In April, Abhi posted about two high school girls in New York whom the FBI and Homeland Security jailed on suspicion of being aspiring suicide bombers. The girls were held under Orwellian secrecy, but the case seemed dubious from the start:

“Nobody here believes they are wanna-be suicide bombers,” the [FBI] official added… “We’re not spun up about this case,” said a Homeland Security Department source. [NY Daily News]

After six weeks virtually incommunicado in detention, one girl was released, and the other is being deported to Bangladesh:

… after holding the girls for six weeks in a Pennsylvania detention center, the government has quietly released one and is allowing the other to leave the country with her family… Many questions remain unanswered in a case that has been marked from the start by secrecy, including closed hearings, sealed FBI declarations, and orders barring attorneys from disclosing government information. [NYT, reprinted in Kansas City Star]

So that’s what happens under the USA FASCIST Act if you’re a 16-year-old Muslim girl who writes a school essay about Islam. Like Guantánamo Bay, you can be jailed without charges for life, and nobody will confirm that you exist. The same behavior by King George III sparked the American Revolution; the same behavior by Cuba, North Korea and Iran lands them on our various axes of evil.

Now what happens if you’re a bug-eyed, swastika-festooned, non-Muslim murderer with a criminal assault record, and you show up at the U.S. border with a bloody chainsaw, slashing weapons and body armor?

You get served coffee and let into the U.S.

Have a nice day!

Gregory Allan Despres was supposed to be going to jail the morning folks spotted him hitchhiking to the U.S. border with a bloody chainsaw. His trousers were spattered with blood. Inside his backpack he had a homemade sword, a hatchet, a knife and brass knuckles. He was also packing pepper spray and wearing a bullet-proof vest… Mr. Despres… has a 10-inch swastika tattooed on his lower back… Mr. Young said the U.S. customs agents appeared to be joking around… “When I come back in (to the room) they were giving him a coffee,” he said. “He got processed faster than I did.” [Ottawa Citizen]

U.S. customs agents… let him into the United States… The following day, a gruesome scene was discovered in Despres’ hometown of Minto, New Brunswick: The decapitated body of a 74-year-old country musician named Frederick Fulton was found on Fulton’s kitchen floor. His head was in a pillowcase under a kitchen table. His common-law wife was discovered stabbed to death in a bedroom… On the same day Despres crossed the border, he was due in a Canadian court to be sentenced on charges he assaulted and threatened to kill Fulton’s son-in-law, Frederick Mowat, last August. [CNN]

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Lester Gesteland quotes an Asian Media Watchdog email saying the Jersey Guys will apologize on air:

… 101.5FM agreed in writing to the following.

• Issue an on air, formal & blanket apology by the “Jersey Guys,”
• Invite Jun Choi (the KoreanAm candidate who was attacked) to be a guest by “Jersey Guys…”

… Comcast and Verizon agreed to suspend their radio ads…. “Kick The Jersey Guys Off The Air!” collected the largest amount of signatures in the shortest amount of time, even more so than our last major campaign, Hot 97…

Gesteland, who’s got three hapa kids, says:

This evening my wife was listening to the infamous Carton & Rossi show when she heard Jun Choi being interviewed…

Choi is running for mayor of the desi haven of Edison, NJ. Now that’s consumer power. Well done.

Update: Carton apologized, and Choi raked him on air, telling him why his comments were offensive. Listen here: part 1, part 2

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The Pacific News service features an essay by Sandip Roy and his feelings about the soon-to-be-over Asian Pacific American Heritage month:

Oops, I did it again. May is almost over and I forgot to feel special. It’s Asian Pacific American Heritage month, and I have nothing to show for it. I didn’t learn to wear a kimono or cook pad thai or read Amy Tan.

Public television and libraries are just bursting with Chinese memoirs and Filipino writers and Japanese origami demonstrations. Growing up in Calcutta, I was just Calcuttan. But with every boarding pass I received on my way to the United States, my identity ballooned — Calcuttan, Indian, South Asian and, finally, Asian. Now I get a whole month, and I’m at a loss as to what to do with it.

Asian Pacific American Heritage (APA) month, Black History Month and Hispanic Heritage Month are well-meaning attempts at promoting diversity and multiculturalism. But in a San Francisco that’s one-third Asian, celebrating APA month seems a bit like carrying rice to China.

True, San Francisco is a city where Asian political power is nowhere close to representative of the city’s Asian population. Only one Asian remains on the Board of Supervisors, while another high-profile Asian city official, the assessor, recently handed in her papers.

Well I feel like after reading that I should find out for myself what Asian Pacific American Heritage month is all about, so I googled it and found this site.

In May 1990, the holiday was expanded further when President George H. W. Bush designated May to be Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. May was chosen to commemorate the immigration of the first Japanese to the United States on May 7, 1843, and to mark the anniversary of the completion of the transcontinental railroad on May 10, 1869. The majority of the workers who laid the tracks were Chinese immigrants.

Asian Pacific American Heritage Month is celebrated with community festivals, government-sponsored activities, and educational activities for students. This year’s theme is “Freedom for All—A Nation We Call Our Own.”

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Two bloggers psychoanalyze a Sikh religious body which lobbied against Jo Bole So Nihaal. But their analysis also applies to the rise of virtually all lobbying groups. Mass outrage focused through the lens of a group wields power like a typhoon. Eventually the middlemen siphon off funding for themselves, and the groups self-perpetuate with or without legitimate grievances.

Arnab Ray says:

This is not the first time that religious loons have objected to titles and sequences of movies. The song “Mustafa Mustafa” from “Aatish” which had Raveena and Karishma cavorting in revealing attire had to be changed to “Dilruba Dilruba” following protests from Muslims. Mani Ratnam had a bomb thrown at him for having a Bal Thackeray-lookalike in Bombay.

Usually these things are solved by the producer/director going to one of the self-styled defenders of morality and making some discreet payoffs euphemistically called “seeking blessings/clearing misunderstandings”. The morality police get their dues, the producers get the free publicity and everyone is happy…

… money had exchanged hands, sins had been expiated, everything was right with the world. And yet people wind up dead. What the hell happened?

Amardeep says:

… Until yesterday, the invocation of “blasphemy” seemed pretty laughable… The SGPC seems increasingly like an organization desperate for direction, now that their established enemies — the Congress Party, the Nehru family, the Indian Army’s counter-terrorist measures in Punjab — have either dwindled or transformed. In an era when the Prime Minister is himself a practicing, if secular, Sikh, Sikh organizations in India can no longer claim exclusion or discrimination. They have as a result chosen to mimic the world-wide rhetoric of religious outrage, exemplified in India by the RSS and by conservative Muslim groups. The rhetoric of outrage is, it seems, the primary way in which religious leaders — around the world, and in every major religious community — attempt to make themselves relevant to modernity.

You might not know this, but it is illegal to be gay in India.

While “there is no explicit mention of homosexuality or homophilia in any of the statute books,” in practice Section 377 of the colonial era Indian Penal Code (written in 1860) effectively criminalizes homosexuality by criminalizing gay sex. The Indian government stands by this law, saying

Indian society, by and large, disapproves of homosexuality and justifies it being treated as a criminal offence even when adults indulge in private [BBC]

A recent effort by activist groups to have the law reframed to legalize sex between consenting adults (the law also bans pedophelia and bestiality) failed on technical grounds, with the Delhi High Court saying that third parties have no right to bring such challenges. The Indian Supreme Court is now looking into the matter, but it is unclear what will happen next.

Even though being a lesbian isn’t criminalized by Section 377 (“unnatural acts” are defined by penetration and it is claimed that “Queen Victoria refused to include the lesbianism clause in the law because she could not imagine ‘such a thing existed’“), as with most things desi, it’s still harder to be a woman than a man:

In a largely patriarchal society, lesbians bear the brunt of social ostracisation and the law more than gay men. In many states, lesbians have taken their lives after facing harassment at home and outside.[Many women] …  have been forcibly married off by their parents. When they tell the truth, they are thrown out of their homes by their spouses, parents and relatives.  [BBC]

In one case, the father of a 31 year old teacher kicked her all the way down from the third floor when he learnt of her sexual preference [cite]

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Dimly sensing through his/her reptilian sub-brain that Greg Gutfeld’s contribution to the Huffington Post wasn’t offensive enough, someone doing a parody of that site took it even further:

Keep the curry and coffee flowing and I’ll get right on it. — Kumar…

“damn i spilled curry in the server…”

Have you withheld curry from them, too?

Because who’s M. Night anyway except another one of those curry-eaters with long last names who all look the same.

As for the original post, Om Malik says, ‘Huffington Post: Now promoting culturally insensitive racist pigs.’

Update: In Saturday’s update, the hilarity keeps coming:

I have no idea how that IED [roadside bomb] ended up in my backpack… — Kumar

Because desis and Arabs are the same, brown people from that-thar region who need to be killed.

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Some stories of struggle are so dispiriting, so mismatched in power between attacker and victim, you can barely get through them. This one’s about widespread abuse of Sri Lankan maids in the Middle East:

More than a million Sri Lankans – roughly 1 in every 19 citizens – now work abroad, and nearly 600,000 are housemaids… In Saudi Arabia, the most common destination, they call Sri Lanka “the country of housemaids.”

… 15 to 20 percent of the 100,000 Sri Lankan women who leave each year for the gulf return prematurely, face abuse or nonpayment of salary, or get drawn into illicit people trafficking schemes or prostitution… Hundreds of housemaids have become pregnant, often after rapes, producing children who, until Sri Lanka’s Constitution was recently amended, were stateless because their fathers were foreigners. More than 100 women come home dead each year…

Some of the more horrific stories:

The young scion of the Kuwait house where she worked had repeatedly tried to molest her, finally pushing her to the ground and breaking her wrist… Thangarasa Jeyanthi… had a face as purple and puffy as a plum, eyes swollen shut, burn marks on her body and dried blood still around her ears. The husband and wife she worked for had assaulted her daily… They had cut her with a knife, kicked and stomped on her, tied her hands with rope and denied her food…

For Sri Lankan women, long hair is a source of pride, its absence, a source of shame. Ms. Manilariatne’s employer – her “mama” – had cut boy-short [her] hair…

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