My dear Mr. Prime Minister,
Re: Arrested Pakistani Students at Manchester

We refer to the above and confirm that Association of Pakistani Lawyers a team of Pakistani origin lawyers, Solicitors, Barristers, Judges in UK jointly have decided to approach your kind intervention on this very sensitive issue pertaining to Pakistani students and community here and abroad.

Facts:

On 8 April 2009, Manchester based police Officers arrested 12 men in parallel raids at 10 addresses across Manchester, Liverpool and Clitheroe, Lancashire. Operation Pathway was rushed into action early on Wednesday evening following accidental breach of security by a Govt official. Twelve men were arrested in the north west of England. Ten of those arrested are Pakistan-born nationals on student visas and one is a UK-born British national. Their precise ages are not known but likely to be ranging between mid-to-late teens and a 41-year-old man.

Greater Manchester Police said several hundred officers were involved in the operation, including armed officers during some of the arrests. Detective Chief Superintendent Tony Porter, head of the North West CTU said: “Today’s action is part of a continuing investigation and we have acted on intelligence received. Prime Minister himself issued a statement after those arrests with a hope to have intercepted a big gang. Nothing concrete have come to light so far. Those detained has been remanded into custody and are under investigation. There is no information whether they have been able to access their local consulate, lawyer of their choice and or their families to alert them of the happenings.

Issue:

Clause 29 of the Magna Carta ensures that ‘no freeman shall be taken or imprisoned or have his liberties removed but by lawful judgement of his peers’. This 800 years old tradition is mirrored in Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights 1950 where it was pledged that “Everyone has the right to liberty and security of person. No one shall be deprived of his liberty save in the following cases and in accordance with a procedure prescribed by law” and due process of law and fair trial were considered as the basic ingredient of a citizen’s freedom.

APL believes that British courts have played genuinely a praiseworthy role by separating the chaff from grain. They ensured that due process of law, fair trial and citizen’s liberties remain intact whilst govt ensures to protect the public and look after the interest of the state. Life would be miserable if on the basis of fear, further fear is created and these liberties which were achieved by continuous sacrifices of our ancestors are lost on the basis of some threats of a few fanatic and thugs, who are, and will remain in a small minority.

Looking at the treatment of missing persons where hundreds were handed over to CIA by Pakistani regime & military authorities in exchange of dollars without due process of law in the absence of any extradition treaty without a judicial oversight and USA’s military trials in Guantanamo bay, and water boarding, its very reassuring that whatever the case may be British subjects are safe in securing their basic human rights such as right to have an attorney, free trial, innocent until proven guilty and right to liberty through its free, independent, robust and pro justice Civil and Constitutional Courts.

APL requests the Prime Minister to intervene and support our charter of demand:

Resolution of Demand:

1. Govt of Great Britain must allow the detained Pakistani students to have access to their respective country’s mission as protected by diplomatic norms and convention

2. Govt of Great Britain must allow the detained Pakistani students to have access to their family member(s) to confirm their arrest and well being;

3. Govt of Great Britain must allow the detained Pakistani students to have access to their attorney of choice as protected by Article 6(3) c of the European Convention on Human Rights 1950;

4. Govt of Great Britain must allow the detained Pakistani students to have a periodical check up with the respective medical officer to ensure they are not tortured;

5. Govt of Great Britain must allow the detained Pakistani students to have access to their basic human rights such as right to have a free and fair trial believing them innocent until proven guilty and their right to liberty must be protected through its free, independent, Civil and Constitutional Courts. If there is any evidence against them, they be allowed to face a trial by charging them rather than keeping them under administrative detention where nothing is known and one sided media trial takes place on limited information.

APL believes that 9/11 was the most tragic incident in this decade which brought so much hatred; vengeance along with it, as well as, it brought the ancient civilisations on to a flash point where tolerance and forbearance was lost somewhere down the line.

Pakistanis as a nation suffered a great loss not only economically but physically. Its army has lost around a thousand soldiers and thousands civilians lay their lives and scores got injured and displaced as a result of their active participation in the north of their country bordering areas of Afghanistan.

Pakistani community on the whole condemn terrorism in any form or shape and firmly believe in civil and political emancipation of people by protecting its own heritage and culture, and we seek international community’s cooperation to acknowledge such drive of the community, and allow such treatment which is befitting to its role.

We are sure Prime Minister will look into this matter as a matter of extreme urgency and we hope our representations are given due weight in the interest of public in order to promote rule of law, justice for the minority community who is under hardship since 9/11.

Yours Sincerely,

Amjad Malik, MA, LLM
Solicitor-Advocate sc (England)
Life Member SCBA (Pakistan)
Chair

Saleem Shah, LLB
Solicitor Supreme Court (England)
Vice President

Mr. Ilyas Gondal, LLB
Former Add Session judge of Punjab Courts
Solicitor Supreme Court (England)
Permanent Secretary

Mohammad Rafiq
Assistant Secretary
Association of Pakistani Lawyers

Arshad Ch
Advocate Supreme Court
Co-ordinator Islamabad

Azhar Ch
Vice Chair 2006 PBC
Advocate High Court
Co-ordinator Sialkot

Ijaz Ahmed Wahla
Advocate High Court
Life Member Lahore High Court Bar Association
Co-ordinator Faisalabad

Younas Naul
Advocate High Court
Co-ordinator Lahore

Office Address:
APL Chambers:
149a DRAKE STREET
ROCHDALE
OL11 1EF

TEL: 00 44 1706 346 011
FAX: 00 44 1706 346012
MOBILE: 00 44 7770 983308
EMAIL: APLRochdale@aol.com

c.cRt. Hon. David Miliband
Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs
House of Commons
London
SW1A OAA

Dear Mr. President,

Welcome back. My apologies for delaying the third part of this letter.

The challenges for me in thinking it through and writing it down have been twofold… beginning with the need to summarize deep human motives for scapegoating and ending with my own desire to tie such motives to a key point in Part One of this letter: the world’s inattention to Pakistan’s amazing yearning for democracy, and their real capacity to establish it.

Besides the phenomenon of mimesis, human history points to another hidden motivation for scapegoating to which none can claim immunity.

I got my first inkling of this motivation under rather unlikely circumstances. Quick story, if I may.

In early March, 1997 I was in Bangalore, India with a group of fifteen westerners, and one afternoon we were sitting on a dirt floor inside an airy tent-looking-building that could have held three hundred of us. And we were doing something westerners sometimes do when they go to India… we were listening to a spiritual teacher hold forth on our naïve and insufferable questions.

Someone asked, “What is the highest spiritual knowledge?”

The teacher paused for sometime and in his pause I anticipated some generic sermon on love or peace or empty mind. Some guru kind of answer.

And then he answered in one word.

“Discrimination.”

I could feel my face scrunch up. “What!” I responded to myself.

“Discrimination.” he said again, then paused and continued, “Knowing the difference between what is permanent and what is not.”

I thought what kind of lame and obscure answer is that? This is the highest spiritual knowledge? Somebody please tell me I didn’t come all the way to India for this.

Ironically, what I now think he was calling forth with this one word – discrimination – was a practical and, to me, not particularly “spiritual” way of addressing a confounding and paradoxical human experience, mostly unseen and unconsidered in our daily lives.

In our attempt in this letter to get to the roots of scapegoating, this all too human paradox is also our second “lowest common denominator:” the existential experience. And it appears to be the elephant in the room, a deeply personal experience that informs the way we feel about our daily lives, an experience we’re constantly dancing around or managing in one way or another, yet with little or no awareness of it being there.

Quick review. We’ve already looked at mimesis – a measurement of the degree of sameness in a culture – and how this sameness increases group tension from internal members competing to fulfill the same desires. Mimesis is social mechanism.

To avoid internal group violence, highly mimetic groups will instinctively activate this mechanism by opening an escape valve for that tension… scapegoating. And scapegoating works well to lower, not the mimetics in the group, but the tension arising from it.

Scapegoating, then, is natural, a “human instinct”, programmed into human group behavior as a defense mechanism.

But if scapegoating is natural, it is also irrational. And we instinctively know that too, don’t we?

But how can that be?

Otto Rank, one of a handful of brilliant men who created the science of psychoanalysis wondered the same thing. Late in his career in the 1930s he laid out for skeptical colleagues in Beyond Psychology, an “irrational basis of human nature which lies beyond any psychology, individual or collective.”

We humans are conflicted by nature.

And the unsettling and disturbing experience of this conflict is what we call “existential.”

But we said the existential experience is also a precursor for scapegoating!

Uh oh. Looks like an ugly downward spiral.

On one side we have deep personal feelings of unlimited possibilities for expansion of ourselves, biologically exempt, seemingly immortal, unbounded in our capacity to think, create, experience and become.

On the other side we have deep personal feelings of doom. Regardless of our unlimited potential, we are merely creatures who will die.

In the real experience of ourselves, we are living miracles, angels in bodies, untouched by time.

Also in the real experience of ourselves, we are living targets of instant death, with the inglorious and anonymous fate of ants.

A perplexing situation. To call it “existential” is almost to whitewash it from the overwhelming anxieties and depressions it can – and does – let loose.

What to do?

Humankind has developed civilization, culture, religion… a mass of strategies and social structures … to help bolster the good view we do have of ourselves and of the world.

But human nature has also invented a million distractions, not the least of which are prejudice, hate and war to repress our overwhelming fears to help us feel like we’re in control.

But under the best of circumstances, what exactly are we in control of, anyway?

For starters, we didn’t ask to be born, nor did we contribute to the recipe of our genetic make-up. In our bodies trillions of subatomic interactions move in just the right way, and do so in the amount of time it takes the reader to say, “holy smoke”. You get the picture. Our existence has little to do with our actual control of things.

In this sense, nothing in our existence seems permanent. Even worse? With exception to our knowing that life will some time end, everything in life itself, everything in our existence… is subject to doubt.

Or is it?

Everything in our existence?

What about our existence, itself?

Is our existence subject to doubt?

Can we say, “I have some doubt about whether or not I exist right now.”

Doubt is apparently a key function in anyone’s healthy life maintenance. Human beings doubt, and everything inside and outside us is subject to doubt. Our bodies, our minds, our well-being, our love ones, friends and neighbors… all subject to human doubt.

All except our own existence.

If I cannot in any way doubt my own existence, then what is it and why does it seem to stand alone in such an obviously unchanging way?

Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am.”

But the certainty of our existence, right now, isn’t a thought. It seems to be deeper than thought…

Rather, it’s a basic feeling… coupled with a basic awareness… an awareness that I exist, a “who” with no discernible qualities other than a kind of “taste.”

Let’s go back to what the Indian teacher discussed as the highest knowledge. Discrimination. Knowing what is permanent and what is not. It all seems laughable, at best.

Still… it seems strange, does it not, that by some instinct (or whatever you prefer to call it) we do yearn for something permanent, something eternal, something beyond our mortal selves?

Scholars like Ernest Becker tie such yearning to our fundamental and over-whelming fear of death, and the subsequent denial of death we conjure up as an anxiolytic for our fear. Makes sense to me.

And yet perhaps there is something else in play, something other than fear, and our weird management of it.

Let’s do a little self reflection.

You, the reader, right now, have a sense of who you are… a sense of your own existence.

Now think for a moment. Is this sense of who you are somehow different from your sense of who you were when you were ten years old?

How about five years old? How about your earliest memories of your sense of who you are?

Besides the obvious differences in emotions, thoughts, experiences, memories, understanding of the world, etc., there is no change at all in this sense of who we are… in our undeniable existence.

And this isn’t some subtle or obscure or mystical realization. On the contrary, upon self reflection, it seems way too obvious.

It’s weird. Our existence appears to be not only beyond all doubt, it also has this unchanging quality to it.

What does it all mean?

I don’t have a clue. Not even a speculation.

And yet, this presence, this “being-ness” may deeply play a role in the “existential experience,” especially if we consider all the nifty ways we have of dealing with the downside-negativity of the “existential experience,” like assigning timeless or godlike qualities to things in our life that are neither, like money, like fame, like youth, etc.

In other words, regardless of metaphysics… doesn’t matter… Our “beingness” has a basic feeling of permanency to it. And this feeling is of precious value to us.

Is it then possible, that we are afraid of losing it? Losing not just our bodies but our beingness? Losing something that feels rather timeless? Assigning an end (or a death) to something that doesn’t appear to have had a beginning… at least not one we can remember, or conceive of… unlike the body, the beginning of which, and the end of which, we at least have a sophisticated intellectual and scientific view?

“No wonder” (quoting Becker) we’re batshit crazy. No wonder our tranferences, our projections, and yes our scapegoating are so destructive of self and others. We do indeed confuse that which feels permanent with that which isn’t.

Kierkegaard, Otto Rank, Ernest Becker and other resolve this paradox in an action that is not different from the essence Islam (a religion the west dearly loves to scapegoat) … surrender to the Divine.

I think somehow that Erich Fromm was trying to get at this in his work, “To Have, Or To Be.”

When we are oriented to “the being-ness” mode of our existence, we have some sense of our authentic existence, and are able to deal with the “terrors” of life in more healthy ways. Right now, we apparently don’t, and definitely aren’t. Some people say video games create violence. Perhaps however, violence, out of the fears from which it grows, creates video games… and now video war.

If you were “to have” democracy, you would have it with holidays and music and ceremony and flags…

But if you were “to be” democracy, you and your family and friends and neighbors would intelligently and peacefully and with a full sense of the goodness of who you are, take to the streets.

If we take a moment to think about it, Pakistani people are not our scapegoats, they are, for the world right now, our teachers.

Respectfully,

Tommy Schmitz
Des Moines, Iowa

[My thanks to E. James Lieberman and Robert Kramer from whose many brilliant works I caught many helpful glimpses online.]

Dear Editor!

Please allow me to share my perturbation over the (reported) flogging of a 17 year old girl. The final straw for me turned to be the disappointing remarks widely circulating among the journalists’ forums. In short, their remarks toe the line Taliban and their apologists, the ANP have adopted on the deplorable episode. Regrettably, some of these journalists work for your paper. After reading their comments my conscious didn’t allow me stay quite anymore. At the risk of inviting wrath of many, I would like to state the following:

1. Please don’t label capitulation to the oppressors as the so-called ‘national interests’; as if allowing a state within a state merits to be called a state to begin with. Please don’t take refuge behind ‘national interests’ when it comes to chauvinism. Bravery doesn’t mean locking women (mothers, daughters, sisters or wives) behind 7 doors. A real man gouges the eyes out of a pervert who even dares to looks at them with malice. A man of his salt defends the weak and not incarcerates them.

2. Shoot the message and not the messenger. I was hoping to see a healthy debate on the subject from highly educated and esteemed journalists, but not personal attacks on Ms. Summar. What a shame!

3. Flagrant abuse of women’s rights at the hands of self-righteous Taliban isn’t actually a secret in an age of camera equipped cell phones. I am old enough to remember how Taliban slowly tightened their noose around women’s rights in Afghanistan. At the height of their rule, birthing mothers were allowed to die, over allowing them to be taken to hospital without a ‘mahrum’/male-escort. Others died because they were forbidden to seek medical help from male physicians. While the lady-doctors were not allowed to work altogether under the pretexts of: they can’t work in the same facilities where male counterparts worked too; and allegedly, there was no money to build or run schools and hospitals, exclusively for women. Bravo, what a justice system!

4. If the video is fake, then why did ANP minister Mian Iftikhar and the Taliban spokesman Muslim Khan earlier accepted the occurrence of incident? Didn’t they also allege that she was punished for illicit relationship with her father-in-law? They even had nerve to suggest, that she should have been thankful that she wasn’t stoned to death. Latter on, these men first launched attacks on Ms. Summar and then started to question the authenticity of the tape. I cringe to imagine how some people could even give a second thought to their doubletalk.

5. Two wrongs don’t make a right. Just because bloody and senseless war in Sawat was wrong, doesn’t mean abuse of women’s rights cannot be condemned either. Pacification of abuse of any sort should be condemned loudly, or it would bread even more severe abuse.

6. Can someone please enlighten me how many ANP politicians (along with their families) are currently residing in the Swat Valley? What a brave trendsetting men they are!

7. If Talibanization is a just cause and has become all too real, then instead of going on defensive, shouldn’t they accept their actions with courage? I call them to stand up and be counted for condoning Talibanization!

8. If it was my daughter, starting with the man delivering lashes, I would have put a bullet through everyone’s eyes gathered there. At minimum, I would shoot her and I before becoming a spectacle for the (na-mehrum) perverts watching whole perverse episode.

I can’t stress enough, my disappoint with those defending the most deplorable, shameless, barbaric and un-Islamic actions of these self-righteous barbarians.

Sincerely,

Adnan Gill
Los Angeles

Dear President Obama,

This is the second part of my open letter to you. We were, I believe, discussing Afghanistan and Pakistan and moving into our key topic: Scapegoating.

Scapegoating is not rocket science. It is older than the wheel. The academic literature on the topic overflows with wisdom. Yet even if it did not, it doesn’t matter because, strangely, people seem to know intuitively – even if they don’t have the words — just exactly what it is.

Yet it might be useful, with an appropriate dash of gratitude, to tap into a few great minds that know infinitely more than I do to conjure up some words that might light for us a path out of this mess. We have reached a critical point in human existence where the words for such a dug-in and ancient human thing might well come in handy.
We don’t normally consider the human race as being guided, like countless other species on the earth, by instinct.

If we did consider it, however, our species proclivity for scapegoating, might be one of those instincts.

Scapegoating is a self-defense mechanism for – ostensibly — increasing our chances for survival. It largely operates below the radar of our normal awareness. And apparently it always has.

It’s longevity and ubiquity seems to indicate the powerful presence of some ingrained human characteristics we all share, some “least common denominators” at play, regardless of person, place, culture, religion, philosophy or historical context.

Let’s look at two of them — both widely thought out, researched and documented — courtesy of such minds as Soren Kierkegaard, Ernest Becker, René Girard, Martin Luther King, Mohandas Gandhi, Erich Fromm, Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, and nearly every spiritual prophet who has ever graced the earth.

Tonight, let’s explore the first LCD: a powerful group phenomenon called mimesis. And on Monday night we’ll wrap up our discussion looking at humankind’s greatest paradox, but we’ll save that term for later.

In biology and in anthropology, mimesis is a tendency for an animal to mimic those of the same species near by. It produces “sameness” in a group, including the sameness of desire, and the resulting competitive tensions that arise out of everybody wanting the same thing. Many animal species experience mimesis, but the human capacity for mimicry is off the charts. As a survival mechanism, like scapegoating, mimesis can also pose insidious problems. And today the consequences of human mimesis in our large scale actions, is pointing the way to catastrophe.

How so and why?

In any group or society, mimesis is the mostly unnoticed and preceding condition that often morphs into scapegoating. As “sameness” intensifies, so do the competitive tensions related to fulfilling the mimetic desires of the members. Naturally, as this tension builds, so does the need to relieve the tension. The relief is found through internal violence.

This sets up an odd but unavoidable condition in any mimetic group: as the group becomes more undifferentiated (more the same), the more violent it becomes.

Here, according to Rene Girard, a leading scholar of mimetics, is how the group is saved from self-annihilation.

Human groups, very early on, learned to use sacrifice “to replace the potentially multiple victims inside the group with a unique candidate: the scapegoat.”

The rest is easy. Sacrifice the scapegoat. Save the group.

“The ‘scapegoat’ is selected for sacrifice to purge the group of its internal violence. Therefore, and this is key, scapegoats are inevitably selected from a source as remote as possible from the selecting group.

“The act of the sacrifice permits a rupture in the sequence of violent action and thereby grants
a form of salvation to the group by occasioning a release from self-inflicted violent action with an alternate but equally fulfilling form of violence.

“The inherent and mimetic necessity for violence is transferred to an object away from the group. The need for violence is no longer inter-acted, yet the violence is still expressed. Sacrifice thus constitutes a cathartic function for the group.”

Let’s go over it again, but fill in some new information this time.

“During the mimetic crisis, the convergence of desires leads to reciprocal hatred, meanwhile, the
object of desire becomes veiled. And this more intensified undifferentiated situation – mutual hatred –tends to radicalize the conflict.

“When the mimetic crisis peaks, and the lack of differentiation inside the community becomes absolute, the self-preservation instinct is activated. A scapegoat is selected and eliminated. And the release of tension in the group leads to reconciliation.

“Again, in the animal world, the mimetic conflict already exists, but animals have an instinctive inhibition that prevents intra-group slaughter merely in response to mimetic rivalries. Ethologists emphasize the domination-pattern effect: animals will stop fighting as soon as dominance is established.

“According to Girard, man is at once the most mimetic animal, and the less able to cope with his own violence.

“Hence, for group survival human beings elaborate what becomes a ubiquitous cultural response: the scapegoating mechanism.

Since dangerous mimetic crises never fail to re-appear, the community adopts and repeats a reliable and low energy method for selecting the necessary scapegoat — the accusatory gesture.

The experience of the act of scapegoating unites the group and recovers for it what it longs for: a naïve and magical peace. Scapegoating is therefore a lived and sacred experience. Groups re-iterate these truly self protecting ritual sacrifices, analogous to the original. And in this way arise cultural and religious patterns to maintain the survival of the group.

Spotting the scapegoating motives and methods of an unfamiliar group is not so difficult. What is difficult, sometimes impossible, is the coming to awareness and recognition of the scapegoating in one’s own group.

Mimetic intensities in the modern world shift from balanced states to unbalanced states, and back again.

Fundamentalism and conservatism encourage the mimetic, the imitation, the undifferentiated, the status quo. These “unchanging”, mimetic orientations are common in all cultures simply because they create feelings of safety for a lot of people. And that’s a good thing. But as their mimesis intensifies, they create the violence in the world.

From time to time a leader or a nation or an average citizen become self-aware of these factors at play in their respective groups, and attemps are made in various ways to reverse their group’s mimetic and violent fates. Such basic awareness is a powerful internal switch for interrupting the scapegoating cycle, and elevating the group to a new level of peace.

Take Japan for example. Who would deny the existing power of its undifferentiated culture, with the world’s highest mimetic energy – meaning its capacity for exporting violence through scapegoating – to avoid massive internal violence — is higher in Japan than in any other culture.

History illustrates Japan’s warrior culture. Internally and externally. Many Asian people today, in Japan’s neighboring countries, can still testify to the savagery of Japanese scapegoating during and before WW2.

Yet how many countries today have carved into their constitutions the very illegality of war? The same. Japan. Yes, Japan was burnt and broken when it made war unconstitutional, but records show it was in fact their own initiative.

It took unthinkable courage for this intensely mimetic, two-thousand-year-old, warrior nation – even as they worked and slept in the ashes of their loved ones – to single themselves out as a pacifist state.

But they did it. And as you know, this clause is still in their constitution. For over 60 years, in spite of their neighboring country’s hatred for them, Japan has not sacrificed a scapegoat, nor spent its hostilities internally on itself.

Indeed, Japan has continued to find, in the meantime, the most creative and productive ways the world has ever seen for releasing their mimesis. Japan today still wins the prize as the most mimetic culture on earth. But they’ve adapted. They’ve learned how to deal with it.

For the purposes of this discussion, let’s set aside and forget about Japan’s constitutional amendment. Japan continues today as a needed and healing lesson for the rest of the world, a vision for what is possible, an undeniable and dramatic proof of concept.

The earth is now a tiny place for human beings. It more resembles a community than it does a arguing mish-mash of politically sovereign nations. Our shrinking earth underscores my motive for addressing you from a Pakistani forum: Pakistan is not different. The earth itself is becoming one mimetic entity.

To avoid species annihilation, we need the most powerful among us to stand up and say so.

That, Mr. President, would be you.

Politics might be the art of avoiding being scapegoated, while increasing one’s power to single others out for sacrifice, but great political leaders can do much more.

American mimetics has long been intensifying. And yes, that is a good thing. There have been accruing benefits for all. You might not be in office otherwise. Yet our potential today for scapegoating — indeed our long record of scapegoating for the past 60 years — is scary, even more so considering the relative unawareness (and denial) of our population for this gathering national mimetic tension and our increasing addiction for exporting it.

It’s time for the US to stop the cycle. At present, this does not appear do-able. Why? You do have many differentiated strengths, but in the area of foreign policy and peace, you remain undifferentiated, hence your potential for exporting American violence, for singling out scapegoats as we’re discussing now, is significant.

Yet we still must, and for our own sake, for our own survival, stop this decades-long cycle of ours, and in order to begin the process, (and this is difficult for me to say) our leader must become willing to single himself out – to clearly differentiate himself as a peacemaker.

You know what, Mr. President? In millions of people’s minds, even sometimes in my own, you are already a hero.

So why risk your standing? And why risk the accruing benefits your standing may have for millions of people and for decades more?

Only you can think that question through.

As you do, you’ll ask yourself: How in the world can I do this? Where would I possibly start?

Well, first it might be a good idea to allow yourself the quiet realization that this is not an impossible task. And with that in mind and keeping things simple, let’s take something you said yesterday as a good place to start this differentiated healing process.

“I remind everybody, the United States of America did not choose to fight a war in Afghanistan. Nearly 3,000 of our people were killed on Sept. 11, 2001, for doing nothing more than going about their daily lives.”

I am quite sure most Americans would agree with that statement and I empathize with my compatriots, and I am awestruck by your responsibility to protect America. But frankly, coming from you, I could not believe what I was reading. Your statement knocked me off my chair. And I do know why.

I know in your heart you see the bigger picture. You understand the roots of “terrorism”, and every ingredient of its mortal desperation. And you know these things largely from your own life experience. And you do have the capability, perhaps more so than anyone, to articulate and make happen your deepest heartfelt understanding …

…but to do so, would be to single yourself out, to differentiate yourself, to set yourself up as the scapegoat, and to completely lose your status.

Yes, this is the risk.

But consider Gandhi for a moment, a fellow lawyer. And Lincoln who did the same. And Martin Luther King.. And consider – again in irony but with a knowing smile this time — the great Pashtun leader and Islamic pacifist, Abdul Gaffar Kahn.

Yes. There are great people who do this. Leaders who stand up under the crushing weight of political and personal risk and single themselves out as peace-makers.

And Barack Obama is one of them. And now it is your turn.

With all due respect, this right now is your test, Mr. President.

I’m convinced you’ll pass it. As are the majority of human kind, including with all their hearts most of the people of Pakistan, as well as the people of our own country, even if we don’t yet realize it.

You know it is the right thing to do – to differentiate yourself. You know it will work. Let’s reverse the new AfPak policy, lay down our weapons and turn our soldiers into healers.. And let’s do it now.

Sincerely,

Tommy Schmitz
Des Moines, Iowa

_______________________________________________________________________________

P.S. For the sake of argument I’ll post the third installment Monday night, 31Mar09. It takes a different, yet significant angle on our need in America to explore and heal our increasingly dangerous and still denied addiction to scapegoating.

References:

Jean-Baptiste Dumont, MSc, Mres. “Mimesis – The Scapegoat Model.”

René Girard, “Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World”, 1978.

Also see:

website: Colloquium On Violence & Religion (COV&;R)

website: The Scapegoat Society. Forest Row, East Sussex, RH18 5JF, England.

Dear President Obama,

I am writing to you in three brief installments as an American and as one who also loves his country.

And I write from Des Moines, Iowa, a place that you know well and fondly, I believe.

But today I am going to do something intentionally unusual and address you from this forum of Pakistan Times.

Why?

Three years ago I knew nothing and cared less about Pakistan. I couldn’t even spell Cashmear. Okay maybe I still can’t. But I lived as an industrially minded expatriate (in Japan) for seven years and came away from that experience with at least a micron of confidence and common sense for sizing up international situations. And in sizing up US policy on Pakistan today, things look ineffective in the short run, and disastrous in the long. A sure sign of not understanding the situation in hand and not healthy for the future of our own country.

Most telling of this? Two weeks ago, there occurred in Lahore, Pakistan an action of democracy as powerful and as meaningful as the world has seen in decades.

And this democratic action manifested not out of the machinations of Pakistani politicians, not from the intimidation of the Pakistan army, and not by the urgent folly of mindless patriotism, but by the people of Pakistan.

And they made it happen in democratically massive numbers. Peacefully and without the formality of the voting booth.

The people of Pakistan stood up and spoke out against injustice in their own country. They demanded something better from their elected leaders. And it worked. It was pure democracy in action, an astonishing event, one that any lover of democracy, such as our own country, might have applauded and congratulated and celebrated.

Did we? No. With an irony that has not yet hit us considering the trillion dollar cost of our own failed efforts to build democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan, we were too wrapped up in our anger over bonuses paid to AIG executives on Wall Street to give it much notice, much less the honor the people of Pakistan deserved for their democratic achievement.

What is going on?

In a word (and this is no simplification and certainly no mere generalized criticism), what is happening on our part is the scapegoating of Pakistan. And this — scapegoating — this historically ubiquitous human tendency, of persons and of peoples, for unwitting and unintended self-destruction, we’ll examine in the second part of this letter.

Respectfully,

Tommy Schmitz
Des Moines, Iowa

Dear Editor!

Please allow me to offer my sincere apology to the Sri Lankan guests for failing to protect them. However, I am beaming with pride for the bravery of our policemen we witnessed on the TV screens. I salute the brave sons of soil, who kept their word in spirit even at the cost of their lives. I have no doubt Pakistan will survive through this storm too, just like it weathered countless other calamities throughout its 60 years of history.

If we didn’t know any better, it would appear certain people in the highest circles of the government never miss an opportunity to lay the blame of every terrorist act — around the globe — on Pakistan; they will do so this time too.

Rumor has it, Rehman Malik is CIA’s man. Even if he isn’t, at minimum, he has to be Mr. Zardari’s man. How else a person who miserably failed to protect the life of his boss could have been promoted to a ministerial position? Anywhere else in the world a professional worth his salt would have tendered his resignation upon the first horrendous failure; and here despite sitting over one after other monumental failures, like Ms. Bhutto’s assassination, Marriot blast and now Lahore attack, Mr. Malik is still allowed to go strong. God forbid, if Mr. Zardari or his party would have dared to ask for his resignation.

Hopefully one day we will findout the powers to be behind Mr. Malik iron grip over one of the most important offices in the Pakistani security apparatus.

Sincerely,

Adnan Gill

Los Angeles