Sunday, July 2, 2017
MYANMAR: MANUFACTURING TERRORIST EVIDENCE
Here is the link to Dr. Maung Zarni's facebook news about how Myanmar government has been distorting facts and manufacturing false evidences against the Rohingya Muslims.
Kovind, Dalit Politics and Hindu Nationalism
by Ram Puniyani
By nominating Ramanth Kovind as the Presidential candidate, BJP has tried to play the politics of tokenism to the hilt. Mr. Kovind is a dalit from UP. While many names were doing round from BJP parivar, finally they settled down for a person who is dalit in name and Hindu nationalist in ideology. Last three years of Modi Sarkar has not only seen rising violence against Muslims, religious minorities but also against dalits in particular. Starting from banning of Periyar Study circle in IIT Madras, to creating a situation where Rohith Vemula, a dalit research scholar, had to take his life, to ‘cow-violence’ against dalits in Una, the dalits as a social group have come under severe attack, which is by product of Hindu nationalist politics. Apart from this; there are also instances where the a Central minister equated dalits to dogs, a BJP leader, UP BJP vice President Kripa Shankar Singh said that Mayawati was worst than a prostitute. Incidentally he was apparently reprimanded but through back door his wife was given the ticket for assembly elections and later was made a minister in Yogi cabinet in UP. To add salt to the injury one saw the horrific anti-dalit violence against dalits in Saharanpur as Mr. Yogi came to power and upper caste are feeling more powerful. When the Bhim Army under Chandrasekhar protested against the attack on dalits, the young Dalit leaders were arrested while to attackers were left off with minor charges.
This move of nominating Kovind, seems to be a superficial attempt to assuage the deep injury inflicted upon the dalits of the society. One recalls here that after the Gujarat carnage, orchestrated on the pretext of Godhra train burning, and the deep wounds inflicted upon Muslims in Gujarat Mr. APJ Abdul Kalam was chosen by BJP to be the President of India. It was another tokenism, which did not change the deeper anti minority dynamics in the society. This is what tokenism is supposed to be doing, creating an impression that one is offering a helping hand.
Mr. Kovind has been a RSS swayamsevak; he has donated his ancestral house for RSS work. His opinions as reflected in many of his statement show that he regards Islam and Christianity as alien religions. This came out when he was participating in the debate on Rangnath Mishra commission report, when the issue of reservations for dalits converting to Islam or Christianity came up for discussion. Mr. Kovind says that education should have primacy over reservations, undermining reservations for dalits.
As a part of BJP, Kovind has been trying to woo the non-Jatav Dalits in UP in particular. BJP-RSS have won over many a dalits. Likes of Mr. Ram Vilas Paswan, who has been compromising the interests of dalits for the sake of personal power, said that all those who oppose Kovind should be regarded as anti dalit! What does it mean to be a dalit leader today? There are many of the likes of Kovind and Paswan who seal their lips when atrocities against dalits are going on and are rising. The dalit leadership is in the dilemma today. Many of Ramvilas Paswan variety of dalit leaders are aligned with Hindu Nationalist politics of BJP-RSS as it gives them perks and power. But there is a large number of others who are engaging in the protests against the system on the issues of survival and dignity of the dalits, for their rights as equal citizens. For the dalits the major achievement has been the coming into being of Indian Constitution, a document giving them theoretical equality. It gives them the ground on which they can stand and struggle for their rights.
On the other hand the politics of RSS has been opposing Indian nationalism, in favor of Hindu nationalism. RSS politics has been upholding the scriptures which have provisions of caste hierarchy inherent in them. As such Hindu nationalism has come a long way during last close to a century or so. Is it a coincidence that RSS came up in the context of the rising protests by dalits in the form of non Brahman movement in Vidarbha region of Maharshtra. This movement was against the social structure which gave primacy to landlord Brahmin. The movements based on equality have been running parallel to the freedom movement. The dalits were articulating their needs through agitations and movements for equality. Hindu nationalism upheld the age old system; it upheld the caste structure in a subtle way. In due course, especially after the decade of 1990s the politics of RSS-BJP has been opposing reservation and equality for dalits. It has operated at multiple levels to co-opt the dalits in to their political fold. Adding on to Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, which has been working for Hidnukaran of Adivasis (Hinduisation), Samajik Samrasta Manch (Social harmony forum) came up to oppose the struggles for Samata (equality) in favor of ‘harmony amongst castes’. Through cultural mechanisms it has been trying to propagate that dalits have been defending Hinduism against the attacks from Islam.
Lately RSS combine has been making attempts to pay respect to Ambedkar, by calling him Great Hindu, by observing his anniversary at grand scale etc. Ambedkar’s politics and Hindu nationalist politics are polar opposites. Ambedkar stands for Liberty, Equality and Fraternity while Hindu nationalism is for the hierarchical values of Vedic times. Through social engineering dalits have been made to participate in destruction of Babri Masjid and also to participate in anti Muslim violence. How do assess Mr. Kovind? The politics of a person is not just guided by birth, dalits propagating and working for Hindu nationalism are harming dalits in a serious way, while even non dalits upholding the path of Ambedkar are truly working for uplift of dalits!
Mr. Kovind must have taken the oath of RSS, which calls for primacy of Hindu nation. Indian Constitution is for Indian nationalism. What will he uphold as President of India, the former or the latter?
Priyanka Gandhi on lynching incidents in India
In the wake of growing cases of mob lynching in the country, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra has said such incidents make her blood boil. “It makes me furious, it makes my blood boil when I see these things on TV and the Internet. It makes me furious. And I think it should make every right thinking Indian’s blood boil,” Priyanka told India Today when asked whether she was on the same page as her mother Congress chief Sonia Gandhi and President Pranab Mukherjee on the issue of lynching. She was speaking at the sidelines of an event of the launch of a commemorative publication by National Herald.
Addressing the same event, President Mukherjee said, “When mob frenzy becomes so high, irrational and uncontrollable, we have to pause and reflect. Are you vigilant enough. I am not talking of vigilantism. I am talking about whether we are vigilant enough proactively to save the basic tenets of our time.”
Meanwhile, Sonia Gandhi said the “inclusive conception” of the country was “under attack” and that the nation was facing a great challenge in the form “domestic misrule”.
Recently, thousands of people across the country took to the streets under the tagline “Not in My Name” to protest against a string of mob lynching incidents in the country. The lynching of 15-year-old Junaid Khan in a Mathura-bound train last week was the genesis of the latest flashpoint.
Addressing the same event, President Mukherjee said, “When mob frenzy becomes so high, irrational and uncontrollable, we have to pause and reflect. Are you vigilant enough. I am not talking of vigilantism. I am talking about whether we are vigilant enough proactively to save the basic tenets of our time.”
Meanwhile, Sonia Gandhi said the “inclusive conception” of the country was “under attack” and that the nation was facing a great challenge in the form “domestic misrule”.
Recently, thousands of people across the country took to the streets under the tagline “Not in My Name” to protest against a string of mob lynching incidents in the country. The lynching of 15-year-old Junaid Khan in a Mathura-bound train last week was the genesis of the latest flashpoint.
Obama pushes tolerance, respect in childhood home Jakarta
Following another week of dust-ups between the media and President Donald Trump, his predecessor shared a bit of wisdom from the other side of the world about tolerance and taking the daily news cycle in stride. “I wasn’t worried about what was in the newspapers today,” former President Barack Obama said Saturday during a nostalgic visit to Indonesia’s capital, his childhood home.
“What I was worried about was, ‘What are they going to write about me 20 years from now when I look back?'”
Obama has largely stayed away from US politics and the Trump administration, but he did tout one of his accomplishments while in office.
“In Paris, we came together around the most ambitious agreement in history about climate change, an agreement that even with the temporary absence of American leadership, can still give our children a fighting chance,” he said.
Trump shocked many countries last month by announcing he was pulling out of the accord. He has also had a difficult relationship with members of the press and was recently condemned by Democrats and Republicans for a tweet that attacked a female MSNBC host.
Obama stressed the importance of stepping away from news sites where only like-minded views are shared, and warned about social media giving rise to resentment of minorities and bad treatment of people.
The former president was greeted by a crowd of thousands, including leaders, students and businesspeople, in Jakarta, where he opened the Fourth Congress of Indonesian Diaspora. He is wildly popular in Indonesia, where many view him as an adopted son. A statue of the boy still remembered as “Barry” stands outside his old elementary school.
He reminisced about moving to Jakarta in 1967 when he was just 6 years old, shouting, “Indonesia bagian dari diri saya!” or “Indonesia is part of me!”
Obama said he had been gorging on the local food since arriving.
“If the rainy season came, the floods were coming and we had to clean out the floors in our house and then chase the chickens because they had gone someplace else,” he said to roaring laughter. “Today, Jakarta is a thriving center of commerce marked by highways and high-rises. So much has changed, so much progress has been made.”
Obama lived in the country with his mother, an anthropologist, and his Indonesian stepfather. The couple split up after having his half-sister, and Obama moved back to Hawaii when he was 10 to live with his grandparents. But he said he has never forgotten the years he spent in Indonesia.
“My time here made me cherish respect for people’s differences,” he said, noting how he and his family had just visited two of the most treasured ancient temples — Borobudur, a Buddhist complex, and the Hindu compound of Prambanan — in the world’s most populous Muslim country.
Obama’s speech came on the final leg of his 10-day vacation in Indonesia. In addition to visiting the temples in the city of Yogyakarta on the island of Java, he and his wife, Michelle, and daughters, Sasha and Malia, also went rafting and toured the resort island of Bali. On Friday, he met Indonesian President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo at the grand Bogor Palace in West Java, just outside Jakarta.
The Indonesian visit marked Obama’s first trip to Asia since leaving office. He urged the country to be a light of democracy and to never stop embracing differences. Indonesia has faced a rise in Islamic radicalism and anti-gay attacks, and was recently condemned by rights groups for jailing Jakarta’s former governor, an ethnic Chinese Christian, for blasphemy.
“The spirit of this country has to be one of tolerance. It’s enshrined in Indonesia’s constitution, it’s symbolized by mosques and temples and churches beside each other,” Obama said. “That spirit is one of the defining things about Indonesia. It is one of the most important characteristics to set as an example for other Muslim countries around the world.”
“What I was worried about was, ‘What are they going to write about me 20 years from now when I look back?'”
Obama has largely stayed away from US politics and the Trump administration, but he did tout one of his accomplishments while in office.
“In Paris, we came together around the most ambitious agreement in history about climate change, an agreement that even with the temporary absence of American leadership, can still give our children a fighting chance,” he said.
Trump shocked many countries last month by announcing he was pulling out of the accord. He has also had a difficult relationship with members of the press and was recently condemned by Democrats and Republicans for a tweet that attacked a female MSNBC host.
Obama stressed the importance of stepping away from news sites where only like-minded views are shared, and warned about social media giving rise to resentment of minorities and bad treatment of people.
The former president was greeted by a crowd of thousands, including leaders, students and businesspeople, in Jakarta, where he opened the Fourth Congress of Indonesian Diaspora. He is wildly popular in Indonesia, where many view him as an adopted son. A statue of the boy still remembered as “Barry” stands outside his old elementary school.
He reminisced about moving to Jakarta in 1967 when he was just 6 years old, shouting, “Indonesia bagian dari diri saya!” or “Indonesia is part of me!”
Obama said he had been gorging on the local food since arriving.
“If the rainy season came, the floods were coming and we had to clean out the floors in our house and then chase the chickens because they had gone someplace else,” he said to roaring laughter. “Today, Jakarta is a thriving center of commerce marked by highways and high-rises. So much has changed, so much progress has been made.”
Obama lived in the country with his mother, an anthropologist, and his Indonesian stepfather. The couple split up after having his half-sister, and Obama moved back to Hawaii when he was 10 to live with his grandparents. But he said he has never forgotten the years he spent in Indonesia.
“My time here made me cherish respect for people’s differences,” he said, noting how he and his family had just visited two of the most treasured ancient temples — Borobudur, a Buddhist complex, and the Hindu compound of Prambanan — in the world’s most populous Muslim country.
Obama’s speech came on the final leg of his 10-day vacation in Indonesia. In addition to visiting the temples in the city of Yogyakarta on the island of Java, he and his wife, Michelle, and daughters, Sasha and Malia, also went rafting and toured the resort island of Bali. On Friday, he met Indonesian President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo at the grand Bogor Palace in West Java, just outside Jakarta.
The Indonesian visit marked Obama’s first trip to Asia since leaving office. He urged the country to be a light of democracy and to never stop embracing differences. Indonesia has faced a rise in Islamic radicalism and anti-gay attacks, and was recently condemned by rights groups for jailing Jakarta’s former governor, an ethnic Chinese Christian, for blasphemy.
“The spirit of this country has to be one of tolerance. It’s enshrined in Indonesia’s constitution, it’s symbolized by mosques and temples and churches beside each other,” Obama said. “That spirit is one of the defining things about Indonesia. It is one of the most important characteristics to set as an example for other Muslim countries around the world.”
Fifth column: Good speech, but not enough - by Tavleen Singh
Fifth column: Good speech, but not enough
The Indian Prime Minister said last week that nobody had the right to take the law into his own hands. So what he needs to do now is investigate why it is mostly in states ruled by BJP chief ministers that we have seen so many incidents of cow vigilantism.There is a sad sort of irony in the Prime Minister’s choice of the Sabarmati Ashram to finally speak out last week against vigilante killings in the name of cow protection. Does he not know that the Mahatma is not a hero in the ‘new’ India? No sooner did he finish his speech than angry voices filled the realms of social media. In shrill tones they denounced Gandhiji for being a symbol of an ‘impotent’ India. In their view, that impotent India is a country that belongs in the past. They mocked Narendra Modi for speaking of non-violence in the ashram of a man whose non-violence they blame for hundreds of thousands of Hindus being massacred by Muslims when India was partitioned. So not only is Gandhi no hero in the new India, he is a symbol of weakness.
It is possible that the Mahatma was never a hero in the eyes of those whose voices are heard loudest today, but it is only in the past three years that they have dared to say this out loud. Violence is the mood of the new India and the armed men who wander our highways in search of Muslims to kill are today’s heroes. Videos of victims being beaten to death with iron rods and stones are circulated proudly by the killers, who seem to believe that the only way to keep Muslims in check is to show them what will happen if they forget their place.
So even as the Prime Minister spoke out clearly against killing people on the excuse of protecting cows, news of another lynching came from Jharkhand. A man identified as Alimuddin Ansari was beaten to death near Ranchi because he was transporting meat in his van. Videos of the lynching show his killers pushing him to the ground and holding his terrified face up in front of the camera for a few last shots before beating him to death. His van was burned afterwards so nobody will ever know if the meat he was transporting was beef or not. In all the lynching videos, the killers are young men who appear to take great pride in their violence. They see what they do as valour, that is why they film every detail despite the danger of providing the police with incriminating evidence.
The Prime Minister said last week that nobody had the right to take the law into his own hands. So what he needs to do now is investigate why it is mostly in states ruled by BJP chief ministers that we have seen so many incidents of cow vigilantism. Could it be that the rule of law is no longer respected or feared in these states because of some secret pact that allows killers to believe that they can get away with murder? Or could it be that law enforcement in India has always permitted political criminals to get away with crimes that ordinary criminals would be jailed for?
Beef vigilantes do not see themselves as ordinary criminals, although many of them may well be just ordinary killers. They see themselves as part of a political movement to save India from being ruled once more by Muslims. They pay close attention to speeches made by men like Syed Salahuddin and Hafiz Saeed in our neighbouring Islamic republic and they take their words seriously. These gentlemen routinely make it clear that their ultimate aim is to bring Islamic rule back in India. And then to confirm the worst fears of today’s Hindutva warriors, there is the worldwide jihad. Every time there is a new act of jihadist terrorism somewhere in the world, a hysteria gets whipped up against our own Muslims, as if they are somehow guilty just by being Muslim.
So although it is very good that the Prime Minister has condemned cow vigilantism in such clear terms, it may not make as much difference as some of us may have hoped. On a personal level, I have often criticised him in this column for not speaking out loudly and clearly against every lynching, but now I find myself wondering if it will make any difference at all. What will make a difference is strict law enforcement, especially in states ruled by BJP chief ministers. It is not enough to arrest the killers and release them on bail quietly as soon as the media loses interest.
If there can be special fast track courts for terrorists and rapists, there can and should be special courts for cow vigilantes. It is no longer enough to say, as our political leaders love saying, that the law will take its own course. In India, this is a very long, slow course indeed. This is why the rule of law in our ancient land is such a tenuous thing that killers do not fear it.
‘Love Thy Neighbor?’
Here below is an article that appeared in the Washington Post. It is worth reading for many immigrants to the USA. It is written by Stephanie McCrummen who is a national enterprise reporter for The Washington Post. Previously, she was the paper's East Africa bureau chief. She has also reported from Egypt, Iraq and Mexico, among other places.
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DAWSON, MINN. — The doctor was getting ready. Must look respectable, he told himself. Must be calm. He changed into a dark suit, blue shirt and tie and came down the wooden staircase of the stately Victorian house at Seventh and Pine that had always been occupied by the town’s most prominent citizens.That was him: prominent citizen, town doctor, 42-year-old father of three, and as far as anyone knew, the first Muslim to ever live in Dawson, a farming town of 1,400 people in the rural western part of the state.
“Does this look okay?” Ayaz Virji asked his wife, Musarrat, 36.
In two hours, he was supposed to give his third lecture on Islam, and he was sure it would be his last. A local Lutheran pastor had talked him into giving the first one in Dawson three months before, when people had asked questions such as whether Muslims who kill in the name of the prophet Muhammad are rewarded in death with virgins, which had bothered him a bit. Two months later, he gave a second talk in a neighboring town, which had ended with several men calling him the antichrist.
Now a librarian had asked him to speak in Granite Falls, a town half an hour away, and he wasn’t sure at all what might happen. So many of the comforting certainties of his life had fallen away since the presidential election, when the people who had welcomed his family to Dawson had voted for Donald Trump, who had proposed banning Muslims from entering the United States, toyed with the idea of a Muslim registry and said among other things, “Islam hates us.”
Trump had won Lac qui Parle County, where Dawson was the second-largest town, with nearly 60 percent of the vote. He had won neighboring Yellow Medicine County, where Granite Falls was the county seat, with 64 percent. Nearly all of Minnesota outside the Twin Cities had voted for Trump, a surprising turn in a state known for producing some of the Democratic Party’s most progressive leaders, including the nation’s first Muslim congressman.
Now Trump was in the White House, and Dawson’s first Muslim resident was sitting in his living room, strumming his fingers on the arm of a chair. The pastor had called to say two police officers would be there tonight, just in case. The late afternoon sun came in through the windows, beyond which was a lovely town of sprawling cottonwoods, green lawns and so many people the doctor felt he no longer knew or maybe even could trust. The doorbell rang.
“Hey there,” Ayaz said, snapping out of his thoughts to greet his neighbor.
“Hiya,” said the neighbor, who worked in security.
He had heard from his wife about the talk in Granite Falls and, wanting to be helpful, had offered to lend Ayaz his bulletproof vest for the evening, and here it was, in the duffle bag he was slinging through the ornate front door. He set it down on a chair in the doctor’s study and pulled out the vest. Ayaz looked at it. He began taking off his suit jacket and tie to try it on.
They arrived on a breezy fall day, and he remembered how it all seemed almost corny, from the park with little gnome figurines, to the wide streets named Oak and Maple, to the formidable Grace Lutheran church at the town center. The whole visit felt like one big welcoming parade.
Welcome to our hospital and clinic, where the two other doctors, the nurses and other staff members were lined up to greet them. Welcome to the school, where the principal showed them around. Welcome to the two-block downtown, where there was a butcher, and a bowling alley, and a diner named Wanda’s, and as they walked along, Musarrat noticed something rare. She didn’t feel people staring at her headscarf. They were saying hello and smiling.
Ayaz remembered that it “just felt right.” Wholesome. He had been wanting to get away from his job working for a huge health-care chain in Harrisburg, Pa., and find a way to practice what he called “dignified medicine.” The town seemed to want him, too, a doctor with a medical degree from Georgetown University and an interest in rural health. No one seemed to care that he was Muslim, of Indian descent, born in Kenya and raised in Florida. They just needed a good doctor. So the Virjis decided to move to Dawson.
By the winter of 2014, they were settling into the Victorian house on Pine and the life Ayaz imagined for his family. The children — Maya, Imran and Faisal, the oldest, who was 12 then — enrolled in the public school around the corner. Musarrat set up a spa business down the street. Ayaz often walked to work, where his smiling photo hung on the clinic and hospital walls along with his titles: chief of staff and medical director. He was one of only three doctors practicing in Dawson, and one of a few in the county, and was soon busy with patients and helping to plan a $7 million expansion of the facilities.
He and Musarrat made friends — Jason, Betty, Duane, Stacey and other Dawsonites who would drop by for kebabs or chicken parmesan. When John and Jill Storlien, the local butchers, found out that Ayaz was driving all the way to Minneapolis to get his halal meat, they offered that perhaps they could manage. Their cows came in facing Mecca anyway, it turned out. Ayaz texted them the prayer to say as they butchered, and so one day in a tiny Midwestern town, two Lutherans spoke their first Islamic verses over the carcass of a cow. In summer, neighbors spread blankets and chairs on the Virjis’ front lawn and watched the annual parade float by.
And that was how it was going in Dawson, even through an election season that Ayaz found increasingly disturbing, as Trump kept whipping up crowds by saying that maybe Syrian refugees were part of a secret army, and maybe he’d have to shut down mosques, and maybe Muslims were the one immigrant group that could not become fully American.
All of that was in the air, but in a county that Barack Obama had won twice, Ayaz saw only two “Trump-Pence” yard signs during the whole campaign. He never thought Trump would win, much less in Dawson.
He and Musarrat talked about what to do. He began investigating a job in Dubai. He spoke to his brother in Florida, an investment adviser, who had received a fax after the election that read, “Get the f--- out of my country you Muslim pig,” and was moving to Canada. Musarrat kept thinking about the time after Sept. 11 when a man had chased her with a baseball bat, yelling about her headscarf.
Nothing like that had happened in Dawson, but the Virjis began feeling differently about the town. They wondered whether the people who had seemed so warm were secretly harboring hateful thoughts or suspicions about them. Musarrat told Ayaz that she noticed more silence from certain friends. Ayaz was stopped on a sidewalk by a woman who said, “Jesus loves you,” and wondered what would happen if he said, “Muhammad loves you.” Another day, he ran into a patient who told him that a lot of farmers had voted for Trump because of sky-high health insurance premiums, not because of “anything racial,” and please, no one wants you to go.
Ayaz wasn’t sure whether to believe that. But he and Musarrat decided to stay, at least for the time being, and he tried to transform his anger into understanding. Maybe people really didn’t know, he told himself. Maybe people were suffering in ways he didn’t understand. Not long after that, a patient of his named Mandy France, a pastor in training at Grace Lutheran, asked if he might be willing to give a talk about Islam to the community. She said she’d been horrified by some of the things she’d heard people saying about Muslims in her prayer group.
Ayaz had reservations. He almost never talked about his religion, and he wasn’t sure it was his responsibility to teach people about it now. On the other hand, he thought how else will people learn, and so three months after the election, Dawson’s first Muslim resident found himself standing on the stage of the high school auditorium in a suit, a bright spotlight shining on him.
He squinted, trying to make out the faces in the crowd of nearly 400 people filling up the seats. In the days before, people had been saying the whole thing was an effort to convert Christians to Islam. People had called the school, angry that the event was being held there. Ayaz had worked for weeks on what he would say, writing out an intricate 11-page outline by hand — from “step into shoes of Muslim” to “Quran-philosophical framework” — but when he ran it by Pastor Mandy, she had said no, you need to talk to people on a basic level. They are scared. So he tried to address the tension.
“I heard many people were protesting this talk,” he began. “And I have to say, that stings a little bit. I mean, do I look that intimidating?”
He laughed, and a few people in the audience laughed.
“Do I look like a terrorist?” he said smiling at them, and after talking for an hour about what “99.99 percent” of Muslims believe, he ended with a slideshow of family photos.
“Look! We’re normal!” he said. “That’s our cat!”
People applauded and even stood up, and when it was over, some of them submitted questions to be answered later in the community newspaper.
“Do Muslims believe in birth control?”
“Do the majority of Muslims tolerate/respect other religions?”
“Why are terrorist attacks always from Muslims?”
When Ayaz read them, he wondered if this was what people were thinking when they saw him walking down the street. Still, he felt good enough about the whole exercise that when he was invited to speak in another town, he agreed, even though he had some reservations about venturing beyond Dawson.
Montevideo was 20 minutes east down the highway, a town of 5,200 people. He’d given a talk on obesity at the hospital there once but otherwise he was a stranger, and when he arrived at the library, about 75 people were waiting, including several men with Bibles. As he began talking about how faith without deeds is meaningless, they began shouting verses at him. They yelled that they were praying for his salvation and called him the antichrist. Their tone became so hostile that Musarrat, who had brought their 9-year-old daughter, moved to the back of the room, closer to the exit. In the days after, people wrote letters to the local paper saying how embarrassed they were at the doctor’s reception, but Ayaz decided he was done with trying to explain Islam to rural Minnesota.
“What’s the plan for Thursday?” a nurse asked Ayaz now.
It was Tuesday, two days before the talk, and people kept asking him about it with notes of worry in their voices. Pastor Mandy was saying she had a bad feeling. One of his friends told Ayaz that he should have police there. A colleague had mentioned that her husband had a bulletproof vest, and maybe Ayaz would like to borrow it.
“We’re going to get security,” Ayaz told the nurse.
He was sitting at a computer in the nurse’s station, dictating notes on a patient. “Anxiety, as mentioned, under control, back pain, under control . . . ”
“Oh,” the nurse went on. “Don’t do it.”
“Mandy asked if I wanted to cancel,” he said, checking another chart, his leg bouncing. He didn’t want to be paranoid, but he didn’t want to be naive. He kept thinking about the rise in hate crimes since the election. “I said I don’t want to cancel. It’s got me mad. I’ve got all this to think about — the talk, and now I have to worry about security. I mean, I’m not Martin Luther King.”
He went back to dictating. “Stress level . . . white blood-cell count . . . breathing . . . delirium . . . ”
“Granite Falls is a different town,” the nurse continued. “It’s a little bit rough.”
“Okay. Well. Such is life,” Ayaz said, getting up.
He headed down the hall to tend to his next patient, which was why he had come to Dawson anyway, he kept reminding himself. He asked a nurse to call a patient about lab work. He went into his office to call a colleague.
“Everything okay?” he said into the speakerphone.
They were supposed to be talking about a medical equipment issue.
“Isn’t today the day you — ” the colleague said.
“Thursday. It’s Thursday. I decided to do it. So. Yeah,” Ayaz said, and felt his anger rising again.
He hung up the phone and stared out the window.
He didn’t want to be angry. He knew some of it was because Trump at times reminded him of people who had bullied him growing up, including high school classmates who called him the n-word and a “taco-eating bastard” and made those years “hellish” and “like a prison,” all of which he had tried to escape by telling himself that one day he was going to be respected. One day he was going to lead a decent and dignified life, which is what he was trying to do when he closed his office door just after 1 p.m. He rolled out his mat, prayed, and carried on with the day.
On Wednesday night, Pastor Mandy came over to the house to talk through the plan for Granite Falls.
“Okay, so,” she was saying. “I’m going to open by reading out of the Bible that there is no fear in love, but love casts out fear.”
“That’s good,” Ayaz said, making a note on his outline.
“I think John 14:6 is going to be thrown at you. . . . ‘I am the way and the truth and the light,’ ” Mandy said, referring to the verse many Christians understand to mean that Jesus is the only path to salvation.
Ayaz made a note of that, too, and suggested that perhaps she could explain to people how the verse is not necessarily literal.
“As soon as I say the Bible is not the literal truth, I’m going to be crucified,” she said.
“Okay, don’t do it,” Ayaz said. “Let me be crucified. It’s okay.”
“No, you were crucified in Monte. It’s my turn to be crucified,” Mandy said.
“No, I’ll do it,” Ayaz said. “I’m the main enemy.”
He told Mandy he’d found a verse to quote in case someone called him the antichrist again, and began looking for it in his Bible.
“Can I ask you a personal question?” she said. “Was that hurtful to you? Be honest.”
“It wasn’t,” he said, not looking up.
“How could that not hurt you?” Mandy said. “He called you the embodiment of all that is evil.”
“Didn’t bother me,” Ayaz said, still looking for the verse.
“I think that hurt you,” she said.
He found it. He read the verse, about how unsparingly Jesus will judge hypocrites.
“What do you think of that?” he said. “Do you think that’s good?”
On Thursday, he got home from the hospital and went to pick up Maya from school, hurrying along the sidewalk in the bright sunshine and shade of cottonwoods.
“Hi, Dr. Virji!” someone called out from a front lawn.
“Hey!” Ayaz called back to a woman he knew had voted for Trump. “How are you doing?”
He crossed the street and headed toward the school.
“Hi, Dr. Virji!” said a kid who had been over to their house often before the election, but not since.
“Hey there!” Ayaz called back.
When he got home, he went upstairs to change, and came down in his suit.
“Does this look okay?” he asked Musarrat.
She looked at him. She held his face for a moment.
He went into the living room and sat in a chair, waiting for the body armor to arrive. He rubbed his face. The doorbell rang.
“Do you want to put it underneath or on top and really make a statement?” the neighbor asked Ayaz as he pulled the bulletproof vest out of the duffle bag.
“I don’t want to make a statement,” Ayaz said. He took off his jacket, his tie and his shirt as the neighbor tried to adjust the straps of the vest to make it less bulky. “It doesn’t go any smaller than that?”
“No, this is it,” his neighbor said, helping Ayaz put it on over his T-shirt.
Maya came into the study.
“Dad, what are you doing?” she said.
“Now I put the shirt on over?” Ayaz said, struggling into his dress shirt.
He walked over to a mirror, looked at himself and turned to his neighbor.
“I don’t think this is going to work,” he said. “This is very conspicuous.”
He took it off and began getting dressed again.
“We really appreciate you doing these talks and stuff,” the neighbor said, zipping the vest back in the duffle bag.
“Yeah. Sure,” Ayaz said.
“I think some people are coming from Dawson to be supportive,” she offered.
“I know a way they could be supportive,” he said, thinking once again of the vote.
“Maybe they are sorry,” Musarrat said.
“Would be nice if they said it,” Ayaz said. “I don’t think they regret it.”
They passed through Montevideo and continued farther east. “Ah, goodness,” Ayaz sighed, and soon, they were arriving in Granite Falls, and parking in front of a square brick City Hall with a flapping American flag.
Ayaz went inside and made his way to the front of the city council chamber. He stood behind the long dais and looked out at the crowd filling all the chairs in the room and spilling into the lobby. He spotted the two police officers and began scanning faces in the audience for ones that appeared off-kilter. A man in khakis and tortoise-shell glasses. A brown-haired man holding a Bible. A disheveled, balding man in the lobby, looking at him through the glass door. A white-haired man sitting in the front row, arms folded. Ayaz recognized him.
“Hey,” he said to Duane Husted, a neighbor he knew had voted for Trump.
“Hey,” Duane said back, and soon Mandy stood up to begin, saying to the crowd, “I encourage you to listen.”
Ayaz glanced at his outline and stood up. He said he hoped what he had to say might lead to a better understanding of one another, which was the point of the talk. “So, with that, I begin in the name of God, the most beneficent and most merciful,” he said, reciting the Islamic phrase that usually comes before prayer.
Some people shifted in their chairs.
He introduced himself as a doctor who had studied comparative religion at Georgetown with professors who were “the epitome of intellect and scholarship.” He said that what he learned was that if you want to understand Islam, or anything, “you have to be sincere” and “you have to use your brain.”
He looked around at the crowd.
“Because it’s easy to demonize. You know, ‘Everybody else is crazy and I’m just right,’ ” he said sharply. “And what kind of society does that create? That’s what ISIS does. That’s what these zealots do. Do we want to be like that? As Americans, don’t we want to be better than that? We better be better than that.”
He glanced at his outline and made the point that of course Islam has its zealots, and he condemns them.
“But that’s not what we’re talking about,” he said. “Because if you say, ‘That’s Islam,’ then that’s like me saying, ‘Well, Christianity is David Koresh,’ ” he said, referring to the cult leader.
He began pacing a bit. People were listening.
“Do you guys know who the LRA is?” he said, referring to the Lord’s Resistance Army, the cultish Ugandan rebel group blamed for the deaths of more than 100,000 people. “How many of you knew about that? I want you to raise your hands.”
Two hands went up.
“How come you don’t know about that?” Ayaz said. “How come only Islam has terrorism? The KKK had 5 million members in the 1920s. Lynching of black people was normal. It was routine. Why don’t we look at ourselves, too, as well as others? You have alternative facts? Then go to a different lecture.”
No one was getting up to leave.
“So, the purpose of today is to know one another,” Ayaz continued, going back to the outline.
He quoted Koran verses to explain how there is no compulsion to convert people to Islam, how extremists who believe that “hate me more than they hate you,” and how Islam means peace, and soon, he began to veer.
“So Islam is not what you see on TV, okay?” he said. “I know Fox News. It’s not news. It’s the WWF, okay? Don’t use them as my spokesperson. When you say, ‘These people are animals and we have to blow them up,’ don’t say, ‘This is Islam.’ It’s not. And 99.9 percent of us will agree we need to condemn these people and it hurts us even more because they’re saying that God said this? Muhammad said this? Never in a million years.”
His voice was rising. He was getting angry. Mandy looked at him.
“Breathe, breathe,” she said.
He began talking about Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who had referred to Islam as a “vicious cancer.”
“There are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world! Now, according to General Flynn, we have to purge them? ‘We have to purge the world of Islam!’ ” he said in a mocking voice.
He was far off his outline now.
“You can sense I’m angry about that,” he said. “Wasn’t Jesus angry when he went into the temple and knocked over the tables of the money changers? He was angry. Injustice should make us angry! Okay? I am angry about the election. Because there is injustice there, and I have felt that within my family. And with the burning of mosques? And something like 150 bomb threats to Jewish synagogues? We should think.”
He looked at Duane again, a neighbor he had considered a friend before the election but had barely spoken to since.
“I’ll tell you. After the election, I was angry. And I was angry at my community for what they did. And I was ready to leave. Okay? I was ready to go and say you know what? Not my job. People think I’m a terrorist? I’m outta here. Fine. Find somebody else. The reason I’m here is not because I want to — my faith is very personal to me. I’m here because who else is going to do this, if not me?”
People were just sitting there, listening, not saying anything.
He asked them to imagine how they would feel if he judged Christians the way some people judge Muslims.
If he was dishonest, he said, he would pull out all the most violent Bible verses and say Christianity commands followers to kill.
If he was unfair, he would call the Christian cross a “symbol of torture.”
The room was quiet.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“Love thy neighbor? Do unto others?”
“Why should I come to rural America and help people who think I’m a terrorist and say, ‘Let’s ban these people from coming here! Ban these doctors from coming here!’ ”
He looked at his outline.
“So, now let’s get to the issues . . . ” he said. “Who believes that Islam supports and promotes terrorism?”
No hands.
“None of you believe that? Really? Be honest! It’s okay! Nothing’s going to happen! I’m not a terrorist!”
Still no hands.
He moved on to what the Koran says about women, that they should be treated with dignity, and what Trump had said about grabbing women.
“What did he say? What did he say? You know what he said.”
He moved on to sharia.
“Sharia,” he said in a menacing voice. “Come on. You guys know. This is the Devil talking! Come on! You guys know this. Sharia. All Muslims want to impose sharia? Chop off your heads and gouge your eyes out? Right? Isn’t that what Muslims want to do? Isn’t that what I want to do?”
He kept going, veering on and off his outline, from arcane points of Islamic doctrine to the absurd things people say about Islam, which “are about as stupid as they come.”
He went over the history of Islam in America. He mentioned that Thomas Jefferson hosted what is considered the first iftar dinner, the meal that breaks the fast during the holy month of Ramadan. He talked about refugees. He talked about mercy. He talked and kept talking, and after an hour and a half in which not one person had left the room, Pastor Mandy tapped him on the arm and whispered that he needed to finish.
“I gotta do this,” he told her.
He had one last thing to say, about judgment. He read the Bible verse he had written down the night before from the Gospel of Matthew, which describes what Jesus will say to those who professed his name but failed him.
“And he will say, ‘I never knew you,’ ” Ayaz read. “ ‘Get away from me, you wicked people.’ ”
He looked up from his notes at the audience.
“He’s telling this to you,” Ayaz said. “So.”
He gathered his outline.
“Anyway,” he said. “I’m not going to talk about anything else.”
He sat down. He was exhausted.
People shifted in their chairs. Mandy stood up.
“Okay,” she said. “So. I think, what we will do is to give some time for people to ask questions.”
Hands went up.
“The lady in the back?” Mandy said, and the woman stood up.
“I want to thank you,” she said. “These conversations are very much needed.”
She sat down.
“Thank you,” Ayaz said, and looked out at all the hands.
He called on a man with a beard.
“I don’t have a specific question for you, but maybe a comment,” he said. “In the U.S., the way we teach American history, we condense it down so much. We clean it up. We leave out a whole bunch of things. As Christians, we sanitize it even more . . . and you kind of alluded to that. People really need to be honest about our history.”
“I would agree with you, well said,” Ayaz said. “Who’s next?”
He scanned the hands, and called on a man with short gray hair, who stood up.
“Um, I guess where I’d want to go is simply — ” he began, then started over again. “Part of what I want to share with you is this.” He paused for a moment. “I hear a lot of pain from you this evening.”
Ayaz was looking at him. He was listening.
“Um, I’m sorry,” the man said.
He sat down. The room was silent. People looked at Ayaz, waiting for his response. He glanced down and then around the room at them, at the two police officers, the man in the tortoise shell glasses, the man with the Bible, the disheveled one, his neighbors.
“Thank you for that,” he said.
There were a few more questions, and then Ayaz was done talking. He had said everything he wanted to say, and now he listened to the applause.
He said that he’d been surprised to see Duane, and some other Dawson people.
Musarrat said she saw Lori, Diane, Mary and her husband.
“Oh, and then Sandy and her husband,” she said.
They passed the same fields they passed before, now in the last light of day.
“Was I too negative?” Ayaz asked after a while.
Soon it was dark, and their headlights were shining on the “Welcome to Dawson” sign, and the same streets with the same houses and the same people who had seemed to Ayaz so good and so genuine when his family first arrived. In the morning, he would walk to work as usual, and do his rounds as usual, and that’s how he wished things could be.
Only now, arriving back in Dawson, he still felt different, more and more like a stranger in a rural Midwestern town.
He didn’t want to feel that way. He hoped in time he wouldn’t. He turned onto Pine Street, and then he was home.
============
DAWSON, MINN. — The doctor was getting ready. Must look respectable, he told himself. Must be calm. He changed into a dark suit, blue shirt and tie and came down the wooden staircase of the stately Victorian house at Seventh and Pine that had always been occupied by the town’s most prominent citizens.That was him: prominent citizen, town doctor, 42-year-old father of three, and as far as anyone knew, the first Muslim to ever live in Dawson, a farming town of 1,400 people in the rural western part of the state.
“Does this look okay?” Ayaz Virji asked his wife, Musarrat, 36.
In two hours, he was supposed to give his third lecture on Islam, and he was sure it would be his last. A local Lutheran pastor had talked him into giving the first one in Dawson three months before, when people had asked questions such as whether Muslims who kill in the name of the prophet Muhammad are rewarded in death with virgins, which had bothered him a bit. Two months later, he gave a second talk in a neighboring town, which had ended with several men calling him the antichrist.
Now a librarian had asked him to speak in Granite Falls, a town half an hour away, and he wasn’t sure at all what might happen. So many of the comforting certainties of his life had fallen away since the presidential election, when the people who had welcomed his family to Dawson had voted for Donald Trump, who had proposed banning Muslims from entering the United States, toyed with the idea of a Muslim registry and said among other things, “Islam hates us.”
Trump had won Lac qui Parle County, where Dawson was the second-largest town, with nearly 60 percent of the vote. He had won neighboring Yellow Medicine County, where Granite Falls was the county seat, with 64 percent. Nearly all of Minnesota outside the Twin Cities had voted for Trump, a surprising turn in a state known for producing some of the Democratic Party’s most progressive leaders, including the nation’s first Muslim congressman.
Now Trump was in the White House, and Dawson’s first Muslim resident was sitting in his living room, strumming his fingers on the arm of a chair. The pastor had called to say two police officers would be there tonight, just in case. The late afternoon sun came in through the windows, beyond which was a lovely town of sprawling cottonwoods, green lawns and so many people the doctor felt he no longer knew or maybe even could trust. The doorbell rang.
“Hey there,” Ayaz said, snapping out of his thoughts to greet his neighbor.
“Hiya,” said the neighbor, who worked in security.
He had heard from his wife about the talk in Granite Falls and, wanting to be helpful, had offered to lend Ayaz his bulletproof vest for the evening, and here it was, in the duffle bag he was slinging through the ornate front door. He set it down on a chair in the doctor’s study and pulled out the vest. Ayaz looked at it. He began taking off his suit jacket and tie to try it on.
This was Dawson six months after the election, which was how Ayaz most often thought of things these days — before and after.
He remembered his first visit three years before, driving with Musarrat on a narrow highway west into the prairie and passing one little farm town after another — Cosmos, Prinsburg, Bunde, and finally seeing the wooden sign, “Welcome to Dawson.”They arrived on a breezy fall day, and he remembered how it all seemed almost corny, from the park with little gnome figurines, to the wide streets named Oak and Maple, to the formidable Grace Lutheran church at the town center. The whole visit felt like one big welcoming parade.
Welcome to our hospital and clinic, where the two other doctors, the nurses and other staff members were lined up to greet them. Welcome to the school, where the principal showed them around. Welcome to the two-block downtown, where there was a butcher, and a bowling alley, and a diner named Wanda’s, and as they walked along, Musarrat noticed something rare. She didn’t feel people staring at her headscarf. They were saying hello and smiling.
Ayaz remembered that it “just felt right.” Wholesome. He had been wanting to get away from his job working for a huge health-care chain in Harrisburg, Pa., and find a way to practice what he called “dignified medicine.” The town seemed to want him, too, a doctor with a medical degree from Georgetown University and an interest in rural health. No one seemed to care that he was Muslim, of Indian descent, born in Kenya and raised in Florida. They just needed a good doctor. So the Virjis decided to move to Dawson.
By the winter of 2014, they were settling into the Victorian house on Pine and the life Ayaz imagined for his family. The children — Maya, Imran and Faisal, the oldest, who was 12 then — enrolled in the public school around the corner. Musarrat set up a spa business down the street. Ayaz often walked to work, where his smiling photo hung on the clinic and hospital walls along with his titles: chief of staff and medical director. He was one of only three doctors practicing in Dawson, and one of a few in the county, and was soon busy with patients and helping to plan a $7 million expansion of the facilities.
He and Musarrat made friends — Jason, Betty, Duane, Stacey and other Dawsonites who would drop by for kebabs or chicken parmesan. When John and Jill Storlien, the local butchers, found out that Ayaz was driving all the way to Minneapolis to get his halal meat, they offered that perhaps they could manage. Their cows came in facing Mecca anyway, it turned out. Ayaz texted them the prayer to say as they butchered, and so one day in a tiny Midwestern town, two Lutherans spoke their first Islamic verses over the carcass of a cow. In summer, neighbors spread blankets and chairs on the Virjis’ front lawn and watched the annual parade float by.
And that was how it was going in Dawson, even through an election season that Ayaz found increasingly disturbing, as Trump kept whipping up crowds by saying that maybe Syrian refugees were part of a secret army, and maybe he’d have to shut down mosques, and maybe Muslims were the one immigrant group that could not become fully American.
All of that was in the air, but in a county that Barack Obama had won twice, Ayaz saw only two “Trump-Pence” yard signs during the whole campaign. He never thought Trump would win, much less in Dawson.
The morning after the election, he was shocked and angry, and when he looked up the local results before he went to work, the feelings only intensified. Not only had Trump won the county, he had won Dawson itself by six percentage points.
By the time he got to the hospital, he was pacing up and down the hallways, saying he hoped people realized that they just voted to put his family on a Muslim registry, and how would he be treated around here if he didn’t have “M.D.” after his name? People tried to reason with him. A colleague told him it’s not that people agreed with everything Trump said, and Ayaz said no, you’re giving them a pass. He told the hospital’s chief executive that he was thinking of resigning, and she told him to take some days to cool off.He and Musarrat talked about what to do. He began investigating a job in Dubai. He spoke to his brother in Florida, an investment adviser, who had received a fax after the election that read, “Get the f--- out of my country you Muslim pig,” and was moving to Canada. Musarrat kept thinking about the time after Sept. 11 when a man had chased her with a baseball bat, yelling about her headscarf.
Nothing like that had happened in Dawson, but the Virjis began feeling differently about the town. They wondered whether the people who had seemed so warm were secretly harboring hateful thoughts or suspicions about them. Musarrat told Ayaz that she noticed more silence from certain friends. Ayaz was stopped on a sidewalk by a woman who said, “Jesus loves you,” and wondered what would happen if he said, “Muhammad loves you.” Another day, he ran into a patient who told him that a lot of farmers had voted for Trump because of sky-high health insurance premiums, not because of “anything racial,” and please, no one wants you to go.
Ayaz wasn’t sure whether to believe that. But he and Musarrat decided to stay, at least for the time being, and he tried to transform his anger into understanding. Maybe people really didn’t know, he told himself. Maybe people were suffering in ways he didn’t understand. Not long after that, a patient of his named Mandy France, a pastor in training at Grace Lutheran, asked if he might be willing to give a talk about Islam to the community. She said she’d been horrified by some of the things she’d heard people saying about Muslims in her prayer group.
Ayaz had reservations. He almost never talked about his religion, and he wasn’t sure it was his responsibility to teach people about it now. On the other hand, he thought how else will people learn, and so three months after the election, Dawson’s first Muslim resident found himself standing on the stage of the high school auditorium in a suit, a bright spotlight shining on him.
He squinted, trying to make out the faces in the crowd of nearly 400 people filling up the seats. In the days before, people had been saying the whole thing was an effort to convert Christians to Islam. People had called the school, angry that the event was being held there. Ayaz had worked for weeks on what he would say, writing out an intricate 11-page outline by hand — from “step into shoes of Muslim” to “Quran-philosophical framework” — but when he ran it by Pastor Mandy, she had said no, you need to talk to people on a basic level. They are scared. So he tried to address the tension.
“I heard many people were protesting this talk,” he began. “And I have to say, that stings a little bit. I mean, do I look that intimidating?”
He laughed, and a few people in the audience laughed.
“Do I look like a terrorist?” he said smiling at them, and after talking for an hour about what “99.99 percent” of Muslims believe, he ended with a slideshow of family photos.
“Look! We’re normal!” he said. “That’s our cat!”
People applauded and even stood up, and when it was over, some of them submitted questions to be answered later in the community newspaper.
“Do Muslims believe in birth control?”
“Do the majority of Muslims tolerate/respect other religions?”
“Why are terrorist attacks always from Muslims?”
When Ayaz read them, he wondered if this was what people were thinking when they saw him walking down the street. Still, he felt good enough about the whole exercise that when he was invited to speak in another town, he agreed, even though he had some reservations about venturing beyond Dawson.
Montevideo was 20 minutes east down the highway, a town of 5,200 people. He’d given a talk on obesity at the hospital there once but otherwise he was a stranger, and when he arrived at the library, about 75 people were waiting, including several men with Bibles. As he began talking about how faith without deeds is meaningless, they began shouting verses at him. They yelled that they were praying for his salvation and called him the antichrist. Their tone became so hostile that Musarrat, who had brought their 9-year-old daughter, moved to the back of the room, closer to the exit. In the days after, people wrote letters to the local paper saying how embarrassed they were at the doctor’s reception, but Ayaz decided he was done with trying to explain Islam to rural Minnesota.
Except that the invitations kept coming, including the one from Granite Falls.
It was 35 minutes east on the highway, a town of 2,900 people he’d only breezed through once or twice, but Ayaz decided okay, one more. Now fliers with his photo, the date and time of the talk were going up around Granite Falls and on Facebook, where reactions were coming in, including a thumbs-down from a man whose own photo was superimposed with a huge Confederate flag.“What’s the plan for Thursday?” a nurse asked Ayaz now.
It was Tuesday, two days before the talk, and people kept asking him about it with notes of worry in their voices. Pastor Mandy was saying she had a bad feeling. One of his friends told Ayaz that he should have police there. A colleague had mentioned that her husband had a bulletproof vest, and maybe Ayaz would like to borrow it.
“We’re going to get security,” Ayaz told the nurse.
He was sitting at a computer in the nurse’s station, dictating notes on a patient. “Anxiety, as mentioned, under control, back pain, under control . . . ”
“Oh,” the nurse went on. “Don’t do it.”
“Mandy asked if I wanted to cancel,” he said, checking another chart, his leg bouncing. He didn’t want to be paranoid, but he didn’t want to be naive. He kept thinking about the rise in hate crimes since the election. “I said I don’t want to cancel. It’s got me mad. I’ve got all this to think about — the talk, and now I have to worry about security. I mean, I’m not Martin Luther King.”
He went back to dictating. “Stress level . . . white blood-cell count . . . breathing . . . delirium . . . ”
“Granite Falls is a different town,” the nurse continued. “It’s a little bit rough.”
“Okay. Well. Such is life,” Ayaz said, getting up.
He headed down the hall to tend to his next patient, which was why he had come to Dawson anyway, he kept reminding himself. He asked a nurse to call a patient about lab work. He went into his office to call a colleague.
“Everything okay?” he said into the speakerphone.
They were supposed to be talking about a medical equipment issue.
“Isn’t today the day you — ” the colleague said.
“Thursday. It’s Thursday. I decided to do it. So. Yeah,” Ayaz said, and felt his anger rising again.
He hung up the phone and stared out the window.
He didn’t want to be angry. He knew some of it was because Trump at times reminded him of people who had bullied him growing up, including high school classmates who called him the n-word and a “taco-eating bastard” and made those years “hellish” and “like a prison,” all of which he had tried to escape by telling himself that one day he was going to be respected. One day he was going to lead a decent and dignified life, which is what he was trying to do when he closed his office door just after 1 p.m. He rolled out his mat, prayed, and carried on with the day.
On Wednesday night, Pastor Mandy came over to the house to talk through the plan for Granite Falls.
“Okay, so,” she was saying. “I’m going to open by reading out of the Bible that there is no fear in love, but love casts out fear.”
“That’s good,” Ayaz said, making a note on his outline.
“I think John 14:6 is going to be thrown at you. . . . ‘I am the way and the truth and the light,’ ” Mandy said, referring to the verse many Christians understand to mean that Jesus is the only path to salvation.
Ayaz made a note of that, too, and suggested that perhaps she could explain to people how the verse is not necessarily literal.
“As soon as I say the Bible is not the literal truth, I’m going to be crucified,” she said.
“Okay, don’t do it,” Ayaz said. “Let me be crucified. It’s okay.”
“No, you were crucified in Monte. It’s my turn to be crucified,” Mandy said.
“No, I’ll do it,” Ayaz said. “I’m the main enemy.”
He told Mandy he’d found a verse to quote in case someone called him the antichrist again, and began looking for it in his Bible.
“Can I ask you a personal question?” she said. “Was that hurtful to you? Be honest.”
“It wasn’t,” he said, not looking up.
“How could that not hurt you?” Mandy said. “He called you the embodiment of all that is evil.”
“Didn’t bother me,” Ayaz said, still looking for the verse.
“I think that hurt you,” she said.
He found it. He read the verse, about how unsparingly Jesus will judge hypocrites.
“What do you think of that?” he said. “Do you think that’s good?”
On Thursday, he got home from the hospital and went to pick up Maya from school, hurrying along the sidewalk in the bright sunshine and shade of cottonwoods.
“Hi, Dr. Virji!” someone called out from a front lawn.
“Hey!” Ayaz called back to a woman he knew had voted for Trump. “How are you doing?”
He crossed the street and headed toward the school.
“Hi, Dr. Virji!” said a kid who had been over to their house often before the election, but not since.
“Hey there!” Ayaz called back.
When he got home, he went upstairs to change, and came down in his suit.
“Does this look okay?” he asked Musarrat.
She looked at him. She held his face for a moment.
He went into the living room and sat in a chair, waiting for the body armor to arrive. He rubbed his face. The doorbell rang.
“Do you want to put it underneath or on top and really make a statement?” the neighbor asked Ayaz as he pulled the bulletproof vest out of the duffle bag.
“I don’t want to make a statement,” Ayaz said. He took off his jacket, his tie and his shirt as the neighbor tried to adjust the straps of the vest to make it less bulky. “It doesn’t go any smaller than that?”
“No, this is it,” his neighbor said, helping Ayaz put it on over his T-shirt.
Maya came into the study.
“Dad, what are you doing?” she said.
“Now I put the shirt on over?” Ayaz said, struggling into his dress shirt.
He walked over to a mirror, looked at himself and turned to his neighbor.
“I don’t think this is going to work,” he said. “This is very conspicuous.”
He took it off and began getting dressed again.
“We really appreciate you doing these talks and stuff,” the neighbor said, zipping the vest back in the duffle bag.
“Yeah. Sure,” Ayaz said.
He was quiet as they drove along Oak Street and out of Dawson, heading east on the narrow highway into the open fields.
Musarrat brushed cat hair off his suit jacket.“I think some people are coming from Dawson to be supportive,” she offered.
“I know a way they could be supportive,” he said, thinking once again of the vote.
“Maybe they are sorry,” Musarrat said.
“Would be nice if they said it,” Ayaz said. “I don’t think they regret it.”
They passed through Montevideo and continued farther east. “Ah, goodness,” Ayaz sighed, and soon, they were arriving in Granite Falls, and parking in front of a square brick City Hall with a flapping American flag.
Ayaz went inside and made his way to the front of the city council chamber. He stood behind the long dais and looked out at the crowd filling all the chairs in the room and spilling into the lobby. He spotted the two police officers and began scanning faces in the audience for ones that appeared off-kilter. A man in khakis and tortoise-shell glasses. A brown-haired man holding a Bible. A disheveled, balding man in the lobby, looking at him through the glass door. A white-haired man sitting in the front row, arms folded. Ayaz recognized him.
“Hey,” he said to Duane Husted, a neighbor he knew had voted for Trump.
“Hey,” Duane said back, and soon Mandy stood up to begin, saying to the crowd, “I encourage you to listen.”
Ayaz glanced at his outline and stood up. He said he hoped what he had to say might lead to a better understanding of one another, which was the point of the talk. “So, with that, I begin in the name of God, the most beneficent and most merciful,” he said, reciting the Islamic phrase that usually comes before prayer.
Some people shifted in their chairs.
He introduced himself as a doctor who had studied comparative religion at Georgetown with professors who were “the epitome of intellect and scholarship.” He said that what he learned was that if you want to understand Islam, or anything, “you have to be sincere” and “you have to use your brain.”
He looked around at the crowd.
“Because it’s easy to demonize. You know, ‘Everybody else is crazy and I’m just right,’ ” he said sharply. “And what kind of society does that create? That’s what ISIS does. That’s what these zealots do. Do we want to be like that? As Americans, don’t we want to be better than that? We better be better than that.”
He glanced at his outline and made the point that of course Islam has its zealots, and he condemns them.
“But that’s not what we’re talking about,” he said. “Because if you say, ‘That’s Islam,’ then that’s like me saying, ‘Well, Christianity is David Koresh,’ ” he said, referring to the cult leader.
He began pacing a bit. People were listening.
“Do you guys know who the LRA is?” he said, referring to the Lord’s Resistance Army, the cultish Ugandan rebel group blamed for the deaths of more than 100,000 people. “How many of you knew about that? I want you to raise your hands.”
Two hands went up.
“How come you don’t know about that?” Ayaz said. “How come only Islam has terrorism? The KKK had 5 million members in the 1920s. Lynching of black people was normal. It was routine. Why don’t we look at ourselves, too, as well as others? You have alternative facts? Then go to a different lecture.”
No one was getting up to leave.
“So, the purpose of today is to know one another,” Ayaz continued, going back to the outline.
He quoted Koran verses to explain how there is no compulsion to convert people to Islam, how extremists who believe that “hate me more than they hate you,” and how Islam means peace, and soon, he began to veer.
“So Islam is not what you see on TV, okay?” he said. “I know Fox News. It’s not news. It’s the WWF, okay? Don’t use them as my spokesperson. When you say, ‘These people are animals and we have to blow them up,’ don’t say, ‘This is Islam.’ It’s not. And 99.9 percent of us will agree we need to condemn these people and it hurts us even more because they’re saying that God said this? Muhammad said this? Never in a million years.”
His voice was rising. He was getting angry. Mandy looked at him.
“Breathe, breathe,” she said.
He began talking about Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who had referred to Islam as a “vicious cancer.”
“There are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world! Now, according to General Flynn, we have to purge them? ‘We have to purge the world of Islam!’ ” he said in a mocking voice.
He was far off his outline now.
“You can sense I’m angry about that,” he said. “Wasn’t Jesus angry when he went into the temple and knocked over the tables of the money changers? He was angry. Injustice should make us angry! Okay? I am angry about the election. Because there is injustice there, and I have felt that within my family. And with the burning of mosques? And something like 150 bomb threats to Jewish synagogues? We should think.”
He looked at Duane again, a neighbor he had considered a friend before the election but had barely spoken to since.
“I’ll tell you. After the election, I was angry. And I was angry at my community for what they did. And I was ready to leave. Okay? I was ready to go and say you know what? Not my job. People think I’m a terrorist? I’m outta here. Fine. Find somebody else. The reason I’m here is not because I want to — my faith is very personal to me. I’m here because who else is going to do this, if not me?”
People were just sitting there, listening, not saying anything.
He asked them to imagine how they would feel if he judged Christians the way some people judge Muslims.
If he was dishonest, he said, he would pull out all the most violent Bible verses and say Christianity commands followers to kill.
If he was unfair, he would call the Christian cross a “symbol of torture.”
The room was quiet.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“Love thy neighbor? Do unto others?”
“Why should I come to rural America and help people who think I’m a terrorist and say, ‘Let’s ban these people from coming here! Ban these doctors from coming here!’ ”
He looked at his outline.
“So, now let’s get to the issues . . . ” he said. “Who believes that Islam supports and promotes terrorism?”
No hands.
“None of you believe that? Really? Be honest! It’s okay! Nothing’s going to happen! I’m not a terrorist!”
Still no hands.
He moved on to what the Koran says about women, that they should be treated with dignity, and what Trump had said about grabbing women.
“What did he say? What did he say? You know what he said.”
He moved on to sharia.
“Sharia,” he said in a menacing voice. “Come on. You guys know. This is the Devil talking! Come on! You guys know this. Sharia. All Muslims want to impose sharia? Chop off your heads and gouge your eyes out? Right? Isn’t that what Muslims want to do? Isn’t that what I want to do?”
He kept going, veering on and off his outline, from arcane points of Islamic doctrine to the absurd things people say about Islam, which “are about as stupid as they come.”
He went over the history of Islam in America. He mentioned that Thomas Jefferson hosted what is considered the first iftar dinner, the meal that breaks the fast during the holy month of Ramadan. He talked about refugees. He talked about mercy. He talked and kept talking, and after an hour and a half in which not one person had left the room, Pastor Mandy tapped him on the arm and whispered that he needed to finish.
“I gotta do this,” he told her.
He had one last thing to say, about judgment. He read the Bible verse he had written down the night before from the Gospel of Matthew, which describes what Jesus will say to those who professed his name but failed him.
“And he will say, ‘I never knew you,’ ” Ayaz read. “ ‘Get away from me, you wicked people.’ ”
He looked up from his notes at the audience.
“He’s telling this to you,” Ayaz said. “So.”
He gathered his outline.
“Anyway,” he said. “I’m not going to talk about anything else.”
He sat down. He was exhausted.
People shifted in their chairs. Mandy stood up.
“Okay,” she said. “So. I think, what we will do is to give some time for people to ask questions.”
Hands went up.
“The lady in the back?” Mandy said, and the woman stood up.
“I want to thank you,” she said. “These conversations are very much needed.”
She sat down.
“Thank you,” Ayaz said, and looked out at all the hands.
He called on a man with a beard.
“I don’t have a specific question for you, but maybe a comment,” he said. “In the U.S., the way we teach American history, we condense it down so much. We clean it up. We leave out a whole bunch of things. As Christians, we sanitize it even more . . . and you kind of alluded to that. People really need to be honest about our history.”
“I would agree with you, well said,” Ayaz said. “Who’s next?”
He scanned the hands, and called on a man with short gray hair, who stood up.
“Um, I guess where I’d want to go is simply — ” he began, then started over again. “Part of what I want to share with you is this.” He paused for a moment. “I hear a lot of pain from you this evening.”
Ayaz was looking at him. He was listening.
“Um, I’m sorry,” the man said.
He sat down. The room was silent. People looked at Ayaz, waiting for his response. He glanced down and then around the room at them, at the two police officers, the man in the tortoise shell glasses, the man with the Bible, the disheveled one, his neighbors.
“Thank you for that,” he said.
There were a few more questions, and then Ayaz was done talking. He had said everything he wanted to say, and now he listened to the applause.
He kept thinking about it all as they headed back west on the highway.
“People were very nice,” he said. “Gracious.”He said that he’d been surprised to see Duane, and some other Dawson people.
Musarrat said she saw Lori, Diane, Mary and her husband.
“Oh, and then Sandy and her husband,” she said.
They passed the same fields they passed before, now in the last light of day.
“Was I too negative?” Ayaz asked after a while.
Soon it was dark, and their headlights were shining on the “Welcome to Dawson” sign, and the same streets with the same houses and the same people who had seemed to Ayaz so good and so genuine when his family first arrived. In the morning, he would walk to work as usual, and do his rounds as usual, and that’s how he wished things could be.
Only now, arriving back in Dawson, he still felt different, more and more like a stranger in a rural Midwestern town.
He didn’t want to feel that way. He hoped in time he wouldn’t. He turned onto Pine Street, and then he was home.
Saturday, July 1, 2017
UN in Myanmar reaps what it has sown in genocidal Sri Lanka
The news below appeared in the Tamilnet.
=============
Myanmar on Friday surpassed ‘Sri Lanka’ in challenging UN scrutiny of its crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing. Myanmar will refuse entry to members of a UN probe focusing on allegations of killings, rape and torture by its security forces against Rohingya Muslims. In addition, it wants to keep the so-called ‘Domestic Investigation’ in the hands of people coming from the very military against which the allegations are made. As Myanmar follows genocidal Sri Lanka, UN is heading for the fate of The League of Nations. Defying international norms on people’s affairs such as human rights has to be carefully differentiated from defiance shown to the UN on other matters, as the former is the worst one from the vantage of the masses, and elements that advise and back such State defiance are the worst enemies of humanity, commented Tamil activists for alternative politics in the island.
A UN report this year said that mass killings and gang rapes of Rohingya amounted to crimes against humanity and possible ethnic cleansing.
In March, EU brought a resolution in Geneva calling for a mission to look into the allegations as well as abuses in other longstanding ethnic conflicts in the country.
As in the case with genocidal Sri Lanka, New Delhi and Beijing competing with the West to have entry into the country, jumped to save the Establishment in Myanmar. The most articulating was New Delhi.
The UN missions and nominees could hardly go beyond playing handmaids to global agenda-setters. For instance, Angelina Jolie didn’t see genocide-motivated Sinhala military rape in the island. But, whenever a probe on human rights is structurally denied for whatever the reason of geopolitics, it morally affects the victims worse than the atrocities committed on them. The anger will only turn against those who engineer the denial.
Reuter on Friday cited Aung San Suu Kyi saying in Sweden this month that the UN mission "would have created greater hostility between the different communities". The majority in Rakhine are ethnic Rakhine Buddhists who, like many in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, see the Rohingya as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.
This is in line with the excuse coming from many Sinhala-Buddhist establishments, even when Eezham Tamils are a parallel historical nation in the island.
A group of Myanmar Buddhist monks recently coming to Jaffna in the company of Sinhala Buddhist monks was seen as giving moral support to the on-going genocidal colonization in the occupied country of Eezham Tamils.
Over concerned about Islam, opinion is obtuse to what other religious institutions, especially Theravada Buddhism and Hindutva do in the region at present.
The State in Colombo, having long experience in deceiving the nation of Eezham Tamils, has successfully extended the expertise to deceive the world. The expertise is now exported to other parts of the world.
The ‘Sri Lankan’ modus operandi of the world’s first genocide in 21st century has institutionalized genocide and camouflaged follow-up as accepted paradigms of world polity.
In the case of Rohingya in Myanmar, lessons particularly go to Bangladesh, Pakistan, Maldives and Bengalis in India in the region, whose governments were a party to the ‘Sri Lanka’ paradigm; to a host of world Muslim countries that were in the bandwagon; and to the countries in Latin America that were carried away by the red shawl and deceptive diplomats of Rajapaksa.
As States, powers and international organizations are not likely to change, world may have to think of alternative movements and methods to check culprits and empower victims, especially in the area of collective human rights of peoples and nations.
=============
Myanmar on Friday surpassed ‘Sri Lanka’ in challenging UN scrutiny of its crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing. Myanmar will refuse entry to members of a UN probe focusing on allegations of killings, rape and torture by its security forces against Rohingya Muslims. In addition, it wants to keep the so-called ‘Domestic Investigation’ in the hands of people coming from the very military against which the allegations are made. As Myanmar follows genocidal Sri Lanka, UN is heading for the fate of The League of Nations. Defying international norms on people’s affairs such as human rights has to be carefully differentiated from defiance shown to the UN on other matters, as the former is the worst one from the vantage of the masses, and elements that advise and back such State defiance are the worst enemies of humanity, commented Tamil activists for alternative politics in the island.
A UN report this year said that mass killings and gang rapes of Rohingya amounted to crimes against humanity and possible ethnic cleansing.
In March, EU brought a resolution in Geneva calling for a mission to look into the allegations as well as abuses in other longstanding ethnic conflicts in the country.
As in the case with genocidal Sri Lanka, New Delhi and Beijing competing with the West to have entry into the country, jumped to save the Establishment in Myanmar. The most articulating was New Delhi.
The UN missions and nominees could hardly go beyond playing handmaids to global agenda-setters. For instance, Angelina Jolie didn’t see genocide-motivated Sinhala military rape in the island. But, whenever a probe on human rights is structurally denied for whatever the reason of geopolitics, it morally affects the victims worse than the atrocities committed on them. The anger will only turn against those who engineer the denial.
Reuter on Friday cited Aung San Suu Kyi saying in Sweden this month that the UN mission "would have created greater hostility between the different communities". The majority in Rakhine are ethnic Rakhine Buddhists who, like many in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, see the Rohingya as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.
This is in line with the excuse coming from many Sinhala-Buddhist establishments, even when Eezham Tamils are a parallel historical nation in the island.
A group of Myanmar Buddhist monks recently coming to Jaffna in the company of Sinhala Buddhist monks was seen as giving moral support to the on-going genocidal colonization in the occupied country of Eezham Tamils.
Over concerned about Islam, opinion is obtuse to what other religious institutions, especially Theravada Buddhism and Hindutva do in the region at present.
The State in Colombo, having long experience in deceiving the nation of Eezham Tamils, has successfully extended the expertise to deceive the world. The expertise is now exported to other parts of the world.
The ‘Sri Lankan’ modus operandi of the world’s first genocide in 21st century has institutionalized genocide and camouflaged follow-up as accepted paradigms of world polity.
In the case of Rohingya in Myanmar, lessons particularly go to Bangladesh, Pakistan, Maldives and Bengalis in India in the region, whose governments were a party to the ‘Sri Lanka’ paradigm; to a host of world Muslim countries that were in the bandwagon; and to the countries in Latin America that were carried away by the red shawl and deceptive diplomats of Rajapaksa.
As States, powers and international organizations are not likely to change, world may have to think of alternative movements and methods to check culprits and empower victims, especially in the area of collective human rights of peoples and nations.
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