Editorial cartoonist Sandy Huffaker published this toon today:
Sure, maybe it’s a stereotype, but 9/11 changed everything. We really need to sock it to the bastards.
Well, we’ll do it sensitively. We’ve learned from our excesses.
“If I see someone (who) comes in that’s got a diaper on his head and a fan belt wrapped around the diaper on his head, that guy needs to be pulled over,” [Louisiana Congressman] Cooksey said. [Link]
The Wired story about Lt. Neil Prakash I pointed y’all to before was just posted. It’s exactly as bombastic as I misremembered. Previous post here.
The hirsute Aalok Mehta from American Chai and Bombay Dreams is in a new Coke ad. Gently tossing his windblown musician locks, he makes the ad look authentic. It says, ‘Yo dawg, I see brown people. This colored sugar water’s down.’
The ad has alt rocker G. Love and a group of demographically correct city people jamming with a guitar on a Philly rooftop (thanks, brimful). They’re singing a mutant version of the ’70s song, ‘I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.’ Actually, that’s backward. The song by the New Seekers started as a ’70s Coke pusher jingle (‘I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke’), and the clean version later became a bona fide hit.
Watch the ad, which runs before a Daily Show clip. Previous post here.
How people think subway bombers look:
How some of them actually look:
Here’s a Reaganesque guy in a suit:
That’s the Boston Strangler.
You can’t catch the black guy above by profiling those who ‘look Muslim.’ You couldn’t even get accurate racial ID before the bombings. To the confused masses, those who ‘look Muslim’ means those who ‘look Arab,’ which means Sikhs and other South Asians.
It works in reverse too: last month, a light-skinned man with brown hair was gunned down after being misidentified as South Asian.
At the subway station, you need to scan for the bombs, not the people.
This tidbit about an Amnesty International report yesterday on extraordinary rendition caught my eye:
Others have suggested “high-value” detainees could be held secretly in Diego Garcia, a British-held island in the Indian Ocean that the United States rents as a strategic military base. [Link]
Torture is hardly a newcomer to the Indian Ocean. You only have to go a bit north of the atoll to see it in practice by both intelligence and garden-variety cops on the subcontinent. But has the CIA joined the party? The Toronto Star reported last month:
… intelligence analysts say Diego Garcia’s geographic isolation is now being exploited for other, darker purposes… These prisoners are known as “ghost detainees” or the “new disappeared,” and they’re being subjected to treatment that makes the abuses at the military-run Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad and Guantanamo Bay camp in Cuba look small-time, say intelligence analysts…
Analysts say there are at least a score of unacknowledged facilities around the world… one, they suspect, on Diego Garcia, where two navy prison ships ferry prisoners in and out… the United Nations said it will investigate a number of allegations from reliable sources that the U.S. is detaining terrorist suspects in undeclared holding facilities, including on board ships believed to be in the Indian Ocean. “Diego Garcia is an obvious place for a secret facility,” says American defence analyst John Pike. “They want somewhere that’s difficult to escape from, difficult to attack, not visible to prying eyes and where a lot of other activity is going on. Diego Garcia is ideal.”
The British government has flatly denied detainees are being held covertly on the island. When asked last year, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state Lawrence DiRita didn’t deny it outright, saying only, “I don’t know. I simply don’t know.” [Link]
Hambali (Riduan Isamuddin), the leader of the Asian terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah, responsible for the 2002 terrorist bombing in Bali, is currently being held on the island. [Link]
Diego Garcia is a 6Å“-by-13-mile coral atoll in the Indian Ocean south of Sri Lanka. It’s as long as Manhattan and three times as wide, but with much less usable land. With a huge central lagoon protected on three sides by land, it’s an equatorial paradise. The lagoon reaches depths of 60-100 feet with coral underneath.
In the early ’70s, the British government forcibly deported the 2,000 Iloi residents, mostly coconut farmers, to Mauritius to make way for a military base which it leased to the U.S.:
The drumbeat for racial profiling grows louder in New York City (thanks, DesiDancer):
Two elected New York City officials say Arabs should be targeted for searches on city subways. They claim the NYPD has been wasting time with random checks in its effort to prevent terrorism in the transit system… The New York Police Department said in a statement that racial profiling is illegal, of doubtful effectiveness and against department policy. [Link]
… they are most likely to be young Muslim men. Unfortunately, however, this demographic group won’t be profiled. Instead, the authorities will be stopping Girl Scouts and grannies… commuters need to be most aware of young men praying to Allah and smelling like flower water. [Link]
Even Tunku Varadarajan of the WSJ came out for profiling desis:
I find that I am–for the first time in my life–part of a “group” that is under broad but emphatic visual suspicion. In other words, I fit a visual “profile,” and the fit is most disconcerting… one must be satisfied either that profiling ought to be done or at least… that it isn’t something that “ought not to be done…” The practice cannot be rejected with the old moral clarity. The profiling process is not precisely racial but broadly physical according to “Muslim type…” [Link]
I’m pretty sure the 7/7 bombers did not leave the house all gulab attar-fabulous. It’s a practice more Arab than Pakistani, and the smell would have drawn too much attention. Racial profiling, the knee-jerk reaction to terrorist attacks on public transit, is a fool’s game. Instead of detecting inaccurate signatures (black, Arab, South Asian), the goal must be to detect behavior (carrying a bomb). The goal is accuracy. Otherwise you let deadly attacks succeed while wasting massive amounts of resources searching ordinary people.
The arms race between black hat and white hat has deep analogues in the military, the human immune system, antivirus tools, firewalls, spam filters and so on. In realm of computer security, behavior detection has utterly buried signature detection in terms of effectiveness. Signatures are trivial to spoof once you know what’s being looked for. Most viruses, worms and spam now mutate with every attack, it’s designed in from the beginning.
On 7/7, Al Qaeda switched from using Arabs to using Pakistanis and a Caribbean. Not two weeks later, they switched to using Africans. The pool of Muslim phenotypes is enormous; they can tap Chechens, Uzbeks, Filipinos, Indonesians, Chinese, Malays, white converts, black Americans, red-haired Kashmiris, blue-eyed Afghans. This is why the NYC mayor says the NYPD will use a true random sample instead of racial profiling. It’s not out of liberal fuzzy-mindedness, it’s because they’re being hard-nosed about saving lives. A race-based approach fails completely. It’s suicidal to rely on it.
I’m one of those Philistines. I dig modern art more than the classics, and Rothkos are pretty to look at, but their high price utterly escapes me. I’m very finicky about what I read, but I sometimes feel like I was born without certain senses. A sommelier in my kitchen might be bored by the mundaneness of the choices. I wish someone would sit down and say, ‘It’s ok. Most people think someone is crazy-eyed when they mention the top notes in a wine’s bouquet. Really, you’re perfectly normal.’
So I’m probably not the best person to introduce this post, but here goes. A NYC art gallery is exhibiting the works of the eminent Indian abstract painter Syed Haider Raza:
Raza’s form was heavily influenced by the Abstract Expressionism of the New York School of Painters including Sam Francis, Kandinsky and Rothko. He has also been especially inspired by moderist masters, particularly by the feverish intensity of color of
Cezanne and Van Gogh’s work. However, the underlying and continuing inspiration in his work has been his homeland, India…
Born in Madhya Pradesh, India in 1922, Raza studied at the JJ School of Art, Bombay. In 1950 he received a scholarship from the French government to study at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He was awarded the Prix de la Critique in 1956 in France. In 1962, The University of California, Berkeley, invited him as a visiting lecturer where he did some pivotal work. He was awarded the Padma Shri by the President of India, the highest honor bestowed by the Indian Government. He currently lives and works in Gorbio [in France] and Paris.
This is the first show for my buddy Priyanka Mathew, the new gallery director. She says, ‘He’s 82, and this probably will be a rare and perhaps final visit to New York. A disciple of his, Sujata Bajaj, will also be mounted.’ I assure you she’s referring to Bajaj’s paintings 
Bajaj shuttles between homes in Norway, France and Pune along a disjoint meridian.
Here are photos from an exhibition of Raza’s work last year. Here’s the gallery’s current Indian art exhibit, Shakti 2005. It’s quite lovely.
Syed Haider Raza exhibition, Gallery Arts India, Sep. 16 – Oct. 9, 2005; opening reception Sep. 16; 206 Fifth Avenue at 25th St., 5th Floor, Manhattan; times TBD Continue reading
Abhi posted about a collaboration between Asha Bhosle and Kronos Quartet. But has anyone ever told you about Bhosle’s original version of the hippie anthem ‘Dum Maro Dum‘?
Here, take a look:
A Ugandan politician came up with a novel scholarship scheme a couple of weeks ago (via chick pea):
A Ugandan member of parliament has pledged to reward [high school] girls for their chastity by paying their university fees if they are virgins when they leave school… Bbaale County MP Sulaiman Madada said any girl in his district who wanted to take part in the scheme aimed at promoting girls’ education would be given a gynecological examination by health workers to check they were virgins. [Link]
“We want to encourage people to be morally upright and not to go into early marriages,” Madada said, adding, “We also want girls to resist defilement. We do not want these girls to get exposed to AIDS…” [Link]
If ‘free schooling for virgins’ were extended to desis, it would rapidly bankrupt both the IITs and the MITs. But the program would hardly cost a paisa at certain art schools in Bombay, and even in Delhi it would get cheaper over time.
Of course, if you interrogated virginal high school students before handing out the money, you might find out why they want to go away to college in the first place
Madada has not extended his offer to young men, because there is no medical examination to prove their virginity. [Link]
You don’t need a medical exam for that. Just ask if they blog.
Around half the British bombers of 7/7 and 7/21 were of Pakistani origin, the other half of African or Caribbean origin. The NYT now spins the Pakistani group as victims of cultural confusion:
“They don’t know whether they’re Muslim or British or both…” They are alienated from their parents’ rural South Asian culture, which they see as backward… they feel excluded from mainstream British society, which has so far not yielded to hyphenated immigrant identities as America has.
‘Give me mango lassi and aloo gobi in every grocery store, or give me death’ (which they actually have in the UK, bless Sainsbury’s little heart). The sale of desi exotica and Apu on The Simpsons irritate thin, sunlight-deprived snarkidesis into penning high-class rants on blogs, like the class nerd hitting the football star with a rubber band sneak attack and then running like a coward. But did Apu push the 7/7 murderers over the edge?
It’s pretty silly when you put it that way, of course. And the UK has one of the richest desi diasporic subcultures anywhere, so there’s no lack of musicians, movie stars and models for teens to identify with. Naturally, it’s not about cultural chiseling. IMO the Beeston milieu boils down to three factors: the reverse psychology of teen rebellion, the in-your-face racism of working-class Britain and standard-issue criminality. The perversity of rebelling by being more conservative than your parents is by far the strangest one.
The second gen is much more demanding of their rights as Britons than their immigrant parents who just want to keep their heads down and earn a paycheck:
The British Raj officially ended on Aug. 15, 1947, but its relationship to its subjects did not. In the following decades men of the Indian subcontinent came to Britain en masse to supply cheap, unskilled labor for factories, foundries and, especially, textile mills in northern Britain…Mr. Hussain, now 54, worked in factories and mills, drove a taxi, and has run a corner minimart for 15 years… Integration was minimal, thanks to barriers of race and language, culture and religion. The migrants were the colonized who came to live among their former colonizers. “When we came, we were like servants,” Mr. Hussain said…
The children of the immigrants have shed the servility, and passivity, of their parents, Mr. Hussain said. They want their rights, even if they have to fight for them. This inspires both pride and unease in him… Arshad Chaudhry, an accountant and member of the Leeds Muslim Forum, sees it differently. “They were very timid,” he said of the first wave.
