quoted 285 lines From: "rafeeq hasan" <rafeeqhasan@hotmail.com>
>From: "rafeeq hasan" <rafeeqhasan@hotmail.com>
>To: bakhtiar13@hotmail.com, teenbeat27@aol.com,
>thestrongestmanalive@hotmail.com, dokeefe@wesleyan.edu,
>gabrielcyr@hotmail.com, gfxmith@aol.com, harelshapira@hotmail.com,
>hshapira@midway.uchicago.edu, johnpatrickleary@yahoo.com,
>jpleary@midway.uchicago.edu, julietib@eden.rutgers.edu,
>bakhtiar@midway.uchicago.edu, kimmer9123@aol.com, kacasady@uchicago.edu,
>lindadaugustyn@avenew.com, m_waggaman@hotmail.com, src@uchicago.edu,
>betasarah@yahoo.com, jonathancwu@hotmail.com
>Subject: Fwd: Revenge Comes Home
>Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2001 07:40:55 -0500
>
>
>
>Revenge Comes Home
>
>By Sonia Shah
>
>
>
>
>"What are you looking at, terrorist bitch?"
>
>So said a surly gentleman on a Manhattan-bound subway
>to my sister, who violated the rules of
>overcrowded-island etiquette by stealing a glance at
>him as he discussed the pros and cons of prejudice.
>
>Ordinarily, racist slurs would make her angry. As it
>was, having just watched stricken people jump from
>burning towers to their certain deaths, her eyes
>filled with tears and she hurried off the train.
>
>A few days later, some thugs visited my cousin's
>convenience store/gas station, demanding "Where are
>you people from?" and "Why don't you have a flag up?"
>My cousin rushed out and bought two gigantic flags and
>installed them prominently on his house and the store.
>
>At least five South Asian or Middle Eastern Americans
>have been slain so far and dozens of incidents of
>harassment, intimidation, and terror have been
>reported, against Arab-Americans, Muslims, Sikhs,
>Pakistanis, and other South and West Asians, according
>to the Asian Pacific American Legal Center. In Mesa,
>Arizona, a Sikh man was shot, the suspect shouting "I
>stand for America all the way" as he was handcuffed.
>In Los Angeles, an Egyptian American man was shot; a
>Persian woman was beaten; a gun was shoved into
>another woman's face; a Spanish-speaking woman was
>attacked after being told "you foreigners caused all
>this trouble!"; and another was attacked after being
>told "America is only for white people." In San
>Francisco, a bag of blood was thrown on the doorstep
>of an immigrant-services center. In Chicago, 300
>people waving flags and shouting "USA! USA!" tried to
>march into a mosque; a firebomb was tossed into an
>Arab-American community center; and a Morrocan man was
>attacked with a machete. In New York, two Pakistanis
>were killed on Coney Island, a Sikh man was attacked
>with a baseball bat; two others attacked with a
>paint-ball gun; another was fired upon with rubber
>bullets; a taxi driver was pulled out of his cab and
>beaten; and a Pakistani woman was chased by a car,
>whose driver threatened to kill her for "destroying my
>country." In Cleveland, a Sikh temple was attacked
>with lit bottles of gasoline. In Tulsa, a Pakistani
>was beaten by three men. In Dallas, a Pakistani grocer
>was shot dead; elsewhere in the state shots and
>firebombs were lobbed at mosques, and a Molotov
>cocktail was thrown at the Islamic Society building.
>
>There have been others. Most of those who suffer such
>attacks won't report them. They'll just hide, lay low,
>wear baseball caps or bindis, as the Indian
>consul-general advised, and pray they won't be
>targeted again. As word spreads, their friends and
>families will do the same. Even my liberal family says
>I shouldn't take my small boys to the anti-war
>rallies, because they have brown skin, hair and eyes,
>and even Muslim names. What if they are targeted? What
>if someone throws a rock?
>
>Hate crimes hotlines have been set up, and I hope
>anyone who witnesses or suffers harassment or violence
>will use them, at least so this wave of violence can
>be accurately recorded for posterity. For anti-Asian
>violence organizations, calling these episodes of
>domestic terror "hate crimes" is tragically
>understated. For the news media and administration
>officials, however, it is offensively, dangerously
>hypocritical. These are not just isolated acts
>committed by crazed individuals, driven mad by fear
>and trauma. This wave of violence is a necessary
>extension of today's warmongering patriotism as
>defined by our political and media elites.
>
>"There is only one way to begin to deal with people
>like this," said former Secretary of State Lawrence
>Eagleburger on CNN, "and that is you have to kill some
>of them even if they are not immediately directly
>involved in this thing." "People like this need to
>feel pain," said National Review editor Rich Lowry in
>the Washington Post. "This is no time to be precious
>about locating the exact individuals directly involved
>in this particular terrorist attack," wrote syndicated
>columnist Ann Coulter in the New York Daily News.
>
>In other words, indiscriminate revenge, whether on
>millions of Afghans or against some random brown
>person on the subway, is what flag-waving patriots
>must do. "They" need to be punished, commentators say,
>whoever "they" may be. On a recent episode of PBS's
>Newshour with Jim Lehrer, even the learned
>commentators couldn't or wouldn't distinguish between
>Arabs, Muslims, Afghans (who are not Arabs),
>fundamentalists, and terrorists. All were just simply
>"they."
>
>It must be clear to most now. "We" are white. "They"
>are brown. "They" celebrated--not only in Palestine,
>as the news media would have us believe, but also in
>Pakistan, in Nigeria, and elsewhere. This is taken as
>evidence of their inhumanity. But of course when the
>jocks in the sports bar in my old neighborhood cheered
>when Scud missiles hit Iraq years ago, that was good
>old red-blooded Americanism in action. "They" hate
>"us" not because of our government's violence and
>arrogance, but because?well, because "we" are so damn
>great. Because we are so modern, so advanced, so free,
>and so rich.
>
>How sad to have to say that all of this is nothing
>compared to the carnage of the plane attacks, and will
>be entirely insignificant compared to the massive,
>sustained slaughter of innocent people that Bush is
>threatening. Bush's tepid response to the wave of
>anti-Asian violence at home was to say that the
>perpetrators should be "ashamed" of themselves.
>Ashamed? Like how you feel when you steal a cookie
>from a baby? Like how you feel when you think you
>might be reproached? Will Bush be "ashamed" when his
>bombs kill, maim, and further impoverish desperate
>men, women and children in South and West Asia?
>
>POLLS PAINT PUBLIC OPINION RED
>
>And who is this "we" who hate some unspecified, brown
>"them" so much and are so willing to forego all the
>rules and procedures usually insisted upon (for even
>the most disgusting, murderous American thug) in order
>to hunt "them" down and kill them?whoever "they" are?
>
>A spate of polls paid for and trumpeted by the
>warmongering news media in the two weeks following the
>September 11th attacks told us who. They are us.
>
>But these polls asked loaded questions to handfuls of
>people who by any measure were still in shock. Their
>"findings" intensified in each re-telling, as
>reporters referred to them in their articles,
>columnists referred to the articles, and letter
>writers referred to the columnists. The sense of
>widespread blood-thirst calcified into a basic truism
>rationalizing the rush to war.
>
>Although most news reports on public support for war
>simply cited "numerous polls" or some such, most
>referred to the two ongoing, nationally representative
>polling efforts on this topic--by CBS News/New York
>Times and by Gallup/CNN/USA Today. Both circumscribed
>and contained people's potential responses to paint a
>portrait of a vengeful, angry America, one that will
>support Bush's war in South Asia and not
>coincidentally, sell a few newspapers too.
>
>Questions aren't neutral. Their timing and wording
>reveal the questioners' expectations and assumptions.
>Gallup's and CBS News's crude questions seem designed
>to gauge the extent of U.S. rage and vengeance and
>couldn't have captured a complex, nuanced perspective
>even if they wanted to.
>
>For instance, on the dark evening of the attacks
>themselves, CBS pollsters called 402 shell-shocked
>people and asked them the following incendiary
>questions. "Are these attacks another Pearl Harbor?
>they wanted to know. "Should the U.S. retaliate even
>if innocent people are killed?" About 6 in 10 said
>yes, 2 said no, and 2 said?well whatever they said
>went unrecorded. Then the interviewers went on to goad
>people into apportioning blame--at least toward the
>two immediate culprits they could think of. "Should
>U.S. intelligence have known about the attacks?" they
>asked. "Could the attacks have been prevented by
>tighter airport security?" And then, click, interview
>over. The "findings"--two-thirds of Americans want
>retaliation even if innocents are killed, as they put
>it--were trumpeted eagerly. "America Wants
>Retaliation" their headline proclaimed.
>
>The next day, our intrepid pollsters bothered another
>638 people. Do you feel bad? Do you feel angry?
>Horrified? Or shocked? pollsters asked. Assuming each
>respondent picked just one answer (a big assumption,
>unilluminated by CBS's poll website), about 80 percent
>felt one of those ways.
>
>So how did the other 20 percent feel? Nobody asked.
>(How about scared? How about sad? That's how I felt.)
>
>About 25 percent said they were angry, and despite the
>fact that pollsters had no idea how many people would
>have said they were angry the previous day (it's
>within the realm of possibility that some portion of
>Americans are always angry)--CBS announced that
>"Americans are no longer shocked, they're angry."
>Seventy-one percent wanted retaliation, they found.
>
>Over the next two days--Thursday September 13 and
>Friday September 14--our pollsters again took to the
>phones. They demanded answers from 959 people. They
>asked essentially the same questions, except this time
>they added a new one.
>
>"Are Arab Americans more sympathetic to terrorists?"
>they wanted to know.
>
>Twenty-seven percent said yes, CBS noted ominously.
>
>(But this is a meaningless question, by itself. Which
>terrorists? Irish ones? Sympathetic how? Like they
>know how to pronounce their names? Like they know
>where they are coming from? Like they'd give them
>loads of cash and their passport? What?)
>
>The Gallup Organization, "one of the world's leading
>management consulting firms" according to their
>website, in partnership with USA Today and CNN have
>also been conducting ongoing much-cited national
>polling. They asked much the same questions that CBS
>did, with much the same results, but they also wanted
>to know how many people attended memorial services,
>cried, displayed a flag, or prayed in response to the
>attacks.
>
>How many wrote letters to their editors? How many gave
>flowers to their Muslim neighbors? How many attended
>peace rallies? Gallup won't say. The unasked goes
>unanswered.
>
>Since my whole argument here is that these polls are
>worse than useless, it may not be fair to note one
>underreported finding. When asked whether the U.S.
>should act immediately against known terrorists or
>only against those responsible, over sixty percent
>said that only the proven perpetrators should be
>targeted.
>
>Doesn't that just blow all the other findings about
>wanting war, indiscriminate revenge, and all the rest
>of it out of the water?
>
>Gallup's and CBS News' numbers frighten me. But I'm
>going to try not to make much of them either way. As a
>statistician friend of mine who used to work at Harris
>Polls says, "polling companies burn through hundreds
>if not thousands of phone numbers to get the sample
>sizes they need. But there is probably good reason to
>think people who refuse to participate, who aren't
>home, who don't answer the phone, who don't have
>phones would respond quite differently from those
>people who do participate."
>
>"In other words the samples are not truly
>representative of the American public," he says.
>
>That's good to hear.
>
>
>__________________________________________________
>Do You Yahoo!?
>Get email alerts & NEW webcam video instant messaging with Yahoo!
>Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com
>
_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at
http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: idm-unsubscribe@hyperreal.org
For additional commands, e-mail: idm-help@hyperreal.org