The Satanic Verses became Salman's Rush(to)Die.

Sometime in the spring of 1989, I swung by Tridib Banerjee's office to chalk out my plans for the summer.  I was going to India, and was hoping to get a little bit of research done under his guidance.

As is always the case with such visits, the conversations were less about the scheduled agenda and more about everything else.  That particular meeting was all about Salman Rushdie and his controversial novel, The Satanic Verses.  Stroking his beard, as he often did, Tridib asked me whether I wanted to take with me a copy to India--he had one to spare because both he and his wife had purchased a copy.  "It is banned in India, you know."

I didn't take up Tridib's offer.  In fact, to this day, I haven't read The Satanic Verses.  Not because of any religious faith, and not because I am worried that a fanatic will kill me for having read it.  I just wasn't interested in it. Plain and simple.  After all, there are many, many things all around me in which I have no interest whatsoever, and this happens to be one.

During my undergraduate days, I read Rushdie's Midnight's Children and thoroughly enjoyed it.  A couple of years ago, Rushdie was on BookTV's "In Depth" program and I recall watching it practically from the beginning till the end.  The guy is brilliant.  Quite a few questions there were also about the Islamic fundamentalist response to his book.

It is quite an irony of a coincidence that his memoir about all those fatwa years is being released at the same time that radical fundamentalists have been creating quite some news with their violent response to a reportedly moronic and sophomoric video on Islam and its prophet.  Rushdie sure knows how to get himself into the middle of the action!

In the excerpts published in the New Yorker, Rushdie writes about the confluence of various events that led to his writing this controversial fiction, including this event:

In 1982, the actor Amitabh Bachchan, the biggest star of the Bombay cinema, had suffered a near-fatal injury to his spleen while doing his own movie stunts in Bangalore. In the months that followed, his hospitalization was daily front-page news. As he lay close to death, the nation held its breath; when he rose again, the effect was almost Christlike. There were actors in southern India who had attained almost godlike status by portraying the gods in movies called mythologicals. Bachchan had become semi-divine even without such a career. But what if a god-actor, afflicted with a terrible injury, had called out to his god in his hour of need and heard no reply? What if, as a result of that appalling divine silence, such a man were to begin to question, or even to lose, the faith that had sustained him? Might he, in such a crisis of the soul, begin to lose his mind as well? And might he in his dementia flee halfway around the world, forgetting that when you run away you can’t leave yourself behind? What would such a falling star be called? The name came to him at once, as if it had been waiting for him to capture it. Gibreel. The Angel Gabriel, Gibreel Farishta. Gibreel and Chamcha: two lost souls in the roofless continuum of the unhoused. They would be his protagonists.

Most of us followed the news about Amitabh and went on with our lives. Rushdie finds an inspiration for a novel!

Can one imagine something like The Satanic Verses being published in the contemporary world?  Even Rushdie thinks not:

The writer said the banning of his book in many countries and the subsequent threats on his life had created a "long-term chilling effect".
"A book which was critical of Islam would be difficult to be published now," he told the BBC's Will Gompertz.
He said the only way to solve the issue was for publishers to "be braver".
"The only way of living in a free society is to feel that you have the right to say and do stuff," he said.

One of the powerful ayatollahs in Iran is confident that the film that sparked the current violence would never have been made if only Rushdie had been killed back then!

Ayatollah Hassan Sanei, head of a powerful state foundation providing relief to the poor, said the film would never have been made if the order to execute Rushdie, issued by the late Iranian spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had been carried out.

Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced a fatwa sentencing the author to death in 1989 after declaring his novel, The Satanic Verses, "blasphemous", but Iranian officials later indicated it would not be implemented.

"It [the film] won't be the last insulting act as long as Imam Khomeini's historic order on executing the blasphemous Salman Rushdie is not carried out," he said in a statement.

"If the imam's order was carried out, the further insults in the form of caricatures, articles and films would not have taken place. The impertinence of the grudge-filled enemies of Islam, which is occurring under the flag of the Great Satan, America and the racist Zionists, can only be blocked by the absolute administration of this Islamic order."

 The same news item also reports on a renewed bounty for Rushdie's life.  The guy's misfortunes continue. 

Remember the Kerala professor whose arm was chopped off?

It was two years ago that extremists, in the name of defending their religion, chopped off the arm of a college professor in Kerala.  In front of his family. 

As if this wasn't enough, his employer soon fired him from his teaching job.

Whatever happened to him since then?

Two years after his right palm was chopped off by alleged activists of the Popular Front of India (PFI), T.J. Joseph, former professor of Newman College, Thodupuzha, is still battling physical disability.
The palm that was stitched back, his left hand and left leg still give him a great deal of pain and discomfort.

All these mean that he has been forced to learn to live a new life:

“I learned to write with the left hand and I still struggle with the fingers in the right hand as I can’t fold them. I also can’t fold the little finger in my left hand. I can’t walk properly as I had multiple fractures on the left leg as well,” he said.

How terrible!

I am certain that I do not have even the tiniest percentage of the perseverance and determination that Joseph has.

Writhing in pain, T J Joseph is writing a book with his left hand, two years after that fateful Sunday.
In between, life taught some bitter lessons to Joseph who taught Malayalam language and literature for hundreds of students over the years.
 But he is on a positive note.
 “There is a cause for every action. I am writing the book to tell the world that don’t ever give up,” he reveals his intention behind the endeavour.
Writing is not an easy affair for Joseph as his right hand is yet to regain its strength after the attack while his family considers July 4 as his day of resurrection.
The book would narrate his life in exile after a case against him, the attack, the painful hospital days and his vision about life.
 He expects to complete the book in a year’s time.

So, were the brutal attackers tried and sentenced to time in prison?  Did the college realize its idiocy in firing him? 

No and No :(

The National Investigation Agency (NIA) which conducted the probe is yet to file the final chargesheet.
The case Joseph filed against the college management is before the University Appellate Tribunal in Thiruvananthapuram. “I have two more years of service and I hope I will be reinstated as I have done nothing wrong,” he said.

A tragic irony that all these happened in Kerala, which is often hailed as a progressive state!  To put it differently, if such things can happen in a "progressive" Kerala, then one has to wonder how much worse things might be in Bihar or Orissa--more than whatever is reported, that is!

Fatwa of the day: on women and bananas. Yes, it is about that!

Asra Q. Nomani writes:

This past week, an email pinged around the world, claiming that a Muslim cleric "residing in Europe" issued a, well, interesting fatwa, or religious ruling, banning Muslim women from touching bananas or cucumbers: “He said that these fruits and vegetables ‘resemble the male penis’ and hence could arouse women or ‘make them think of sex,'" according to a report in a supposed Egyptian website, BikyaMasr. The Times of India ran the story: "Islamic cleric bans women from touching bananas."
"If women wish to eat these food items, a third party, preferably a male related to them such as their a father or husband, should cut the items into small pieces and serve," the cleric supposedly dictated.
It's hard to confirm that the fatwa is true, but the fact that we, in the Muslim community, would even think it's possible is a reflection of just how inane the phenomenon of fatwas has become in the Muslim community.

She adds the following as her favorites of the inane ones:

1. A man can work with a woman to whom he's not a brother, father, uncle, or son, if he drinks her breast milk first.
2. A husband can divorce his wife with a text message, declaring: "I divorce you. I divorce you. I divorce you.”
3. Muslim girls can't be tomboys.
4. Mickey Mouse is a corrupting influence and must die.
5. Emoticons are illegal.
6. You can't wear a Manchester United soccer jersey.
7. A husband and wife can't have sex naked.
8. Pokemon is as bad as Mickey Mouse.
9. Ditch the downward dog. Yoga is forbidden.
10. Girls above the age of 13 can't ride bikes. (See fatwa No. 3.)

Breast milk? Seriously?

The "war on terror" is a failure

The Economist has a neat way of summarizing the Norway terrorism:

Relative to Norway’s population, the two attacks taken together are of a similar magnitude to the September 11th hijackings in the United States.

Norway's dead from the twin attacks are proportionally worse, strictly on the basis of population.  Norway has a shade under five million people, while the US is home to more than sixty times that number.

Soon after the news of the explosion, pundits were theorizing about Islamic fundamentalist militants and even Kurdish and Uighur elements.  When, as was the case in the Oklahoma City violence, it was "home-grown" terrorism. 

Apparently this extreme right winger boasted about having been in contact with the English Defence League.  Thanks to the New Yorker's profile of this outfit and its leader, only a couple of weeks ago, I can understand why the EDL might have such fanatics. 

One of the many aspects of this atrocious violence in Oslo is that the Bush/Cheney "War or Terror" as a response to 9/11 was one of the worst things they could have done.  And for Obama to continue to wage that war against terror, as if it is something like an identifiable army that can be defeated, is a tragedy.

I am all the more reminded of the television program I watched when I was in India a couple of years ago.  It was in one of those news channels, and was a talk show featuring some wannabe public intellectuals.  The question for this panel was this: "all Muslims are not terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims."  I had to force myself to watch it for a while.  It was awful to hear most of them assert that all terrorists are Muslims.

They conveniently forgot all kinds of non-Islamic terrorism within India's borders alone, leave alone the rest of the world.  Two prime ministers were assassinated, and neither was caused by terrorists who were Muslims.  Indira Gandhi was felled by bullets fired by a Sikh, and Rajiv Gandhi was blown to pieces by a Srilankan Tamil suicide bomber.  In contemporary India, Maoist guerrillas use violence, and these are not driven by any religion, Islam or otherwise.

Yet, there was only the Islamic terrorism that was discussed.

It seems to be a similar story in the rest of the world, and definitely in the West.  Even when unfortunate events like in Oslo repeatedly point out that terrorism comes in all flavors.

A rational rethink might then question the War on Terror that the US continues to fight.  But, apparently not.

A violent crime proportionally greater in magnitude than the 9/11 event.  I recall being depressed for a few days after that happened.   I can't begin to imagine the emotions among Norwegians now ...

Stoned Pakistan and harsh punishments

The graphic says it all (ht):

Pakistan's spiraling descent

Reacting to the brazen assassination of Salman Taseer, the governor of Pakistan's populous and influential province, Christian Caryl writes in the NY Review of Books:

I can’t help feeling that the killing of Salman Taseer is a calamity for everyone who lives in the country—including the people who are now strewing flowers at the feet of the man who allegedly pulled the trigger. Those who support the takfiri worldview don’t seem to understand that this is an ideology that cedes the definition of “true Islam” to the self-declared defenders of religion—and that these definitions shift according to the political wind, to selfish agendas and narrow factional interests, rather than to the uncorrupted dictates of faith. And that means that those who consider themselves right-minded believers today can easily find themselves on the wrong end of a Kalashnikov tomorrow.

Taseer's son writes in the NY Times:

According to the authorities, my father’s stand on the blasphemy law was what drove Mr. Qadri to kill him. There are those who say my father’s death was the final nail in the coffin for a tolerant Pakistan. That Pakistan’s liberal voices will now be silenced. But we buried a heroic man, not the courage he inspired in others.

And he concludes thus:

It may sound odd, but I can’t imagine my father dying in any other way. Everything he had, he invested in Pakistan, giving livelihoods to tens of thousands, improving the economy. My father believed in our country’s potential. He lived and died for Pakistan. To honor his memory, those who share that belief in Pakistan’s future must not stay silent about injustice. We must never be afraid of our enemies. We must never let them win.

I worry that "they" are winning.  Back to Caryl:

The West, and especially the United States, should also take notice. It is time for policymakers in Washington to understand that Pakistan is not simply a vexing sideshow to the war in Afghanistan. Pakistan—populous, chaotic, and nuclear-armed—needs to be taken seriously in its own right. An imploding Pakistan promises immense pain and turmoil to itself and the world at large. Let’s hope that this realization doesn’t come too late.

This comic was not published?

Over to Matt Welch:

As Radley Balko noted in yesterday's Morning Links, the Washington Post and other newspapers pulled Wiley Miller's syndicated "Non Sequitur" cartoon from their comics pages two Sundays back, because Miller pulled a familiar-to-Reason-readers "where's Waldo?" gag with the Prophet Muhammad, satirizing the new 21st century taboo on the depiction of even jokes about the fear of depicting a historical figure who really existed.
As is typical of the genre, Washington Post editors tried to play their own "where's Waldo" with the censorship process:

Style editor Ned Martel said he decided to yank it, after conferring with others, including Executive Editor Marcus W. Brauchli, because "it seemed a deliberate provocation without a clear message." He added that "the point of the joke was not immediately clear" and that readers might think that Muhammad was somewhere in the drawing.

If the Post's new standard for comics is to make jokes "immediately clear," then it might be time to kill the comics page altogether. No, Martel/Brauchli, you pulled the cartoon because your fear of Muslims outweighs your commitment to free expression, period.
Now comes L.A. Times media critic James Rainey, who, even while concluding that the cartoon should have run (the L.A. Times, to no one's surprise, suppressed it), makes sure we understand that fear was not a factor, nosiree:

That's not to agree with some commentators who have called the refusal to run the comic a cowardly retreat from radicals. I'd say the ax that fell on "Non Sequitur" had more to do expediency. Moving in a hurry, with many other decisions that seemed more pressing at the time, editors probably killed the item rather than face the possibility of a furor for a piece they honestly felt was not of high quality.

Uh-huh.

Hands off: academic thinking meets fundamentalism in India

For a while now, I have been following from afar the strange and tragic story of T.J. Joseph, who was a professor at Newman College--a private Catholic institution in Kerala.  One of the questions he had in the exams upset a few students, which quickly became a huge issue, and a couple of months later, Joseph's hand was crudely chopped off in front of his family and was also fired from his job.

All these in India. In Kerala, which is often hailed as India's most progressive state.

First, about the question paper itself:

The question paper, for an internal degree exam in March, contained a text taken from an article written by P T Kunjumuhammed, a director of several award-winning films and former CPI(M) legislator.

Referring to his film Garshom, Kunjumuhammed explained in the article that the thread for a scene in the movie, in which the protagonist speaks to God, was picked from his own experience about a madman who used to speak to God. While reproducing the conversation as a passage for punctuation, Joseph replaced the mad man with Muhammed, thus making it seem like a dialogue between God and Muhammed.

Protesting against the question paper, Muslim organisations, particularly the Popular Front of India and Jamaat-e-Islami, had said it was an insult to Prophet Muhammed. The issue soon gained communal colour, leading to violent incidents in Thodupuzha region.

Just as this was beginning to show signs of calming down, Joseph was brutally, physically, attacked when he:

was returning home after attending Sunday prayers at the local church when he was attacked. He was accompanied by his mother and sister.

Police have taken into custody two suspected activists of the right-wing Popular Front of India. Joseph has been admitted to the Specialist Hospital in Kochi.

According to Joseph’s sister, Stella Joseph, the assailants in a van waylaid their vehicle and pulled out the lecturer, after bursting explosives to create a scare. While Joseph was being attacked, his mother and sister were warned not to step out of the vehicle. The gang fled the scene after severing his right hand.

To recap, a Christian professor at a Catholic college uses a standard text in the exams where he substitutes Muhammad in place of the mad man in the original. This causes a riot in town, and later his hand is chopped off in front of his mother and sister.

But, the story does not end there, as if these tragedies aren't enough. Joesph was:

was first suspended after the question paper row earlier this year and dismissed from service on September 1 on the ground that he had hurt the religious sentiments of a community.

Off with your hand, and off with your job!  That ought to teach everybody a lesson, eh :(

One might think that such a development would draw in the likes of India's equivalent of the FBI. Not!

The National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Thursday informed the Keral High Court that it would not like to take up the case related to the attack on T. J. Joseph, Professor of Malayalam at Newman College in Thodupuzha, whose right palm was chopped off by the assailants on July 4.

The counsel for the agency made this clear while responding to a public interest litigation demanding that the NIA should take up the investigation of the case. It was pointed out that the case would not come under the purview of the agency, as the police had not included terrorism and anti-national activity charges against the accused.

According to Joseph's sister, Stella:

Even after getting his dismissal order, Mr. Joseph had written to the college management to pardon him. “He has touched the feet of the Bishop and the manager of the college seeking pardon,” she said.

Stella, a nun, said she had also met the Bishop on July 2, before the attack, on behalf of her brother.

The family is also upset by the pastoral letter written by the Kothamangalam bishop against Mr. Joseph. Ms. Stella said the entire family was “upset” and “scared.”

Mr. Joseph is presently undergoing physiotherapy as his right hand was hacked by radical outfit Popular front of India (PFI) on July 4. He was taking pain killers to ease the pain and is recovering slowly, she said.

The faculty body has filed protests that proper procedures were not followed, and the state's education minister calls the dismissal of the professor excessive.

And, al-Qaeda materials found at the attacker's homes?

The anti-Muslim vitriol ... in America? :(

It is deplorable that Islam and Muslims are sought to be held responsible for the acts of a few who preach hate and practise terrorism in the name of saving the religion. There were Muslims among those killed in the 9/11 attacks. The hostility to the proposed centre, to which the 2008 vice-presidential candidate's tweet has added political overtones, reveals that considerable sections of American public opinion continue to believe that Muslims must collectively be punished for the attacks. Despite the celebrated U.S. constitutional guarantees on the freedom to worship, there have been instances of communities blocking the construction of religious buildings, usually non-Christian ones, for ‘civic' reasons. The final go-ahead for the building project has to come from the Landmarks Preservation Commission, which could turn it down on the ground that the existing building is a historical landmark. It would be a great pity if the most liberal-minded of American cities joins the list of places that suffer from Islamophobia.

An editorial all the way from my favorite newspaper in India.

It is awful how the situation has been shaped into a raging anti-Islam propaganda .... with simultaneous chants of how this is a Christian nation.  It is hard to believe that New Gingrich was once a university history professor when he says the following:

There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia.  ...
They ignore the fact that more than 100 mosques already exist in New York City. Meanwhile, there are no churches or synagogues in all of Saudi Arabia.

WTF!  Hey, Professor Newt, using the same remarkable logic, here is another statement you should issue:

McDonald's does not have beef-hamburgers on the menu in India.  Until this is reversed, we shall not allow any Indian restaurant here in America.

What might Atticus Finch say about the likes of Gingrich and Sarah "refudiate" Palin who are on this path of bigotry?

They've done it before and they did it tonight and they'll do it again and when they do it--seems that only children weep.

Or, perhaps I should quote to Gingrich one of the famous lines from a dark period in America's recent history:

"Have You No Sense of Decency?"

Women in Afghanistan--once, and now ...

Much before all the craziness that is now into the fourth decade, it was possible for women in Afghanistan to be like, well, the photo says it all:

More here ...
Later, it became this ...

Redemption, religion, and Rrrrrrrrrrr!!!!!

Ayaan Hirsi Ali's story is one that I find discussing in many different contexts with my students--it can be a discussion of migration, Somalia, Islam, female genital mutilation, radical Islamism, ....
In this Q/A, the final question/response is:

Are you in touch with your mother?
I talk to her on the phone. She says, Please go back to being a Muslim because that’s the only way that you’re going to have any kind of redemption in the hereafter.

Hmmm ....

I can't but wonder why quite a few people so preoccupied with the hereafter can't be "human" in the here and now :(  Oh well ...

More on South Park, the prophet, and Islamism

Continuing with previous posts (here, and here), this one is from Ross Douthat's column in the NY Times (BTW, this is the first time I am linking to a piece by Douthat; I am not sure if he has earned his place as a columnist yet; he was a great blogger though)

Across 14 on-air years, there’s no icon “South Park” hasn’t trampled, no vein of shock-comedy (sexual, scatalogical, blasphemous) it hasn’t mined. In a less jaded era, its creators would have been the rightful heirs of Oscar Wilde or Lenny Bruce — taking frequent risks to fillet the culture’s sacred cows.
In ours, though, even Parker’s and Stone’s wildest outrages often just blur into the scenery. In a country where the latest hit movie, “Kick-Ass,” features an 11-year-old girl spitting obscenities and gutting bad guys while dressed in pedophile-bait outfits, there isn’t much room for real transgression. Our culture has few taboos that can’t be violated, and our establishment has largely given up on setting standards in the first place.
Except where Islam is concerned. There, the standards are established under threat of violence, and accepted out of a mix of self-preservation and self-loathing.

I catch up on South Park only every once in a while.  of the episodes I have watched, including the Superbest Friends, well, I have watched better ones.  The two that stand out in my mind are the one about the smug factor in the SF Bay Area, and the Scientology piece with Tom Cruise in the closet .... those two were hilarious :)

South Park, Muhammad, and free speech

Dan Savage:

What a country!

After watching the Daily Show's take on the death threats against the creators of South Park, and Comedy Central's censoring of the show, I was reminded of Yakov Smirnoff's line: "America, what a country!"
What's the background, you ask?  South Park showed a character in a bear suit said to be the Prophet Muhammad.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
South Park Death Threats
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

So, death threats because of .... this?

Remember these cartoons from a couple of years ago?  The police nabbed a Somali who broke into the house of the Danish cartoonist. 
The Somali group, al Shahab, thinks that this Somali did something awesome; according to the BBC:

Al-Shabab spokesman Sheikh Ali Muhamud Rage told AFP news agency: "We appreciate the incident in which a Muslim Somali boy attacked the devil who abused our prophet Mohammed and we call upon all Muslims around the world to target the people like" him.

(ht)

BTW, the New Yorker has an excellent piece on Mogadishu and Somalia

Of course, even academic analysis is subject to this same treatment.  As I blogged earlier,

Yale University and Yale University Press consulted two dozen authorities, including diplomats and experts on Islam and counterterrorism, and the recommendation was unanimous: The book, “The Cartoons That Shook the World,” should not include the 12 Danish drawings that originally appeared in September 2005. What’s more, they suggested that the Yale press also refrain from publishing any other illustrations of the prophet that were to be included, specifically, a drawing for a children’s book; an Ottoman print; and a sketch by the 19th-century artist Gustave Doré of Muhammad being tormented in Hell, an episode from Dante’s “Inferno” that has been depicted by Botticelli, Blake, Rodin and Dalí.

More on Yale banning cartoons in a book

I blogged earlier about Yale University Press forcing the author of a forthcoming book on the Danish cartoon controversy not to include the cartoons in the book.

Christopher Hitchens says it best (as always):

[Now] the rot has gone a serious degree further into the fabric. Now we have to say that the mayhem we fear is also our fault, if not indeed our direct responsibility. This is the worst sort of masochism, and it involves inverting the honest meaning of our language as well as what might hitherto have been thought of as our concept of moral responsibility.

Last time this happened, I linked to the Danish cartoons so that you could make up your own minds about them, and I do the same today. Nothing happened last time, but who's to say what homicidal theocrat might decide to take offense now. I deny absolutely that I will have instigated him to do so, and I state in advance that he is directly and solely responsible for any blood that is on any hands. He becomes the responsibility of our police and security agencies, who operate in defense of a Constitution that we would not possess if we had not been willing to spill blood—our own and that of others—to attain it. The First Amendment to that Constitution prohibits any prior restraint on the freedom of the press. What a cause of shame that the campus of Nathan Hale should have pre-emptively run up the white flag and then cringingly taken the blood guilt of potential assassins and tyrants upon itself.

Yale bans a book--on the Danish cartoons issue

Cartoons published in an obscure newspaper in Denmark shook the world. And burnt the world. Why? Because the cartoons were about Islam and its founder. People who value the freedom to express views were aghast, and newspapers (a few brave ones) republished the cartoons in order to stress their freedom and in support of the Danes.

Almost four years have gone by since then. Naturally one would expect academics to crank out books on this issue; academic books that nobody will read, which is the case with most "university press" publications.

Well, not so fast! The NY Times reports that Yale University Press has banned those cartoons from a forthcoming book:

Yale University and Yale University Press consulted two dozen authorities, including diplomats and experts on Islam and counterterrorism, and the recommendation was unanimous: The book, “The Cartoons That Shook the World,” should not include the 12 Danish drawings that originally appeared in September 2005. What’s more, they suggested that the Yale press also refrain from publishing any other illustrations of the prophet that were to be included, specifically, a drawing for a children’s book; an Ottoman print; and a sketch by the 19th-century artist Gustave Doré of Muhammad being tormented in Hell, an episode from Dante’s “Inferno” that has been depicted by Botticelli, Blake, Rodin and Dalí.

Lest you think that the Danish cartoon controversy was an exception that has not been repeated since, think again.

More on Uighurs

James Fallows notes that:

it is a lasting error and embarrassment that after 9/11 the U.S. won Chinese government support by agreeing that Uighur separatists -- formally, the East Turkestan Liberation Organization -- should be seen as part of the world terrorist threat. After all, they are Muslims.

It is such stupid decisions by the US government that continue to fuel the Islamist view that America and the West is anti-Mulsim.

Fallows throws a damper on my hope--my hope that the collapse of the Chinese communist stronghold will be triggered by any radical youth or Tibet, but with Uighurs. He approvingly cites the NY Times op-ed:

The state apparatus has become dizzy with success in dealing with unrest. This gives little hope that further mass outbreaks will not be violently crushed. It also demonstrates that social upheaval will not pave the way to democracy. The party is too strong and confident to allow change from below.

Fallows is way more informed about China--way, way, more than me--which means that I have to kill my hopes for reform, and any hopes for the Uighurs. The world might not care because, after all, they are Muslims without oil :-(

Violence in Uighur territory of China

The presence of a student of Uighur ethnicity sparked me to write about them--particularly in the context of Guantanamo.
A few days ago, I read this compelling essay by Parag Khanna. When I read about Urumqi in that essay, I emailed that student--now a former student since her transfer--whose family is from that city.

I had hoped for a debate/discussion between this student and another student--an alum now--who was a Han Chinese from China. I told them that if they were not comfortable with a public setting, well, we could discuss Xinjiang in my office. But, that did not come to pass.

My interest in this is because I was confident that while the world was fixated with Tibet and the Tiananmen Square, it is Xinjiang where there will be real tensions. And, for all we know, the tight grip that the Communist Party has on the country will crumble only starting with Xinjiang. Of course, the latest news could very well be nothing more than a flash in the pan. But, I think we ought to spend time covering this news item, and understanding the issues. According to the BBC:

Several hundred people have also been arrested after the violence erupted in the city of Urumqi on Sunday.

Xinhua news agency said police restored order after demonstrators attacked passers-by and set fire to vehicles.

The protest was reportedly prompted by a deadly fight between Uighurs and Han Chinese in southern China last month.

The BBC's Chris Hogg in Shanghai says that if the numbers of dead are to be believed - and state media say they may rise - this looks like the bloodiest suppression of protest in China since Tiananmen Square 20 years ago.

I am all the more concerned about this development because these are the kind of opportunities that keep alive groups like al-Qaeda. Those maniacs can easily spin this as a situation where "godless" communists are wiping out Muslims because of their beliefs and practices. A few convinced graduates of the fundamentalist madrassahs in Pakistan and Afghanistan will try to sneak across the border into China, and soon we can have yet another crazy place on the planet. And, by the same token, and unfortunately, the legitimate demands of the Uighurs will get pushed into the background.

Stay tuned.

These damned terrorists!

The Islamist extremism nurtured by a succession of military rulers of Pakistan has now come to haunt its well-intentioned but lamentably weak elected civilian government. The bombing of Islamabad’s Marriott Hotel proved that Frankenstein’s monster is now truly out of that government’s control. The militancy once sponsored by its predecessors now threatens to abort Pakistan’s sputtering democracy and seeks to engulf India in its flames.

That was Sashi Tharoor.

I have blogged enough about Pakistan. It is terrible that we can spot all the flashing red signs, but are simply unable to stop innocents being killed in horrible terrorist acts.

Very sad.