Fallout from Sept 11 still being felt!

Tweet

MUSINGS By MARINA MAHATHIR

There are efforts by ordinary citizens all over the world to heal the wounds left by the Sept 11 tragedy. Many people have been reaching out to one another with respect, humility and trust.
Image by Getty Images via @daylife

UNLESS you’ve been on Mars this past week, you would have realised that it was the 10th anniversary of Sept 11 a few days ago. There had been so much news and stories about it everywhere.

Nobody doubts that the events of Sept 11 10 years ago were a horrific tragedy, and all sympathy should go to the families who lost loved ones that day. But it should also be remembered that the aftermath of Sept 11 has been equally tragic, and is still ongoing.

According to the costs-of-war project at Brown University, a “very conservative” estimate is that about 137,000 civilians have been killed in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan and that the wars have created more than 7.8 million refugees in these countries.

The Brown project puts the wars’ ultimate cost, including interest payments and veterans’ care, to the United States at up to US$4tril – equivalent to the country’s cumulative budget deficits for the six years from 2005 to 2010. Think of how many people that money could feed and school.

What have all these gained? Even Americans have been affected by it. Today, they live in an environment so fearful of another attack that they have to suffer the indignity of all manner of surveillance and security inconveniences. One recent op-ed in the New York Times suggested that on balance the infringements on civil liberties that Americans have had to suffer are relatively minor.



It failed to mention that for its American Muslim citizens, these have been major. The blame, the humiliation and the abuses that they have had to endure are not yet over.

But despite all these, and its global impacts, there are efforts by ordinary citizens to heal these wounds. In the United States and several other Western countries, the issues that arose from Sept 11 were not glossed over but discussed and debated as a way to rebuild the broken bridges. Civil society, rather than governments or politicians, have been at the forefront of these.

I was just in Western Australia where I was asked to speak at a conference on Rebuilding Harmony in the post-Sept 11 world. It was heartening to see so many people interested in the subject, and so disappointed by the ongoing violence that has accompanied the event by all sides.

Many Australians had been opposed to the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, correctly seeing that this was no way to have peace.

They emphasised that people of different backgrounds, cultures and faiths need to know one another in order to avoid war, and that politicians should be held accountable for their part in the violence.

In the evening after the conference, we attended a special service at the main cathedral in Perth to commemorate the anniversary of Sept 11. It was attended by all the state dignitaries as well as people from all faiths. The entire service was beautiful and solemn as befitted the occasion.

But what moved me most was something I did not expect nor had ever experienced. An imam from a local mosque got up and recited the Al Fatihah and two other verses from the Quran dealing with compassion to humanity.

To hear the first surah of the Quran recited in Arabic in a cathedral while everyone listened so respectfully was a profoundly emotional experience for me. Never had its meaning been more beautiful.

It led me to think about how elsewhere in the world so many people have been reaching out to one another with respect, with humility and trust. When I heard the Al Fatihah in that church, it made me love my religion more.

The translation was in the programme, along with the words of all the other prayers and hymns that day, Christian and Jewish.

And what struck me most was how the sentiments expressed, while coming from different holy books, were in fact similar. My religion is as compassionate and generous as any other, not just to our own people but to all of humanity.

It made me wonder why this does not happen at home, why there is so much mistrust that nobody steps into a house of worship that is not their own.

Surely to be able to know one another is a good thing. After all, God says in surah Al-Hujarat, verse 13: O men! Behold, We have created you all out of a male and a female, and have made you into nations and tribes, so that you might come to know one another.

By constantly isolating ourselves from each other, are we not rejecting what our Creator intended?

As Malaysia Day approaches, perhaps we should think about how we can reconcile with one another. Or at the very least, refuse and reject the many deliberate attempts to divide us.

Selamat Hari Malaysia!

Malaysians are always an ‘exception’?

Tweet

We are always an ‘exception’

Musings By Marina Mahathir

Malaysian policies often state that we are different and therefore cannot be compared with others. Yet those who join peaceful marches are likened to British rioters. Suddenly we are the same?

ARE we getting progressively schizophrenic? Judging by current responses to events around the world, it would be easy to conclude that we are.

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder that makes it difficult to tell the difference between real and unreal experiences, to think logically, to have normal emotional responses and to behave normally in social situations.

If you read up on Malaysian policies and statements on various issues, the one striking factor is our insistence on exceptionalism. That is, we are different and therefore cannot be compared with any other country.

Fiery aftermath: The violent riots in London left many properties in ruin. — AFP

In the early years of the AIDS pandemic, we thought we were protected because we were different. If non-Muslims in other Muslim countries use the word “Allah” for God with no fuss, ours can’t because we are different. We are apparently unique and incomparable to anyone else in the world.

Which is why it puzzles me that all of a sudden our citizens, or at least the ones who want to voice their opinions with peaceful assemblies and marches, are being compared to British rioters and looters.
If we are always different, how come suddenly we are the same?

Going by the statements of our leaders, basically we are nothing more than savages who would rob, rape, loot and pillage given half the chance. Therefore, we need all sorts of laws to keep us in check and not venture in groups of more than five outside our homes.

Now, this is why that schizophrenic inability to think logically comes into play. Despite evidence that none of the 30,000 or so peaceful marchers last July robbed, raped, looted or pillaged, our leaders insist that we would have. They must be looking at mirrors.

Just a few days ago the fellow who demonstrated how inconvenient a protest is by inconveniencing everyone in Penang declared that he would burn down two online news portals whose reports he disagreed with. Now if that’s not London rioter behaviour, I don’t know what is.



More disturbingly, after already having insulted all the good citizens who exercised their right to peaceful assembly, our leaders go on to insult them some more.

Instead of being proud that we did not have the type of violence that the UK experienced, instead of talking about how so much more civilised our people are, our leaders liken us to rioters who have vandalised, stolen and killed.

Talk about the inability to distinguish between reality and fantasy.

A certain amount of hypocrisy also rears its ugly head. What if Mark Duggan, the man who was shot by police in London and whose family’s peaceful protest became the original rallying cry for the rioters, was Mohamad Duggan?

Between 1987 and 1993 and 2000 and 2005, the Palestinian people went through two uprisings against the Israeli government, known as the First and Second Intifadas, respectively. Both Intifadas involved demonstrations, protests and, yes, a certain amount of violent rioting.

They were met with an even more violent response from the Israelis that resulted in many deaths and the eventual blockade of Gaza, still in force today.

Our government supported the Intifadas then. Does that mean that our government supports the right of Palestinians to demonstrate, protest and riot, but refuses its own people’s right to do much less, that is to just march peacefully?

Or is the logic that when governments are democratically elected, its people then lose the right to protest against them?

Conveniently ignored, too, is the fact that in the UK, protests and demonstrations are held all the time without the type of violence we saw recently.

One of the biggest was in 2003 when hundreds of thousands of people marched against the Iraq war. At the time we looked benignly at this because we had the same stand. Did we tell the Brits and others round the world that they should not demonstrate against the war?

So what is the message here? We may be trusted to peacefully protest as long as the subject of our protest is in sync with the Government’s. Otherwise, if we should protest for free and fair elections, against corruption or anything else that the Constitution gives us the right to, we are labelled as unpatriotic thugs out to disturb the peace and destroy the economy and image of our country.

Looking at the UK riots, are we even talking about the same thing? What cause was the UK rioters espousing?

Some wide reading instead of political posturing might be more beneficial here. The UK rioters did not loot bookshops, and some have suggested it’s because they don’t like to read.

Perhaps they are not unlike some of our politicians.

The polarised world of politics

Tweet

Musings By Marina Mahathir

Politicians of every stripe have two bad habits. Firstly, they think that those who don’t belong to any political party are incapable of having a single political thought. Secondly, when non-politicians think of a good populist idea, politicians of all stripes rush to hijack it.

Image via Wikipedia

George W. Bush, that giant of intellectuals, famously said after the Sept 11, 2001 attacks that “Either you’re with us, or you’re against us.”

Those words unleashed a world polarised by politics with no hope for peace, which necessarily requires a coming to the table of all sides to discuss common issues.

This “Us versus Them” mentality is an affliction that has befallen not only American politicians but many others around the world, including in our own country.

It creates an illness known as hyperpartisanship, which can be defined simply as “if you’re not on my side, you must be wrong.”

It’s the only explanation I can give for the consistently delusional statements that tend to come out from our politicians’ mouths.

To their minds, nobody can be right unless they’re on the same side.

Additionally, if you don’t agree with them, then you must surely be on the “other” side. Politicians can’t seem to fathom anything but a bipolar world.

They can’t seem to get it into their heads that firstly, there may yet be a third (or fourth, fifth) way of looking at things, and secondly, that the ones with these different perspectives could conceivably be civilians.



Politicians of every stripe have two bad habits.

Firstly, they think those who don’t belong to any political party are incapable of having a single political thought.

They forget that every five years or so, it is they who insist that we think of politics when we go and vote.

Secondly, when non-politicians think of a good populist idea, politicians of all stripes rush to hijack it.

Non-politicians, otherwise known as civil society, then have to fight them off tooth and nail.

How many times have we had politicians turning up at big events organised by non-politicians and trying and making it sound as if it’s a big endorsement of themselves?

Some politicians are certainly more delusional than others. Since Bersih 2.0 shocked them, they have been working overtime to demonise it.

It is one thing to badmouth the rally in the days before it happened but it’s quite shocking to see the pathetic attempts to paint it as a riot when it was clearly not.

From calling the teargassing “mild” to denying that the police had fired teargas into the Tung Shin Hospital, to trying to check the motives and bank accounts of those who went for the rally, our dear leaders insult us every day.

Yet all they have to do is, instead of surrounding themselves with sycophants who will only tell them what they want to hear, read all the heartrending and heartwarming personal accounts written by the many ordinary people who went to the Bersih 2.0 rally.

These were housewives, retirees and young people, all fearful of what violence they might encounter, but who steeled themselves to go and exercise their right to voice their opinions.

These were people who had probably never done anything more confrontational than argue with a salesperson in their entire lives, who faced teargas and water cannons fired at them by a government they probably voted in.

How much courage does it take to insult your own people from an airconditioned room compared to facing the FRU?

If our leaders think teargas is something mild, they should ask the FRU to try it on them. I was lucky that day because I chose a route where the police decided not to deploy their gas and water cannons on us.

But many of my friends and colleagues were not so lucky. I feel ashamed that I suffered no more than tiredness, compared with what they so courageously went through.

And all our hapless leaders can do is call them names. The people who went to Bersih 2.0 are Malaysians who will forever feel united and bound to each other because of that experience. Some may have been politicians and NGOs but so many more were just people of every race, religion, age and creed.

So many have said they never felt more Malaysian than they did that day. At a time when everyone has been lamenting how divided we are, we came together. What more could we have wished for?

Perhaps we should take another leaf from Sept 11. In the wake of the death and destruction wreaked by the US government to avenge the World Trade Centre deaths, some of the families of those who died, horrified by such violent vengeance, started an NGO called Not In Our Name.

Perhaps those many decent Malaysians, the “silent majority” our leaders like to claim as their own, can come out and say that, even if they disagree with Bersih 2.0, they will not stand by and let their fellow citizens be insulted and abused in this way.

At least, not in their name.