Following the comment thread on my last post it quickly became apparent that folks were going to fixate on the wrong labels and thereby detract from the more important discussion that needs to take place. “They weren’t South Asian, they were Pakistani.” “They weren’t Pakistani, they were Kashmiris.” “There is no such thing as South Asian.”

Allow me to propose that we put semantics aside to focus on the one label that really matters. There is one label that we can hopefully all agree on: They were Second-generation. Born and raised in a western country with all the freedoms and opportunities they could want. In this instance the pejorative “confused” really does apply.

When I was a child my mother told me a story that her mother had told her. I can only re-tell the story as it was told to me:

“Once when mami was young she was at a train station. There was a strange man there who simply looked at her and hypnotized her. The man was a Fakir. She followed him unable to control herself as he led her away. Fakir’s have magical powers. Really Abhi (I was shaking my head in disbelief). They are Muslim and they kidnap and convert you to Islam. Luckily the family got her back before she walked too far off. She didn’t remember anything that happened afterward and said she couldn’t control herself. A Fakir can just look at you and you’ll forget everything, your whole life.

Now bear in mind that my family is from Gujarat, where bigotry has persisted for generations. My mom is not a bigot but she believed (and still does) that a Fakir has mystical powers that can brainwash a normal person and get them to walk away from their life and convert to Islam (even though not all Fakirs are Muslim and the Sufi order is the least fundamental). I actually asked her to tell me this story again when I went home just last month.

Most of us know at least one person that is a “born-again” into some religion. Various things motivate these people. Many of them (like at least one of these bombers) were described as being out-of-control before their conversion (or re-discovery of their family religion). Others feel overwhelmed by the influence of the world they live in and retreat back to a basic set of instructions that they think will bring order to the chaos they feel. Some take this “order” too far by trying to impose their interpretation of that order on others. Most born-agains however are perfectly sane and choose to practice their new beliefs in private without a harmful thought toward anyone. How do we recognize in our second generation peers which path they have chosen to walk? Continue reading →

The Arab sheikhs on their annual bird hunts in Pakistan also run side errands: kidnapping or buying little boys for use in sport.

Intense media interest forced many of the Gulf kingdoms to ban the use of children under 15 for camel racing. “The move failed miserably because child traffickers simply got fake passports which stated a four-year-old’s age as 16,” says Mr Burney.

Most of the repatriated children hail from the south-east Punjab districts of Bahawalpur, Dera Ghazi Khan and Rahimyar Khan… These districts are the preferred hunting grounds for Gulf sheikhs, some of whom go there every year to hunt the houbara bustard… The three districts are also home to the Cholistan – one of Pakistan’s two main deserts and one of the few areas in the country where camels are regularly used for travel and trade. [Link]

These 40,000 kids are imprisoned, and many are raped:

… the boys are kept in terrible prison-like conditions where they are deliberately underfed to keep them light so the camels can run faster. [Link]

It is not uncommon for child jockeys to fall off and be injured while racing, and their illegal status means race track owners are often reluctant to take them to hospital… the boys often arrive with broken hands or broken legs. And many, he says, have been sodomised.

One boy shows me the scar he was left with after being trampled by a camel. Crudely stitched, it stretches from his chest down to his hips… “There was a child in the camp, and because he wanted to leave the camp and go to Dubai, one of the racetrack owners ran over the child in a truck and killed him,” he tells me. [Link]

Continue reading →

After every terrorist attack in the Western World I look for the “B” word in the news the next day. Here we go:

The San Jose Mercury News– Among London’s Muslims, fears of backlash linger, but quietly

Newsday– U.S. Muslims denounce London bombings, brace for backlash

Vive le Canada– Canuck Muslims dread backlash

Monsters & Critics– Australian Moslems fear backlash after London bombs

India Monitor– Muslims cower in fear of backlash

See, here is the thing. Whenever a terrorist attack like this occurs, the cold, dispassionate, analytical side of me asks, “why is the average citizen so afraid to get back aboard that plane, train, or bus the very next day?” The attack was temporally and spatially isolated and not something they must continue to cower in fear of. Aside from not giving the terrorists what they want, the probability that there will be another attack within days or months of the original is just not backed up by the data. The compassionate side of me realizes however, that humans are humans. Fear, real or imagined, is part of who we are and keeps us alive.

For people with brown skin, and especially Muslims, the actual attack is just the beginning of a terrorist incident however. For this group an attack is not a temporally or spatially isolated event. The moment that the physical attack ends is when the real fear begins for a sizeable portion of the population (as shown by the headlines above). With a terrorist attack you don’t know when it’s going to come. You realize that you shouldn’t live your life in fear so you go about your day quite normally, perhaps being slightly more attentive. The general population has a Homeland Security Department to warn them of a possible terrorist attack by means of a color coded system. After a terrorist attack however, if you are brown or Muslim, you need your own system. You have knowledge of credible but unspecified threats.

My point? This is exactly what Reza Aslan stresses. This isn’t a war between Islam and the West. This is a war between Islam and Islam. Brown-on-Brown violence. The West is often just caught in the crossfire because they provide the most dramatic field of battle. Continue reading →

In 2001, a 15-year-old named Nicholas Minucci allegedly beat an elderly Sikh gentleman with a baseball bat while spitting racial epithets against ‘Arabs’ (via Turbanhead). He allegedly lay in wait outside the main gurudwara in Queens and shot several people with a paintball gun.

Because the attack happened the day of 9/11, Attar Singh chose not to press charges, saying it was a time for healing. Another Sikh did press charges, but the conviction was overturned on appeal.

Singh’s 62-year-old grandfather, Attar Singh, who wore a turban, was walking to a Richmond Hill temple when Minucci and two other teens assaulted him as the twin towers burned… Mistaking Singh for an Arab, they screamed: “Go back to your own country!” the sources said. Two of the teens shot paint balls at Singh, and when he turned to run, one of three beat him with a bat… “F- Arab, why don’t you blow this up,” Minucci allegedly screamed, the sources said…

“It was Sept. 11,” the grandson said. “The country was in mourning. He didn’t want to make it a big deal…” [Link]

Mistake. Attar Singh’s magnanimity, when he was just five months from death by cancer, turned into his own version of Spiderman’s origin myth. Minucci was encouraged by the slap on the wrist. A year later, he allegedly stabbed another teen in the stomach. Before the victim could testify, he ‘accidentally’ stepped in front of a subway train. Nobody saw nothin’. In that case, the unusually lucky Minucci skated by with probation.

He then made a guest appearance on (surprise, surprise) Growing Up Gotti, the show about Mafia kids. The unemployed teen managed to get ahold of a $60K Cadillac Escalade through his family. For the coup de grace, Minucci, now 19, is accused of beating and critically injuring another man with a baseball bat a couple of days ago.

Minucci’s got a long criminal history, so why is his face all over the papers now? Because he was too dumb to realize that beating a black man in a neighborhood notorious for race riots would land him in the NYT and guarantee the mayor’s attention.

 A group of white men set upon three black men on the streets of Howard Beach, Queens, early yesterday, beating one with a baseball bat and fracturing his skull… One of the black men, Glenn Moore… tripped over a lawn. There, his assailants beat him with a metal bat, stole the sneakers off his feet and ripped an earring from one ear, the police said. [Link]

Continue reading →