Mumbai terrorism

Last week I went to Jakarta.  I saw how life might have been like for a native Indonesian boy growing up in Jakarta.

Born into a shaky hut, one of the thousands lining the rivers that served both toilet and tea.

The only educational opportunity given by the religious teacher at the local mosque.

Growing up sifting through the garbage behind the luxurious shopping centers, seeing food in the bins that your family could never afford even for the New Year.

You peddle plastic souvenirs in the middle of bustling streets, risking your life, and sometimes getting hurt by irate drivers. The beautiful, well dressed people inside staring at you with either disgust or fear, locking their car doors the moment you approach.

You grow up and get the best job you possibly could get : as a chauffer to one of the many rich Chinese families, for a montly salary that isa third the price of their ferragamo shoes.

 Everyday you are spoken to in barks and orders, while the family dog is patted and cooed.

Everyday you wait with a hundred other chauffers outside the high-end shopping malls. Outside these malls, are all native indonesians, like you. In these malls, not a single native indonesian, they are all chinese. Security guards stand at the doors to make sure it stays this way. The inside of the mall is a heaven you get a glimpse of only when the doors open; you will never step in for your whole life.

You have no idea about anything beyond this world of yours, about computers and the internet, the stockmarket and the banks, about anything at all. All you know is the stark difference between your life and the life of a privilledged race. And all around you, people blame this privilledged race for the oppression — on your own native soil.

In that context, I understood how time and again, the violent acts against the Chinese could have been commited. I understood, how given the technology and arms, could acts of terrorism be commited at any opportunity available, on local or foreign soil.

I believe few people are evil, and even fewer would give up their lives in the name of evil. It is only for justice, and for the liberation from oppression, that people would fight for and die for.

I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands,
organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same
food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases,
heal’d by the same means, warm’d and cool’d by the same winter
and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If
you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?
And if you wrong us, do we not revenge? If we are like you in the
rest, we will resemble you in that.
The Merchant Of Venice Act 3, scene 1, 58–68

So I say, let’s make sure that the Pakistanis and Afghanistanis and Tibetans and all the oppressed people of the world get justice and equality, before they have to resort to more terrorism, to make themselves heard.

Its easy to condemn the terrorists as evil people whom we should deal with by just killing them all and weeding them out. For a few moments, I felt that way too, when I learnt of the death of a Singaporean girl, one that I actually attended school with, even though i did not know her personally. I felt the rage that one feels, at the injust and cruel murder of “one of us”.

That may be how we feel, as humans, as people. But I hope the leaders of this interconnected world do not act on such impulses and emotion.

In dealing with terrorism, we definately should be pre-emptive…. but its hard, when the enemy are not people, but an idea. To simply annihilate people who could potentially be influenced by such dangerous ideas however, would be fighting evil with evil, and evil still wins.

I think right now the problem is that there are many many poor and oppressed people (there will ALWAYS be poor and oppressed people) who believe that the West is the cause of their troubles. You can kill the leaders, but then there will be many oppressed people willing to fill that space.

I think we need a lot of foreign aid to help alleviate the poverty and oppression…… then people will see that it is only the fanatics and crazies who become terrorist, and stop supporting them.  We need to get the messge across that it is their inept , self-serving and corrupt national leaders that cause their poverty and oppression, and not the West, as I’m sure their government-censored local media would like to tout.

And we need to stop the campaign of hate against the people from whom the terrorists come, because that will only breed resentment that fuels this cycle of co-destruction. I wonder how much motivation and support the Mumbai terrorists got from Obama’s pledge to use violence against Pakistan, Given their restricted/selective access to information, how could they not feel unjustly threatened and compelled to act?

World AIDS Day

It’s World AIDS Day today

wishlist

1. Legislation to prevent discriminatory firing of HIV infected people / expulsion from organisations or schools

2. Medical subsidies for HIV medication

3.  Scrapping the HIV test as part of pre-employment medical check ups

4. Increased public education about HIV prevention, and anti-discrimination

5. Repeal 377a!