Exorcism: it’s not just for Bobby Jindal (see liberal blog DailyKos) any more. Faith healers in the UK are fleecing depressed Muslim women by vending talismans and djinn exorcisms:

A victim of exorcism, eighteen-year-old Sureha Begum, from Manchester, attended the conference. She suffered from chronic depression and was self-harming after an arranged marriage in Bangladesh. When she became ill her parents were told that she was possessed by jinns. They spent over £3,000 on faith healers and exorcisms…

Said Sureha: “Faith healers told my parents that I was possessed and the more my mental health deteriorated the more these faith healers convinced them it was the work of the jinn… These faith healers know your weaknesses as soon as you open your mouth and they use it to con people out of hundreds of pounds.”

If I were to be the property of a djinn, let that djinn be Barbara Eden.

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A story about Northern Ireland must deal with the IRA or Protestant/Catholic violence right? That was the old Northern Ireland. Is this indicative of the new? From Scotsman.com:

Politicians today slammed thugs who targeted members of the Turkish and Indian communities in the latest act of racial violence in Northern Ireland.

Police were trying to hunt down those responsible for damaging cars and daubing racist slogans such as “Turks Out” on their victims’ homes in Comber, Co Down.

The ironic part is that it seems from this article that many of the Indian and Turkish immigrants in this community work in the medical services industry. Thus, these criminals are committing violence against a people that can be of aid after the fallout of a Protestant vs. Catholic clash.

“This sort of activity is reprehensible and it is seemingly happening everywhere in Northern Ireland.

“Many people from abroad are living in the Province and working in vital jobs like medicine. I am confident the Health Service couldn’t cope without them.

“This is supposed to be a free society and everybody ought to be free to live where they want no matter where in the world they’re from,” he said.

The New York Daily News runs a story on the success of immigrant children. This sounds all well and good but I personally was left with a sense of glass-half-full dismay. Here is how the story starts:

Ask 13-year-old Amarnath Kuppannan and his 10-year-old sister, Aarthi, what they want to be when they grow up and they respond in unison: “A doctor.” Both youngsters, the New York-born children of Indian immigrants, spent their summer at the Elite Academy on 39th Ave. in Flushing.

I fought back nausea at the fact that yet another generation of immigrant kids would be brainwashed down certain paths, and I continued to read trying to focus on the overall positive message in the article.

Starting at 8:30 a.m. and some days finishing as late as 2:30 p.m., the youngsters were drilled and quizzed four days a week in higher mathematics and the complexities of English grammar and composition.

But who am I to judge these parents’ ambitions for their children? As the article points out the father is from a rural Indian village and didn’t get educational opportunities. The article lauds the success of New York’s immigrant children:

A dramatic 62.4% of New Yorkers younger than 18 are foreign-born – the so-called 1.5 generation who come here as children and are reared and educated here.

“These immigrants and their children are the future,” said Prof. John Mollenkopf, director of City University’s Center for Urban Research. “How well they do is critical.”

It seems that the future is in good hands.

“Foreign-born students outperform native-born students on traditional measures of academic achievement,” according to a 2003 study by New York University’s Taub Urban Research Center. “Immigrants have higher reading and math scores … despite their higher poverty rates, limited English skills and newness to the U.S. schooling system.”