Will the real Joe Biden please stand up!

I usually stay away from commenting about the goings on in the old country.  Because, more often than not, it is simply heartbreaking even to read about the news about India!

This morning, I woke up to the news about a dam break in the northern part of India, after "part of a Himalayan glacier broke off, triggering an avalanche of rock, mud, water and debris that swept away a hydroelectric dam."

It was a disaster that was bound to happen: "Environmentalists have long cautioned against building dams and power plants there, because it's so prone to landslides and flooding."

A terrible tragedy.

I hope that people will India will think more about how much we – and our economies – are ‘embedded’ within Nature, not external to it.  If only the religious in India too can be motivated to do something about the natural environment.

But, I want to first catch up on an older issue.  It is about how the authoritarian government is tightening its chokehold on the country.

In response to the growing farmers protests, the artist Rihanna tweeted:

why aren’t we talking about this?! #FarmersProtest https://t.co/obmIlXhK9S

— Rihanna (@rihanna) February 2, 2021

Rihanna has a following.  Nearly 102 million!

So, of course, the fanatics in India burned her effigy.

The teen activist icon Greta Thunberg tweeted about the protest. So, of course, the fanatics in India burned her effigy.

Meena Harris tweeted:

Weird to see a photo of yourself burned by an extremist mob but imagine what they would do if we lived in India. I'll tell you—23 yo labor rights activist Nodeep Kaur was arrested, tortured & sexually assaulted in police custody. She's been detained without bail for over 20 days. pic.twitter.com/Ypt2h1hWJz

— Meena Harris (@meenaharris) February 5, 2021

In case any academic decided to write or talk about these issues, the Indian government was ready for them:

In a new restriction on academic freedom at the country’s publicly-funded universities, professors and administrators will now have to get prior approval from the ministry of external affairs (MEA) if they want to hold online international conferences or seminars that are centred around issues relating to the security of the Indian state or which are “clearly related to India’s internal matters”.

The latter phrase is so broad as to include virtually every topic of interest to academics. The farmers’ protest relates to ‘India’s internal matters” as does the government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, or caste issues or even the pros and cons of demonetisation.

In addition, the names of all participants in such seminars will have to be approved in advance by the government.

Am I shocked?  Not one bit.  

This is what anti-democratic forces do. This is why I have been blogging against the current prime minister and his toadies forever.  

I am not at all shocked.  I am terribly sad though that my old country has been reduced to such a pathetic state of affairs.

What can one do besides issuing statements that won't have any influence on "the strong man"?

Why aren't we talking about all these?

Immigrants and Project Lightspeed

The tRump regime--"administration" doesn't really describe it--loudly and openly beat up on immigrants and Muslims.  Remember how one of the first things he tried to do was a blatant Muslim ban?  He then had to scale it down and pretend it was not really a Muslim ban when it was.

During those dark days, social media--from the anti-tRump side--pointed out how Apple might not have happened if a certain Syrian immigrant had not come to the US.  Steve Jobs' biological father, Abdulfattah Jandali, was an Arab Muslim from Syria, who came to the US to pursue a PhD.

Now, it is another Muslim immigrant to the rescue.  Make that two immigrants.  Not here in the US, but in Germany.  But, it is also an American story.

Scientists have greeted with cautious optimism a press release declaring positive interim results from a coronavirus vaccine phase III trial — the first to report on the final round of human testing.

New York City-based drug company Pfizer made the announcement on 9 November. It offers the first compelling evidence that a vaccine can prevent COVID-19 — and bodes well for other COVID-19 vaccines in development.

Pfizer being a US-based company.  But, the immigrants who provided the scientific breakthrough are not here.  They are in Germany, born to Turkish immigrants.

Dr. [Ugur] Sahin, 55, was born in Iskenderun, Turkey. When he was 4, his family moved to Cologne, Germany, where his parents worked at a Ford factory. He grew up wanting to be a doctor, and became a physician at the University of Cologne. In 1993, he earned a doctorate from the university for his work on immunotherapy in tumor cells.

Early in his career, he met Dr. [Özlem] Türeci. She had early hopes to become a nun and ultimately wound up studying medicine. Dr. Türeci, now 53 and the chief medical officer of BioNTech, was born in Germany, the daughter of a Turkish physician who immigrated from Istanbul.

BioNTech is the firm that the couple founded.

BioNTech began work on the vaccine in January, after Dr. Sahin read an article in the medical journal The Lancet that left him convinced that the coronavirus, at the time spreading quickly in parts of China, would explode into a full-blown pandemic. Scientists at the company, based in Mainz, Germany, canceled vacations and set to work on what they called Project Lightspeed.

They partnered with Pfizer, whose CEO is Greek!

Albert Bourla was born and raised in Thessaloniki, Greece.^[2] Born into a Jewish family, he earned his doctorate in the biotechnology of reproduction at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki's Veterinary School.^[3] He left Greece with his wife when he was 34 and since then he has lived in seven different cities, in four different countries.

The tRump regime eagerly broadcast the Pfizer success as one that was made possible through its Operation Warp Speed.  Controversies are in plenty on how much Warp Speed really made it possible.  Whatever that might be, did the regime say anything about how it was immigrants who created this success?  Did the regime say anything about the Turkish Muslim backgrounds of the two scientists in Germany?

I am glad that the fucking tRump regime is on its way out, though they will torch everything they possibly can during the exit.  I can only hope that we Americans have inoculated ourselves against that kind of a political virus.

Meanwhile, I hope that the Pfizer vaccine and the others under development will deliver us from the global pandemic in a matter of mere months from now.

Howdy mOdi + नमस्ते tRump = Screw Indians!

During my trip to India a few weeks after the Houston rally where mOdi toadied up to tRump, people were still talking about it.  Knowing my political perspectives, the extended family did not engage me on those issues.  To  friends who asked me about it, I said India should not trust tRump.  He will screw India at the earliest chance, I warned.

Most of India didn't worry much about tRump because the people who voted for mOdi share something deep and fundamental with tRump and his minions--hatred for Muslims.  That shared Islamophobia made mOdi and his toadies warmly embrace tRump, even if he didn't care a bit about the "shithole" conditions in most of India.

I have been worried about the two politicians selling hatred of the other so openly.  In a post in March 2016--when tRump was doing his warming up act in the primaries--I blogged that the largest democracies have mainstreamed hatred.

mOdi and his adoring Indian-American toadies believed that they could thread the needle through tRump's racism and xenophobia:

“Part of what makes it complicated for Indian-Americans is that they don’t like Trump for the most part and yet they like Modi,” Karthick Ramakrishnan, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Riverside and the director of AAPIData.com, a policy research and data firm that focused on Asians and Pacific Islanders, told Power Up. “They bristle against the kind of nationalism that Trump represents here in America, but then they still support Modi regardless of what he is doing in India. So, there is some ideological inconsistency there, but that is the kind of complicated world that we live in.”

A few months ago--which in the age of the coronavirus seems like an eternity--tRump and his trophy wife went to India, and the mOdi gang put on quite a show.

They forgot the old story from Hindu mythology that a scorpion, however friendly it might seem to be, is a scorpion that will eventually sting you, even to death.

The scorpion did its thing.

The freeze on work visas (H-1) was the first sting.

Nearly half of a million H-1B visas issued between 2004 and 2012 went to Indians. Along with their dependants they accounted for more than a fourth of the Indian-American population, which is currently around 3 million.

And then came the regulations regarding international students.

This headline says it all about the Indian perspective in response:

Trump admn slams door on F-1 visa students whose institutes have moved to online-only mode

So, whatever happened to Howdy mOdi and नमस्ते tRump?

This news report refers to that special "friendship" between mOdi and tRump:

Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) state chief and Sangrur MP Bhagwant Mann on Wednesday appealed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to leverage his friendship with US President Donald Trump for the benefit of millions of Indian students studying in the US so that they are not made to leave the country.

Do these people know anything about tRump?  Have they not been following various reports on the narcissistic sociopath that he is?

Blinded by their Islamophobia, mOdi and his toadies failed to recognize that their brown skins are not welcomed by tRump.

He hates the brown-skinned.  His party hates the brown-skinned. And a good chunk of his party hates immigration, especially of the brown-skinned.

I.Told.You.So!!!

The mask unveiled

In April 2010, which makes it more than ten years ago, I blogged about the French government fining a 31-year old French woman for wearing a niqab while driving.

Yep, that was her crime.

That seemed like a different era. I call that BC--Before Coronavirus.  Now, France requires everybody to wear masks in the public.  So, if masks are mandatory, then a niqab should work, right?  Keep in mind that there is a huge difference between a niqab and a burqa:

Source

A niqab and a face mask reveal the eyes comparably, right?  Here's a photo of the French president with a mask on:

Source

You put a baseball cap, er, beret, on Macron and the niqab equivalent will be complete.

But then in the age of the coronavirus, France reveals what the niqab ban is really about:

That one type of face covering is seen as withdrawing from society and another has become a sign of civic duty reflects the contradictory ways France defines community and solidarity, political analysts and historians say.
“It’s not a hypocrisy, it’s a schizophrenia at the end,” said Olivier Roy, a French scholar of secularism and Islam. “Which is to say that it’s about the problem of Islam. If you cover your face for Islam, it’s not the republic. If you cover your face for a reason not to do with Islam, it’s acceptable.”

So, if a woman ventures out wearing a niqab but not a face mask, "the result is a Catch-22. Those who do not wear a mask can be fined, as can those who violate the face-covering law."

Amnesty International notes that "the current recommendations on wearing face masks also lay bare the absurdity of the arguments that some European governments have used to prohibit the wearing of face coverings in the public space."  

When has politics not been a theatre of the absurd!

One politician has made a fashion statement out of masks.

Source

That person making a fashion statement is the president of Slovakia, Zuzana Čaputová.

Caputova was here in Eugene not too long ago.  When I met with her and chatted, I never imagined her as the president of her country!  Life --the coronavirus included--is beyond my imagination.

The rule of law, my ass!

I agree with the idea of rule of law.  But, I don't believe in the rule of law as it is.  What if, as Dickens described it, the law is an ass?

Think about this: Slavery was legal for a long time.  Yes, slavery was legal.  The Constitution as it was framed did not even consider blacks to be fully human!  Will we be happy with the rule of law as it was?

The rule of law also requires a constant critical examination of what is wrong with the law.  We humans are imperfect, and the laws we craft will be imperfect.  It is up to us to make laws less imperfect.

Last spring, we watched a documentary that taught us about yet another imperfection, which remained the law for a long time.  It was about the Chinese Exclusion Act.  The details in that completely floored me.  The law not only made it illegal for Chinese to come to America, it even denied the citizenship of those who were already in America.

The rule of law is not sacrosanct because the laws can be awful.

The challenge to the law went all the way to the US Supreme Court.  In 1889, the Court upheld this law.  And was the law for six decades.

Remind me again why the rule of law is sacrosanct!

In the recently concluded hearings at the Senate regarding the nomination of brett kavanugh to the Supreme Court, Kamala Harris asked the nominee about what he meant as settled law, which kavanaugh touted often.

In the 1889 Chinese Exclusion case, the Supreme Court permitted a ban on Chinese people entering the United States. The court said Chinese people are "impossible to assimilate with our people" and said they were immigrating in numbers "approaching an invasion." This case has never been explicitly overruled. Can you tell me was the United States Supreme Court correct in holding that Chinese people could be banned from entering our country,” Harris asked.

Even to a non-law person like me, it was obvious that the question was not really about the Chinese Exclusion Act per se. So what was the question really about?

It was about trump's Muslim Ban.

Go back to that Kamala Harris question, and make the following substitutions: Muslims in place of Chinese, and 2017 in place of 1889.  It becomes deja vu all over again, right?

Should such a case go up to the Supreme Court, what would kavanaugh do?

So, what was kavanaugh's response about the 1889 ruling?

It was pathetic. Awful. Disgusting.

Watch for yourself.

Cry me a river!

Europe has become an anti-immigrant continent.  Germany, too, where its chancellor is fighting to hold on to her job, which is under threat because of her past strong support for immigrants, especially refugees.

Anti-immigration sentiments mostly stem from "they" being "different."  The looks, speech, habits, dresses, ... Particularly if "they" are Muslims.  Even in the tiny country that is mostly irrelevant on the global stage.  No, I am not referring to the UK, but Denmark.

For decades, integrating immigrants has posed a thorny challenge to the Danish model, intended to serve a small, homogeneous population.

So, what is the Danish approach?

Denmark’s government is introducing a new set of laws to regulate life in 25 low-income and heavily Muslim enclaves, saying that if families there do not willingly merge into the country’s mainstream, they should be compelled.

Ah, yes, compel them.  "That tough approach is embodied in the “ghetto package.”"  And then the beatings will continue until the morale improves!

Whenever I read anything like that, the old anti-colonialist teenager that I was come out from within me.  But, what am I gonna do?  Stop eating havarti?

I did the only thing that I could do as a powerless member of the public.  I wrote a letter to the newspaper.  That will send a powerful message to the Danish government!  

Oh well, I know the letter wouldn't even get published, given the volume that the NY Times receives.  But, hey, I have my own blog where I can publish whatever I want; so, here is that letter:

Dear Editor:
I read with interest, "In Denmark, Harsh New Laws for Immigrant ‘Ghettos’".
Every time I read one of these reports on how European countries are "struggling" to deal with immigrants, especially Muslims , I wish such reports also included reminders about the past.
While Denmark might be peaceful now, with its people being the happiest on earth, the Danes imposed themselves on places and people far away from Scandinavia.  I grew up in the state of Tamil Nadu, in the southern tip of peninsular India.  In a small coastal town, Tharangambadi, Denmark established a trading post and then a fort nearly 400 years ago.  The Danish East India Company couldn't match the resources of the British East India Company, and ended up with a very small footprint in the Subcontinent.
Whether it is Denmark or France "struggling" with foreigners with hijabs and the Koran, it is history echoing how peoples far away from Europe "struggled" with foreigners who came with guns and the Bible.  I wonder if the native Danes are being educated about this even as the "ghetto children" are being forced into assimilation camps.

People, who don't need people?

Two years ago, the university where I work invited interested faculty members to self-nominate themselves to serve on the Strategic Planning Committee.  Given my interests in higher education, and given that the directions that the university sets through this committee will be in place until I retire or am fired, I nominated myself and provided evidence of my track record in thinking above and beyond mere courses and the small little bubbles in which most discussions are trapped.

Of course, I was not selected to be on that committee.  What do I know about higher education, right? 

In a brief thank-you email after receiving the notification that also included the list of faculty named to serve on the committee, I added a sentence that I hoped would make them all think about the committee's composition:

BTW, it seems kind of odd that faculty membership does not include any "people of color" as they say ;)

It was not diversity for the sake of diversity that I pointing out, but was instead about the need to think of the demographic reality.  Strategic Planning is about consciously developing specific action items for the future.  The demographic future of the country is in beige, the 2042 that even comedians joke about.  Oregon is notorious for not knowing how to deal with diversity, whether based on the superficial skin or on religion.   Especially Islam.

Everybody is talking and writing about Islam and the Arab world and Muslims.  The more one delves into the news, the more we realize we don't know anything about Islam, the Arab world, and Muslims.   It is bizarre that we are madly against something about which we know nothing!

Edward Said covered all these and more in his Orientalism.  Naturally.  Said had plenty of profound observations on the distorted--and intentional at that--understanding that the "West" has about Islam and the Arabs.

The scholar Edward Said took this point further, writing in his book Orientalism in 1978 that Islam had defined Europe culturally, by showing Europe what it was against. Europe’s very identity, in other words, was built in significant measure on a sense of superiority to the Muslim Arab world on its periphery. Imperialism proved the ultimate expression of this evolution

In a lengthy essay after his book was published, Said wrote--keep in mind that this was in 1980:

 If you were to ask an average literate Westerner to name an Arab or Islamic writer, or a musician, or an intellectual, you might get a name like Kahlil Gibran in response, but nothing else. In other words, whole swatches of Islamic history, culture and society simply do not exist except in the truncated, tightly packaged forms made current by the media. As Herbert Schiller has said, TV’s images tend to present reality in too immediate and fragmentary a form for either historical or human continuity to appear. Islam therefore is equivalent to an undifferentiated mob of scimitar-waving oil suppliers, or it is reduced to the utterances of one or another Islamic leader who at the moment happens to be a convenient foreign scapegoat.        

If that is the case with the average literate Westerner then do we need to even wonder why there are plenty of Americans today who eagerly embrace the anti-Muslim and anti-Arab rhetoric from the likes of trump!

Even at the university, the numbers of students from Saudi Arabia and their families have not been strategically used as opportunities to truly understand "them."  Instead, it seems that my university, like many others, merely continues to treat the foreigners as revenue sources, which is not that different from the "scimitar-waving oil suppliers" caricature that Said was upset about. 

Rewriting history in the land of immigrants

Nope. The title of this post should not lead you to think that this is about trump and the United States of America.  Though, yes, that could work too.

It is about another land of immigrants. One of the oldest ever.

I quoted that country's Supreme Court back in 2011:

While North America (USA and Canada) has new immigrants who came mainly from Europe over the last four or five centuries, India is a country of old immigrants in which people have been coming in over the last ten thousand years or so. Probably about 92 per cent of the people living in India today are descendants of immigrants, who came mainly from the North-West, and to a lesser extent from the North-East.

Yep, this post is about the fascist and his party in the old country. 

modi, the fascist, was elected a couple of years after that remark by the Supreme Court.  And, boy have things changed in a hurry in India. The overwhelmingly majority Hindu population seems to have gladly signed on to the fascist politics!

After coming to power, they quickly started rewriting India's history itself, very much consistent with George Orwell's warning in 1984, in which he wrote: "Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." 

Rewriting history, in which Winston Smith was employed, has always been a favorite of those fascist thugs.  And that is exactly what is unfolding in India now.

During the first week of January last year, a group of Indian scholars gathered in a white bungalow on a leafy boulevard in central New Delhi. The focus of their discussion: how to rewrite the history of the nation.
The government of Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi had quietly appointed the committee of scholars about six months earlier. Details of its existence are reported here for the first time.

Instead of the fictional Winston Smith, you have numerous modi's toadies working on this grand project. 

Where do non-Hindus fit into this history that is being rewritten?

For India’s Muslims, who have pointed to incidents of religious violence and discrimination since Modi took office in 2014, the development is ominous.
The head of Muslim party All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, Asaduddin Owaisi, said his people had “never felt so marginalised in the independent history of India.” “The government,” he said, “wants Muslims to live in India as second-class citizens.”

Yep, who controls the present controls the past, and who controls the past controls the future.

The American Carnage

When visiting with the folks, which typically happens in December, every morning I wake up, have coffee, and head out for a five-mile walk well before six.  As I exit the compound, it is almost always the same time when a group (all-Brahmim?) goes by reciting the Vishnu Sahasranamam.

Most of the words echo deep within my memories--I used to recite those verses when I was an obedient teenager ;)

The sing-song recitation in the pre-dawn darkness when the rest of the city is quiet is a sound that is soothing.

As I walk towards the public park, which is where I walk the laps, I pass by a masjid.  Their sing-song recitation of the Quran in the pre-dawn darkness when the rest of the city is quiet is a sound that is soothing.

I thought about these when I read about mike pence reverently visiting the Western Wall in Jerusalem.  And that reminded me about trump at the Western Wall a few months ago.

Which is when I got to thinking ... Has trump ever been to a mosque?  At least once?  Either as a private citizen, or as the President?  Has pence ever been to a mosque?  Have they ever been to a Hindu temple?

I wonder what the response would be if a journalist were to ask trump that question.  Perhaps he will simply ignore the question.  After all, his base would not want to hear him say anything other than bashing up Muslims as evil.

I wonder how many of the trump voters, including past commenters and neighbors, have ever participated in a religious worship gathering that was not Christian.  I wonder if any of them have any in their immediate or extended families a person who married outside their religion.  Chances are nil, I assume.

In these aspects, too, Obama was truly presidential and one who set a wonderful example for impressionable kids and youth.  Obama even hosted Iftar dinners at the White House!  Imagine trump or pence ever doing that!!!

At the Iftar dinner in 2015, Obama said this about "those who seek to divide us by religion or race or sect.:

Here in America, many people personally don’t know someone who is Muslim.  They mostly hear about Muslims in the news -- and that can obviously lead to a very distorted impression.
We saw this play out recently at a mosque in Arizona.  A group of protestors gathered outside with offensive signs against Islam and Muslims.  And then the mosque’s leaders invited them inside to share in the evening prayer.  One demonstrator, who accepted the invitation later, described how the experience changed him; how he finally saw the Muslim American community for what it is -- peaceful and welcoming.  That’s what can happen when we stop yelling and start listening.  

In contrast, we now we have a President who constantly feeds the yelling and screaming, and actively promotes hate.

In wrapping up that speech, Obama said:

Together, we can overcome ignorance and prejudice.  Together, we will overcome conflict and injustice -- not just with words, but with deeds.  With what a hero of mine, the civil rights icon John Lewis, calls using our feet -- getting out in the real world to organize and to create the change that we seek.  

And we know how trump described John Lewis.

We have fallen a great deal over the past two years, and we continue to descend deep down into darkness with the Republican "leaders" that we now have in the White House and Congress.

The virus that wouldn't die

In her routine, the stand-up comedian and actor, Sarah Silverman had a valid observation: She said that she is a product of her upbringing.  Her liberal activism is not a surprise, she said, given that she grew up with progressive Jewish parents.

You are perhaps nodding in agreement.

What about the children who grew up with parents who taught them to hate?  It is not difficult to imagine that there are adults who hate pick-your-group, and these adults have kids.  They are not going to teach their kids to love everybody when they are filled with hate for some "wrong" kind of people, right?  (Here's a lengthy essay on one such real life person, if you are interested.)

modi, putin, trump, duterte, and the like (all men?) have mainstreamed hate.  What previously was said and done only behind closed doors and in secret is now openly said and done.  Unlike the small pox or polio virus, hate apparently cannot be completely eliminated, and it keeps coming back to cause epidemics over and over again.  And, in the process, the hate virus infects even people who were brought up by parents who taught their children well.

Over the past few years, it seems that Muslims have displaced Blacks as the most hated group.  It is just bizarre that the hate virus goes after new targets if attacking the old targets do not produce the virulence that was once possible.  It does not matter to the religious that their messiah preached about love, and not about hate.  We humans are messed up.

Even the Buddha's name cannot stop his followers, it seems.  Yes, I am referring to the crazy hate-filled Buddhist monks leading the war against Muslims in Myanmar.  I first blogged about this back in April 2013.   Imagine that!

In 2014, I wrote that it is practically game over when even Buddhists commit genocide.  In 2015, I was shocked that even the Dalai Lama could not get the attention of the Myanmar politicians; they didn't care for what the respected religious leader had to say.

Earlier this year, before the fascist's official swearing-in, I wrote that we should stop saying "never again" given how much we have stood by witnessing the Myanmar genocide.  Should we be surprised then that the rest of the world has gone on with its business of hating immigrants, Muslims, Blacks, gays, trans, ...

Is hate, or evil,  a permanent feature of the human condition?  Or, "As the American clergyman William Sloane Coffin put it: “Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer, and nothing is more difficult than to understand him.”"

On immigrants and refugees in trumpistan

Soon it will be the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere.  But then, every day has seemed long like the longest day ever since the disastrous November election.

The president campaigned on various hateful themes, including putting an end to Muslim refugees and to undocumented immigrants. Those themes, and more, won him the few votes that made all the difference in states like Pennsylvania where Hillary Clinton got 2,926,441 votes versus 2,970,733 for trump.  A difference of 44,292 votes.  Clinton's share was 47,46% of the votes cast, and trump's was 48.18%  The winner-take-all electoral votes went to trump.

How are things in trumpistan?

Immigration law is being enforced more aggressively. Out in rural Pennsylvania, in a county Donald Trump carried with 66% of the vote, this is already having a devastating effect on the economy and culture.

That is from an uber-left publication?  Nope; it is an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal!

Beautiful as it is, York Springs is the sort of place people leave after they finish high school. When I moved here in 2012, real estate was cheap and abandoned houses dotted the back roads. The town was aging and dying, though Mexican newcomers were already bringing green shoots. Over the past five years I’ve seen a steady renewal. Townspeople have fixed up many old houses and are raising families.
There has been a little tension, but York Springs in recent years has developed a vibrant, intersectional culture, insofar as that’s possible in such a sparsely populated place.

And then the elections happened.

This stringent enforcement of immigration law is destroying a rich, new rural culture. It’s likely to destroy the economy, too. The orchards generate over $500 million a year, and, one way or another, most of the jobs. But the local growers, many of whom have been operating the family orchards for generations, worry they won’t have enough manpower this fall to harvest the crop.
Sure, a lot of the white folk out here voted for Mr. Trump. Even then, many of them had reservations specifically about his immigration stance. I heard them expressed by Trump supporters in line to vote at the Latimore Township building. Now as we spiral into a local depression that is personal, cultural and economic, a lot of them are going to regret voting for him anyway.

An hour away from York Springs is Lancaster, deep in the Amish country.  This area too was won by trump.  What I didn't know until today is this, which I came across in my Twitter feed:

Lancaster, PA, hosts more refugees per capita than any other place in USA. And they raise money for the work via... square dancing parties! pic.twitter.com/HqwI7OuaaX

— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) June 11, 2017

The ever doubting me did a quick Google search.  It is true.  Like in this news report from a couple of months ago:

Here in Lancaster County, a politically conservative area well known for its Amish community, traditional Christian values run deep. Since the Church World Service opened a Lancaster office 30 years ago, it has been a favored destination for resettling refugees because churches here easily assemble welcome teams whose members see it as a godly duty to care for those in need.
In the last fiscal year, Lancaster County resettled more than 400 refugees from all over the world, with the largest numbers coming from the Congo and Syria.

For once, I hope that the white supremacist British bastard, aka Churchill, was correct when he said that Americans will do the right thing after they exhaust all other possibilities.  After electing trump, there is nothing worse that we can do.  Here is to hoping that better days are ahead.

But, of course, hope alone won't change the world.  So, I did the next best thing that I could: I donated.

Speak. Don’t be without a voice.

Remember Khizr Khan?  The Pakistani-American who spoke at the Democratic convention?  And he was later savagely attacked by the man who was elected to the White House by Republicans?

Yes, that Khizr Khan.

The New Yorker has an interview with him.  By Robin Wright, whose writings on global affairs are always phenomenally educational.  The executive order by the POTUS is the context.  You know which one that is:

executive order banning the entry of Syrian refugees indefinitely and all refugees for four months. The executive order suspends the entry of all citizens from seven predominantly Muslim countries—Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen—for ninety days. 

 I cannot even begin to imagine what an Iranian-American goes through.  I think about the sweet and gentle Shahab, who was an Iranian-American.

It is terrible what this POTUS and his people are doing to Muslim-Americans, Muslims anywhere, and to the entire world.  Terrible!

As I wrote, back in June 2016, in an op-ed:

The anti-Muslim rhetoric makes a mockery of the noble idea of freedom to practice religion — a freedom that has been a foundational principle of the United States. ...
When we know people and have developed meaningful relationships with the “other,” it becomes difficult to tolerate sweeping statements that condemn hundreds of millions of Muslims because of a minuscule minority that bombs and kills. 

Anyway, I read Wright's interview with Khan.  His message not only to Muslims in America but to "all American patriots" includes this:

Don’t be without a voice. Speak about the issues that affect your society.

I wonder if perhaps Khan was also channeling the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, who became a Pakistani after the horrible partition of India.

Speak, by Faiz Ahmed Faiz
Speak, your lips are free.
Speak, it is your own tongue.
Speak, it is your own body.
Speak, your life is still yours.

See how in the blacksmith's shop
The flame burns wild, the iron glows red;
The locks open their jaws,
And every chain begins to break.

Speak, this brief hour is long enough
Before the death of body and tongue:
Speak, 'cause the truth is not dead yet,
Speak, speak, whatever you must speak.

Never again should we bother with "never again" :(

Up until four years ago, I had no idea about the Rohingya--the Muslim community that stands out in a Buddhist Burma.  In fact, if things were going well, I would not have known about them at all.  Perhaps all the way till my own end.

But, I read about them because all was not well.  Buddhist maniacs, especially led by one with an ominous nickname--the Buddhist bin Laden--were engaging in violence of every possible kind in order to wipe out the Ronhingya from Burma.

It was even more depressing when the much lauded Nobel Peace Prize-winning Aung San Suu Kyi kept silent.  Not a word from her.

I understand that a nobody like me can express all the righteous indignation I want, but that politicians have to compromise on principles in order to get things done.  But, compromise is one thing, and ethnic-cleansing/genocide is entirely another.  This NY Times report is a tough read!

The NY Times editorial says everything that I want to say:

Last month, President Obama lifted sanctions against Myanmar, citing “substantial progress in improving human rights” following the historic election victory of the Nobel laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party in November 2015. Tragically, that praise is proving premature.

Premature because of "a military campaign against the Rohingya."  In addition to covering things up:

Myanmar’s government has barred independent journalists from the region, and dismissed reports of abuses as “fake news” and “fake rape.”

The US, under the demagogue and his minions, is now providing plenty of cover for regimes to criticize the media reports as fake.  A remarkably depressing beacon we have become for the world!  Further, with all the Muslim-bashing that the fuhrer and his people did and do, we have no moral ground to tell the likes of Burma to stop the atrocities.  Thanks, you atrocious Republican voters!

We will simply stand by and watch as more and more Rohingya sob while saying, “They killed my father and mother. What is left for me in this world?”  Or like this:

Noor Ankis, 25, said the next morning soldiers went from house to house looking for young women.
“They grouped the women together and brought them to one place,” she said. “The ones they liked they raped. It was just the girls and the military, no one else was there.”
She said the idea of trying to escape flickered through her head, but she was overcome by fatalism. “I felt there was no point in being alive,” she said.

"Never again" has become such a hollow phrase. Sad!

History is just one damned thing after another

The seventh and eighth centuries were the years were when the Pallava Empire in the southern peninsular India was at its peak.  (Click here for my favorite post after visiting an old Pallava temple.)  About that time, the concept of zero in mathematics was a breakthrough invention in a different part of India. The Hindu-Arabic number system, along with zero, then spread to Europe, as interactions between Muslims and Europeans escalated after the first conquest in of the Iberian Peninsula in 711 by the invading Muslims.  Thus, as Bertrand Russell is supposed to have remarked to Jawaharlal Nehru, India gave "nothing" to the world.

While the mathematician-philosopher Russell was punning about the "nothing," there are quite a few white supremacists who passionately believe, out of their arrogance and ignorance, that nothing good ever came from any part of the world that was not European and Christian.  The GOP's Steve King spoke for them all:

"I'd ask you to go back through history and figure out, where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you're talking about, where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?"

How conveniently we forget history, and how easily do we spin stories that do not have to resemble truth in any form!  King went on to talk about the glories of Western Civilization and Christianity, before the host of the show effectively cut him off.

Oh well ... The world seems to have forgotten about the long and rich history of Islam in Europe.  A year ago, Robert Kaplan argued in his short essay that Europe's identity itself was nothing but a response to Islam:

Europe was essentially defined by Islam. And Islam is redefining it now. ... the swift advance of Islam across North Africa in the seventh and eighth centuries virtually extinguished Christianity there, thus severing the Mediterranean region into two civilizational halves, with the “Middle Sea” a hard border between them rather than a unifying force. Since then, as the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset observed, “all European history has been a great emigration toward the North.”

The Crusades, and then the colonial empires.

Europe’s very identity, in other words, was built in significant measure on a sense of superiority to the Muslim Arab world on its periphery. Imperialism proved the ultimate expression of this evolution: Early modern Europe, starting with Napoleon, conquered the Middle East, then dispatched scholars and diplomats to study Islamic civilization, classifying it as something beautiful, fascinating, and—most crucial—inferior.

That "inferior" is what now King and his fellow white supremacists in the GOP talk about!

The colonial era of the recent times brings us to Nice, which "was part of the Kingdom of Sardinia":

It was not until 1860 that Nice would become a permanent part of France, thirty years after France invaded and occupied Algeria. In the Second World War the region was occupied by Italy, and Nice became a refuge for Jews fleeing persecution in Vichy France, allied with Nazi Germany. When the Germans seized the city in 1943, they deported thousands of Jews to be murdered in occupied Poland.
When France’s 132 year colonial history in North Africa came to an end in 1962, more than a million people left Algeria, and others left Tunisia and Morocco to “return” to a France that was not their home.
Among them were Europeans of different origins, many North African Jews, and Muslims who had fought for the French in Africa. 

All that complicated history, along with the recent economic migration, is why at least 30 of the dead in the attack in Nice were local and visiting Muslims.  Including children.

Oucine Jamouli, 62, the head of a Moroccan association, attributed the heavy Muslim turnout at least partly to the fact that there is less drinking at the Bastille Day festival than at other big events in Nice because it is a family-oriented celebration.
It is also less religious than Nice’s other major festivals: a Christmas market, the Carnival festival at Mardi Gras and the fireworks for Aug. 15, which marks the Catholic feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary to heaven.  

Nice is, thus, more than the mere French Riviera, and is a city that is increasingly divided by religion and ethnicity, and the political leaders who want to deepen this divide;

Muslim and non-Muslim, lived alongside each other in relative peace for generations, but that has begun to change along with the rise of France’s far-right National Front party, led by Marine Le Pen. Nice is governed by the center-right, which includes the Republicans, but some say its leaders increasingly play the politics of division.

I suppose getting along will become increasingly difficult in such a political climate.  But then, history is one damned story of people not getting along! :(

This wasted land, Kashmir

For a while now, I have not blogged anything that is focused on India.  Of course, I refer to my experiences in the old country because of the autoethnographic approach in my way of understanding the world.  But, it has been a long, long, while since I commented on anything that is going on in India.

All because--and this will not agree well with Indians, and with Ramesh in particular--I have given up on India :(

Like how a family simply gives up after years of riding the roller coaster of emotions as the relative continues to go down a destructive path, I decided a few months ago that for my own sanity I needed to disengage from the internal happenings in the old country that is so dear to me.

But then, it is not as if we can completely shut ourselves off.  We might get updates about the relative through the grapevine.  An occasional sighting somewhere.  Or the news of something that happened.  It is an unfortunate development that compels me to blog about the old country.  The news reports from Kashmir.

One image, among many, brought me to tears.  Literally. I paused to clear my eyes before I continued to read on.  It was this photograph:

Source

That is an x-ray of a boy who was one of the many Kashmiris who were pummeled by India's military with pellet guns.  The sparkling rhinestones in the x-ray are the tiny iron balls, the ball bearings, that got lodged in him.  Count them! 

The tiny iron balls have also blinded--yes, blinded--so many that eye surgeons have been rushed to Kashmir to treat them, most of whom will not get their eyesight back. (The number of reports of people--including kids pelleted--is why I am convinced that the x-ray image is real.)  Those with the tiny iron balls in their eyes include this Kashmiri:

Source

When a democratic government uses such cruel violence against its own people, pacifists like me lose all hope.

I found it particularly awful to look at the following photograph of India's military shooting at Kashmiris, after aiming at the target--humans:

Source

It reminded me of a notably violent incident from the decades of the white supremacists' political control of the Subcontinent: The afternoon at Jallianwalla Bagh a hundred years ago, when civilians who had gathered at the park for a political rally were mercilessly gunned down, was one of the darkest of the darkest of the many dark moments of the British Raj, 

The Indian government behaves as if it is a nineteenth century European colonizer, controlling the natives.  The Indian government in New Delhi has merely replaced the Queen's Viceroy!  If the natives rebel, they shall be put down with brute force.

If only a referendum had been held decades ago, soon after the departure of the white supremacists.  Instead, we have witnessed India's occupation of Kashmir and the wars with Pakistan, we bear witness to the violence that continues on, and Kashmir is the most militarized region in the world.

The government violence in Kashmir, and the lone-wolf violence in Nice have crushed me inside.   I will return to blogging after a couple of days.

Understanding ‘others’ essential in today’s world

(For The Register-Guard: June 8, 2016)

My childhood classmates came from diverse religious backgrounds. This included Farooq and Yasmeen, among others, who were Muslims. Of the teachers, I still recall Yusuf Ali, who was the machine shop instructor. Thanks to India’s diversity, and to life in an industrial setting, we Hindu kids went to school with Muslims and Christians, and even my highly religious and orthodox grandmothers did not worry about “traditional values.”

As a kid, I did not know that there were Muslims in America. When the name of a boxer, Muhammad Ali, appeared in the newspaper, The Hindu, I assumed he was one of our people who had moved to America.

In the grainy black-and-white news photographs more than four decades back, Ali easily looked like one of us — only immensely more handsome. When my brother and I fought, much to our mother’s displeasure, we sometimes imagined that we were boxing like Ali, though neither one of us knew anything about the sport.

As a fresh-off-the-boat student, I made friends for the first time ever with a student, Siddiqui, who was from India’s arch-enemy — Pakistan. Toward the end of my first year of graduate school, when I was getting introduced to life here in America, I was amused by the sight of my classmate John — a white skateboarding dude — practically worshiping a basketball player named Kareem.

Even while the mullahs of Iran were always in the political crosshairs, the Iranian-­Americans in Southern California went freely out and about — and were seemingly one of the more prosperous groups, too. In those early years of my life in America it seemed as though nothing was said or written in public that was against Islam and Muslims.

After such a healthy head start in my life in the old country and then in this adopted home, it shocks me to no end now when I hear or read virulent anti-Muslim remarks, especially from those seeking or holding elected office. The anti-Muslim rhetoric makes a mockery of the noble idea of freedom to practice religion — a freedom that has been a foundational principle of the United States.

While neither Farooq nor Yasmeen lives in the United States, I think of those old schoolmates when very serious people make yet another anti-Muslim comment. I recall how Siddiqui and I shared the foods that we made as struggling graduate students. When we know people and have developed meaningful relationships with the “other,” it becomes difficult to tolerate sweeping statements that condemn hundreds of millions of Muslims because of a minuscule minority that bombs and kills.

Muhammad Ali’s death provides us with yet another context for learning about Islam, and about Muslims in America.

Islam in America is nothing new. Thomas Jefferson owned a copy of the Quran, which provided him with more than a passing familiarity with the religion and its practices.

Researchers estimate that between 15 percent to 30 percent of slaves were Muslims. One of those was Omar Ibn Said, whose life-story has been well documented. Imagine the double whammy of being a slave who was also a Muslim, after having been raised in what is now the West African country of Senegal!

Islam’s holy month of Ramadan, which began on Sunday, is another opportunity to get to know the religion and its faithful. For a month, most of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims will fast from sunrise until sunset, to remind themselves about the mortals that we humans are and about the fragility of life without food and water. This fasting alone, which humbles the rich and the poor alike, ought to trigger the curiosity of those who harbor only suspicions about the “other.”

One of the challenges in this rapidly globalizing world is for us to understand the “other.” While in centuries past it might have been easier for people to spend an entire life fully within their own respective tribes, we live in a world in which mixing of people and ideas is the norm, not the exception.

It is also clear that the momentum of globalization will not slow down — it will only pick up more speed. This requires all of us to broaden our horizons. To borrow from the late Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore’s “Where the mind is without fear” — a poem Yasmeen, Farooq and I read in school — we need to create a world of freedom that has not been broken into fragments by narrow domestic walls. It is difficult work to create such a heaven right here on Earth, but is an effort worth pursuing.

Hey, the Donald has issued his Ramadan greetings!

Think about May 27th next year--as in 2017.  I know it is difficult to think about a year from now.  But, go ahead,  Think about it.

By then, the new President of the US would have been in office for four months.  Now, imagine President Donald Trump issuing a Ramadan greetings message on May 27, 2017.

If you are not a Trump supporter, then you won't be able to imagine the fascist wishing the Muslims in America and the world.  If you are a Trump supporter, then you know well that he ain't gonna wish Muslims anything good, which is one of the few reasons that you are supporting him in the first place!  (Editor's note: What?  You have Trump supporters reading your blog?)

Trump saying anything informed about Muslims is beyond anybody's wildest imagination.  As Sam Harris remarked, everything that Trump knows about Islam and Muslims won't even take up the 140 characters that Twitter allows!

The current President, Obama, who--along with his wife--have set themselves as examples of class act for children all over the world, and who will be sorely missed after the new year--included in his Ramadan message this:

Far too many Muslims may not be able to observe Ramadan from the comfort of their own homes this year or afford to celebrate Eid with their children. We must continue working together to alleviate the suffering of these individuals. This sacred time reminds us of our common obligations to uphold the dignity of every human being.

Trump, who doesn't care about "the dignity of every human being", had this to say about Muslim judges in this country, when asked by John Dickerson:

Mr. Dickerson asked Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, if a Muslim judge would be similarly biased because of Mr. Trump’s call for a ban on Muslim immigrants. “It’s possible, yes,” Mr. Trump said. “Yeah. That would be possible. Absolutely.”
When Mr. Dickerson said there was a tradition in the United States, a nation of immigrants, against judging people based on heritage, Mr. Trump replied, “I’m not talking about tradition, I’m talking about common sense, O.K.?”

Can you imagine a President Trump having a Eid celebration dinner at the White House to mark the end of Ramadan, after uttering one contemptuous statement after another?

Meanwhile, in the old colonial headquarters, London, from where the white supremacists bled half the world in order to make themselves rich and fat, it will be the first Ramadan while in office for the newly elected mayor, Sadiq Khan, who is the son of Muslim immigrants.  Khan embodies two words that fire up Trump and his faithful fanatics: "Muslim" and "immigrants"

Khan said that Trump's "inflammatory remarks about Islam could threaten security in Britain and the United States":

“Trump’s ignorant view of Islam could make both our countries less safe,” Mr. Khan wrote on Twitter on Tuesday morning. “It risks alienating mainstream Muslims. London has proved him wrong.”

Reports suggest that Trump will soon be visiting the UK.  No, it is not to meet with political leaders and show that he can be presidential.  Trump will be there in less than three weeks to, get this, "at the Turnberry hotel at the golf course in south-west Scotland on 24 June for its official relaunch following a £200m redevelopment."  Which draws the appropriate response from across the party divide:

Tommy Vietor, a longtime aide to President Obama and a former US National Security Council spokesman, said the fact that Trump is “leaving the country this close to the election to promote his golf resort is another reminder that he cares more about himself and making money than his campaign”. 

So, yes, go ahead and imagine President Trump!!!

Muslims in America?

It was my father, I am sure, who set me on the path of reading the newspaper every morning with his routine of sitting with the paper (and sometimes taking it to the bathroom too!)  Early on in my life--I wish I knew exactly when it happened--I got to that habit.  I was so much addicted that if The Hindu wasn't there, anxiety set in.

I read every page, whether or not I understood the deeper issues.  One of the most confusing moments, which I still recall, was when the business section of the paper had a report that jute prices were affected because of oil prices.  I could not ask anybody about it because in the culture back then we kids did not nag the elders with questions and I was terrified of teachers to ask them.  Stupid is as stupid does!

I read the sports pages too, and keenly followed the action even when I had not participated in the real world even for a nanosecond.  I celebrated the fact that a Muhammad Ali was winning boxing fights.  I did not understand what a jab or a hook meant, but I felt joyous that there was a name that I could recognize who was winning over names that were alien to me.  But, the mystery deepened within: how did one of our guys manage to get to America in order to box?

If the world is confusing to adults, well, it was head-spinning to the kid that I was.  Muhammad Ali looked like he could have been from India, was dark-skinned, and had a Muslim name, but was in America?

Imagine my surprise when I learnt that there were Muslims in the US and that Ali was one of the American Muslims.  When we are kids, I suppose the world is a fascinating place about which we are constantly learning something new every single day, but for some reason as we get older we think we have seen it all and that we know it all--and we stop being amazed with all things all around us.

Much later in life, here in the new country, I watched documentaries, especially Eyes on the Prize, which made me understand and appreciate Ali not for the boxing, which I don't care for, but for the phenomenally courageous civil rights fighter that he was, and for how well he articulated his views.  Which is also why of the homages that I read about Ali, I liked this part in Kareem Abdul Jabbar's tribute:

Today we bow our heads at the loss of a man who did so much for America. Tomorrow we will raise our heads again remembering that his bravery, his outspokenness, and his sacrifice for the sake of his community and country lives on in the best part of each of us.

Indeed!

Slate notes this from Ali's interview with Playboy back in 1975 on how he wanted to be remembered:

… I’ll tell you how I’d like to be remembered: as a black man who won the heavyweight title and who was humorous and who treated everyone right. As a man who never looked down on those who looked up to him and who helped as many of his people as he could–financially and also in their fight for freedom, justice and equality. As a man who wouldn’t hurt his people’s dignity by doing anything that would embarrass them. As a man who tried to unite his people through the faith of Islam that he found when he listened to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. And if all that’s asking too much, then I guess I’d settle for being remembered only as a great boxing champion who became a preacher and a champion of his people. And I wouldn’t even mind if folks forgot how pretty I was.

A "champion of his people" he certainly was.  And a pretty one at that.

Remember Aylan Kurdi?

Remember this from nearly a year ago?

Who the fuck cares, right?  I mean, given the more important and urgent issues like how a man's fingers tell us about the size of his penis!  Especially when that was a Muslim male child, who would have only grown up to be a terrorist, right?  We are seriously fucked up in our understanding of what it means to be human! :(

That kid had a name.  Aylan Kurdi.  He had a family who loved and cherished him.  His father, who managed to survive, remembers and laments:

Aylan Kurdi's father has said his son and family "died for nothing" after a string of boat disasters in the Mediterranean that have put 2016 on course to be the deadliest ever year for refugees.

The father continues:

“Refugee children continue to drown every day, the war in Syria has not stopped,” he told Italy's La Repubblica newspaper.
“I see countries who build walls and others that do not want to accept us. My Aylan died for nothing, little has changed.”

I never would have imagined that I would live through a time when the entire world simply stood and watched a humanitarian disaster unfold before our eyes--in real time, thanks to the global electronic coverage.  It is depressing to think about how we simply do not care a shit about this tragedy.

You think yet another photograph of yet another dead child will make any damn difference?

Source

We won't care about the death of this child, too.  We will run marathons, watch ball games, and spend gazillions on entertainment of every possible kind.  Hey, it is a free market where people exercise their preferences.  Our preferences clearly reveal that we don't care a shit when people struggle for their very existence.  Especially the brown people.

The unidentified child died in one of the three big tragedies involving migrant boats last week that left more than 700 people dead, coinciding with an increasing number of people who are attempting the perilous crossing to Europe as the weather improves.

It will be a long summer of tragedies.  Yawn!

My university and Europe

The university where I work invited interested faculty members to self-nominate themselves to serve on the Strategic Planning Committee.  Given my interests in higher education, and given that the directions that the university sets through this committee will be in place until I retire or am fired, I nominated myself and provided evidence of my track record in thinking above and beyond mere courses and the small little bubbles in which most discussions are trapped.

Of course, I was not selected to be on that committee.  What do I know about higher education!

In a brief thank-you email after receiving the notification that also included the list of faculty named to serve on the committee, I added a sentence that I hoped would make them all think about the committee's composition:

BTW, it seems kind of odd that faculty membership does not include any "people of color" as they say ;)

It was not diversity for the sake of diversity that I pointing out, but was instead about the need to think of the demographic reality.  Strategic Planning is about consciously developing specific action items for the future.  The demographic future of the country is in beige, the 2042 that even comedians joke about.  Oregon is notorious for not knowing how to deal with diversity, whether based on the superficial skin or on religion.   Especially Islam.

Everybody is talking and writing about Islam and the Arab world and Muslims.  The more one delves into the news, the more we realize we don't know anything about Islam, the Arab world, and Muslims.  Robert Kaplan writes that "Europe was essentially defined by Islam. And Islam is redefining it now."

The cultural purity that Europe craves in the face of the Muslim-refugee influx is simply impossible in a world of increasing human interactions.
“The West,” if it does have a meaning beyond geography, manifests a spirit of ever more inclusive liberalism. Just as in the 19th century there was no going back to feudalism, there is no going back now to nationalism, not without courting disaster.

In his short essay, Kaplan makes extensive reference to Edward Said's Orientalism.  Naturally.  Said had plenty of profound observations on the distorted--and intentional at that--understanding that the "West" has about Islam and the Arabs.

The scholar Edward Said took this point further, writing in his book Orientalism in 1978 that Islam had defined Europe culturally, by showing Europe what it was against. Europe’s very identity, in other words, was built in significant measure on a sense of superiority to the Muslim Arab world on its periphery. Imperialism proved the ultimate expression of this evolution

In a lengthy essay after his book was published, Said wrote--keep in mind that this was in 1980:

 If you were to ask an average literate Westerner to name an Arab or Islamic writer, or a musician, or an intellectual, you might get a name like Kahlil Gibran in response, but nothing else. In other words, whole swatches of Islamic history, culture and society simply do not exist except in the truncated, tightly packaged forms made current by the media. As Herbert Schiller has said, TV’s images tend to present reality in too immediate and fragmentary a form for either historical or human continuity to appear. Islam therefore is equivalent to an undifferentiated mob of scimitar-waving oil suppliers, or it is reduced to the utterances of one or another Islamic leader who at the moment happens to be a convenient foreign scapegoat.        

If that is the case with the average literate Westerner then do we need to even wonder why there are plenty of Americans today who eagerly embrace the anti-Muslim and anti-Arab rhetoric from Donald Trump and Ted Cruz!

Even at the university, the numbers of students from Saudi Arabia and their families have not been strategically used as opportunities to truly understand "them."  Instead, it seems that my university, like many others, merely continues to treat the foreigners as revenue sources, which is not that different from the "scimitar-waving oil suppliers" caricature that Said was upset about.

At this rate, it seems like it will be a close race between my exit from the university and the ultimate exit itself ;)