. And I just returned from a busy weekend in Orange County, California, whose main event was a fundraiser for Todd Shea’s organization SHINE Humanity (see its excellent new website). The short speech I was able to give there was very gratifying, because I’m very proud of and grateful to Todd as well as Pakistani friends for responding so promptly, intelligently and compassionately to the earthquake in Haiti. Haiti is a very old friend of mine, so my gratitude is personal. Here’s a short excerpt:
Todd is not the only American in this room who has worked in Haiti since the earthquake. I want to single out two others: Dr. Farzana Naqvi and Dr. Salman Naqvi. The story of how Farzana, Salman and others have stepped up as physicians, as Muslims, as Pakistanis who know the devastation an earthquake can cause, and not least as Americans, is a powerful message that the American public needs to hear.
I’ve published the full speech on this website under the “Speaking” tab, along with some photos that I showed that evening.
My new book Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip is at the printer and will (inshallah) be published later this month. I’m looking forward to introducing it at events in Chicago on March 27 and Tampa on March 28. More on those, and other travel and promotion, as the publication date nears. If you haven’t yet purchased your copy, now is a great time to ensure that your copy comes signed and with a personal letter from me by pre-ordering it from this website. I’ll be sitting down in early April to send out all pre-ordered copies.
More soon!
Todd and Ethan on Haiti on Chicago radio station
Haiti relief led by Todd Shea of CDRS Pakistan needs urgent help
Todd Shea of CDRS Pakistan is on the ground in Haiti leading what is, as far as I can tell, the single most intelligent relief initiative since the earthquake last Tuesday. (Read the joint statement from Todd and me titled “How Pakistanis Can Help Haiti – and Why”.) He has opened a supply route for medical and relief supplies across the border from Santo Domingo, capital of the neighboring Dominican Republic. Todd’s latest email tells why his effort needs your support NOW – even if you’ve already, and admirably, donated to the Red Cross or Partners in Health or Medecins sans Frontieres:
I’m sad to report that the situation in Haiti is acute and worsening. People are beginning to get even more desperate and frustrated. The leadership of the Government of the U.S. and its partner nations are ”forming up” great things that will take shape in a week or so down the road, but they really need to quickly work through the current paralyzing logistical challenges. Many large agencies are failing to think selflessly and share their financial, operational resources with smaller but super-effective agencies. This attitude is not helping anyone. Quite frankly, I would have thought some of them would have learned an important lesson from other disasters where some of the same mistakes were made.
Here’s the bottom line: If things don’t start improving very rapidly, then life and limb-threatening infections and deadly dehydration and unnecessary conflict will likely emerge on a scale that has the potential of becoming rampant and widespread. The correct option would be to stage multiple and overwhelmingly robust and well-managed multi-national supply lines and helicopter sorties using locations and bases other than Port au Prince airport, particularly from the Dominican Republic through the border near Jumani. It’s a darn good road compared to the roads in the Pakistan earthquake-affected areas that I’ve been traveling on for the past four years. Distributing aid from several points over a more widespread area can reach far more people far more quickly.
Why should Pakistanis in particular be doing this? There are several good reasons, including your experience of a similarly devastating earthquake in 2005 and the fact that many of you in the U.S. are highly skilled physicians. The Prophet Mohammed (pbuh) answered the “Why?” question best, though, when he said, “He who sleeps on a full stomach whilst his neighbor goes hungry is not one of us” and “A believer wants for his brother what he wants for himself.”
I’m proud to say that quite a few Pakistanis of my personal acquaintance are already responding. Dr. Salman Naqvi, Laila Karamally and others are taking the lead in Southern California. Tahmena Bokhari in Toronto is leveraging her new position as Mrs. Pakistan World to recruit volunteers and raise funds and awareness for a relief trip from Canada soon. Speaking of Canada, my friends at the Pakistan-Canada Association in Vancouver have launched a fundraising initiative locally and on their website. In an email exchange Raza Mirani, the PCA’s general secretary, told me: “This Haiti situation has really hit home, and this is what I see myself doing community work for. Not putting on events or having dinners. If we can’t help out in this type of situation, then what are we good for?”
What should you be doing, right now? For starters please, now, give money through this link – any small or larger amount – to support the relief convoy Todd Shea of CDRS Pakistan has established from Santo Domingo. Time is of the essence.
And in the weeks and months ahead, Haitians will continue to need our help and attention and active human sympathy – just as Pakistanis need and deserve the human sympathy from Americans that is the purpose of this blog and my books. You can be sure that as I continue to write and speak around North America, I’ll be continuing to call Haiti to your attention – beginning later this week in Detroit and Ann Arbor, where I’ll be covering for Todd on several speaking engagements. Batool Raza of the South Asian Awareness Network at the University of Michigan told me by phone last night how proud she and others at SAAN felt of Todd when they learned he was dropping everything – including his commitment to speak at their annual conference – to go to Haiti. Let’s all express our pride in Todd by supporting his crucial relief convoy concretely with money, supplies, and our volunteer time.
Postscript: I’m planning to set aside a portion of the proceeds from sales of my books in a fund to make donations to the Pakistani nonprofit organizations whose work in Pakistan I support. For now, because of the urgency of the Haiti situation, I’ll be donating 20% of the retail price of all sales of Alive and Well in Pakistan and Overtaken By Events to Todd Shea’s emergency relief work in Haiti.
