Thoughts on Syria: part III

This is part III of a three part series on Syria. If you like what I said here (or even if you don't) please check out parts I and II. 

It’s Sunday, and Social Media seems to have quieted down after the fear mongering outrage of last week’s refugee crisis. Yet, while we’re spreading our beach towels and scolding our kids for not putting on sunscreen, the bloated bodies of decomposing Syrian children are still washing up on Turskish beaches. But, we’re Americans; we have a lot of issues; Thanksgiving is coming up; it’s apparently time to move on. 

When I was at college in California one of the professors had her car tires slashed and her windows spray-painted with racial slurs. There had been some racially charged events on campus the month preceding this and it happened during a conference on campus racism. So, as you would expect, the student-body exploded. There was an organized classroom walkout and then a candlelight vigil against racism. There were seminars and panel discussions which culminated in a concert to end the hate. At the finale of the event they brought out a surprise guest: the victimized professor. Nobody had seen her since the incident, so we all went wild in support.

A few days later she was arrested. Two witnesses identified the victim as the perpetrator and the stuff she'd reported as stolen was found in her own closet. In an effort to galvanize the campus against racism, the professor slashed her own tires and spray painted her own windows. The ends justify the means, or something like that. We all felt betrayed.

Life went on. No more vigils, no more seminars, and definitely no more concerts. It's been ten years and college racism continues unabated. The same campus has been repeatedly in the news over racial tension. 

A few years ago I wrote a post about the lack of affordable housing on Kaua’i, the need for systemic change, and our lack of substantial public dialogue on the issues. Other than it being Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and Kaua’i having a chronic lack of affordable homes, there was no precipitous event that caused me to focus on poverty. One hundred and seventy five people read it.

Earlier this week Facebook was blowing up due to Governor Ige’s announcement that Hawai’i would comply with Federal law and accept Syrian Refugees. In an attempt to respond to the over-hyped fear mongering on Facebook, I wrote a post on the Syrian Refugee crisis. Five thousand people read it.

In the coming months the Senate will pass the SAFE Act. Obama will veto it. Republican members of Congress will then threaten a Government shutdown if the SAFE Act isn’t signed into law. The Syrian Civil War will continue, the refugee crisis will get worse, and children will keep washing up on beaches.

Yet the nation, especially Social Media, will have long since stopped paying attention. A refugee will commit a crime somewhere and politicians will say “I told you so, these people are dangerous” Tulsi Gabbard will sweep her way to reelection as our representative in Congress without ever having to defend her vote to halt the flow of refugees. And Governor Ige won’t mention the issue again.

Our dysfunctional political process is fueled by our chronically short attention spans.

I have one simple plea for this holiday season: don’t stop paying attention. We all can vote, we all have a voice, and we’re all human. In a democracy, that’s all the tools we need to make a difference.

And, in a brief interruption of your happy Sunday adventures, here are some pictures of Syrian children at the beach. 

Before you scroll down, I want to clarify that I'm not saying that we shouldn't be happy, or that we shouldn't post animal videos on Facebook, or that we should feel guilty about enjoying ourselves at the beach on Thanksgiving. We just need to remember to be continuously grateful for the freedom that we have based merely on the geographic lottery of our birth. And that it's our duty to ensure that others have that freedom as well. 

That is why these pictures are worth looking at...

All photos taken from the Facebook album of AsOmii Jay. 

Thoughts on Syria: Part II

This is part II of a three part series on Syria. If you like what I said here (or even if you don't) please check out parts I and III.  


"In the absence of any guiding principle, politics becomes a naked struggle for power."
-Bertrand Russell

Remember the fury over the Wall Street bailout and inflation? Or the Obamacare death panels? Or the insistence that we can't allow Africans into the country during the Ebola epidemic? Or the current theme that any action against climate change will cripple our economy?

In yet another example of the fear mongering and partisan pandering inherent in American Democracy, yesterday the Republican party (with the support of some conservative Democrats, including Hawai'i' Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard) passed the American Security Against Foreign Enemies (SAFE) Act. I won't go into the details, because I know that you'll close the browser window, but, if it becomes law it will temporarily halt all refugee resettlement and ultimately add a cumbersome layer of bureaucracy to an already cumbersomely bureaucratic process.

As I wrote about the other day, the UN accepts less than 1% of refugees for resettlement. And then the US takes only a tiny fraction of them after an 18-24 month background check.

Since September 11, 2001-- the US has resettled 748,000 refugees. You know how many of them have committed an act of terrorism against the US? Zero. How many of the attackers in Paris were refugees from Syria? Zero. The Syrian Passport was a fake, and they were all French and Belgian nationals.

The US has accepted 1,500 Syrian Refugees since the civil war began. In comparison, Turkey has taken in 2.2M, Lebanon 1.2M, Jordan 1.4M, Saudi Arabia 100-500K, Iraq 247K, and Germany 200K.

I don't think that anyone who is not running for an election is saying that our Syrian refugee program is too lenient.

So, what if the Republican party wanted to actually do something to limit the chances of terrorism in the US. How about making it so that terrorists can't buy guns? According to the Government Accountability Office: "Membership in a terrorist organization does not prohibit a person from possessing firearms or explosives under current federal law... Between 2004 and 2014, suspected terrorists attempted to purchase guns from American dealers at least 2,233 times. And in 2,043 of those cases-- 91 percent of the time-- they succeeded."

This insane loophole was highlighted by an al-Qaida operative in 2011 who released a video saying: "America is absolutely awash with easily obtainable firearms, you can go down to a gun show at the local convention center... So what are you waiting for?"

Despite widespread support among Democrats, gun safety advocates, and even the Director of the FBI-- the NRA opposes any legislation limiting the rights of terrorists to purchase guns. As the NRA goes, so does the Republican Party. Congress has repeatedly failed to pass a measure that would ban guns for those on the FBI's terrorist watch-list.

Yet, instead of gun control, Presidential candidate and Senator Rand Paul thinks it would be a better idea to eliminate all welfare support for resettled refugees from 34 mostly Middle Eastern countries.

My wife is a refugee. She subsisted off of food stamps for her entire childhood. She lived in government sponsored housing until she was eighteen. She went to college with federal aid. And now she pays the government somewhere around $20,000 a year in taxes. She is a proud American who is a productive member of our economy. That's how our system works.

When you cut off aid to refugees you create a second class tier of citizens. When you refuse to integrate those citizens, you create a hotbed of terrorism-- regardless of religion. Which is what is happening across Europe. And is exactly what ISIS wants.

The Intercept recently published a chilling look into the stated strategy of ISIS and Al Qaeda:

The [Charlie Hebdo] attack had “further [brought] division to the world,” the group [ISIS] said, boasting that it had polarized society and “eliminated the grayzone,” representing coexistence between religious groups. As a result, it said, Muslims living in the West would soon no longer be welcome in their own societies. Treated with increasing suspicion, distrust and hostility by their fellow citizens as a result of the deadly shooting, Western Muslims would soon be forced to “either apostatize … or they [migrate] to the Islamic State, and thereby escape persecution from the crusader governments and citizens,” the group stated, while threatening of more attacks to come.

In a 2004 letter to Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, laid out his proposal for provoking such a conflict, calling for terrorist attacks against the Shiite majority population that would lead to a harsh crackdown on the Sunni minority. In such a scenario, his group could then coerce the Sunni population into viewing it as their only protector. “If we succeed in dragging them into the arena of sectarian war,” Zarqawi wrote, “it will become possible to awaken the inattentive Sunnis as they feel imminent danger and annihilating death. 

... Through increasingly provocative terrorist attacks, hostage executions, and videotaped threats, the Islamic State is consciously seeking to trigger a backlash by Western governments and citizens against the Muslim minorities living in their societies. By achieving this, the group hopes to polarize both sides against each other, locking them into an escalating spiral of alienation, hatred and collective retribution. In a such a scenario, the group can later attempt to pose as the only effective protector for increasingly beleaguered Western Muslims.

Yet, what do Republicans (and Tulsi Gabbard) do? They fall right into the trap.

As The Wahington Post reports, Donald Trump "is refusing to rule out extreme measures that include warrantless searches or faith-based identification cards." When asked how his plan differs from that of Nazi Germany requiring Jews to register, he responded, "You tell me."

Speaking of fascism, Presidential Candidate Ben Carson who has repeatedly compared the Obama administration to Nazi Germany is now saying that "you have to reject the tenets of Islam" in order to be President of the United States.

Good thing that Ted Cruz is setting the record straight by reminding Ben Carson that "the Constitution specifies there shall be no religious test for public office... The president's faith is between him and God." But Cruz's religious tolerance doesn't stretch much further than the Oval Office. He is advocating that the US only accept Christians from Syria, because, in his words, "there is no meaningful risk of Christians committing acts of terror."

Huh? As The New York Times reports, "Since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly twice as many people have been killed by white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims." Or, what about the 4,743 lynchings of the Ku Klux Klan in the name of Protestantism.

We could dismiss these bigoted and unconstitutional claims if these three guys weren't the front runners. But between them, they represent 64% of the Republican electorate. The more inflammatory they get, the higher they rise in the polls. 

Let me pause here.

I want to be clear that I recognize that radical Islam presents an extreme danger to the west. To go one step further, I agree with the words of moralist Sam Harris when he says that "my concern [is] that the political correctness of the Left has made it taboo to even notice the menace of political Islam, leaving only right-wing fanatics to do the job." As he points out, "there is only one religion that systematically stifles free expression with credible threats of violence."*

It is important to recognize the unique danger of extremist Islamic ideology. For example, the Charter of Hamas, the democratically elected ruling party of the Gaza Strip, quotes Muhammad as saying "The Day of Judgement will not come until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, 'O Muslim, O servant of God, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him."

While we need to condemn the aspects of religious violence in the Koran, we also need to understand that the vast majority of Muslims also reject the extremist tenets of ISIS. 

According to The Washington Institute, only 3% of Egyptians and 5% of Saudi Arabians "expressed a favorable opinion of ISIS." Those numbers aren't too scary.

This, in my opinion, is much more frightening: in one South Carolina poll, 40% of respondents said that "Islam should be illegal in the United States," and 72% said that "A Muslim should not be allowed to be President of the United States." More broadly, a Gallup poll found that 50% of Republicans "Feel a great deal of prejudice against Muslims."

I know that this post is more inflammatory and politically polarizing than I have ever been. However, since I feel strongly that the Muslim community should denounce ISIS and extremist Islamic ideology-- it's equally my role as an American to denounce extremism in our political system. In that same Gallup poll, only 17% of Democrats felt the same level of prejudice. Other than Tulsi Gabbard and a group of other democrats, the SAFE Act that just passed the house was a Republican initiative. I hate to say it, but Hillary Clinton's plan makes her sound like the only adult in the room.

Just like we can't separate the recent terrorist events from the extremists wing of Islam, we also can't separate the nationalistic fear mongering and blatant bigotry from the conservative wing of the Republican Party.

While it's gotten them plenty of votes, none of the GOP fear mongering of the last five years has come true. Obama is not a muslim. The US never experienced rampant inflation after the stimulus. There are no Obamacare death panels. Nobody died of Ebola. Nobody took anyone's guns in Texas. And Syrian Refugees are not going to take over our country. Refusing to accept and integrate refugees into American Society will only widen the divide between East and West while perpetuating the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II.

But, it does help Donald Trump.

*Just to be clear, Sam Harris's arguments are fascinating, complex, and very easy to take out of context. He criticizes Catholicism's teachings which enable pedophilia and Christianity for teachings which block stem cell research. And he also says that Leviticus, Exodus, and Deuteronomy "are the most repellent, the most sickeningly unethical documents to be found in any religion. They're worse than the Koran. They're worse than any part of the New Testament." Please check out his blog at Samharris.org.

Thoughts on Syria

This is the first of a three part series on Syria. If you like what I said here (or even if you don't) please check out parts II and III. 

I was robbed on Friday. They took four computers, jewelry, and possibly our two favorite ducks. I have never felt such shame and anger towards my fellow humans. This feeling is new to me. But not because some young punk broke into our house and violated our privacy. Crystal meth is creating a lost generation on Kaua'i who are driven to unconscionable acts. I can understand that.

It's our collective response to the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II that makes me want to vomit. It's the venom that is coming out on Social Media that's making me lose faith in humanity. From my friends-- people I know to be smart, good people.

That, I can not understand.

In case you missed it, Governor Ige said that Hawai'i would welcome Syrian refugees with aloha. And Social Media exploded in vehemence. This xenophobic outburst caused Governor Ige to partially retract his statement yesterday by saying "I suppose in hindsight I should probably be more thoughtful about my statements."

Yes-- Governor Ige, you should have known better. While we don't talk about it, we all know that under the thin veneer of the aloha spirit, Hawai'i harbors an intense distrust towards outsiders. But no-- Governor Ige, you shouldn't have to apologize for Hawai'i's lack of humanity. This is one of those rare times where it's important to say "fuck public opinion, I'm doing what's right."

My wife was born in a Cambodian refugee camp. My grandparents and great-grant parents were refugees. Most of my grandfather's family were shot or gassed because they could not get political asylum quick enough. Jews were painted as communists, and communists were thought to be dangerous. Nearly 70% of Americans were opposed to accepting Jewish refugees on the eve of World War II.

And the wheel of history turns.

According to a recent Bloomberg Poll a majority of Americans do not want the US to allow Syrian refugees into our country. The Syrian crisis is our generation's holocaust. We're using the same xenophobic arguments against Muslims as were made against Jews. We're using the same Nationalistic arguments against foreign aide as were used then. And it's sickening to be an impotent witness.

I used to wonder how the world remained silent for so long in the face of Nazi atrocities. Now it's my generation's turn, and we're making the same obscene mistake.

Before I go on, I should clarify that I did read an article that said that liberals are exacerbating the situation by making this a moral issue. Since as soon as you mention "morality" you lose your reader. Conservatives think "self-righteous liberal, are you that out of touch?" And, instead, we should focus our conversation on something we can all agree on-- like increasing the security process to gain entry. Sorry, but I have more respect for whoever is reading this blog than to pander to that bullshit. If you think that minimal background checks are a problem, then take 14 seconds to google the process. It takes two years of security clearance to gain entry as a refugee. So, unless you're a politician looking to avoid substantive conversation on the issue (cough cough, Tulsi Gabbard), then can we all agree to discuss the real issues?

There are two main streams of argument against accepting Syrians. A) Muslims are terrorists and shouldn't be allowed in, and B) we should focus on our own homeless problems first. There are plenty of fringe arguments that I don't think are worth addressing- such as the fact that neighboring countries to the East are not taking in many refugees (when was the last time we compared our human rights standards to the Middle East?)

So-- are Syrians terrorists?

There is a line of reasoning that goes: Terrorists are Muslim. Syrians are Muslim. So Syrians are terrorists. This flawed logic and elementary thought process is what fuels all racial hatred. It's what is driving Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan to say that the US, despite international law, shouldn't accept any Syrian refugees. Despite anti-discrimination laws, it's driving Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush to say that we should only accept Christians. It's why Donald Trump is going as far as saying that we should deport all current Syrian refugees from the US. It's why 31 governors (it's worth mentioning that that's all but one of the Republican governors in the US) are saying that they won't accept Syrian refugees in their state, despite the fact that governors have no say over refugee placement.

Since state level job re-training and English language programs for refugees are funded by grant money through the Federal Government, all that the governors can do is block funding for those programs-- thereby starving refugees of the resources necessary for integration into the fabric of American society, and ensuring that it takes longer for them to become economically productive members of our community (more on that later).


But, are Syrians terrorists?  Only 1% of refugees who apply for resettlement are accepted by the UN. And then only a very small portion of those actually make it into the US. In order to gain entry you have to prove that you've never had any association with a terrorist group. Imagine that ISIS killed your mother and raped your sister. And your dad, in angry desperation, gives a pack of cigarettes to a young resistance fighter engaged in a pursuit against ISIS. Your entire family is now disqualified from ever gaining entry to the US.

Further, 75% of Syrian refugees are either female or under 18 and 38% are under the age of 12. That doesn't sound too threatening to me.

So, the answer is no. The chances of your own mother being a terrorist are currently higher than a Syrian refugee in America being a terrorist.

For the most part, what people in Hawai'i are focusing on isn't terrorism, but homelessness. So, will Ige's willingness to accept Syrian Refugees increase our rates of homelessness?

A quick slip into partisanship. Since this is mostly a conservative argument, speaking of homelessness, where was the outcry when your party was cutting food stamps? Or blocking unemployment benefits? Or opposing an increase in the minimum wage? Or reducing the expansion of veteran's benefits? Or blocking funding for the Affordable Care Act and Planned Parenthood?

Back to the topic: in the last decade, Hawai'i has resettled 21 refugees. For all the heat that Obama is in, he is only proposing that the US accept a paltry 10,000 refugees (out of 4.2 million looking for resettlement- for comparison, Germany, 1/26th the size of the US, is saying they will take in one million refugees this year). Proportionate to our state's population, that means our share would be 40. And Kaua'i's share will be two.

A recent World Bank study says that the inflow of Syrian refugees into Turkey caused average wages in the country to increase. Syrians now account for 20% of the population in Jordan, and the influx has caused no rise in total unemployment. Looking at the US, a study of the economic impact of refugees in Cleveland shows that "refugees are more likely to be entrepreneurial and enjoy higher rates of successful business ventures compared to natives. The literature also supports the argument that immigrants in general do not take jobs away from natives."

I'm currently writing this blog on the product of a Syrian refugee. Yeah, Steve Jobs, the guy who founded the most profitable company in history which created more than one million US jobs is the son of a Muslim Syrian refugee. Imagine if he never gained entry into the US.

Homelessness is a very serious issue in Hawai'i. When compared to the rest of the country, we have the second highest proportion of residents without a roof over their heads. And there seems to be no end in sight. But, the causes and solutions to homelessness are very different than the refugee crisis. Most of the fleeing Syrians are members of their educated middle class. They provide economic benefit and skills for the workforce. And, regardless of the economic value of Syrians, this is a humanitarian issue that is very different. Homelessness in Hawai'i is a complex mix of high home prices, failing public education, lack of shelters, and a lack of support for displaced Native Hawaiians. There is no evidence that Syrian refugees will impact those conditions.

Instead of offering any type of smug conclusion to this horrible issue. These pictures and captions of Syrian children taken by Magnus Wenman conclude this much more clearly than words can.


All of the captions are his words and are taken from his album on Facebook.

Walaa, 5, in Dar-El-Ias, Lebanon

Walaa, 5, wants to go home. She had her own room in Aleppo, she tells us. There, she never used to cry at bedtime. Here, in the refugee camp, she cries every night. Resting her head on the pillow is horrible, she says, because nighttime is horrible. That was when the attacks happened. By day, Walaa’s mother often builds a little house out of pillows, to teach her that they are nothing to be afraid of.

Lamar, 5, in Horgos, Serbia

Back home in Baghdad the dolls, the toy train, and the ball are left; Lamar often talks about these items when home is mentioned. The bomb changed everything. The family was on its way to buy food when it was dropped close to their house. It was not possible to live there anymore, says Lamar’s grandmother, Sara. After two attempts to cross the sea from Turkey in a small, rubber boat they succeeded in coming here to Hungary’s closed border. Now Lamar sleeps on a blanket in the forest, scared, frozen, and sad.

  Abdullah, 5, in Belgrade, Serbia

Abdullah has a blood disease. For the last two days he has been sleeping outside of the central station in Belgrade. He saw the killing of his sister in their home in Daraa. He is still in shock and has nightmares every night, says his mother. Abdullah is tired and is not healthy, but his mother does not have any money to buy medicine for him.

Ralia, 7, and Rahaf, 13, in Beirut, Lebanon

Ralia, 7, and Rahaf, 13, live on the streets of Beirut. They are from Damascus, where a grenade killed their mother and brother. Along with their father they have been sleeping rough for a year. They huddle close together on their cardboard boxes. Rahaf says she is scared of “bad boys,” at which Ralia starts crying.

Eight-year-old Maram had just come home from school when the rocket hit her house. A piece of the roof landed right on top of her. Her mother took her to a field hospital, and from there she was airlifted across the border to Jordan. Head trauma caused a brain hemorrhage. For the first 11 days, Maram was in a coma. She is now conscious, but has a broken jaw and can’t speak.

Shehd, 7, on the Hungarian border

Shehd loves to draw, but more recently all of her drawings have had the same theme: weapons. “She saw them all the time, they are everywhere,” explains her mother when the little girl sleeps on the ground alongside Hungary’s closed border. Now she does not draw at all. The family brought neither paper nor crayons with them on their flight. Shehd does not play anymore either. The escape has forced children to become adults and share concern for what happens in an hour or a day. The family has had difficulty finding food during their wandering. Some days they have had to make do with apples they were able to pick from trees along the road. If the family had known how hard the journey would be they would have chosen to risk their lives in Syria.

Renaissance Selfies

We visit Florence to see the cradle of the Renaissance. Botticelli's Birth of Venus. Michelangelo's youthful optimism of David. The uninhibited celebration of the human form. Of life.

But what happened to Botticelli for him to paint Calumny of Apelles? The darkness of medieval man overwhelms the innocence of the Renaissance. That's not how the story is supposed to go.

 

 

And how could Michelangelo, he who saw beauty as the embodiment of heaven, paint the grim foreshadowing of the Last Judgement underneath his creation story masterpiece which sprawls across the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel?

 

 

Maybe Florence's veneer of eternal spring is best pierced with the pain of a miscarriage. No. That last word is not a metaphor.

The luminescence of each brush stroke of the Renaissance has been replaced by the glowing fluorescence of tourist's iPhones reflecting off their slack faces while they gorge on a first course of tagliatelle and a second course of tripe. Ghosts contemplating death in the city of eternal youth. The lonely couple, sitting in the orange glow of Italy's street lights, staring silently at each other-- wondering what went wrong.

Cobblestones. Narrow lanes. Santa Maria Novellas on every block. Old women, eyes gleaming with the spark of adolescence. Domes and gothic spires. And the Piazzas which keep the city confined to a pedestrian scale-- the Rennaisance's human-centric influence on urban planning. Florence is just like the guide books, except nobody mentions the gross self idolation of the tourists.

"Selfie stick?.. Selfie stick?" You can't approach a famous European sight without pushing through a maze of vendors hawking that ultimate expression of our own vanity.

Where the Romans erected Egyptian obelisks in front of their greatest creations to show how they conquered the Pharohs-- we now snap photos of ourselves in front of their masterpieces simply to show that we exist.

While Renaissance man reveled in the glory of human form, the modern human form revels in the glory of itself.

What drove Botticelli to burn his own art? And Michelangelo to paint himself into the Last Judgement as an empty skin being dragged into hell? Could they have begun to doubt the same humanity who's form they idolized? 

 

We did David.

We did the Duomo.

We did the Uffizi.

Even our language and the dysfunctional relationship between subject and predicate justifies the tourist's domination over art. In just 48 hours I've lay claim to the entirety of the Renaissance. I cringe when I have to share her with the gawking crowd. And the vanity of the Selfie Stick feels like rape. But there have been 500 years of tourists like me, all laying ownership to someone else's creation. How could Botticelli do anything other than burn his work? And what could be left of Michelangelo but an empty skin?

Yet, I do understand the urge of the Selfie. When we look in awe at these masterworks of creation we need to justify our own feeble existence. It's the same creationist urge that is pushing me to record my own anger. It's the same urge that pushed Rennaisance man through a fury of creation. Social media has just channeled that human desire towards self vanity.

I write. And so I exist.

Here is my face. Please like it. And so I exist.

But, what about the child that we conceived six weeks ago that we just flushed down the toilet of a cheap B&B. She, the masterpiece of my life, no longer exists while Michelangelo's David and Botticelli's Venus still do. While our Selfies will still haunt the web long after we're gone, our child never even had a sonogram. And so, as we face mortality in the city of eternal youth, we do all that we know how to do.

We hold out our arm and snap the picture. And so we exist.

 

 

*please excuse the clunky formatting and potential typos. Written on my iPhone and iPad where blog formatting is a nightmare. 

 

 

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