Today is the 13th day of September — 10 years after an important milestone for the United States and the West. Ten years ago our way of life and our freedoms, our liberal democracy and our rule of law were all assaulted and violated.
No, it didn’t take place in New York or Washington. It took place at a small family-run petrol station in Mesa, Arizona. A young man named Balbir Singh Sodhi, sporting a smartly kept beard and a turban, was shot dead. He was planting flowers in the garden of his family business.
But why mention his beard and turban? Was this at all relevant to Sodhi’s murder?
When the planes first crashed into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, men sporting turbans and beards were all suspected of some kind of involvement. The first pictures released by the FBI of suspected terrorist passengers included men sporting beards and turbans. Even Sydney’s Daily Telegraph carried a front page showing a man, his head bowed, sporting a small beard and a blue turban, being taken into custody. The headline screamed “FIRST ARREST”.
Turbans and beards were now the symbol of terror. Why? Because Obam … whoops … Osama bin Ladin wore a turban.
Frank Silva Roque, 44, of Harvest, Ala., was sentenced to death or first-degree murder in the death of Balbir Singh Sodhi:
“Roque was convicted of killing Sodhi, a Mesa gas station owner whom prosecutors said was targeted because Roque thought Sodhi was Arab. Sodhi wore a turban and beard as part of his Sikh faith.”
According to an AAP report about Roque’s sentencing in 2003, after shooting Sodhi, Roque shot at another gas station where the clerk was a man of Lebanese descent, and shot at the home of an Afghan family. They were not injured.
This was just the beginning. The New York Times reports that “an eclectic Sikh temple called Gobind Sadan was burnt down by four teenagers who thought that the turbaned worshippers were Muslims and that the temple’s sign said ‘Go Bin Laden’.”
Sikhs, like other minorities, have suffered a disproportionate amount of prejudice since 9/11. They have stood out due to their visible religious devotions including wearing the dastaar, a traditional Punjabi-style head dress.
Until recently, Sikhs had to remove their turbans when flying. Sikhs also have their turbans frisked at airport security, a ridiculous and humiliating practice.
Paranoia about turbans has become so great that they even became an issue in the US Presidential elections when a picture of Obama wearing traditional clothes of Somali elders was leaked by opponents.
September 11 was the day when tragedy struck the US and when men and women of all nationalities and faiths were murdered by crazed fanatics. But 9/13 is the day when minorities of all nationalities and faiths were subjected to abuse and denial of liberty in the name of protecting us from terrorists who wish to abuse our way of life and deny us liberty.
It isn’t just about airport searches. Men from certain minorities have been detained more readily and for longer periods of time. Paranoia was even present in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, when immigrants such as painting contractor Abdurrahman Zeitoun were detained and treated like terror suspects.
The war on terror hasn’t just led to imbecilic wars that have killed hundreds of thousands of innocents. It has created a scud missile mentality where at home our collective hatred is hardly ever directed at the right people. Just ask the Sodhi family.
yeah but how many died on 9/11 …. in the USA ….. of poverty? I wonder, let alone mad gun laws.
that’s not to excuse or down play the grief and anger around the mass murder at the twin towers.
but I do feel queasy about whose death has a shape and a voice, and whose does not.
Surely there is a fair degree of mass media corporate brainwashing going on here.
Not only was the attack against trade, but it was an attack against advertisers, and of course the people involved in that economic activity.
Whereas the nameless other deaths from poverty inside and outside the USA are a commercial and corporate nullity, requiring no memorial, doco or mass grieving. Even as we all know it’s happening every day, day in day out, so constantly as to be mere background white noise on the moral landscape.
I don’t know about other people but my conservative Christian upbringing doesn’t sit well with that disjunction, not at all. I reckon all those lives are precious and deserve human rights and respect. So we as a species can go to the moon and build hyper fast rocket delivery systems across the globe, and split the atom, but we are helpless against mass poverty and related corruption.
Where is the leadership and sustainable solutions to this crushing issue of even greater violent and crushing nature, you never read about?
Box Brown created a comic based on this event:
http://www.everythingdiescomic.com/?s=42&p=1&b=58
It’s well worth a read, as are his others.
puts one in mind of the Asimov story ‘Silly Asses’ Tom Mac
“It isn’t just about airport searches. Men from certain minorities have been detained more readily and for longer periods of time”.
Probably has something to do with the fact that the overwhelming majority of participants in terrorist acts on 9/11 and since have been adherants to a particular religious viewpoint usually hailing from specific ethnic backgrounds.
To put it another way, it wasn’t Irish-American’s flying those airliners into the twin towers…
Michael, nor was it Sikhs, Bangladeshis, Indians, Pakistanis, Hispanics, Fiji-Indians, South African Indians, Guyanese and others frequently subjected to this kind of treatment.