Van Jones Lauds Muslim and Pakistani Americans as "Model Community" & "Geniuses"

Here's CNN analyst Van Jones talking about the ill-effects of Islamophobia in America:

"Honestly, if a Muslim family moved next door to you, you would be the happiest person in the world. First of all, the chances of your kids getting into trouble just went way down. OK, went way down.

Because (American) Muslim community has the lowest crime rate, the highest entrepreneurship, the highest educational attainment for women in the country (US). They are the model American community.

And so, when you have people who are now afraid to come here--that's starting to happen--you have geniuses from Pakistan, who are from Indonesia, who now (think to themselves) "I'm not safe here".

That becomes an economic problem for America long term. So that we're starting to do stuff here that doesn't make good sense for what has made us great so far."


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gr5cLv8Dj2I




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Comments

Riaz Haq said…
In Year of Anti-#Muslim Vitriol, #Brands Promote Inclusion. #Islamophobia #Trump #Amazon #Advertising

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/01/business/media/anti-muslim-vitriol-brands-promote-inclusion.html?_r=0

The gentle piano music starts as the doorbell chimes. A white-haired Christian pastor greets his friend, a Muslim imam, and the two converse and laugh over a cup of tea, wincing about their creaky knees as they prepare to part ways. Later, it spurs the same idea in each for a gift: kneepads sent via Amazon Prime. (It is a commercial, after all.)

The piano notes accelerate as the men open their deliveries with smiles, and then each uses the item to kneel in prayer: one at a church, the other at a mosque. The final chords fade.

The ad from Amazon and its message of interfaith harmony became a viral sensation this holiday season, at the end of a year in which talk involving Muslims became particularly ominous. Amazon — which aired the commercial in England, Germany and the United States — cast a practicing vicar and Muslim community leader in the lead roles and consulted with several religious organizations to ensure the ad was accurate and respectful.

“This type of a project is definitely a first for us,” said Rameez Abid, communications director for the social justice branch of the Islamic Circle of North America, one group Amazon worked with. “They were very aware that this was going to cause controversy and might get hate mail and things like that, but they said it’s something that they wanted to do because the message is important.”

A slew of major American brands — including Honey Maid, Microsoft, Chevrolet, YouTube and CoverGirl — prominently featured everyday Muslim men, women and children in their marketing last year. While such ads were apolitical in nature, focused on themes of community and acceptance, they were viewed as bold, even risky, in a year when there were campaign statements by Donald J. Trump about a Muslim registry and a ban on Muslim immigrants.


It was “a glimmer of hope in the midst of a greatly traumatic year for Muslims,” said Mona Haydar, an American poet and activist who appeared in a recent Microsoft commercial with a variety of community leaders, including a transgender teenager and a white policeman.

“For me as a Muslim woman, I represent something right now in the country that for some people incites fear,” said Ms. Haydar, 28, who wears a hijab and hails from Flint, Mich. “This normalizes the narrative that we are just human beings.”

Several advertising executives likened the movement to the decision by mass marketers to cast same-sex couples and their children in ads for the first time in 2013 and 2014, making inclusion and acceptance a priority over potential criticism from some customers.

“With the kind of gay parent issue, we’ve gotten a little closer to acceptance, but the Muslim issue in America is still pretty raw for a lot of people,” said Kevin Brady, an executive creative director at the ad agency Droga5, which worked last year with Honey Maid on a commercial about white and Muslim-American neighbors. “I don’t think it should be, but it’s one that I think brands took an extra step of courage to really go out there with in 2016.”

A campaign for YouTube Music in the middle of last year highlighted five individuals, including a young woman in a hijab, rapping to a song by Blackalicious while walking through a school corridor. The inclusion of the ad, “Afsa’s Theme,” was purposeful, said Danielle Tiedt, the chief marketing officer at YouTube, adding that highlighting diversity is “more important than ever.”

“I don’t think diversity is a political statement,” she said. “This is an issue of universal humanity.”

For its ad, Amazon was painstaking in its attention to detail, checking with religious groups about costuming and background imagery, and sending over final proofs of the ad for review, said Mr. Abid and Antonios Kireopoulos, an associate general secretary of the National Council of Churches, another group Amazon consulted.
Riaz Haq said…
Spate of mosque fires stretches across the country. 4 torched in first 2 months of 2017. #Islamophobia #Trump @CNN

http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/02/us/mosque-fires-2017/index.html

In just the first two months of the year, at least four mosques have gone up in flames as attacks against religious minorities have surged.

Those fires follow "the worst year on record for incidents in which mosques were targets of bias," according to the Council of American-Islamic Relations.
CAIR documented 139 incidents of "damage/destruction/vandalism" at mosques last year -- the most since record-keeping began in 2009. It does not track fires separately.
"Islamophobic bias continues its trend toward increasing violence," said Corey Saylor, director of CAIR's Department to Monitor and Combat Islamophobia.
The wave of hostility comes as President Donald Trump campaigned on -- then enacted -- a temporary ban on travelers from Muslim-majority countries entering the United States. He is said to be drafting a new version after the first was struck down in court.

January 7: Austin, Texas
The Islamic Center of Lake Travis hadn't even been completed yet when it mysteriously caught fire.

January 14: Bellevue, Washington
A fire that torched the Islamic Center of Eastside near Seattle was an act of arson, Bellevue Police Chief Steve Mylett said.
No one was inside the mosque at the time of the blaze, which firefighters said shot 40-foot flames into the sky.

January 27: Victoria, Texas
The fire that destroyed the Victoria Islamic Center mosque was intentionally set, the Houston office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco and Explosives said.
The ATF, CrimeStoppers and the mosque are offering a combined $30,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and indictment of whoever set the mosque on fire.
While members of the mosque grappled with their loss, leaders of a local Jewish congregation stepped in to help -- and gave them the keys to their synagogue so they could continue to worship.

February 24: Thonotosassa, Florida
A fire that damaged the Islamic Society of New Tampa has been ruled arson, Hillsborough County fire investigators said.
Authorities have not ruled whether the fire was a hate crime, but Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn said the attack "is no different than the wave of anti-Semitic attacks on Jewish community centers and synagogue and bomb threats that have been called in all across the country, including in Tampa over the recent months."

Riaz Haq said…
Religion Scholar K. Armstrong: #Islamist #violence is "in part a product of #Western disdain" #Islamophobia #terror

https://en.qantara.de/content/interview-with-karen-armstrong-islamist-violence-is-in-part-a-product-of-western-disdain

Armstrong: The Prophet has been caricatured in the West as a violent, epileptic, lecherous charlatan since the time of the Crusades in the Middle Ages; this distorted image of Islam developed at the same time as our European anti-Semitism which caricatured Jews as the evil, violent, perverse and powerful enemies of Europe.
So yes, the attack on the magazine was in part a product of Western disdain. The attack on the Jewish supermarket, which seems to have been backed by ISIS, was directed against Western support for Israel. Here too, there is an element of disdain: there has been little sustained outcry against the massive casualties in Gaza last summer, for example, which seems to some Muslims to imply that the lives of Palestinian women, children and the elderly are not as valuable as our own.

Where do you see the roots of this disdain?
Armstrong: The Enlightenment ideal of freedom was, in practice, only for Europeans. The Founding Fathers of the United States, who were deeply influenced by the Enlightenment, proudly proclaimed that "All men are created equal" and enjoyed the natural human rights of life, liberty and property. But they felt no qualms about owning African slaves and driving the Native Americans out of their ancestral lands.
John Locke, the apostle of tolerance, wrote that a master had "absolute and despotical" rights over a slave, which included the right to kill him at any time. This continues: many of those who marched for freedom of expression in Paris were leaders of states that have supported regimes in Muslim majority countries that denied their subjects basic freedoms; Britain and the US, for example, continue to support the Saudi regime. Again, a disdain: our freedom is more important than yours.
Shouldn't we also look at certain Koranic verses and their interpretation throughout history to explain the phenomenon of Islamist terror?
Armstrong: "Throughout history", these Koranic verses have not inspired terrorist activities. Any empire depends upon force; this is true of the Indian, Chinese, Persian, Roman, Hellenistic and British empires and it is also true of the Islamic empires. Furthermore, until the modern period, Islam had a far better record of tolerance than Western Christianity. When the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem in 1099, they slaughtered the Muslim and Jewish inhabitants of the city in a massacre that shocked the Middle East, which had never seen such unbridled violence. And yet it was 50 years before there was any serious Muslim riposte. There is more violence in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament than there is in the Koran.
Most Christian theologians would disagree.
Armstrong: Those theologians who claim that there are no passages in the New Testament like Koran 2.191–93 have perhaps forgotten the Book of Revelation, which is the preferred text of many Christian fundamentalists who look forward to the battles of the imminent End Time that will destroy the enemies of God. They interpret these texts literally and quote them far more frequently than the Sermon on the Mount. The aggression towards the enemy commanded in Koran 2:191 concludes: "If they cease hostilities, there can be no further hostility." (Koran 2. 193). No such quarter is allowed those who fight the Word of God in the battles of Revelation.

Riaz Haq said…
My research similarly shows that creating spaces for empathy can prove invaluable for combating intergroup hostility. In 2015, my research assistants and I interviewed Americans and Pakistanis on their views of each other’s culture. We found that both groups held highly negative beliefs and stereotypes about the other. Pakistanis didn’t just see Americans as loose, but as immoral and arrogant. Americans saw Pakistanis as overly constrained, but also aggressive and violent. As impressions are often formed through the media, which thrives on caricature, such extreme stereotyping is perhaps not surprising. What’s more, we tend to live in our own echo chambers. Even on Twitter and Facebook, we communicate with those we know and those who share our views, rather than engaging with people from other cultures. In our study, we wondered if we could lessen intergroup intergroup hostility by giving each group a more realistic window into each other’s lives. We didn’t have the budget to fly Pakistanis to the United States or vice versa. But what if Americans were able to read the actual daily diaries of Pakistanis, and Pakistanis were able to read the diaries of Americans, over the course of a week? Would this exposure to one another’s day-to-day lives change their attitudes? To find out, my collaborator Joshua Jackson and I had American and Pakistani students write about their everyday experiences for one week. We then gave a new group of participants, including a hundred American and a hundred Pakistani students, a set of these diary entries to read over the course of a week. The results of this low-cost intervention were striking: As compared with participants who read diary entries from members of their own culture, participants who read diary entries written by members of the other culture viewed the two cultures as being much more similar. What’s more, Pakistani participants who read Americans’ diaries viewed Americans as more moral and as having less of a sense of superiority over other cultures. And, by the end of this intervention, our American participants who read diaries written by Pakistanis viewed Pakistanis as less violent and more fun-loving. “I don’t know many Pakistanis personally, but the diary entries helped me learn about the everyday life of someone in Pakistan,” one American participant wrote at the study’s end. “I think that they tend to be a bit more religious than the people in America, but have similar life patterns and personalities to us.” Likewise, a Pakistani participant remarked, “Americans may be different than us in moral, ethical, or religious values, but the lives of students in America are very similar to the life of a student here . . . They are law-abiding citizens, which is one of the reasons the system in America is working smoothly.” As these quotes show, interventions that improve our understanding of people from other cultures hold tremendous promise for defusing stereotypes, heading off conflict, and resolving intercultural disputes. Every day, citizens are finding meaningful ways to interact with people far outside their own social circles. In 2017, the Washington Post reported that, in a Dairy Queen in Dallas, Texas, two American-born men decided to have a sit-down over burgers and fries to untangle their mutual suspicion. On one end, there was David Wright, a white man who had founded a militia called the Bureau of American Islamic Relations (BAIR) with the mission of rooting out Islamic terrorists in Texas. At the other end was Ali Ghouri, a member of a local mosque where Wright and his coalition had protested twice with weapons and signs reading “Stop the Islamization of America.” Against the advice of other members of his mosque, Ghouri confronted the protesters, saying, “I have a weapon. You have a weapon. I’m not scared of you.” Five months later, Wright and Ghouri met at the Dairy Queen. Each man brought a friend—and a gun.

Gelfand, Michele. Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World (p. 198-199). Scribner. Kindle Edition. 

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