Category Archives: Politics

Police Brutality? Deport That Man!

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Earlier this month SAALT sent around this statement in response to the following event that took place in Edison, New Jersey:

Community members in Edison gathered on August 2nd, 2006, at a rally to protest incidents of police brutality that an Indian man, Raj Parikh, allegedly experienced on July 4th, 2006, by an Edison police officer. The rally on August 2nd occurred after several unsuccessful attempts by community members to address their concerns with government officials. At the rally, a group of approximately 60 South Asians were met by counter protesters who made anti-immigrant and racist slurs, such as, “How many of you are illegals? You must’ve slid under the border to come here”; “You’re all cockroaches! Go home!”; and “If you behave like animals you will be treated like animals”. Mr. Parikh was scheduled to speak at the rally but was unable to do so, because Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials appeared and arrested him. Apparently, Mr. Parikh was out of status and had an order of deportation against him.

The statement that was sent out included the following recommendations; a) to ensure Mayor Choi’s office leads an investigation that is detailed and public, b) a declaration from the mayor’s office and Edison Police Department. to clarify official policies between local law enforcement and immigration authorities, c) to have elected officials and civic leaders commit to community forums to address the racial tension, and d) to require the Edison Police Department employees to receive a diversity training and meet with the South Asian community members. High but simple basic demands needed to be taken in a community with such a large percentage of South Asians (5th on the list of cities with the highest South Asian American population.)

This past Friday, Mayor Choi attempted to address the community, but was met with much disdain:

Holding a microphone, Edison Mayor Jun Choi stood alone Friday night facing Hilltop Apartments, a complex almost entirely populated by Indian-Americans.

The mayor’s critics and political observers say Choi, 34, has mishandled the racial controversy over the Indian’s arrest. Barely eight months into office, Choi faces opponents on both sides of the dispute. For Choi, who never held elected office before becoming mayor, it has been a test of how well he can maintain the balance between his Asian-American constituency and the rest of the township, which has become increasingly diverse. [link]

It’s not just the members of the South Asian community who are disapointed here: Continue reading →

Interesting Legal Precedents, Vol. 2

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The San Francisco Chronicle reported this weekend that Muhammad Ismail and his son Jaber Ismail, U.S. citizens, have been barred from re-entering the United States until they answer questions in Pakistan to the satisfaction of the FBI. The two men were pulled aside during a layover in Hong Kong and informed there was “a problem with their passports.” The elder Ismail is a naturalized U.S. citizen; his son, 18, was born in the U.S. Neither one is a dual national.

The two have not been charged with any crime. They are, however, close relatives of another father and son pair, Umer and Hamid Hayat of Lodi, California, who were tried last year on support of terrorism charges. Coincidentally, the elder Hayat, an ice cream vendor, was just released on time served and fined $3,600 for a minor offence.

Back to the Ismails and their unusual treatment as U.S. citizens denied re-entry into their country without any charge or stated cause:

“We haven’t heard about this happening — U.S. citizens being refused the right to return from abroad without any charges or any basis,” said Mass, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union.

McGregor Scott, the U.S. attorney for California’s eastern district, confirmed Friday that the men were on the no-fly list and were being kept out of the country until they agreed to talk to federal authorities.

“They’ve been given the opportunity to meet with the FBI over there and answer a few questions, and they’ve declined to do that,” Scott said.

Mass said Jaber Ismail had answered questions during an FBI interrogation at the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad soon after he was forced back to Pakistan. She said the teenager had run afoul of the FBI when he declined to be interviewed again without a lawyer and refused to take a lie-detector test.

Here again, we’re looking at an apparently unprecedented situation, and one that any U.S. citizen who travels outside the country might have grounds to be worried about:

Michael Barr, director of the aviation safety and security program at USC, said the Ismail case appears to be unusual in the realm of federal terrorism investigations.

“You become what is called a stateless person, and that would be very unprecedented,” Barr said.

Continue reading →

Posted in Law

Interesting Legal Precedents, Vol. 1

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iqbalstatenisland.jpgLast Thursday Javed Iqbal, a Pakistani citizen and longtime resident of Staten Island, New York City (that’s his house in the picture), was arrested under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act after he offered to sell to an informant a satellite TV package that included al-Manar, the Lebanese channel operated by Hezbollah. The government argues that Iqbal’s commercial provision of this service amounts to financing a terrorist organization. However, the act also exempts a broad range of news and publications:

The broadly defined statute, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, is also used frequently to block the importation of goods and services that would directly support terrorist operations.

The law, which went into effect in 1977, was meant to put legal teeth in international trade embargoes with other nations, but once it was amended by the Patriot Act after 9/11, the government began to use it far more frequently against particular groups and individuals.

The use of the law, however, to focus on television broadcasts seemed to fall under an exemption laid out in a 1988 amendment to the act, several experts said, and it raised concerns among civil libertarians and some constitutional scholars about limiting the free marketplace of ideas.

The exemption covers publications, films, posters, phonograph records, photographs, microfilms, microfiche, tapes, compact discs, CD-ROMÂ’s, art works and newswire feeds.

“One person’s news is another’s propaganda,” said Rod Smolla, the dean of the University of Richmond Law School and a First Amendment expert. “It runs counter to all of our First Amendment traditions to ban the free flow of news and information across borders, yet at the same time all nations have historically reserved the right to ban the importation of propaganda from a hostile nation.”

Professor Smolla also said that so far as he knew, this was the first use of the law to block information, as such.

Clearly, a First Amendment versus “War on Terror” showdown looms. Interestingly, Iqbal’s hometown paper, the Staten Island Advance, reports that al-Manar has a readily accessible online presence (although I couldn’t get through when I tried to connect just now):

Even as Iqbal now faces charges of offering access to what has been dubbed terrorism-backed programming, an Al-Manar Web site is available free to the public, with streaming video, news stories and updates on protests and demonstrations.

The site has logged more than 1.1 million hits in the last month and half.

Another interesting note: one of his attorneys says that Iqbal, who supplies a range of satellite TV services, does more than half of his business with Texas-based Christian evangelical channels.

Iqbal is in jail, having been unable to raise the $250,000 bond. [Update: He posted bond today, Tuesday, August 29.] To be continued… Continue reading →

Posted in Law

The Misogyny Of Chaos

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While Katrina’s flood thrives in our memories, Debby peters off to the east and TD5/Ernesto enters the Caribbean, New Orleans holds its collective breath. Whether to extract Rubbermaid containers from storage this evening or wait until Tuesday (when many hope that Ernie opts for the Yucatan peninsula)? Uncertainty is the toll of living in New Orleans during hurricane season.

Today’s nola.com confirms the rising cost of living in this city. Surrounded by jacked-up insurance premiums, neighborhoods teetering on the fine line between rebound and abandonment, increasing expenses and a mayor without a plan (or a clue), can the middle class make it during the rebuild? The current answer to this $110-billion-dollar question: We shall see.

Forget stress and money; grey hair is easily painted over and moolah comes and goes. In any disaster, whether natural or humanmade, one that occurs overnight or lumbers along over the course of years, the real price of living is borne by its least-enfranchised. At times of chaos, strife, poverty and socio-economic/political instability, women and children need additional protection. The ACLU investigates violations in New Orleans prisons after Katrina and Spike Lee talks of the overall suffering here; who speaks for the women? As pertains to Iraq, Afghanistan and Darfur, concerns about US military misconduct, extremist violence or the semantics of civil war abound, but why is more light not shed on the real victims – mothers whose rights are decreased or taken away, sisters who are brutalized and raped, daughters who are dehumanized? Continue reading →

Mo’ Macacas + Mo’ Planes = Mo’ Problems

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A few days ago we received numerous requests on the tip line that we cover the story of the Northwest Airlines plane that returned to Amsterdam airport soon after taking off for Mumbai. If none of us posted on it at that moment, it’s probably because we were waiting to see what came of the incident. Not surprisingly, we now learn that it was a false alarm:

The Dutch ambassador to India has expressed regret for the arrest of 12 passengers whose India-bound plane was diverted to Amsterdam after their behavior triggered fears of a hijacking, a government minister said on Friday.

The 12 men, all Muslims, were, however, cleared of any wrongdoing and released and their families said they were victims of racial discrimination.

The case of the 27-year-old Canadian radiology resident thrown off a United Airlines flight was also a false alarm:

A Winnipeg doctor is demanding an official apology and compensation from United Airlines after being kicked off a flight in the U.S. this week, an incident he has characterized as “institutionalized discrimination.” Dr. Ahmed Farooq, a Muslim, was escorted off an airplane in Denver on Tuesday. According to Farooq, reciting his evening prayers was interpreted by one passenger as an activity that was suspicious.

The Washington Post has a good round-up article of these and similar events today. In it I learned of this excellent new acronym (perhaps not so new to those of you in the UK): TWA. Most appropriately, the initials of a late lamented airline now stand for “Traveling While Asian” — a little like Driving While Black (DWB) only with higher stakes and more exotic rewards.

Now I know some commenters will point out that so long as groups of young Middle Eastern men have the market on airborne mass murder cornered, there is some rationale behind profiling; but perhaps we can all agree that botched, panic-driven and vigilante-led profiling is, like, a general bummer. Exhibit A:

Farooq said the allegation came from a passenger who appeared drunk and had previously threatened him during the trip. …

Farooq said that even officials from the Transportation Security Administration soon realized the flight crew had overreacted, but by the time that conclusion had been reached the trio were forced to stay in Denver for the night and catch a flight the next day — at their own expense.

The gentlemen on the Amsterdam-Mumbai flight were deemed suspicious because they were fiddling with mobile phones and chatting loudly around the time of take-off. Uh, excuse me? Anyone here ever traveled in the Third World? People being loud and fiddling with cellphones is suspicious? More to the point, what about travel in the civilized West? Every khaki-clad, buttoned-down, yellow-tied Joe from sales and Tim from marketing (not to mention Ashok from strategic planning) is futzing with his phone until the moment wheels leave the ground and again from the instant they touch down.

Now comes the news that the Monarch Airlines Costa del Sol fiasco may — just may — have been… a prank. (Thanks Jai for the tip.) IF — and it’s still a big if, so let’s not jump to conclusions here — IF Messrs. Ashraf and Zeb were trying to prove a point, it’s not clear they have been helpful to their cause. It’s one thing to stage a guerrilla theater event to reveal a little-discussed injustice, but it’s another when every few days a dead-serious case like the ones mentioned above comes to light.

In the meantime, my macacas and macacis, stay away from aviation if you possibly can. Personally, I’ve stopped traveling to any place I can’t get to by the Chinatown bus. Continue reading →

“Macaca” Not Going Away [Updated: Now With Three Cute Lil’ Macacas]

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macacagate.jpgIt looked like it was dying down but it turns out the “Macaca” story lives on, thanks to the two-faced message coming out of Senator George Allen’s camp. Apparently the incident has severely harmed him in the polls, so he’s finally apologized to S.R. Sidarth, the Webb campaign worker whom he twice called “macaca” and asked an all-white audience to “welcome to America.” Allen actually got on the phone:

“He apologized for his comments,” said Mr. Sidarth, who is an American of Indian descent, in a telephone interview from the University of Virginia, where he has resumed his classes. “He took the blame for saying them, and he said he didn’t realize how offended I was until he heard my comments from the media.”

End of story, right? Politician says something stupid, pays price in the polls, apologizes, hopefully learns lesson. Except for one thing. At the same time that Allen is apologizing, his staff is telling Republicans worried that he’s going soft on them that the whole incident was what the papers call “a barnyard epithet” (that’s newscode for “bullshit”) and that it’s Allen who is actually the aggrieved party. [Update: Here’s the campaign manager’s memo.] Here’s today’s editorial in the Washington Post:

[Allen campaign manager] Mr. Wadhams, an itinerant political hit man known for his nasty attacks on opponents, told Republican leaders in a memo sent over the weekend that the Webb campaign and the media had ganged up “to create national news over something that did not warrant coverage in the first place.”

He continued: “Never in modern times has a statewide office holder and candidate been so vilified.” In other words, Mr. Allen is the victim — not the 20-year-old student whom he mocked with an insulting, possibly racist slur in front of scores of chortling supporters and demeaned by saying, “Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia!”

Unlike Mr. Allen, whose contrition has become increasingly abject over time, Mr. Wadhams has been consistent. His first pronouncement to journalists, a week and a half ago, was to refer to the “macaca” story with a barnyard epithet and insist that the senator had nothing to apologize for. He has stuck with that assessment.

With Mr. Allen plummeting in the polls and his reelection prospects now in doubt, he and Mr. Wadhams are in damage-control mode. They have dropped their far-fetched insistence that the word “macaca” referred to Mr. Sidarth’s hairstyle. But they ought to get their stories straight. Is the Allen campaign really sorry? Or are the senator’s adversaries just making a mountain out of “macaca”?

We report, you decide. Continue reading →

Salutations from the Third Coast!

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Given my affinity for South Asia, monkeys and South Asian monkeys, it is an honor to gain guest access to the ND bunker. I must say – seeing lutefisk placed on the same shelf as mango chutney warms this former Upper Midwesterner’s heart.

Employment ushered me to the other end of the Mississippi. With a choice between Houston and New Orleans, I opted for the city with the most interesting cultural dynamics in the United States. A mélange of European and Afro-Caribbean, New Orleans is 70% non-white, poor in wealth, rich in customs and conventions, and a lot more than the drunken-tourist section of Bourbon Street.

As you know, it has been 359 days since Category-3 Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Buras, LA and laid waste to Slidell, LA and lovely beach towns along the coast of western Mississippi. Whole beachfront streets and homes in Waveland and Bay St. Louis were torn off their foundations by the whipping winds of an unusually angry hurricane.

Thankfully, New Orleans was spared that fate. However, our long-suffering and neglected canal levees could not handle the 25-foot and higher storm surges and the unthinkable happened – the levees broke flooding 80% of this city. Friends who stayed behind were forced to act as rescue workers and witness things no American in the 21st century should. Trapped in their homes for more than five days without food, water, medication and rescue, approximately 1400 New Orleanians, mostly the elderly and little children, perished. Demolition workers find carcasses to this day.

What does this have to do with desi or Sepia Mutiny?
Continue reading →

An Adopting Mother Confronts the Complexion Gap

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A few weeks ago we discussed a new kind of camp for Indian children adopted by white American parents. Today, via a tip on the news tab, I came across an article on Alternet by a Jewish New Yorker who adopted an Indian baby as a single mother, and was somewhat taken aback by the darkness of her child’s skin:

The first photo I received of [Redacted] showed her with fair skin. I was surprised, because from what my adoption agency told me, the child assigned to me would be much darker. After I got over that surprise, I had another: I felt relief. Suddenly — guiltily — it was a comfort to know that she would not look so different from me, and even more important, that her light skin would save her from a lifetime of prejudice. But ah, the magic of flashbulbs. A few months later I received several more photos and gaped at them in shock. The baby was much, much darker. (link)

[Redacted] has, initially, a lot of anxiety to deal with about the gap between her skin tone and that of her adopted daughter (read the whole article for examples: the kicker is the diaper change). She gets over it, but is still often surprised by the fact that no one in her social circle — including her Indian and Black friends — is as dark as her daughter:

Very soon, my daughter will have a lot to process. She’s adopted, she’s the child of a single mother, she’s an Indian Jew by conversion. We spent the summer with my father in upstate New York, and she was nearly always the darkest child in music class, gymnastics and day care. In New York City, even Blacks and Indians in [Redacted]’s and my social circle are lighter than she. Over and over I see how light skin equals privilege. Now that I have become [Redacted]’s mother, I realize: We need darker friends. (link)

I’m sure there will be some folks who will be offended that [Redacted] is publicly stating some of these things she says in this article. I personally am not: she’s expressing the shock she felt along with her embarrassment about that shock, and describing how she got past it. Yes, her initial reaction to her baby’s skin tone betrays “racism,” but it looks to me like she’s recognized and dealt with it.

Still, I wonder what people think about the solution she outlines: “We need darker friends.” Is it really damaging to a child (the baby has grown up some now) not to be around anyone who physically resembles her? And wouldn’t it be slightly strange to seek out “friends” on this basis?

[Oh, and one more thing: the Times recently had an interesting article on the growing number of cross-racial adoptions in the U.S.] Continue reading →

Save Her Life

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nirali3.jpg

That precious, happy little girl you see above is Nirali. She has Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (Thanks, bean). According to the following,

Despite overall improvements in outcome, the prognosis for patients…is poor. Their estimated event-free survival (EFS) is only about 30%. [link]

her life is very much at stake, so the way I titled this post isn’t sensational or an exaggeration of any kind. After losing an Uncle to Leukemia two years ago and having an even closer family member go to the hospital this week because of the looming possibility of cancer, Nirali’s story makes me want to weep.

She needs a bone marrow transplant.

She needs that transplant from someone who is brown.

There aren’t anywhere near enough desis in the National Marrow Program database.

We have no excuse for this.

I am terrified of needles, I’ve said this many times. I avoid flu shots, because I find them so traumatic, but even I sacked up and then felt like the biggest baby for being afraid of the “typing” process which put me in the database of potential donors. Apparently, they’ve even taken care of THAT obstacle; now you can just get your cheek swabbed and that is enough.

Look here for a desi-centric list of opportunities to join the database, nationwide. Go. Give a tiny part of your physical self. And then pray, if you are inclined to do so, that we follow-up this post with some joyful news. Continue reading →

Mutiny-Wallah. The Sequel.

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Aaaaaand I’m back! What, you thought they could keep me away from the bunker forever?

It has been a few months since my gig as Mutiny-Wallah has been up, and I have since been in the real world sitting at cubicles writing humdrum policy reports, all the while dreaming of the happy days with the monkeys in the Sepia Mutiny bunker. Boy, did I miss those monkeys.Boy, did I miss those monkeys. When to my surprise, a couple of nights ago while planning my revolution, I was suddenly blindfolded and kidnapped. I was whisked away from Los Angeles on an autorickshaw (we were supposed to fly Jet Blue, but you know…) and when the blindfold was taken off a couple of hours ago, I found myself once again in the Sepia Mutiny bunkers. Yay!

How long will I be a mutiny-wallah this time around? They keep things hushed around me, but rumor has it it will last through November 7th. That is right, Election Day. You see kids, for those of you living under rocks, or not in this nation, we are at the beginning of a heightened election season, for the midterm elections. Here at Sepia, we’ve already brought you an interview with Raj Bakhta and of course, there was the whole Macaca Mutiny. In anticipation for the upcoming stories surrounding the 2006 elections, I have been brought on to assist you on this path. Think of me as the desi George Stephanopoulos, or the Anderson Cooper of the mutiny. I plan on bringing you investigative Election 2006 coverage, hard hitting interviews with political candidates, and keep you educated with the latest issues that will help in casting your ballot on November 7th. Of course, knowing the work that I love to do, you didn’t think you’d get away without a little voter registration, voter education and get-out-the vote, did you?

This is my 9th year working an election, and I know that there must be plenty of you out there working it too. Are you a desi running for office? Let me know. Registering voters? Campaigning on a ballot initiative? Writing a report about the South Asian Vote? Need to know where to register, where your poll is? Let me help and be devoted to getting you the best South Asian American blog Election 2006 coverage. And now, let the real mutiny begin- again.

Continue reading →