Sikh leader was a hero

[shiny!]

The story of how Satwant Singh Kaleka chose to live and die touches me deeply and makes me proud to be a Sikh. My heart goes out to the families of all who were slain.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/06/us/wis...ing/index.html

"From what we understand, he basically fought to the very end and suffered gunshot wounds while trying to take down the gunman," said Kanwardeep Singh Kaleka, his nephew.

"He was a protector of his own people, just an incredible individual who showed his love and passion for our people, our faith, to the end," he said, near tears.

"He was definitely one of the most dedicated individuals I have ever seen, one of the happiest people in the world."

[Ghent12]

Re: Sikh leader was a hero

The first time I heard of Sikhs, it was in the context of their world-renown bravery, martial prowess, and dedication. This tragedy is insane, and I pray for those affected.

[shiny!]

Re: Sikh leader was a hero

The first time I heard of Sikhs, it was in the context of their world-renown bravery, martial prowess, and dedication. This tragedy is insane, and I pray for those affected.

Brave, yes. And truly kind. Charity and hospitality to all are hallmarks of Sikhism.

If that gunman had simply walked in peacefully, they would have welcomed him with smiles and served him the best meal of his life, without asking anything of him in return.

[don]

Re: Sikh leader was a hero

A gunman who killed six people at a Sikh place of worship in Wisconsin has been identified as a 40-year-old former soldier with alleged links to racist groups.

The white, heavy-set shooter – who some witnesses suggested carried tattoos marking the 9/11 terrorist attacks – was named as Wade Michael Page, an former serviceman once stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Officials have yet to confirm the killer's identity.

Meanwhile, the Southern Poverty Law Center – an organisation that monitors the activity of extremist groups – claimed on its website that the shooter was a "frustrated neo-Nazi who had been the leader of a racist white-power band".

Forensic experts spent Monday searching the gunman's home in Cudahy, just a few miles from Oak Creek, where the Sikh gurdwara is located.

Oak Creek police chief John Edwards has already confirmed that the suspect had a military background. It is thought Page was dismissed from the US army in 1998 for "patterns of misconduct", including being drunk on duty.

Edwards told CNN that the gunman "lived in a community neighbouring ours", and said authorities were "doing a 24-hour back-check, just to get any idea what he was up to, what he was doing".

"Right now there is no indication that there were any red flags," he said.

Sunday's attack is being investigated as an act of "domestic terrorism", police have said.

The suspect began shooting shortly before 10.30am local time as dozens gathered at the gurdwara. After killing people inside the building, the gunman fought with officers outside, critically injuring one. A second officer was able to "put down" the suspect, police said. The killer was pronounced dead at the scene.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012...n-army-veteran

[don]

Re: Sikh leader was a hero

Vijah Prashad's take on the shooting . . .

The Sense of White Supremacy

by VIJAY PRASHAD

Yesterday morning the orgies of the lone gunman took hold in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, a town in the dragnet of Milwaukee. He targeted a Gurdwara, the religious home of the local Sikh community. The gunman entered the Gurdwara, and as if in mimicry of the school shootings, stalked the worshippers in the halls of the 17,000 square foot “Sikh Temple of Wisconsin.” Police engaged the gunman, who wounded at least one officer. The gunman killed at least seven Sikhs, wounding many more. He was then killed. A few hours after the shooting Ven Boba Ri, a committee member of the Gurdwara told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, “It’s pretty much a hate crime. It’s not an insider.”

The local police smartly said that this is an act of domestic terrorism. The FBI concurred.

This is the not the first act of violence against Sikhs in the United States.

That story begins in the 19^th century, when Sikhs migrated to the US, fleeing British colonialism for far-flung pastures. Many landed along the western coast of the United States, working alongside Japanese, Mexican and Filipino workers to make California into a fruit-producer and Oregon and Washington into major lumber producers. But they were not welcomed. Riots in Bellingham, Washington (1907) and Live Oak, California (1908) targeted the “rag heads,” the turban-wearing Sikhs. The mob “stormed makeshift Indian residences, stoned Indian workers and successfully orchestrated the non-involvement of local police.” The Bellingham Morning Reveille ran a drawing of a “Sikh” man with the caption, “This is the type of man driven from this city as the result of last night’s demonstration by a mob of 500 men and boys.” It was a mark of pride to have cleansed the city of the Sikhs.

The Sikhs didn’t take this lying down. A decade later, one Sikh man bragged, “I used to go to Maryville every Saturday. One day a ghora [white man] came out of a bar and motioned to me, saying, ‘Come here, slave!’ I said I was no slave man. He told me that his race ruled India and I hit him and got away fast.”

Anti-Sikh violence does not reside only in the early part of the 20^th century. It returned a century later, when, after 9/11, Sikh men and women were targeted once more for their turban and head-scarf. Since Osama Bin Laden wore a turban, it was the turban that attracted the racist to the Sikhs. As I note in Uncle Swami, within the first week after 9/11, a disproportionately large number of the 645 bias attacks took place against Sikhs. The statement on the Oak Creek shootings that came from the activist group South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT) drew a straight line between the post-9/11 violence and this attack, “While the facts are still emerging, this event serves as a tragic reminder of violence in the form of hate crimes that Sikhs and many members of the South Asian community have endured since September 11^th, 2001.”

Two quick reactions to the Oak Creek violence raised the hackles of some of the sharp organizers in the South Asian American community:

* This was an act of senseless violence. “No,” said Rinku Sen, publisher of Colorlines magazines. This is not “senseless,” she noted, but “racist.” This is the fifty-seventh mass shooting in the past thirty years in the United States. Each one is treated as the work of a freak. Patterns are shunned. Structural factors such as the prevalence of guns and the lack of social care for mentally disturbed people should of course be in the frame. But so too should the preponderance of socially acceptable hatred against those seen as outsiders. Intellectually respectable opinions about who is an American (produced, for example, by Sam Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenge to National Identity) comes alongside the politician’s casual racism (Romney’s recent suggestion that the US and the UK are “part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage,” erased in a whip lash the diversity of the United States and Britain). Racist attacks are authorized by a political culture that allows us to think in nativist terms, to bemoan the “browning” of America. By 2034, the Census department estimates, the non-white population of the US is going to be in the majority. With the political class unwilling to reverse the tide of jobless growth and corporate power, the politicians stigmatize the outsider as the problem of poverty and exploitation. This stigmatization, as Moishe Postone argues, obscures “the role played by capitalism in the reproduction of grief.” Far easier to let the Sikhs and the Latinos, the Muslims and the Africans bear the social cost for economic hopelessness and political powerlessness than to target the real problem: the structures that benefit the 1% and allow them to luxuriate in Richistan.

* Sikhs are not Muslims. The second argument, now clichéd, is to make the case that this is violence at the wrong address. Sikhs did nothing wrong, they are peace-loving and so on. It assumes that there are people who did do something wrong, are war-mongering and therefore deserve to be targeted. The liberal gesture of innocence has within it the sharp edge of Islamaphobia. It seems to suggest that Muslims are the ones who should bear this violence, since their ilk did the attacks on 9/11 and they are, all two billion of them, at war with the United States. The attack on Sikhs is not a mistaken attack. Sikhs are not mistaken for Muslims, but seen as part of the community of outsiders who are, as Patrick Buchanan puts it in States of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, “a fifth column inside the belly of the beast…Should America lose her ethnic-cultural core and become a nation of nations, America will not survive.” Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker is not far from all this, being a fan of the Arizona anti-human legislation. The Sikh Coalition, an anti-bias group, is fully aware that this is not simply a situation of mistaken identity. Its 2008 report, Making Our Voices Heard, notes that although it is not the case that Sikhs are members of the Taliban or clones of Bin Laden, it is this recurrent identification that has by now “created an environment in which Sikhs are regularly singled out for abuse and mistreatment by both private and, at times, public actors.” Strikingly, forty-one percent of Sikhs in New York City reported being called derogatory names, half of the Sikh children reported being teased or harassed because of their Sikh identity and one hundred percent of Sikhs report having to endure secondary screenings at some US airports.

Sapreet Kaur of the Sikh Coalition offered her take of the situation, “There have been multiple hate crime shootings within the Sikh community in recent years and the natural impulse of our community is to unfortunately assume the same in this case.”

Vijay Prashad is the author of Uncle Swami: South Asians in America Today (New Press, 2012).

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/08/...ite-supremacy/

[LargoWinch]

Re: Sikh leader was a hero

The story of how Satwant Singh Kaleka chose to live and die touches me deeply and makes me proud to be a Sikh. My heart goes out to the families of all who were slain.

Sikh or not, this was a despicable act.

Death penalty is the only just sentence for human scum such as Page (not that it will be necessary given that he was shot down by police).

Of course, this is but a regular moment in the life of government i.e. the killing of six innocent people, but this discussion is for another day.

[shiny!]

Re: Sikh leader was a hero

This massacre is truly terrible, but no more heinous than the shooting in Aurora and the killings that happen all around the world every day, whether done by individuals or sanctioned by governments. It just hit home more personally for me. I'm not handling my grief very well...

[LargoWinch]

Re: Sikh leader was a hero

This massacre is truly terrible, but no more heinous than the shooting in Aurora and the killings that happen all around the world every day, whether done by individuals or sanctioned by governments. It just hit home more personally for me. I'm not handling my grief very well...

You can take comfort shiny! that those who know you only from behind a computer screen thinks highly of you. Courage friend.

[jk]

Re: Sikh leader was a hero

This massacre is truly terrible, but no more heinous than the shooting in Aurora and the killings that happen all around the world every day, whether done by individuals or sanctioned by governments. It just hit home more personally for me. I'm not handling my grief very well...

if not handling it well means feeling it deeply, i'm not sure that one should aspire to handling it well.

[shiny!]

Re: Sikh leader was a hero

if not handling it well means feeling it deeply, i'm not sure that one should aspire to handling it well.

Thanks LargoWinch, and jk. Your words are very much appreciated.

By not handling it well, I mean that I'm feeling the loss of my husband extra acutely right now. I'm still grieving his loss, and something like this happens and I feel too raw to handle it. Some days my heart just feels broken. This is one of those days.

Thanks again for your words of friendship. It means a lot to me.

[vt]

Re: Sikh leader was a hero

Shiny,

We all are human, and feel your grief as humans. Those of us from other religions respect and admire your religion. Anyone who has faith is deeply saddened by such a loss.

[ProdigyofZen]

Re: Sikh leader was a hero

shiny, I did not know you were Indian?

On a side note, if the guy did it because of "white nationalism" then he should have known that Sikhs and most Indians in general are caucasian.

[srivatsan]

Re: Sikh leader was a hero

Care to explain the last line ?
I am an Indian. I find it absolutely offensive.

shiny, I did not know you were Indian?

On a side note, if the guy did it because of "white nationalism" then he should have known that Sikhs and most Indians in general are caucasian.

[ProdigyofZen]

Re: Sikh leader was a hero

Sorry that you feel offended by the statement. It was not meant to be at all.

What offended you?

Before you over react you should step back and think a little. Here is work done by the pre imminent geneticist Cavalli-Sforza. In his view it is without a doubt that Indians are Caucasoids. As you can see from the chart below Indians are part of the "caucasoid tree" and that goes for North Africans, Arabs, All of Eurasia up to about China (you have admixture in places like Uzbekistan), Iranians, Pakistani's and Indians.

Yep they are all caucasian. In fact the word Iranian is a derivative of the root word Aryan. Never ever call an Iranian an Arab for they are Aryan's. I would venture to say that if you want to see what the original "caucasoid" peoples looked like then head to the mountains of Afghanistan for there you will find a region pretty much untouched by outside invaders. Even Alexander the Great could not conquer this region and finally decided to marry into it to bring it under his control. His first wife Roshanak was from this region now called Afghanistan.

If you wish you can read Cavalli-Sforza book here: http://www.amazon.com/Genes-Peoples-.../dp/0520228731 Its called Genes, Peoples and Languages.

Please do not be offended. I did not mean you to be. I will say that most of the time Science is offensive to just about everyone at least once in their life.


Figure 1: Cavalli-Sforza’s Principal Coordinate (PC) autosomal DNA haplogroup gene mappings of major human ethnic and racial groups. There are differences between a PC mapping and the tree mappings below.Much of the racial grouping below is based on this map – on genetic distance between groups, not on superficial resemblances between groups. The upper left square can be called NE Asian. The lower left square can be called SE Asian. The upper right square can be called Caucasian. The lower right square can be called African.Figure 2: Another Cavalli-Sforza map showing general genetic distance, with tremendous overlap with the map above. This map clearly separates out Papuans and Melanesians and also Filipinos and Thais. There is some confusion here regarding the placement of Northern Turkics with Amerindians and whether NW Amerindians should be cleaved off into a separate race. This map is actually interesting because it implies that there are six major races of humans – not three – NE Asians, SE Asians, Oceanians (Australoids), Pacific Islanders, Caucasians and Africans. As you can see, the distance between NE Asians and SE Asians and between SE Asians and Pacific Islanders is greater than that between NE Asians and Caucasians. SE Asia is clearly an area of profound genetic diversity.
Figure 3: Yet another map, in this case a genetic tree. Once again, Papuans must be cleaved from Melanesians and Thai, and Chinese are clearly separated. This is the first tree that shows the Northern Chinese, and it seems clear it wants to put them with the Koreans and Japanese. This map shows five major races – Caucasians, NE Asians, SE Asians, Africans, Papuans and Aborigines.
Figure 4: More from Cavalli-Sforza showing genetic distance. This was apparently used to map one or both of the maps above. Based on this, I split the Thai off from the Filipinos. This map also shows that Aborigines are most closely related first to Mongolians and Siberians and second to Japanese and Koreans.
I usually wanted about 150 points difference to split off into a separate race, but in some cases I split off closer groups if they were distinguished somewhere else, like in any combination of Figs. 1, 2 or 3. You need to click on it to read it properly.
.

[GRG55]

Re: Sikh leader was a hero

Care to explain the last line ?
I am an Indian. I find it absolutely offensive.

"Race" is always an emotional topic. But why are you offended by a statement that is widely considered to be factually correct?

Unless of course you subscribe to Thomas Huxley's assertion that there is a fourth race called Australoid, and believe that Indians fall into that classification.