My Name is Khan

This is a Bollywood film made in 2010 about an autistic Indian Muslim who moved to America and sets off on a mission to speak to a US President and say “Mr. President, my name is Khan, and I am not a terrorist!”

There a number of themes in this movie, one of which being racism, but another of the fact that well, he’s autistic. He falls for a women, a “normal” women, who soon begins to accept him and a romance occurs. The movie challenges our assumptions of what is “normal” and who is “normal”: the relationship works out, and they get married. Khan does not talk “normally”, and neither does he think “normally”, but his faculties are just as good as anyone and he understands the very basic human emotions we all face: love, anger, joy, regret, etc. He also understands the racism and xenophobia Muslims often face in the West, and sets out on a mission to fix it.

As any Bollywood drama (actually, all Bollywood is drama), there is a dramatic catastrophe that happens in Wilhemina, Georgia. Somehow, this hurricane destroyed almost all of the infrastructure in the little town and lightning strikes the church that everyone is taking shelter in. The church is also flooding several feet high, somehow. Hurricanes can be bad, but let me tell you, the movie exaggerates them quite a bit, especially considering the location. Nevertheless, Khan rushes to the town (he met random people from there once) to help out, and is thanked extensively for his help. The entire event was an emotional story of autistic man that was really more of a man than anyone else.

Now, a SPOILER ALERT. Khan married the girl he fell in love with, and she had a ten year old son already. The son and new father get along beautifully, with both of them learning from each other. The son has a friend whose father is in the military. His father is killed, and the friend blames it on Khan’s son because they are all “terrorists”. Months later, the son meets up with his friend who happens to be hanging out with some older teenagers. The teenagers decide to have some fun, and they team up to bully the son. The friend sits there and watches. The teenagers manage to kill the kid in a heart-wrenching scene, and then Khan’s wife blames it on him because he “is a terrorist” (the wife was Hindu). Khan finds himself in emotional turmoil, but finds solace in helping other people (“normal” people, might I add), instead of resorting to bad deeds. And the saga goes on.

Earlier in the movie, Khan goes to a Presidential rally for U.S. President George W Bush, where exclaims, “My name is Khan, and I am not a terrorist!”. He exclaims this a number of times before anyone hears it; the crowd is wild and the protagonist cannot talk “normally”. Eventually, people hear him, the first people being the Secret Service. He is arrested on terrorist suspicion, causing the media to go haywire for the Justice Department’s stupidity. After intense pressure from American citizens, the government lets him go, as he proceeds to live his life as I explained above.

Later, he gets to another rally, this time, years later, with President Obama. Earlier in the movie, he tipped the FBI for a suspected terrorist at some random mosque he attended in California, but the FBI didn’t respond to it. An informer that caught Khan give the tip later stabbed him, and he was rushed to the hospital, where his wife (who abandoned him) returns. Khan comes back to health, and with the media’s attention still on the autistic “terrorist”, President Obama invites him to a rally. Khan comes to the stage to speak the words he has so long wanted to say, but he cannot get himself to say it. Barrack Obama helps him: “I know. Your name is Khan and you are not a terrorist.”

Khan gets back with his wife, and they live happily ever after.

 

The only good Iraqi is a dead Iraqi

This is the impression I get when I study Iraq War civilian death count statistics: that people really just don’t give a damn. Years ago, it finally struck me that I didn’t give a damn either, and I decided to find the actual statistics of how many people died. The results, or lack thereof, was shocking. I have been anti-War ever since. The total wars of our day are usually only contests of how many people you can blow up. My count so far is zero. Thank God.

I first went on to Wikipedia. The results were astounding:  the lowest toll was from US Classified logs at about 66,000…and the highest was 1.2 million. That is twenty times more. Many other estimates, and mind you all these estimates were at different time spans, ranged from a hundred thousand to six hundred thousand. To give you an idea of proportions: 3,000 American civilians died in 9/11, and 5,000 American soldiers in Iraq. Imagine if no one had to die.

The highest estimate at about 1.2 million from the Opinion Research Business agency ( ORB) is extremely controversial, and I wouldn’t put too much stress on it. The second highest number – the estimate that I am most fond of – is from the The Lancet, a two hundred year old peer reviewed science journal. This estimate has also been controversial, but my emphasis is on the fact that we hardly know how many died, and not on how many died.

I highly recommend you check out the abstract of their survey. You need an account to read the whole thing (it’s free), but I’ll post a chart or two soon to give you an idea of their numbers. Basically, these guys (the only other statisticians to use this method were the ORB pollsters) actually went to Iraq, randomly selected 50 clustered blocks of 40 households from all of Iraq, and surveyed them. They asked them who they knew that died, and they tallied up the numbers. To confirm the accuracy of random Iraqi households, 87% of the time they asked for death certificates. 92% of the time certificates were produced. The other 8% is excusable: in some places at certain times death certificates were not issued, and young children weren’t always  documented. The journal has been criticized for the small poll group of 2,000 and for the polling method, but the polling was random and the death certificates were almost always provided. Perhaps their critics should be asked why they didn’t use polling numbers. Sitting on the other side of the Earth in front of a computer documenting deaths somehow seems a bit more sketchy to me.

So the Lancet Survey is quite interesting. It shows us the shocking disparity of numbers between government run statistics (the United Nations, the Iraqi government, the American government…) and independently run statistics. It shows us the shocking disparity of numbers between computer analysts that have never been to Iraq and pollsters that risked their lives. It is an awful thing for so many people to have died – and for people over here to not even care, know, or even have the ability to know. I intend to post a bit more on the Lancet Survey and what it teaches us…especially about the demographics of who was killed and when. If the survey numbers are true, the coalition forces that invaded Iraq may have caused more deaths then Saddam Hussein. If they aren’t true, they still killed a damn lot of people – and I am confident that there were better but possibly more pricey ways to not do so.

 

 

 

TO BE CONTINUED.

“The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword…”

“…If you would take a man’s life, you owe it to him to look into his eyes and hear his final words. And if you cannot bear to do that, then perhaps the man does not deserve to die.”

“A ruler who hides behind paid executioners soon forgets what death is”

— Eddard Stark. Game of Thrones, by George RR Martin

This is one of the most powerful quotes I have read in my entire life. It has influenced much of my views and thoughts on bravery, hypocrisy, and cowardice. To think that every day we cower behind people to do our dirty work. To think that we are all hypocrites in this way: too afraid to do what we think is right with our own hands. To think that we watch bombs drop day and night on people across the globe and call it legitimate, while too afraid to do it ourselves. If we cannot bear to bring death to others with our own two hands , then perhaps those we think are worthy of death do not deserve to die.

Unless Obama was willing to explode a young teenager with his dad knowing that that was the only way to kill his father. Unless Bush was willing to shoot everyone of the hundreds of thousands people his pawns shot with his own AK-47: the innocent women, children, cripples, and clergymen that had no involvement in anything or no inclinations to violence. Unless President Bashar Al-Assad took chemical weapons with his own hands to fight the rebels of his country, or unless Mao Zedong lit fire to villages with his own matches….perhaps those people did not deserve to die.

The thousands that have been executed under our court systems, many of which died because of racism, failed court rules, or mistreatment from society, were executed behind paid executioners. The judges and the juries that sentenced them, perhaps, have forgotten what death is. The American Presidents that ordered massacres of villages and assassinations of children, perhaps, have forgotten what death is, just like the British Prime Ministers or the Saudi Arabian Kings. People like you and I, who voted in favor of this war or the other, or served in the military of this country or that: perhaps we have forgotten what death is.

Let’s not play the blame game, or equate this political leader to that one. Let’s not fight over things that happened decades ago or judge people for decisions you and I couldn’t make better. But let us remember. If you would take a man’s life, you owe it to him to look into his eyes and hear his final words. And if you cannot bear to do that, then perhaps the man does not deserve to die.

And I don’t know about you, but I cannot bear to do that.

I Know why the Terrorists Terrorize (Part 3)

Continued from Part 2

The social causes of terrorism are aggregated by the historical situations of the Middle East. The political destruction the Islamic World has faced are due to a wealth of reasons, and only some of which will be discussed. Much of what I say here is drawn from the book Crisis of Islam by Bernard Lewis. I have written a review on that book if you would like to check it out. The political chaos in the Middle East today is due to both interior and exterior reasons, and all too often the Middle East fails to recognize the problems it has created for itself while the outside world fails to recognize the problems it has created for the Middle East. Both of these forces have worked to destroy the political, social, economic, academic, and cultural fabric of a civilization equally rich in history and tradition as ours.

We can empathize with the problems the Middle East has unwittingly been forced into, but we must caution ourselves from forgetting the problems it has caused on its own. We must also caution ourselves from removing the blame of terrorism from the perpetrators to the victims, like America. Certainly, this country has seriously failed in Middle Eastern foreign affairs when it comes to the field of terrorism, but we cannot forget who did the bombing on whose soil.But that was before the real warring started. The real warring started with our 43rd President, and I’ll talk about him later.

The real warring started when Britian betrayed the Arab nations . The real warring started when France and Britain occupied the Arab states. The real warring started when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, or when the United States supported Saddam Hussein. The real warring started was when the United States supported a coup in Iran, or when Nasser came to power in Egypt.  These things that happened in the Middle East, that traumatized the masses  and angered the intellectuals, are what brought the violence and the despair in the region. The regimes that oppress the people of that world day by day are practically puppet regimes implemented by western powers.

And thus the terrorism took root. It took root in an anti-western ideology that stemmed from the oppression of regimes and colonial powers. The soviets invaded Afghanistan  – and lost -,  and collapsed soon after. This wasn’t all too correlated, but the masses of the middle east saw that as the hidden power of its people. These strong armed, violent revolts brought down a superpower, in their mind. USSR was a paper tiger, in their perceptions. The US has now inherited that role. As we have adopted a new idol of the “other”: Islam, to replace Communism, the Middle East has adopted us as the enemy likewise. We are wrapped in a chaotic, complicated world, in which we adopt a dualistic worldview just to satisfy our simple minds. The Axis of Evil that Bush so delightfully remarks about, is nothing but scared nations trying to survive in a chaotic world of dangerous bullies. Thus they bully their people, an d load themselves with weaponry and military strength in the hopes of survival. We as a nation eliminated Iraq, one of the three nations of the axis. It is not surprising North Korea and Iran are attempting nuclear weaponry: for fear of elimination too.

The warring continued when we bombed Iraq day after day, massacring hundreds of thousands of people just like us. We criticize the Boston Bomber’s face on the Rolling Stones Magazine, and yet we turn a blind eye when Bush shows up in our newspapers and our books. The warring continued when we bombed Afghanistan day after day, massacring just like we did before. The warring continued when we drone attack Yemen and Pakistan day after day, killing teenagers as “collateral damage” for their parents. The warring continues day after day. The terrorist ideology is like the Greek Hydra: every one of them we kill a number grow in his place. We must get to the root of the ideology, this anti-Western contempt, and fix that, for a long term solution. Else we are just beating around an ever growing burning bush.

How we deal with the people around us is how they deal with us. To treat Muslims as crazy and their regimes as hostile is for them to treat us likewise and for them to become hostile. To be hypocrites day after day by preaching democracy while funding dictatorships isn’t something no one realizes. The people of the Middle East remember the coup in Iran, or the support of Saudi Arabia, and the current lack of action in Syria. When we terrorize people, they terrorize back. Sometimes worse, with more violence, and more ruthlessness. In our own interests, we must stop. We cannot kill ideology with bombs – only with ideology. We terrorize them day after day, and they terrorize us likewise. That is why the terrorists terrorize.

Continued with Part 4/4.

Crisis of Islam

Bernard Lewis is an interesting Middle Eastern scholar who I will surely talk about more when I get into Orientalism. This book, Crisis of Islam, is about the utter chaos the Islamic World has experienced in the last century. The book explores the history of the Islamic World and the modern context it is now. The book discusses the various edge groups and their opponents in the modern world – from the Salafis to the hidden secularist liberals. This is an extraordinary read that is well worth, insightful, easy to understand, and scholarly.

Professor Lewis is quick to explain that Islam is not inherently linked to terrorism. He goes through the historical roots of terrorism and the history of violence in the Islamic World, and thoroughly demonstrates the lack of relationship between the two. Terrorism has “no antecedents in Islamic history, and no justification in terms of Islamic theology, law, or tradition.” Nevertheless, the terrorist of the Muslim World justify themselves through their religion in an incredulous way. Dealing with the Middle East has thus become so difficult – that the fanatics believe wholeheartedly that they are correct, and that killing them is only good for them.

The crisis of the Islamic World and the rise of extremism can be attributed much to the decline in Islamic thinking, which occurred a little before colonialism  and after the fall of the Mongols as a reaction to the Renaissance (the public perception suddenly became that the roots of Islamic decline are because of too much thinking and too little dogma, and this led to only more decline). This was not helped by colonialism centuries later, which destroyed the academic institutions (theological, philosophical, and scientific) forever. In modern times, oil has both been crucial and destructive to the Arab world in particular. Lewis has a famous quote where he flips the common American quote: “No representation without taxation”. The oil rich gulf states have traditionally had almost no taxes on its citizens- the wealth of the nation was generated entirely by oil resources. Their was no need for a parliamentary system to develop a taxation system, and thus the monarchies established themselves permanently, and are only replaced if ever by ruthless tyrants.

His book after explaining what I have said so far in much more details concludes with a solution. The purpose of the text was not really to provide a solution, so it doesn’t focus too much on it, but his conclusion is that the only solution to the Middle East is non-secular democracy (secular preferably, but that is asking for too much too quick). America is a necessary component for reviving the Middle East (Lewis was a big advocate of the Iraq war…before it happened). I won’t comment on what I think about his conclusions, but I am content to say that his identifying of Middle Eastern and Islamic problems was excellent, and his analysis of their roots essential.