Monthly Archives: August 2006

The rewards of perseverance

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The last time we met Saqib and Susan Ali of Maryland was when Anna blogged a long Washington Post feature on the couple’s experience bringing to term a baby that they knew had no chance of surviving outside the womb. Deciding how to proceed after learning of their baby’s condition, and enduring all that followed, was a trial beyond the imagination of most of us. And yet they made it through.

Here is part of the article’s presentation of the couple:

The two were as opposite as could be. Saqib is tall, olive-skinned and athletic. Susan is tiny, fair-skinned and delicate. Saqib is Muslim, the son of immigrants born in India. Susan was raised in a conservative Christian family from a small town in Pennsylvania. He’s a door-knocking community activist who hopes to run for public office someday; she’s soft-spoken and cherishes her privacy.

Well, not only did Saqib and Susan make it through, but they are pursuing their dreams. Saqib Ali is running for the Maryland House of Delegates (the state legislature). And in his capacity as a candidate, he had this experience a few days ago:

A demonstrator sat down Saturday near the home of a Muslim candidate for the Maryland House of Delegates with a hand-lettered sign bearing a crude denunciation of Islam.

The sign was apparently aimed at Saqib Ali, a Gaithersburg resident who is running in the Sept. 12 Democratic primary for a seat in House District 39.

The demonstrator, who wore a T-shirt reading “This mind is an Allah-free zone,” planted himself near the house in the Quince Orchard Estates development that Ali also uses as a campaign office. Ali, a software engineer who is challenging three incumbents, said he went out into his small cul-de-sac to look at the man but said nothing to him.

“I knew he was there to bait me,” Ali said.

According to Ali, the man began saying, “‘You are a terrorist … You guys are violent extremists.'”

The campaign blog has photos of this individual sitting in front of Ali’s house. He also displays a handwritten sign that says “Islam Sucks.”

Here’s how the man, identified as nearby resident Timothy Truett, explained his actions:

An Associated Press account said Truett, 46, of Montgomery Village, called the demonstration “basically an experiment.”

“I had heard that Muslims were generally intolerant of views other than their own, and so I thought I would put it to the test,” the AP quoted him as saying. “I wanted to see what would happen.”

Sadiq was born in 1975 and works in software; surely lots of our readers can relate to that part. What’s less usual is that he had the courage to marry outside his community, the patience and love to get through personal tragedy, and the call to service to run for local political office. His reward is to get this fool sitting in front of his house calling him a terrorist. No wonder so few good people run for office. Continue reading →

55Friday: The “Monkey Gone to Heaven” Edition

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see no hear no speak no macaca.JPG
…and that mother$>@%!#& Macaca apparently got there on a mother$>@%!#& plane. Whether the simian sported a mohawk or a mullet is still open for debate.

Today is Friday and on most Fridays at the Mutiny, we write flash fiction. Co-ink-i-dinkily, today is also August 18th and thus, a very special holiday. It’s Bad Poetry Day!

Bad Poetry Day is a day to create some really bad verse. But, why you ask? Perhaps, the answer is simply “because you can”. Maybe, it exists to allow us to better appreciate good poetry. Or, perhaps it is to be written to irritate someone…the intention is to gather a group of old high school friends, and write some really bad poetry. Then, send the poetry to your old high school teacher. Wow!, That sounds like a lot of fun…[linkage]

Indeed, it does, especially if you ignore that part about sending it off to a teacher– I mean really, who has the time?

The last time the Mutiny did anything collaborative with poetry, it was Valentine’s day and we invited you to submit haikus; since you enjoyed that so much, I thought I should encourage you to write more of those spare, elegant poems, especially if it means that people who normally don’t 55 can participate in our creative corner of Sepiadom.

Many of you ask me either in person or via email, “but how do you write one of those 55 things?” To which I generally and unhelpfully respond, “You just…do. MS Word. Wordcount. Before you know it, you’ve got 65 words and then you find yourself doing some careful pruning.” The reaction to this incoherent response is almost always further confusion or frustration. Well, it may seem daunting to tell an entire tale using less than five dozen words, but what about a three-line work of art? You could manage that, right? It’s a mere 17 syllables (arranged thusly: 5-7-5), you can so do it.

Annnnnd, I think I’m done here. I have one of the most addictive college rock hits EVER happily lodged in my head, you have TWO options to get busy in a thoughtful, literary way and we all have fantastic reading material to look forward to…right, Kobayashi-san? Any mentions of

  • snakes
  • the Confederate flag
  • planes
  • macacas
  • noose-lovin’ Senators
  • Tunisia
  • hairstyles which are all "business in front, party in the back"
  • fake-ass-cowboys
  • Palos Verdes
  • the power of the interweb (in both of those situations!)
  • Samuel L. Jackson

will be enjoyed heartily, I assure you. Now get crackin’, macacas. Continue reading →

Hot terror in the skies

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Yesterday I went on-line to check out all the hype behind the new movie that opens tomorrow, Snakes on a Plane. Not many reviews to go by so I don’t know how good it actually is. While watching the trailer however my sepia radar started howling as the following face splashed onto my computer screen. Who was that cute desi girl and how come I’ve never sat next to her on a plane?

Apple should totally make her a spokeswoman. She “speaks to me” at least.

Turns out that the name of her character in the movie is “Ipod girl.” The actress who plays her is Canada’s own Agam Darshi (born Agamdeep Darshi in Birmingham, UK):

She was born Agamdeep Darshi in Birmingham, England, but her family soon moved to Canada. At the age of 14 she moved to Calgary and began to pursue her dream of acting, a passion that, as a small child, would manifest itself as impromptu plays at any family gathering. She studied theatre at the University of Calgary as well the visual fine arts, earning a BFA in art and theatre in 2002. This passion for being on the other side of the camera has lead to several photographic shows and art publications. Besides acting on both stage and screen, Darshi has also written numerous plays and has recently work on several film scripts, producing two of her projects as independent films.

She is also an avid traveler and has backpacked through Europe and across Australia. [Link]

Continue reading →

Boarding passes and foreskins ready, please

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Abhi and I have both independently been thinking about the same problem, but we’ve come to slightly different solutions. Imagine for a second that Representative King and conservative talk show host Mike Gallagher and other wingnuts are right. Maybe it’s time to overcome our politically correct scruples and embrace overt profiling of all Muslim males. Maybe what we need is a screening policy that makes sure that every single Muslim male is scrutinized, and not one gets by without close examination.

How would we implement this?

None of those in favor of the plan have thought about implementation. For example, this is what one Republican congressional candidate said:

“Well, you know, if he comes in wearing a turban and his name is Mohammed, that’s a good start” [Link]

Yeah riiiiiight. That would be around as effective as looking for men with “Terrorist” signs around their neck.

King calls for special treatment of all travellers of Middle Eastern or South Asian origin, but that clearly would be insufficient to accomplish his goals. 25% of all Muslims in America are black, and his plan ignores all of them. There have also been several serious plots involving both South East Asian Muslims and African ones, so we would need something far more extreme than the wimpy measures King suggests.

No, if we’re going to be real men about this, we have to overcome our squeamishness, adapt a rigid approach and realize that all Muslim men have only one physical attribute in common – they’re all circumcised.

That’s right – I think there should be one line for men with foreskin, and another for men without. Uncut males get expedited boarding, while the circumcised get extra scrutiny.

Continue reading →

I for one welcome profiling

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Yesterday someone posted this clip (on our News Tab) of conservative radio host Mike Gallagher’s appearance on Fox News.

GALLAGHER: It’s time to have a Muslims check-point line in American airports and have Muslims be scrutinized. You better believe it. It’s time. [Link]

Today the House Homeland Security Chairman, U.S. Congressman Peter King (R-NY) said the following (thanks for the tip AM):

Declaring that airport screeners shouldn’t be hampered by “political correctness,” House Homeland Security Chairman Peter King has endorsed requiring people of “Middle Eastern and South Asian” descent to undergo additional security checks because of their ethnicity and religion.

Discussing the recent revelation of an alleged plot in England to blow up U.S.-bound airliners, the Seaford Republican said yesterday that, “if the threat is coming from a particular group, I can understand why it would make sense to single them out for further questioning…”

Despite King’s endorsement of such a process, it is a technique that has been widely dismissed as a legitimate law enforcement tool. [Link]

This, by the way, is the same Peter King who said that supporters of Senate hopeful Ned Lamont were “bigots” and the same Peter King who is set to appear with Sen. Hillary Clinton on Sept. 11th at a “National Spirit of Unity” rally.

I have been thinking about this idea for a week now (even before King spoke out) and I fully support it. I think we should single out all arabs, middle eastern looking people, and South Asians. This doesn’t have to be a bad thing and if we play our cards right we can greatly benefit from it. The “Macaca line,” as it were, might actually move faster and more efficiently than the “American line” since brownish looking people are still a small minority in America (unless you count the Mexicans too). We could even lobby for a door to door airport shuttle that was guaranteed to be explosives free and would have dogs on board that we could pet and play with on the way to the airport (once they were done sniffing us). All of our tickets would be stamped with SSSS to ensure 4S service (“S” is like the new “Star”). We would have curbside check-in and our bags would all go through more advanced machinery (the kind airports can only afford one of). So that we wouldn’t get germs from the other passengers, our security screening area could be completely walled off. It seems that every time I travel I catch a cold, and so this would definitely be a perk. The other people would never even have to see us.

I already know what some of you are going to say to all of this (haters):

“You can’t tell a Muslim by the color of their skin or their appearance. There are black muslims, Asian muslims, and white muslims. How are we going to figure out who is Muslim so that we can give them this VIP treatment if they don’t want their identities revealed?” Continue reading →

How mutineering changes things

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I thought I’d take a moment to lay out for our readers how individual action in the context of a community CAN help change the status quo, particularly when it comes to political power and representation in the U.S. Here is step-by-step look at the BIG PICTURE.

1) First, let me take you back to July 31st (just two weeks ago) when Mason-Dixon Polling & Research Inc. released its poll regarding the Virgina Senate race:

U.S. Sen. George Allen leads Jim Webb for re-election but may be threatened by voter distaste for the Iraq war and President Bush, according to The Times-Dispatch Poll.

Popular and well-known, the Republican senator is favored for a second term by 48 percent, while Democrat Webb, still struggling to get out his name and message, is backed by 32 per cent. Twenty percent are undecided.

That the support for Allen, the state’s dominant Republican for more than a decade, is under 50 percent suggests he is handicapped by anti-GOP sentiment, much of it attributed to uncertainty over Iraq…

As an early snapshot of a race that could help decide control of the Senate, the poll suggests Allen is using the advantages of incumbency, including a huge edge in fundraising, to navigate potential hazards. [Link]

2) When that first domino fell, the Democratic leadership decided to strategically cut their losses and run. They wrote off both Webb and Virgina:

To hear national Democratic party leaders tell it, Democrat James Webb has a solid chance of ousting Republican Sen. George Allen this fall.

“You might find Cinderella in Virginia,” Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., told Congressional Quarterly this spring. “Allen’s numbers are not very strong.”

But in the first major spending decision of the fall campaign, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee – which Schumer heads – took a pass on Virginia.

The committee, which helps elect Democratic senators, has reserved a reported $25 million worth of television ads in states where Republican incumbents are considered vulnerable. Virginia is not one of them.

The spending plan, first reported by The Associated Press, came within days of a Mason-Dixon poll showing Allen leading Webb by 16 percentage points. [Link]

Continue reading →

“Mass murder on an unimaginable scale”? (Updated)

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When the UK authorities brought various accused terrorists into custody, American sources said that the bad guys had been mere days away from a dry run. That is, a 9/11 type event was narrowly averted. But how close were they, really?

Some critics say that the evidence from the UK is weak, and the evidence from Pakistan unreliable:

Imminent threat? They had no bombs, no labs, no tickets, and no passports.None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not even have passports, which given the efficiency of the UK Passport Agency would mean they couldn’t be a plane bomber for quite some time. What is more, many of those arrested had been under surveillance for over a year … Nothing from that surveillance had indicated the need for early arrests.

Then an interrogation in Pakistan revealed the details of this amazing plot to blow up multiple planes – which, rather extraordinarily, had not turned up in a year of surveillance. Of course, the interrogators of the Pakistani dictator have their ways of making people sing like canaries… Trouble is it always tends to give the interrogators all they might want, and more, in a desperate effort to stop or avert torture. What it doesn’t give is the truth. [Link]

Much to my surprise, even security hawks like Andrew Sullivan have voiced skepticism:

So far, no one has been charged in the alleged terror plot to blow up several airplanes across the Atlantic. No evidence has been produced supporting the contention that such a plot was indeed imminent. … Remember: the British authorities had all these people under surveillance; they did not want to act last week; there was no imminent threat of anything but a possible “dummy-run,” … How could they even stage a dummy-run with no passports? [Link]

Continue reading →

When in doubt, blame your staff

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[UPDATE: It is easy to donate to Webb if you wish. Give him $20.01 or an amount of your choice w/ an added one cent at the end to mark the donation as coming from the blogosphere. ]

Allen has changed his story in a small but important way. He no longer claims that he made up the word Macaca on the spot, instead he repeated something that he heard his staff say:

… several Allen campaign aides and advisers are telling allies that the word was a made-up, off-the-cuff neologism that these aides occasionally used to refer to tracker S.R. Sidarth well before last Saturday’s videotaped encounter. According to two Republicans who heard the word used, “macaca” was a mash-up of “Mohawk,” referring to Sidarth’s distinctive hair, and “caca,” Spanish slang for excrement, or “shit.”

Said one Republican close to the campaign: “In other words, he was a shit-head, an annoyance.” Allen, according to Republicans, heard members of his traveling entourage and Virginia Republicans use the phrase and picked it up. It was the first word that came to his mind when he spied Sidarth at the weekend’s event, according to Republicans who have been briefed on Allen’s version of the event. [Link]

Allen wants to shift blame because coverage of this story brings up his long history of racial insensitivity / insult towards blacks which could torpedo his chance at the Presidential nomination:

As governor Allen had a stormy relationship with African-American voters in Virginia, many of whom criticized his policies and his embrace of the Confederate flag, which the NAACP condemned as a symbol of racism and hate. As a lawyer, Allen also had a noose hanging from a ficus tree in his office, a decoration critics have charged was racially insensitive, but which Allen has explained as a symbol of his tough stance on law-and-order issues…
In 1995, 1996, and 1997, Allen proclaimed April as Confederate History and Heritage Month and called the Civil War “a four-year struggle for independence and sovereign rights.” The proclamation did not mention slavery and was subsequently repudiated by Allen’s Republican successor, Governor James Gilmore. [Link]

Under educational guidelines proposed by Allen’s administration, which were revised after an uproar, students would have been taught that slaves were “settlers…” [Link]

“Stormy relationship” is an understatement. The man is completely obsessed by the confederate flag: Continue reading →

Two Lessons From Indra Nooyi’s Success

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By now, most readers probably know that Indra Nooyi is being promoted to the CEO of PepsiCo, a company with $38 billion in revenues. She’s been mentioned several times before on Sepia Mutiny, mainly in response to comments she made at a graduation ceremony at Columbia Business School last year. (There are several other posts on her as well.) And Manish had a solid post on her recent promotion this past Monday on Ultrabrown.

I draw two conclusions from her success. First, you can be a working mother and climb the corporate ladder while raising kids (Indra has two, who are I believe in their early/mid teens). Second, you can get ahead in the American corporate environment without sacrificing who you are culturally.

On the first point, there have been many recent stories about the difficulties facing powerful women. Maureen Dowd, for instance, recently published a book called Are Men Necessary?, where (among other things) she talked about the difficulty some women face in dating and/or marrying men who are less powerful or successful than they are. But a growing number of “power moms” are also flat-out powerful. And they do it without sacrificing their connection to their kids, as I think Indra Nooyi’s Nintendo policy proves:

She views PepsiCo as an extended family and everybody at the company is there to help in every way possible. Sometime ago, when Indra was traveling, her daughter would call the office to ask for permission to play Nintendo. The receptionist would know the routine and ask: “Have you finished your homework? Have you had your snack? OK, you can play Nintendo for half an hour”. She then left a voice message for Indra saying “I gave Tara permission to play Nintendo”. (link)

Have you had your snack? Ok, go play. Momma has to go acquire a multinational or two and pacify the Indian media regarding the recent pesticide allegations.

Secondly, you don’t have to sell yourself out and tell everyone your name is “Bob” if it’s really Balwinder. Nooyi’s story about getting her first job in the U.S. after completing her Master’s at Yale is illustrative: Continue reading →

London Flight Diverted to Boston?

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Apparently, a flight from London to Washington, D.C. just landed in Boston instead, because the pilot was concerned about a passenger’s actions:

A flight from London to Washington, D.C. was diverted to Boston Wednesday morning after the pilot declared an emergency because of a passenger disturbance, the airline said.
United Flight 923 with 182 passengers and 12 crew members landed safely at Boston’s Logan International Airport, United spokesman Brandon Borrman said.
A Logan spokesman said three passengers had a confrontation with the flight crew. State Police took control of the plane after it landed. All the passengers were being taken off the plane and their carry-on luggage was being checked, said spokesman Phil Orlandella.

What got MY attention was the clip NBC just showed– passengers slowly exiting the plane in Boston. To be expected, right? Sure, except all of those shown during the few seconds of footage were wearing Salwar Kameez. Way to zero in on a visual, there.

Developing… Continue reading →