What America Stands For – 2 Muslims Travel Across America

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[Reprinted from CNN Living – “In America”]

2 Muslims travel 13,000 miles across America, find an embracing nation

By Wayne Drash, CNN

September 10, 2010 3:21 p.m. EDT

(CNN) -- The blue Chevy Cobalt broke down amid the mountains of Montana in an area where there was no cell phone reception. The Muslims in the car, on a cross-country journey for the holy month of Ramadan, approached a bushy-bearded fisherman.

It would be another test of a question they wondered when they first set off from New York three weeks earlier: Is America still the accepting nation that embraced our forebears or has it reached a new level of intolerance?

Far from the media frenzy dominating headlines, from the so-called "ground zero mosque" to a pastor's planned Quran burning, Aman Ali and Bassam Tariq traveled more than 13,000 miles into the heart of America over the last month, visiting 30 mosques in 30 days for Ramadan.

They began in New York, headed south and then cut across the country to California before making their way back, ending today in Michigan in the nation's largest Muslim community.

The fisherman in Montana became the embodiment of their trip -- Ali and Tariq were embraced nearly everywhere they went, from a Confederate souvenir shop in Georgia to the streets of Las Vegas, Nevada, to the hills of North Dakota where the nation's first mosque was built in 1929.

Like any road trip, there were strange moments along the way: A Mississippi police officer quizzed them about their beliefs on the ground zero mosque and they were asked to leave a mosque in Mobile, Alabama.

They chuckle about those experiences now and emphasize it shouldn't overshadow the whole trip because, ultimately, they discovered that America still embraces immigrants and the nation is filled with welcoming and loving people.

Ride along on the Ramadan road trip

"After 13,000 miles, I think that America still exists, and I'm happy to know that it does," said Tariq, a 23-year-old American of Pakistani descent. "It's really made America feel like home to me in a way that I've never felt before. The America that we think about [as immigrants] is still actually there. I've seen it! And I'm seeing it still."

When he approached the fisherman after their car broke down, Tariq says, he didn't know how he'd be received. He asked if he could hitch a ride to town and the fisherman "happily does it." When the man asked Tariq what he was doing in Montana, he told him about their 30 mosques journey.

"And he doesn't flinch and doesn't get worried," Tariq said. "For me, it was like, 'Wow! That America still exists.' "

He had a similar experience among Bosnian Muslims in Boise, Idaho, where it took 12 years for the community to build a mosque there "with their bare hands." He saw one man cry on entering the mosque. An elderly couple hugged each other when they walked inside.

"It means so much to these people who've been displaced from their own country, and they come here to this place of worship," he said. "That, to me, is really what this country is about."

For Ali, his favorite moment was Ross, North Dakota, a blip of a town with a population of 48 people. He knew little of the town's rich Muslim history, and it was difficult to try to find someone in the town who did.

A pastor directed them to a woman, who kindly pointed them down a dirt road to where the nation's first mosque once stood. It's no longer there. It's been replaced by a tiny cement block mosque, complete with a gold dome. Nearby, there's a cemetery marking the pioneering Muslims of America, with birth dates of 1882, 1904, 1931.

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Ali stood in awe. As he approached the mosque, his heart pounded. "I knew our roots went deep in this country, but it was great to truly experience it. Praying in there was like hopping in a time machine," said Ali, a 25-year-old Muslim who was born in Columbus, Ohio. "I literally felt like I was plummeting and falling."

His takeaway from the trip, he says, was seeing how Muslims in America have assimilated in their communities, from Jacksonville, Florida, to Wichita, Kansas, to Oklahoma City.

"It was really cool and refreshing to see people who genuinely love the communities they're in and they're there to stay," Ali said. "They're involved in the community, not just the mosque."

It was also remarkable to have people, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, "just bend over backwards and be friendly to us," he said.

Tariq said their blog also helps the rest of America realize "you have to accept Muslims are here in America to stay, and we've been here for awhile. Even the most bigoted person has to accept that."

As for what's next for the young men, they plan to celebrate Eid with their Muslim brethren in Dearborn, Michigan -- happy to have discovered an America that still embraces them, even if that's not always portrayed in the news media.

"It's a small but vocal group of Americans in this country pushing this anti-Muslim rhetoric," Ali said. "And unfortunately in our society, whomever shouts the loudest is going to get the most air time."

Excerpted from 2 Muslims travel 13,000 miles across America, find an embracing nation - CNN.com

http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/09/10/ramadan.roadtrip.folo/index.html?hpt=C2

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Labor Day – 1882-2010

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The first celebration of Labor Day was observed in 1882 in New York City by the Central Labor Union of New York, the nation’s first integrated major trade union. In response to the brutal overreaction of US marshals and military to the Pullman Strike, President Grover Cleveland established the national holiday in 1894.

“Labor Day symbolizes our determination to achieve an economic freedom for the average man which will give his political freedom reality."

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1936

 "The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor - these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship. The savings of the average family, the capital of the small-businessmen, the investments set aside for old age - other people's money - these were tools which the new economic royalty used to dig itself in.

Those who tilled the soil no longer reaped the rewards which were their right. The small measure of their gains was decreed by men in distant cities.

Throughout the nation, opportunity was limited by monopoly. Individual initiative was crushed in the cogs of a great machine. The field open for free business was more and more restricted. Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise.

An old English judge once said: "Necessitous men are not free men." Liberty requires opportunity to make a living - a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.

For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor - other people's lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.

Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of government. The collapse of 1929 showed up the despotism for what it was. The election of 1932 was the people's mandate to end it. Under that mandate it is being ended.

The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody's business. They granted that the government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live."

Excerpted from FDR’s 1936 Democratic convention speech.

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Off the Cuff – 9/6/10

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The Thumb & Pinky Phone

Turn your hand sideways folding your index, middle & ring fingers, leaving your thumb and pinky up. Voila! You have a prop to illustrate your tale of a phone call. You see – those of us listening to your tale have no idea what it means to call someone on the phone, needing that prop to understand.

OK really – do we not know what you mean when you say you called someone? Do we really need that hand prop? I don’t think so. Stop doing that!

Paying for Fire & Police Services

A growing trend among municipalities trying to close budget gaps is to double charge citizens for police & fire services. Not only do you pay taxes to fund emergency services, but you may well receive a bill from the town for the cost of responding to your emergency. No citizen can customize the size of the emergency response so no matter the resources sent to your aid you’re stuck with the bill. Some fire and auto insurance policies will cover those bills, but if they don’t it comes out of your pocket. Hard to believe? Check out this article from the NY Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/automobiles/05CRASHTAX.html?_r=1

More Tired, Trendy Clichés

Let’s drill down on that as, at the end of the day, we have to take it one game at a time. Enough drilling down and we’ll be in China. See Rick Sanchez on CNN’s “The List” for lots of drilling down. Yes, professional athletes, we know you have to take it one game at a time – tough to do 2 games at a time. I’ve pretty much given up on “at the end of the day”. UGH!

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Pedophilia a Way of Life in Afghanistan Ruling Tribe

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[Reprinted from the SF Gate, online home of the San Francisco Chronicle]

Afghanistan's Dirty Little Secret

Joel Brinkley

August 29, 2010

Western forces fighting in southern Afghanistan had a problem. Too often, soldiers on patrol passed an older man walking hand-in-hand with a pretty young boy. Their behavior suggested he was not the boy's father. Then, British soldiers found that young Afghan men were actually trying to "touch and fondle them," military investigator AnnaMaria Cardinalli told me. "The soldiers didn't understand."

All of this was so disconcerting that the Defense Department hired Cardinalli, a social scientist, to examine this mystery. Her report, "Pashtun Sexuality," startled not even one Afghan. But Western forces were shocked - and repulsed.

For centuries, Afghan men have taken boys, roughly 9 to 15 years old, as lovers. Some research suggests that half the Pashtun tribal members in Kandahar and other southern towns are bacha baz, the term for an older man with a boy lover. Literally it means "boy player." The men like to boast about it.

"Having a boy has become a custom for us," Enayatullah, a 42-year-old in Baghlan province, told a Reuters reporter. "Whoever wants to show off should have a boy."

Baghlan province is in the northeast, but Afghans say pedophilia is most prevalent among Pashtun men in the south. The Pashtun are Afghanistan's most important tribe. For centuries, the nation's leaders have been Pashtun.

President Hamid Karzai is Pashtun, from a village near Kandahar, and he has six brothers. So the natural question arises: Has anyone in the Karzai family been bacha baz? Two Afghans with close connections to the Karzai family told me they know that at least one family member and perhaps two were bacha baz. Afraid of retribution, both declined to be identified and would not be more specific for publication.

As for Karzai, an American who worked in and around his palace in an official capacity for many months told me that homosexual behavior "was rampant" among "soldiers and guys on the security detail. They talked about boys all the time."

He added, "I didn't see Karzai with anyone. He was in his palace most of the time." He, too, declined to be identified.

In Kandahar, population about 500,000, and other towns, dance parties are a popular, often weekly, pastime. Young boys dress up as girls, wearing makeup and bells on their feet, and dance for a dozen or more leering middle-aged men who throw money at them and then take them home. A recent State Department report called "dancing boys" a "widespread, culturally sanctioned form of male rape."

So, why are American and NATO forces fighting and dying to defend tens of thousands of proud pedophiles, certainly more per capita than any other place on Earth? And how did Afghanistan become the pedophilia capital of Asia?

Sociologists and anthropologists say the problem results from perverse interpretation of Islamic law. Women are simply unapproachable. Afghan men cannot talk to an unrelated woman until after proposing marriage. Before then, they can't even look at a woman, except perhaps her feet. Otherwise she is covered, head to ankle.

"How can you fall in love if you can't see her face," 29-year-old Mohammed Daud told reporters. "We can see the boys, so we can tell which are beautiful."

Even after marriage, many men keep their boys, suggesting a loveless life at home. A favored Afghan expression goes: "Women are for children, boys are for pleasure." Fundamentalist imams, exaggerating a biblical passage on menstruation, teach that women are "unclean" and therefore distasteful. One married man even asked Cardinalli's team "how his wife could become pregnant," her report said. When that was explained, he "reacted with disgust" and asked, "How could one feel desire to be with a woman, who God has made unclean?"

That helps explain why women are hidden away - and stoned to death if they are perceived to have misbehaved. Islamic law also forbids homosexuality. But the pedophiles explain that away. It's not homosexuality, they aver, because they aren't in love with their boys.

Addressing the loathsome mistreatment of Afghan women remains a primary goal for coalition governments, as it should be.

But what about the boys, thousands upon thousands of little boys who are victims of serial rape over many years, destroying their lives - and Afghan society.

"There's no issue more horrifying and more deserving of our attention than this," Cardinalli said. "I'm continually haunted by what I saw."

As one boy, in tow of a man he called "my lord," told the Reuters reporter: "Once I grow up, I will be an owner, and I will have my own boys."

© 2010 Joel Brinkley

This article appeared on page E - 8 of the San Francisco Chronicle

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/08/29/INF21F2Q9H.DTL#ixzz0yQPnkAxl

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