Screenshot of video of Ellen's acceptance speech at the Mario Savio Young Activist Awards
On this two month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, Marie Choi produces another amazing piece on Occupy Movements with coverage from Monday’s raid in Oakland; the movement to halt the deportation of Pancho (with tape direct from the press conference after his release); and the Mario Savio Young Activist Awards at OccupyCal, which went to Christsna Sot, Josh Healey, and Apex’s own Ellen Choy!
Posted in Conflict/Peace, Economics, Immigration
Tagged Ellen Choy, Francisco “Pancho” Ramos-Stierle, Mario Savio, Occupy Cal, occupy oakland
This week on Apex Express, we reflect back on 9/11. As the nation remembers the victims in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and on board the airplanes, Apex explores the aftermath and how OUR communities have been affected.
We’ll hear a personal documentary by Robynn Takayama on how several Asian Pacific communities responded immediately after 9/11 to address racist scapegoating, hate crimes, and the build up to the War on Terrorism.
We also talk with Co-founder of the Sikh Coalition, Amardeep Singh, about the recent Islamaphobia conference and the accompanying website, “Unheard Voices of 9/11.”
And finally, we bring you a round table discussion with Valarie Kaur, award-winning filmmaker; Fahd Ahmed, legal and policy director with DRUM, Desis Rising Up & Moving; and Zahra Billoo, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations San Francisco Bay Area Chapter.
Plus we have a pair of tickets to Anthony Brown’s Asian American Orchestra at Yoshi’s SF on September 11 for the 30th anniversary of the first Asian American Jazz Festival.
Community Calendar
Posted in Civil Rights, Conflict/Peace
Tagged Amardeep Singh, Anthony Brown, CAIR, DRUM, Fahd Ahmed, Sikh Coalition, Valarie Kaur
Grace Lee Boggs and Michael Hardt discussed themes from Grace’s new book “The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-first Century”. This was at the “Asian American Movement Building Conference:Out of the Margins”, held at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in late March.
The book was released last month and co-authored by Scott Kurashige. You can find out more about the book and order it at GRACELEEBOGGS.COM You can also find links there to her weekly newspaper column to the Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership.
The pledge gifts include the full presentations by Grace Lee Boggs and Michael Hardt and the question and answer period. [CD-audio; DVD-video]
Recordings from Rob Yanagida, a supporter of the Boggs Center and long-time Bay Area activist.
Hosts: Karl Jagbandhansingh, Marie Choi, and Ellen Choy.
Posted in Conflict/Peace, Economics, Environmental Justice, Racism
Tagged Grace Lee Boggs, Michael Hardt, Rob Yanagida
This week on Apex Express, we bring you a speech by noted writer, journalist, and filmmaker Tariq Ali delivered at the Twelfth Annual Eqbal Ahmad Lecture at Hampshire College on November 17, 2009. His lecture is titled “Obama’s War in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
Listen:
By Gina Hotta
Remembering 9-11 in America. Images play over and over again of the Twin Towers torn apart, of flags waving and people singing “God Bless America”. These are our sacred icons and stories.
But there are other stories of war and patriotism.
Balbir Singh Sodhi left religious persecution in India for America. He came to California and at last settled in Mesa, Arizona. But, four days after September 11, 2001, Balbir Singh Sodhi was shot to death while working at his convenience store. “I am a patriot,” yelled Sodhi’s killer Frank Roque, “arrest me while those terrorists go wild.” One year later in San Francisco, Sodhi’s brother was shot and killed when his taxi crashed. His killer was never found.
For the most part voices who could tell stories like that of the Sodhis are silent. They are silenced by war’s mad offspring: that of fear and hate in post 9-11 America. But Valarie Kaur wants to change all that.
Kaur says the Sodhi’s story hit close to home. Both the Sodhi and Kaur family are of Sikh background. And many Sikhs were targeted in the racial profiling after 9-11. Soon after Sodhi’s killing, Kaur and her cousin took off on a road trip across the US to document these cases of hate violence. Kaur’s award-winning film “Divided We Fall: Americans in the Aftermath” is a vehicle for these silent voices to break free and, as Kaur says, “rip open a space” to begin a national dialog about race, war, and, “who counts as an American”.
Kaur’s grandparents are immigrants from India who settled in the rural town of Clovis, California. Kaur was a young college student on September 11, 2001. As she watched the attack in horror on TV, reports of vengeance and backlash came in. And the attacks were often against people who were brown-skinned, wore a turban and fit the stereotype–popularized by American media images–of a terrorist; people who looked like Kaur’s family and friends.
On her road trip across the US, Kaur and her cousin caught all of these voices and images in “Divided We Fall”:
In New York: an elderly Sikh man badly beaten but who didn’t press charges against his attackers because he believed that for the US, “it was a time to heal”.
In California: a woman video store owner knifed in the street, a young boy pelted by lunch boxes and taunted with the names “Osama Bin Laden” and “Saddam Hussein”.
And in Arizona: the family of Balbir Singh Sodhi who called a press conference shortly after his death to draw attention to hate crimes.
Kaur hopes that showing her film “Divided We Fall” throughout the US at the grassroots level will spark a dialog that’s missing on the national political landscape. Towards this goal, community groups are sponsoring the film followed by discussion. In this way, Kaur hopes to help over-come the politics of fear that often permeate national dialogs.
The American vocabulary is full of words that conjure up anger, vengeance, fear. And all are backed up by a wellspring of myths harking back to the days of cowboys and Indians, of yellow and brown hordes banging at US borders while the Texas Rangers ride in to back them all off. Add to this mix, images of men with beards and turbans and it helps to fill the well that might otherwise run dry and expose who’s running off with all the water.
The film “Divided We Fall” gives people the stories, the ways and means of expression to oppose acts that deny the humanity of people like those found in Kaur’s film. “Divided We Fall”, and works like it, create memories and myths that help shape the American psyche.
And there are many new stories now.
Of people who are stopped on trains, on planes, who are denied jobs, put on long lists for deportation and yet, who still believe in the great potential of America. Of men and women who strive to level the uneven playing fields of America and believe in the unlimited possibilities of peace.
But there are few words that describe these actions as up-lifting, as patriotic, as courageous, and there are not enough myths about their deeds.
In America there’s a wellspring of stories to draw from. “Divided We Fall” goes to them to nourish the landscape, changing it into one that will reject the seeds of disparagement and dehumanization.
Balbir Singh Sodhi. One hour before his death, Sodhi donated money to the victims of 9-11. He asked for American flags to put in his store. He was a vehicle for change. In America, will we tell his story? In America, will we remember?
Posted in Civil Rights, Conflict/Peace, Film
Tagged Balbir Singh Sodhi, Valarie Kaur
By Gina Hotta
He was hooded and arrested. He was detained and charged with espionage. His family and financial records were put under surveillance. Yet he received overwhelming support to become a delegate at the Democratic National Convention from the State of Washington. James Yee is the former Muslim Chaplin at Guantanamo Bay and he wants people to know that they can make a difference.
A Barack Obama supporter, Yee is also a 3rd generation Chinese American. “I’m trying to be an example for other people within the Muslim and Asian American communities. If they see me having a positive impact, people can also be inspired as well. I want that to happen.” Towards this end, he was on a speaking tour that ended up at the University of California, Berkeley at Boalt Hall Law School.
Yee has a seriousness about him that underscores the kind grit and determination he must have used to endure his ordeal that started at Guantanamo Bay. He’ll need these same qualities to realize his mission. In Election 2008 where an African American man’s audacious dream was realized, it was also said that no one wanted the Muslim American vote.
Across campus in Barrows Hall on the same day of Yee’s speaking engagement, a panel was held about the American Muslim electorate. Addressing a full house, panelist Agha Saeed of the American Muslim Alliance explains that since 1996, meetings have taken place with many mainstream politicians. Since then, an agenda was put forth with a focus on civil rights that will also increase the public good, bring about global peace and justice, stop the war and improve relations between the US and Muslim world. Another result of their efforts is that there is support for Muslim American concerns among some prominent political figures. However, this support has been in private. For the most part Muslim Americans are seen as foreigners who carry a stigma that taints politicians who too visibly have their support.
Panelist Munir Jiwa also talks about this silencing of the Muslim American voice. Jiwa, the director of the Center for Islamic Studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, says that for some, this silence is self-imposed out of fear. For others, it is a strategic self-silencing that in Election ’08 was done to help Barack Obama’s candidacy. For his opposition to the war and for his stands on social welfare and civil liberties, Obama gained popularity among Muslim Americans. Yet the mainstream mantra of claiming Christianity contained Obama to the point to where it took General Colin Powell, a mostly Republican supporter, to ask the question: what’s wrong with being a Muslim or a seven-year old Muslim who wants to be president?
But, as Americans see their life savings go up in smoke, issues of civil liberties are on the back-burner. This is another reason why Chaplin Yee went on tour. Up at Boalt Hall, Yee said he wants to bring issues of torture and human rights to the fore. “Violating our rights, eroding our civil liberties doesn’t make us safer. Developed nations have the ability to both increase protections of civil liberties as well as national security simultaneously. So when you hear this rhetoric that you’ve got to sacrifice one for the other, we should never buy that.”
Charges against Yee were eventually dismissed and he received an award for outstanding military service. But shortly after his arrest, Yee was put in solitary confinement, something he saw done to break prisoners at Gitmo.
And breaking the isolation and silence surrounding Muslim American narratives remain after Election 2008. Their stories of work in US fields and auto factories, of business owners both large and small, and of the pain of false accusations after 9-11 will still need to be told. The task of breaking stereotypes surrounding people with names like “Hussein”, who are brown-skinned and who wear a head-covering, use rifles and (like Sarah Palin) shoot moose, will still need to be tackled.
Yet perhaps the answers to these questions are found in public discussions and speaking tours like Yee’s and the panel at the University of California. These public platforms are needed now more than ever before. As state surveillance occur with greater frequency, as racial profiling has grown to include people who fit the stereotype of Arabs and Muslims, as immigrants become more suspect, and as the word “socialist” is spoken like an epithet, more stories and lessons must be told that inspire people to up-hold justice and equality for all.
But the hardest step is the first one. It is the courage of a few from the targeted communities to step-up and speak out. Some sixty years ago Japanese in America were incarcerated during World War II. The silence and denial that followed was crippling until Japanese American activists began one-on-one organizing. This led to public government commission hearings on the role of race and wartime hysteria that led to the internment of Japanese Americans. In 2001, this same community came out very publicly to support people who were experiencing a similar situation after September 11th. And more people joined in to form a very loose network that could help make a space for these hidden narratives and figure out how to bring these into the public discourse.
Now those first difficult steps are being taken. The unprecedented election to congress of two Muslims who are also African American (and yes, even the ground-breaking presidency of a man whose name is Barack Hussein), is a reflection in part of Muslim America’s strength. And, on his speaking tour, Chaplain Yee spoke to Muslims, Christians, Asian Americans, and leaders from various communities.
Yee asks one more question. “Why can’t our universities and colleges step-up to educate? Schools should have an Islamic Studies program to provide accurate information. We have Ethnic Studies, American Studies and all these departments can educate the community.” Election ’08 has opened a door that can’t be closed. It has paved the way to a point where, hopefully, someday soon the question, “who wants the Muslim American vote”, won’t be one that needs asking.
Article and Audio Clip by Gina Hotta 2006
Audio Clip: Truth on Trial (downloads 1.2MB mp3 file)
In Berkeley California, Veena Dubal remembers what happened to her friend while walking with him on the University campus.
The friend, a Sikh Indian American, was punched in the nose and pushed down.
“Watch out Osama” the assailant called out.
“There was blood on the ground. And for ten minutes, no one offered him a towel, no one helped,” Dubal says of her friend’s plight.
“And that sort of complacency, on a small scale, is what we see in Lodi only on a larger basis”. For Dubal, “blood is being split metaphorically in the Lodi community.”
It is why Dubal drives ninety minutes from Berkeley to Lodi – a rural town in California’s Sacramento Valley – soon after hearing of the arrests there.
It’s summer in Lodi. In one of Lodi’s older neighborhoods, children play in a park next to a Boys and Girls Club. Warehouses and canneries stand across the street next to railroad tracks.
Hamid Hayat worked at one of these canneries. His father, Umer Hayat, drove an ice cream truck around town.
But on June 3, 2005, the FBI came to Lodi and arrested the Hayats on suspicion of having links to terrorists. Three other men, including two imams – religious leaders in the Lodi Muslim community – were also picked-up.
Dubal drives into Lodi to meet up with attorneys who are helping the Pakistani residents. Her services may be needed as Dubal is studying to be a lawyer.
But upon entering town, “there were blue SUVs circling around the hotel the ACLU was using as its headquarters…trying to make us know that they were watching”, says Dubal. “I had a sense that the city felt besieged.”
The lawyers closely follow the cases.
The FBI says that in Pakistan Hamid Hayat got training to become an Islamic radical while attending religious school and that the imams were involved in anti-American Islamic organizations.
The agency says it has had a years-long investigation into possible connections between the Pakistani Lodi residents and Osama bin Laden’s network.
But the FBI’s choice of an agricultural town helps explain things to Dubal. “I think the biggest reason is because this was in Lodi,” a place that’s a distance away from resources an urban center offers.
Dubal grew-up in Kentucky. Being one of the few Indian American families in her old neighborhood, “I was very aware of being very different”, says Dubal.
Back in Kentucky, the house was toilet papered. The car was egged. Things like this happened on a weekly basis.
Last July 4th, a firecracker went off in their mailbox when her father when to open it.
“My parents almost didn’t tell me about it.” But Dubal was glad they finally did as, “it reminded me that none of these events are isolated.” .
In Lodi, TV crews, journalists, and FBI agents want to speak to members of the Pakistani community. Some people are followed and surveyed.
SUVs with tinted windows are stationed near the park, the Boys and Girls Club and the warehouses. A small, wooden mosque across the street is the center of attention.
Still, after the arrests, Pakistani residents are determined to go on with their daily business. After all, many of them have been in Lodi for since the early 1900’s. Umer and Hamid Hayat are American citizens.
Dubal knows Taj Khan. He’s a member of the Pakistani Lodi community and raised three children in Lodi.
“It came as a shock to us,” says Khan referring to the arrests. “We have good relations with the city and everybody else – sort of a model relationship.”
Khan says one of the detained Imams helped create the inter-faith Celebration Ibrahim, where, “we had 700 people attend – it was an awesome program.”
But Dubal sensed something else was going on with the Pakistani community. “… After getting to speak with them a little longer, I kind of got the sense that they were so scared”.
Dubal goes to the mosque that’s near the Boys and Girls Club. She asks mosque members if they’re OK.
Without looking around, a man tells her, “if you look to your left behind that tree, you’ll see an SUV, if you look to your right you’ll see one, and if you look behind you there’s one.”
“That’s how I found out that the SUVs were FBI,” says Dubal still a bit surprised.
One man talks to her about the FBI interrogations and says, “I don’t care if they ask me questions, but every time they take me away it scares my wife and children.”
That comment rings in Dubal’s mind. She hopes that the legal network started in Lodi will address his concern.
It’s been two weeks since the arrests.
Dubal has returned to Berkeley. But she’s kept up with events surrounding the Lodi cases.
No terrorist charges are filed against the Hayats or the imams. But, the FBI detains the Hayats on charges that they lied about Hamid attending training camps connected to al-Qaida.
The Hayat’s lawyer said a misunderstanding took place when the FBI interrogated them. The Hayats plead not guilty.
The imams Shabbir Ahmed as well as Muhammad Adil Khan and his 19 year-old son are accused of immigration violations. The FBI says one of the imams made anti-US speeches and the other imam is a friend of a Taliban leader.
Dubal is worried.
Moral and material support for the mostly blue-collar Pakistani community isn’t as forthcoming as it should be she thinks.
To help the Lodi community, Dubal and friends begin compiling a list of legal resources.
Dubal has to stay in Berkeley. But she knows of a few things happening to assist the Pakistani Americans.
Back in Lodi, there’s a presentation at the Boys and Girls Club.
A dozen or more women with children gather in a small room.
It’s a Know Your Rights presentation to help the mostly Pakistani immigrant women. Some were at home with only their children when the FBI came to their door for questioning.
A few women from the Latino community are also present. Translations are being provided.
Two men come in – one dressed in a suit holding a microphone and the other with camera equipment. They talk to the panelists from the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights.
“This is a workshop mostly for women,” says a panelist who also explains that the women feel safer this way. “We’ll need to ask them if they think it’s all right if you stay”, says another organizer.
After a few minutes the TV crew leave without interviewing or filming people.
A lawyer in a headscarf, or hijab, explains the importance of the right to legal counsel, “Don’t be afraid and intimidated… your lawyer will make sure that what’s recorded is accurate.”
Another panelist explains what to do in case of an arrest or FBI search. She says to read the warrant to ensure that all information on it is correct.
At this point, a Pakistani woman asks, “what if people can’t read?”
A second or two of silence passes. Then the importance of getting a lawyer is re-stated.
More questions and answers follow and refreshments are provided. It’s a small turnout, but it’s a start in providing resources that are scare in Lodi.
Several weeks have passed since the arrests. But world events still put the spotlight on Lodi.
Horrific bomb blasts have gone off in London. Several British Pakistani men are thought to be responsible.
In the wake of the bombings, Nightline broadcasts their national TV program about the FBI investigation into Lodi’s Pakistani community.
Dubal continues to work on the resource list and follow the Lodi cases.
The Hayats are indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of lying to federal investigators. Denied bail, the Hayats try to raise about 1 million in property value that will release them from jail.
In court, imam Adil Khan and his son agree to be deported rather than fight immigration charges. Khan says that if he could speak in public, he would offer prayers for the victims of the London bombings.
Congress makes permanent most of the security measures of the USA Patriot Act.
Dubal recalls several messages she received.
“I had email from several Pakistani American friends saying they really wanted to go to Lodi but couldn’t because they were really scared.”
Dubal is not Pakistani and does not have a Muslim surname. She thinks that perhaps these factors give her some protection from scrutiny.
She also remembers what happened to her Sikh friend in Berkeley
“For him the worst thing about it wasn’t being knocked down”, says Dubal. It was the sense of isolation and not being offered help.
Finally a woman who Dubal believes was a Latina janitor, “came by, patted him on the shoulder and asked if he was alright. It was the only act of kindness he’d seen the whole time.”
Dubal has a sense of responsibility to, “go and do the work that others can’t do.” She says that the resource list is done and ready for distribution.
(Note: The audio clip is an update of the Hayat’s trial as of Mar. 30, 2006. For more information, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights is a possible resource. Hear Audio Clip: 9-11 Voices to hear recounting of the UC Berkeley incident )
Produced by Gina Hotta
Nine flavors of ice cream, four full meals a day, Burger King, pizzas and someone to clean your toilet, set-up your camp. Is this an up-scale summer retreat? According to Pratap Chatterjee it’s what US soliders get in Iraq. Journalist & KFPA/Apex producer Chatterjee is researching how Asian sub-contract labor makes these comforts away from home possible. Workers and services are supplied by Halliburton to the tune of about $20 billion while laborers get about $300/month. In contrast to this is are services the same company supplies to Abu Graib.
Hear more on Apex Express archives. To learn more go to CorpWatch.
By Gina Hotta
An audio collage of emotions, experiences and a coming together in the wake of wars and racial fears both past and present.
Posted in Conflict/Peace
