Obama and wife portrayed as muslim terrorists

The New Yorker Magazine in its latest issue portrayed Democrat hopeful for the US presidency, Barack Obama in a traditional “Muslim” outfit and his wife in combat trousers carrying a machine gun. Democrats and Republicans were quick to criticize the cartoon as “tasteless and offensive” and predicted most readers would feel the same way.

Not so long ago were some other cartoons and caricatures published which a number of western pundits and politicians decided to, at worst, support and at best, stay numb about: those of the Prophet of Islam. While what the New York Magazine published is undoubtedly offensive, Danish cartoons about Prophet Muhammed (peace be upon him) went miles ahead in derogation, defamation and hurt for Muslims around the world. Agreed that violence was not a sensible or an educated answer to such an insult but essentially, all Muslims around the world were asking for was for the “educated and democratic” societies of the world to condemn such an act and for the editors and cartoonists to issue an unconditional apology. Alas, they always find cover under freedom of speech when it comes to Muslims but defaming someone’s present or past as long as they are non-Muslim is duly criticized and often, punished with imprisonment.

The latest cartoons also present one stereotype and another honest misconception. The former is obvious and I think most people with common sense will understand the deliberate attempt that world media has made to stereotype Muslims as terrorists. Look around you: like every other religion, Muslims are in all walks of lives. Their loyalties are as much with their motherlands as yours or as of Christians for that matter.

The misconception: while the “Muslim” dress depicted in this cartoon has its roots in Arab culture which happened to be where Islamic history began, it has little to do with what Islam prescribes or the so called “Islamic culture”. In other words, there are millions of Muslims around the world in Asia, America, Africa, Europe and Australia; you name a town of the world and you will find someone Muslim there. Do they all wear the same dress? The answer is obviously NO. There is no such thing as a Muslim dress. None was prescribed in the Muslim Holy Book, the Quran or anywhere in the Islamic texts. Perhaps, its just a misconception or perhaps, it helps the media with their attempts at stereotyping.

New Year, Happy?

I don’t know if the new year is really as happy this time around for Pakistanis. It certainly did not begin on a happy note.  Contrary to what mainstream media portrays, I am a Pakistani and I am not grieved ONLY by the death of Benazir. In fact, I am saddened a lot more by its aftermath.  There is no point in a blame game but was there any in killing people, smashing cars, burning down buildings? All that and all we are told is that these were a bunch of unknown assailants, that it was wise of the government to let them express their grief and emotions: How very naive of our nation to take that!!

This year brings a new young face to PPP: Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari. A young lad with a new name for the new year. For a look at his life so far: click here

The good thing about Pakistan’s martial law

It is surprising and perhaps, questionable by many, but I constantly find myself thinking about the many benefits General Musharraf’s martial law will bring to Pakistan in the long run. Don’t get me wrong though: peace, stability, economic growth and roads and infrastructure is not what intend to elaborate on.

Students in protest. For the first time in my (intelligent) life, I have a witnessed a phenomenon I have always wished I could see in Pakistan. Students, that too, from an elite university, have come out to protest infringement of human rights and freedom.

An unprecedented occurrence in today’s Pakistan, this could turn out to be one of the single biggest benefits of imposing martial law in this country. Had it not been for Musharraf’s martial law, these comfy cozy elites would have never woken up. Had it not been for Musharraf’s brute force and wild arrests across the capital, the people of the capital actually didn’t give a damn about the happenings in Swat or down in Dera Bugti or the hunger in a given village in Pakistan.

They are students, they are from the elite class, they are powerful and well read and they are mostly politically neutral: makes them excellent potentials for tomorrow’s leadership. Finally, they are thinking about where Pakistan is headed.

While Lahore is up with its unusual air of protests, Karachi is still asleep. Elite or no elite, students in Karachi have done very little to protest this situation and to taken an initiative to change it. The silence in Karachi yet again makes another point. Student politics in Karachi is largely dominated by student wings of mainstream political organizations. You can see how little they care about the future of this country their greedy minds are intoxicated with political power. Qasim Moini wrote about Karachi and its silence in DAWN here.

Why should we protest, you may ask? A student from Lahore answers here .

There is a LONG way to go. At least I don’t want to be part of the crowd that remained silent and engrossed in mundane activities while I country was thrown into a well of darkness.

Updates on Civil Society Activism in Pakistan

check out the updates from LUMS here and a press release from the LUMS administration here.

SMS revolution in Pakistan, GEO is still available

A GEO news report shows on November 4, 2007, an average of 10 SMSs were exchanged per cell phone. This is a record in Pakistan’s Telecom industry.. Yes Musharraf, are you going to block all these cell phones?

Perhaps a speculation but GEO also said 90% of these SMSs were anti-state.

Also, GEO TV audio stream is available here and the video stream here.

Academics and Human Rights Activists are being arrested and harassed in Musharraf’s Pakistan

Two emails circulated on Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) network need our attention. The first one below is about the arrests of around 50-60 people outside Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) building including prominent members of the society, academics and journalists:

This afternoon, a group of 50 or 60 peaceful protestors – including some prominent journalists, lawyers, academics and human rights activists – gathered outside the HRCP building to protest against Musharraf and his emergency declaration. The protestors were surrounded by the police and arrested. The latest information I have received is that detention orders are expected to be issued soon for all those arrested, which means that they may be put in jail indefinitely. Mr. Bilal Minto (adjunct faculty, Law & Policy) and Professor Ali Cheema (Economics) are also amongst the
arrested individuals.

In another VERY encouraging email that I quote here, a faculty member at LUMS appeals its students to peacefully protest the imposition of martial law in our country.

Dear all. As I write to you many members of society are actively protesting against the travesty that has plunged us once again into the dark ages. The hrcp building has been surrounded by police and peaceful protesters including some of our faculty members are about to be arrested. In islamabad and elsewhere the top judiciary of the country remains under house arrest and similar arrests are being made. The press has been completely muffled. This is the time to peacefully but unequivocally express our very strong dismay and protest against yet another martial law. Howvever as we unite in this please ensure that nothing happens that in any way undermines our institutional norms. Please introspect and gauge whether continuing silence makes sense any more. Please speak up, stand together and be counted. And be careful. Regards. Osama siddique

This appeal applies to all students across Pakistan, it is encouraging that someone is ready to make the move. We wanted leaders right, well we got our leaders. Let Musharraf make more of his mistakes and very soon, we will have such leaders across the whole country.

See this as well

Musharraf, this time, you HAVE to go!!

ANOTHER martial law in Pakistan

General, oh General, you HAD to prove you were one!

Ofcourse, I don’t blame you for that. I mean calling a cat, a tiger does make it into one now, does it?

Is this a martial law? LOL at everyone whos coming up with that question. Shahid Masood elaborated well on the issue only minutes before GEO NEWS went off air in Karachi. He described the constitutional difference between declaration of emergency and a PCO (provisional constitutional order). Emergency is a clause under the constitution which grants extraordinary powers to the capital under certain circumstances as deemed necessary by the president. A PCO on the other hand, in effect, means that the constitution stands suspended.

How else do we define martial law? Chief of Army Staff (the word staff itself is hilarious) and a General declares the constitution is suspended. Now under a suspended constitution, even if legislative and judiciary and the cabinet remain, effectively all power rests in the General. You can call him the Chief Executive, the Chief Martial Law Administrator or in Shahid Masood’s words: even Amir-ul-Momineen, it really doesn’t matter.

How will we justify such measures in the future? Yet another attempt under the doctrine of necessity like General Musharraf did last night?

Perhaps more worrisome is the question of the common man? HOW WILL IT AFFECT ME? That is really what it all boils down to. Events are yet to unroll but it seems it will have very little affect if at all on the lives of common people. I mean, come on, our economy was already flourishing and infrastructure was growing all under the influence of foreign investor and the “aashirwar” (auspices) of these Western powers is still with General Musharraf.

We have grown to live under dictatorships throughout our 60 years. Little do we care about sovereignty and justice If something good happens, its fate. If something bad happens, its inevitable (DOCTRINE OF NECESSITY)

In sixty years, we have grown into a nation which is okay if you take away Kashmir, the nation is okay if you let go of Waziristan. We don’t even care if you break us up into 5 countries. We are okay if foreign troops attack our land in search of so called terrorists. We are okay if our financial systems are all taken over foreign companies. We are okay if we are educated by western boards of education. Sovereignty, as we knew it, is unknown.

another 8 killed

8 people died in the last 2 days when part of a recently built bridge in Karachi collapsed on Saturday. Several are injured and in hospitals. It has not even been a month yet since the bridge was officially opened by none other than the General himself, not even a month!! It is not Minnesota’s bridge that was several years old, it is one that was built hardly 3 weeks back and collapsed to kill 8 people, yes, I said: 8 people killed.

It doesn’t matter whether the bridge collapsed because of the 50 feet deep and 30 feet wide hole that was being dug in the ground or because some idiot some where decided to pretend he never saw the under quality material being used or because of the simple negligence of an engineer. I fail to believe that these deaths were not preventable and hence they were KILLED. This is not an accident, these innocent people were murdered.

I know about one of them distantly, a young guy in his 30s perhaps, father of 3 kids, killed when his car collapsed.

Who is responsible? City District Government? National Highway Authority or that excuse of a General? I suggest those responsible be hanged. After all, this is murder!! Give one a befitting punishment and they’ll all think before they ask for money against their death warrant..

You can’t get it right every time

We all like to think that medicine is an exact science. But Atul Gawande, an American surgeon whose bestselling book inspired the hit TV series Grey’s Anatomy, has news for you. He speaks to John Crace

Atul Gawande cannot forget the first time he sliced someone open. “I was in my final year at medical school,” he says, “and the surgeon in the operating room just handed me the knife on the spur of the moment and said, ‘You start.’ The knife was still warm from the autoclave [sterilising machine] and I started cutting down the line he had drawn for the hernia incision. The skin was much tougher and more rubbery than I expected and my first cut barely went through, so I had to make a second. It wasn’t frightening or nauseating in any way, but I did have a surreal sense that I was committing a violation. It felt an odd claim to make, that cutting someone open could make them better.”

More than 10 years and roughly 4,000 operations later, Gawande has never lost sight of surgery’s narrow divide between the sacred and the profane. Even now, before every procedure — no matter how routine — he runs through a checklist of the top three things that could go wrong and mentally prepares for these eventualities. And yet still things go wrong. “Each year I do about 400 operations and have about a 97 per cent success rate,” he says. “This means that 12 of my patients – two of whom will probably be dead — leave the theatre worse off than when they came in.

“Most of the time, they are patients whom I think I’ve done all I possibly could for, so I can accept it. But there are always the others. Six months ago, I was performing a thyroid operation on a teacher my age and damaged a nerve that led to her vocal cords. This woman can no longer talk and has had to give up work. The only way I can live with myself is to try to do all I can for her and understand what I did wrong and do better next time. Being sorry is not enough.”

Gawande is a general surgeon at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. And he still makes mistakes. It’s this uncomfortable wound that he has opened up, first in Complications — his bestselling book that was shortlisted for the National Book prize in the US and became the inspiration for the TV series Grey’s Anatomy — and now in his follow-up, Better.

“What I’m interested in is failure,” he says, “as it’s the one area of medicine with which the professionals are often reluctant to engage because the stakes we are playing for are so high. We can fail by putting a decimal point in the wrong place and by not asking the right questions. If you ask any doctor when he or she last made a misdiagnosis, the truthful answer would always be in the last month. We get things wrong and we try to put them right. And, of course, we can fail with a slip of the hand. I once performed an emergency trachaeotomy in which I did everything wrong. I had the wrong knife, the wrong lights and I made the wrong incision. There was blood everywhere and the patient would have died if a colleague hadn’t stepped in to help. It was horrific.”

If his call for willingness to ruthlessly examine what goes wrong and why is not always shared by other doctors, then neither will be the second part of his prescription for demystifying failure. Mention league tables to most doctors and they start spitting blood, but Gawande is adamant that there is a value in open accountability. “You have to be careful you are comparing like with like,” he says, by way of a caveat, “because otherwise the data can be meaningless. For instance, death rates for cardiac surgeons can vary hugely, depending on the age of their patients and the difficulty of the procedures they are undertaking. But we shouldn’t allow this to disguise the fact that some surgeons and some hospitals get better results than others. And unless we are prepared to admit this, we’ll never improve the overall success rates.”

As an example, Gawande cites both the case of the paediatric team at a hospital in Cleveland, Ohio, who virtually single-handedly raised the average life expectancy of cystic fibrosis patients from three years old in 1957 to 33 in 2003, simply by providing aggressive preventive treatment before sufferers became visibly sick from it. You could argue that such successes are largely a matter of money, but Gawande disagrees. “We spend huge amounts of cash on healthcare in the US,” he says, “and not all of it is very effective. Infection rates in hospitals are proof of this. Some hospitals have spent a small fortune on portable $5,000 hand-washing machines [superbugs are as rife in America as they are in Britain], but their infection rates have remained as high as before.

“The one hospital in the US that has managed to reduce infection to almost zero did so not by spending money but by analysing procedures. They asked doctors and nurses how they used the system and found that the alcohol gel dispensers were in the wrong place, the gowns they needed for the 3pm ward rounds were in the wrong place and that it was better to have a single stethoscope designated for each patient’s sole use than for a doctor to carry his own from patient to patient.”

Gawande goes on to argue that though we traditionally associate significant improvements in healthcare with the big breakthroughs in science — such as transplant surgery and gene therapies — much the biggest gains are likely to come from the close attention to the detail of failure. Rather than shrugging their shoulders and boasting that a 98% success rate for any given procedure is a stunning success, doctors really ought to be looking at why the procedure does not work in the other two per cent of cases.

Here it all gets tricky, though, because the public’s attitude towards failure has become far less tolerant over the past two decades. Any hint of failure or incompetence is usually met with a lawsuit for malpractice and US surgeons pay insurance premiums of between $30,000 and $300,000 per year in case of just such an eventuality. In a way, this is just as it should be, because doctors should be held accountable for their actions. But Gawande believes there is a mismatch between the public’s perception of what is possible and what actually is. “People don’t truly understand the risks,” he says. “Back in the 1960s, about one in 30 babies would die in childbirth; now we’ve got it down to less than one in 500 and people expect their baby to be born alive. When it isn’t, they assume the doctor has messed up when he hasn’t necessarily. That’s why we have seen such an increase in caesarean sections: doctors just don’t want to take the chance.”

The downside of risk-averse medicine is that we may not have the bottle to see a treatment through. “Back in the 1950s, kidney disease used to be a killer,” Gawande says, “and there was a medical team in the US that was pioneering transplant surgery. Their first 30 patients died. Imagine that. You or I might have stopped at 10, thinking it just wasn’t going to work. After 20 deaths, even members of the team began to wonder if they were murderers. But then they got it right, Joe Murray won a Nobel prize and we now have an everyday operation that has saved many thousands of lives.”

The trick, Gawande insists, is to never lose sight of the fact that surgery is an imperfect science and that there will inevitably be times when you can only “peek and shriek”. “You just have to be the type of person who believes that action is generally better than inaction in times of uncertainty,” he says. “There are times when you are operating that everything feels just right and it’s as though you’re conducting a symphony. But even then you can’t always trust that feeling.

“I had one patient for whom I was convinced I had done great work by removing an adrenal tumour, but he still hadn’t left the intensive therapy unit six months later. Somehow, he caught an infection and just wasn’t strong enough to recover. Our best guess is that someone on the operating team didn’t wash their hands properly. And, you know what? It could have been me.” —Dawn/Guardian News Service

http://www.dawn.com/weekly/dmag/archive/070617/dmag9.htm

A perspective on Kashmir

While Kashmir continues to see phases of war and those of silence for 60 years now, I came across a different perspective of the situation in Kashmir in this news article below. A similar survey of people could now also be carried out in the Pakistani part of Kashmir. Post traumatic stress is even more common in the earthquake-struck areas.

India/Pakistan: Legacy of terror

By Alistair Scrutton

PANZU, India, May 21 (Reuters) – Six months have passed since masked gunmen knocked on the door one night and shot Sarwa’s husband, a Muslim faith healer, six times in the chest at point-blank range.

The Kashmiri villager still can’t shake off the despair. She complained of sleeplessness, mysterious pains, flashbacks, and nightmares. Her children sat near her in a courtyard of her house. They were quiet, unsmiling, with suspicious eyes.

They are the survivors of Kashmir’s 18-year-old separatist war against Indian rule — and have the mental scars to show it.

“I’d commit suicide but I’m just living for my children,” said the middle-aged woman, her dark eyes often staring into space.

“I feel very sad all the time, thinking of my husband,”

Officials say more than 42,000 people have been killed since the revolt. Rights groups put the toll at about 60,000 dead.

But behind those headlines, stories from survivors like Sarwa are repeated across Kashmir where doctors say thousands of people — witnesses to killings, rape and torture by both sides in the dispute — suffer traumas. Violence has subsided since a tentative peace process started in 2004, with only three deaths a day on average last year compared with ten a day a few years ago.

But there is little evidence the impact of war has diminished.

“Wherever you look in Kashmir, you’ll find the mental scars of war,” said Arjimand Hussain Talib, project manager for Actionaid, which runs a counselling service for people suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and other mental problems.

A survey in rural Kashmir published last year by medical aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres showed one in six respondents had been detained by security forces. Of these, more than three-quarters said they were tortured.

The survey, based on interviews with 510 people, showed one in ten respondents had lost one or more members of their nuclear family. A third said they had lost one or more of their extended family members.

LIFE UNDER CONSTANT THREAT

Chats with Kashmiris quickly throw up stories of the war — accounts of relatives killed or tortured, of near misses in bomb attacks and of life under constant threat from anonymous phone calls.

Trauma does not spare the troops either, and many of the 500,000 soldiers stationed in Kashmir face psychological problems.

“Lots of security officers come here, there are lots of suicide attempts,” said Abinah Syed, a doctor at Srinagar’s run-down psychiatry hospital said.

“They miss their families, they fear attacks. Many have seen a colleague dying.”

Sarwa, who did not want to give her full name, said she did not know who killed her husband. But she talked about how he was “martyred” — a way of saying in Kashmir that troops had killed him.

“My eldest son is much quieter since his father died,” Sarwa added. “And my neighbour also suffers from the same symptoms as me, sleeplessness, headaches.”

In the nearby town of Pulwama, Actionaid has some 1,200 cases on its counselling files. Most are women.

“The violence may go down, but it is shocking to see there is no fall in the people coming for help,” said Saudia Qutab, who works on the counselling project.

Qutab recently faced a mother suffering from uncontrolled weeping, sleeplessness and outbursts of aggression. Her 16-year-old son went to school seven years ago. He never returned, one of an estimated 10,000 “disappearances” in Kashmir.

“It is the disappeared cases that are often worse, because families have no closure,” Qutab said.

LIVING WITH TRAUMA

In the psychiatric hospital in Srinagar, doctors had registered 63,000 patients last year, compared with 1,500 patients in 1989.

Despite the stigma in Kashmir of entering a “mental hospital”, many villagers had travelled miles.

Most recount nothing. They just ask for medicine.

“The fear of authority is so great, traumas often don’t even come out in the chamber of the doctor,” said Dr. Arshad Hussain, a consultant at the hospital.

“There is no trust for anybody. There is a community paranoia,” he said, the door to his office constantly opened by patients pleading for his signature.

Some leaders worry how the trauma will affect the next generation.

Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, Kashmir’s chief cleric and head of the moderate separatist alliance All Parties Hurriyat Conference, said he saw at his Friday prayer meetings that more younger people were drawn to radical Islam.

“The psychological trauma has made people a lot angrier,” said Farooq, whose father was killed by unknown gunmen.

“With politics, we are seeing more radical approaches, linked to the trauma of 18 years of violence. We preach to an audience that has a lot of anger. That makes our job more difficult”.