File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_2001/postcolonial.0109, message 138


Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2001 12:20:48 -0400 (EDT)
From: Imre Szeman <szeman-AT-mcmail.cis.mcmaster.ca>
Subject: America Must Show Respect for its Diversity (by Amritjit Singh,


FYI--
Imre

----------------------------------------------------------------------
This attached letter concerning the arrest of a Sikh man last Wednesday
was intended for the Providence Journal, but the Journal has decided to
focus their attention on letters from people concerned with bridge
traffic or the offense of a picture of a six year old girl helping her dad
shovel asphalt at home.  Luckily Media Monitor picked up our letter.
Anti-Muslim backlash is alive and well in Providence.  We have already
had a group of sixteen year olds try to burn an Indian man's convenience
store, had a gas station owned by a Middle Easterner tagged with racist
grafitti, and I personally have heard of numerous epithets muttered or
shouted at Muslim citizens, including my students.

Thanks
Dan Moos

http://www.mediamonitors.net/amritjitsingh1.html

America Must Show Respect for its Diversity

by Amritjit Singh, Zubeda Jalalzai & Dan Moos
We write with reference to the story "Man Taken into Custody at Providence
Rail Station Identified" (September 12) regarding the arrest of Mr. Sher
J. B. Singh of Leesburg, VA.

Mr. Singh is clearly a member of the Sikh faith, the sixth largest
religion in the world today, with over 20 million adherents around the
globe. As we write this, we do not know if Mr. Singh has been released
from police custody. Your story updated at 6:30 p.m. indicates that he
would be arraigned in the morning for the possession of a knife over 3"
long. We are appalled at the hasty actions in this regard of the
Providence Police, FBI, and other federal and local agencies.

The knife in point is a kirpan, one of the five symbols of the Sikh faith,
along with kes (unshorn hair and beard) - two elements of his religious
identity that made Mr. Singh an easy suspect in the first place in the
eyes of Amtrak personnel.

Mr. Singh and three other people initially questioned and released were
all presumed guilty because they looked "Arab," our media's version of a
terrorist. It is a good thing that we did not buttonhole every white
citizen this way when Timothy McVeigh turned out to be the terrorist.

Apparently, in the frenzy to find a target for Americans' anger at the
outrageous attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon yesterday,
our law enforcement agencies media have violated Mr. Singh's civil rights
as a U.S. citizen. Our media - which might be expected to know a bit more
about the world - make matters worse by rushing stories into print or to
TV screen without asking critical questions or doing even minimal
research.

Mr. Singh was driven away in a police cruiser in the presence of loudly
cheering crowd who shouted unprintable racial epithets at him. It seems
Mr. Singh became for these Rhode Islanders a scapegoat and an object of
their uncontrolled rage, harkening back to darker moments of U.S. history
where such overzealous reaction has led to tragic injustices for certain
groups (for example, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War
II).

We hope that our media and our educators, as well as federal and local
leaders, will urge people to show restraint as well as respect for our
diversity so that we do not create new victims in our understandable need
to vent our fury and bewilderment..

We cannot accept that the US government prepares war, eluding its own
responsibility after so many provocations against Arabic and other people
of the world. This is a manipulation of the sufferings of the US victims.
This will only provoke a lot of sufferings for innocent victims in the
Third World and also increase the risk of terrorist attacks in our
countries. Washington did already bombard 23 countries and after a certain
time it was discovered its media had lied to justify it.

Amritjit Singh, Zubeda Jalalzai & Dan Moos contributed above lines from
Department of English, Rhode Island College.

Source:

by courtesy &  2001 Amritjit Singh, Zubeda Jalalzai & Dan Moos




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