The Politics of Crowds

America is a different land, for me exceptional in all the ways that matter. In recent days, those vast Obama crowds, though, have recalled for me the politics of charisma that wrecked Arab and Muslim societies. A leader does not have to say much, or be much. The crowd is left to its most powerful possession -- its imagination.

... Read it all here

Muslim Soldier Fought for America and his Faith

By Nancy A. Youssef

WASHINGTON — "Joe the Plumber" was only one of two Americans injected into thepresidential election this past week. The other was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan , whom former Secretary of State Colin Powell invoked in his endorsement Sunday of Barack Obama .

 Khan was a 20-year-old soldier from Manahawkin, N.J. , who wanted to enlist in the Army from the time he was 10. He was an all-American boy who visited Disney World after he completed his training at Fort Benning, Ga. , and made his comrades in Iraq watch "Saving Private Ryan" every week. 

He was also a Muslim who joined the military, his father said, in part to show his countrymen that not all Muslims are terrorists.

 "He was an American soldier first," said his father, Feroze Khan . "But he also looked at fighting in this war as fighting for his faith. He was fighting radicalism."

 Khan was killed by an improvised explosive device in August 2007 along with four other soldiers and an Iraqi interpreter while searching a house in Baqouba, Iraq . He's one of four Muslims who served in Iraq or Afghanistan and are buried in Arlington National Cemetery , where 512 troops from those wars now rest.

 About 3,700 of the U.S. military's 1.4 million troops are Muslims, according to Defense Department estimates.

 Khan, a child of immigrant parents from Trinidad , was 14 when the Sept. 11 attacks happened. Feroze Khan said he remembered his son watching in stunned silence: "I could tell that inside a lot of things were going through his head." 

Three years later, Feroze honored his son's request and allowed him to enlist him in the Army . "I told him: 'You are going to the Army .' I never said there is a war going on in a Muslim country. I didn't want him to get any ideas that he was fighting (against) his religion."

 Feroze kept his fears for his son's safety to himself.

 His son was assigned to the Stryker Brigade Combat Team out of Fort Lewis, Wash. , deployed to Iraq in 2006 and fought on Baghdad's Haifa Street , a Sunni insurgent stronghold.

 His tour was extended as part of the surge of additional U.S. forces to Iraq , and he called or messaged home often until he was deployed to restiveDiyala province, where he was under fire too often to contact home regularly. But he prayed every day, his father said.

 One Sunday morning, his son sent an instant message: "Hey Dad. Are you there?" Feroze Khan was out, and he saw the message when he returned. A few hours later, his ex-wife called. Soldiers had knocked on her door in Maryland .

 Their only child was dead. A few minutes later, soldiers appeared at Khan's door. "I guess it helped that I knew beforehand," he said. "There are no words to describe it."

 Kareem Khan was a month from finishing his tour when he was killed.

On Sunday, Powell said that Khan's sacrifice and service had swayed him to discuss the way that Muslims have been portrayed in the presidential campaign, and the contention that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is a Muslim.

 Obama "is a Christian," Powell said. "He has always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, 'What if he is?' Is there something wrong with being Muslim in this country? The answer is no. That is not America." He added: "I am troubled that within the (Republican) Party we have these kinds of expressions" suggesting that Obama is a Muslim, and that if he is, he likely associates with terrorists.

 Powell said that he felt strongly about the issue after he saw a photo of Khan's tombstone in the New Yorker magazine . In the black-and-white picture, Khan's mother is resting her head on her son's tombstone. On each side of the stone are flowers, and in between is a copy of the Quran. On the face of the tombstone is a crescent and star, indicating that the soldier buried there is a Muslim.

 "He was an American," Powell said. 

Read more about it in The New Yorker

WILL APPOINTING A LOCAL HEAD SUFFICE?

I read with much interest the column by Datuk Stan Yee (DE 19 October), entitled, “ Will appointing a local head suffice”?

The topic of locals heading federal departments had generated some heat recently, and I was hoping he would hit the point. But after reading his meandering prose, I am led to conclude that somehow  we cannot trust  Sabahans to head federal departments because they would be too beholden to their federal bosses. In other words, he missed the point altogether.

In the first place, there is no policy that federal departments  must be headed by officers from Semenanjung.  Period. 

Secondly, administrative policies, ultimately, must serve to answer local needs, and being beholden to the central bosses does not arise.

Sadly, we must put most of  the blame on Sabahans for what is happening now because, being a former federal officer, I remember well the time in the early 70’s when a lot of federal posts were going begging. There were too few Sabahan graduates, and those in Semenanjung were reluctant to come to Sabah because we were considered then, an ulu place.

A great number of Sabah graduates who were given federal scholarships abandoned their respective federal postings. Who could blame them, for at that time, the expatriate heads of departments were just leaving, and there were opportunities of  speedy promotions.

Some of us persevered in federal postings, and though the perks were not as good as in the State service, it did not turn out too bad for most of us. At the tender age of twenty-six years  and three months, I was already head of department holding Superscale “F” post,  because there was nobody else around. There were also other Sabahans then,  holding  head posts in Telecoms, Customs and the Medical Department, to name a few.

I remember too, the concerted effort of the Federal Establishment Officer to ensure as many Sabahan filled vacant posts, and special fast-tracking exercises were done for officers with good potentials.

By the late 70’s federal vacancies  were practically nil, and the so-called integration exercise has been put in place. From then on all vacancies were filled on a competitive basis.

There was also a time when the RTM needed a Director, and a state officer was loaned out to then for a few years. It showed the state establishment office and its federal counterpart were acting in concert to address the state’s administrative needs.

There were some forward-oriented internal policies of some federal departments, notably the Telecoms which filled jobs with Sabahans after giving them  scholarships to pursue engineering degrees overseas. They were superb fellows. I remember while still in school that children of these officers bring me to their homes to meet their parents and they would treat me like I was one their children.

What we have now is a consequence of failing to subsume our practices to the values and needs of the people.

However, there is a tendency of things to work out in ways that reveal the truth behind reality, and the reality is that  officers from Semenanjung cannot be trusted to head federal departments, because they would  naturally be beholden to different  socio-cultural norms. Some make it worse by allowing  even their lowest posts to be filled by people from Semenanjung Malaysia.

Now is the time to make things right, not because we like our peninsula brothers less but because we love a stable Malaysia more.  This can only happen when the administrative machineries are in sync with the real needs of the locals.

I believe that once this problem is recognized, the state leadership will know what to do. For the moment I would like to propose that all incoming non Sabahan federal heads must undergo a structured orientation period. Secondly, all non-graduate posts for all federal departments  must  be filled by qualified Sabahans within five years.

WHAT IS A BRIDGE FOR?

Source: Daily Express 10 October 2008. Page 7. Caption: " Tenom School Kids at Risk".

(Note: See the car in the background? I wonder how it will cross the bridge)

We are talking 2008. Quite honestly, things like this cannot be. But this is likely the norm here in Sabah.  Why is this so? That's the question begging a reply. Or rather, a long reply.

Why are we not able to mend a small bridge? Part of the answer is that just to replace 23 bridges on main (Federal) roads we need RM205 million ( Daily Express 11th October). There is a total of 166 such bridges.  Then there are state roads, municipal roads and village roads... just imagine the numbers of bridges needed, they could be in the thousands. 

Why aren't we getting the money needed to build and repair roads so that our kids can go to school safely?. First of course is the money, rather the lack of it. Sabahans are a patient lot, and I think because most of the rural people do not realise that other places in Malaysia have better roads and bridges. What you don't know wont hurt you.

Second, is the fact, that most Malaysians, usually the pensinsular kind, especially the politicians, do not realize that Sabah is probably 30 times the size of Malacca, and for which reason they are prone to treat Sabah as just one of the small peninsular states.

Children take these infrastructural shortcoming in their strides. Crossing broken bridges, walking on slippery muddy earth roads, and crossing turbid rivers, are great fun, and  just the things that make up the norm of a laid-back rural life. But adults should know better.

The Curious Case of The Family Who Ate Toad Eggs

I refer to the Malaysiakini article Kota Marudu needs more than wireless Internet

I read Dr Hams letter and cannot help but agree with many of his observations. I worked in Sabah for over seven years as a house officer and medical officer. After my housemanship, I was sent to Ranau to serve in the district hospital. What Dr Hams described in Kota Marudu is not something isolated to that district alone in Sabah . It is an often repeated story in the whole of Sabah .

My first introduction to the poverty in Sabah came during my first months there, when a sweet 70- year-old lady from Kota Marudu was sent to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital with deep jaundice. She lived alone in a small village off Kota Marudu and noticed the jaundice about a month before.

 

She had no money for the taxi fare and so waited a month to sell off her chickens to have enough money to pay RM50 for the transport to Kota Marudu Hospital. She had to walk two miles to get to the road to get to the taxi.

Having been born, bred and educated in Peninsular Malaysia, I was shocked.

When she arrived, she was septic and had a gallstone lodged in her common bile duct. The stone was duly removed but she was found to have a heart problem that required a pacemaker. We arranged for her to get a permanent pacemaker but she refused.

 

When I pressed her for her reason, she told me that she couldn't afford to buy batteries for the pacemaker, having sold off her chickens. Once I explained to her that the batteries would last for years and we would provide them, she agreed to the pacemaker.

 

Ranau town itself has roads and is on the main highway between Sandakan and Kota Kinabalu. It developed primarily as a result of the Mamut Copper Mines in the district. However, highway in this context means a two lane road with frequent landslides and potholes, with a two-hour drive to Kota Kinabalu.

 

Outside Ranau, transportation becomes a problem as tarred roads disappear to become gravel or crudely marked logging trails. Anyone who has worked in Sabah would have the same stories to tell, of extreme poverty and poor transportation.

 

During my 2 years in Ranau, I've heard and seen it all, patients with cerebral malaria, a condition unheard of in Peninsular Malaysia, coming in after 48 hours to the hospital from places like Kaingaran and Karagasan, with relatives having to push the 'pirate taxi' through the mud, spending RM50 on fare during the monsoon season, the equivalent of 2 months income, this too when petrol was only around RM1.20 a litre in Ranau.

 

Patients having to delay treatment for life threatening conditions because a bridge washed away along the trail (I won't even call it a road) to Tambunan. Emergency surgery such as caesarian sections, appendectomies and even ectopic pregnancies had to be performed in our little district hospitals by Medical Officers with little more than 4 months housemanship experience.

 

Medical emergencies such as myocardial infarctions, which in Peninsular Malaysia would be managed in a Coronary Care Unit setting, had to be managed in the district hospital level. I'm grateful however, that my staff in that hospital were the best I've ever had the pleasure of working with and were dedicated enough to want to make a difference in their patients' lives.

 

But poor transportation does not only affect the access to healthcare. Having no roads to be able to transport their agricultural produce for sale means that these people are stuck in a never ending cycle of poverty.

 

At most, some of them get RM20 to RM50 by selling their produce to middlemen to be sold at the monthly tamu or market at prices that are perhaps only 10 percent of the value of the goods. These innocent people are also preyed upon by traveling cloth merchants, mostly foreigners, who offer them 'easy payment schemes' to buy cloth for clothes, and when they cannot pay for the cloth and the interest accumulates, they end up having to marry their daughters to these men, who often have wives back home in Pakistan .

 

One of the cases I could never forget was of the family who came to Ranau Hospital just as I was leaving, a family who had failed crops, were hungry and unable to get food. The father collected some toad eggs and fed them to the whole family in a desperate attempt to stave off hunger. When they arrived at our little emergency room, one of the children were dead and two passed away within 10 minutes of arrival in our casualty unit due to poisoning.

 

Education is a problem in parts of Sabah outside major towns like Kota Kinabalu at the moment. Many children would be lucky to be able to get to a school or even afford to get to one. Most of my patients outside Ranau were lucky to even have a primary school education and a vast number of women marry in their teens.

 

I've had 14 year olds delivering babies in Ranau, most of them have ever ever stepped foot in a school. The education level is so poor that many women feed their children condensed milk thinking that it's better than breast milk.

 

But at the heart of it all, these mothers want the best for their children but are not empowered with the knowledge to help them. Major towns in Sabah have electricity courtesy of the Sabah Electricity Board, but smaller villages have either diesel generators or rely on candles or lamps when night falls.

 

How can children study in these conditions? Like many doctors in the districts, I had to learn Dusun to communicate better with these patients who could speak little else.

 

Forty five years after the formation of Malaysia , the promise of a better life for these poor Dusun, Murut and Rungus patients in the districts of Sabah is a pipe dream at best. How can our politicians claim to have brought development to the state and have neglected these poor people, many of whom still wear the cheap t-shirts and caps given free by political parties from many elections ago.

 

How can I claim to be proud of Putrajaya with it's beautiful bridges and lamp posts and the Petronas twin Towers when our fellow Malaysians in Sabah are so neglected?

 

The cycle of poverty and illiteracy one sees in the districts in Sabah brings despair to the heart. Eradication of poverty must tackle the real issues of education and transport and not just handouts to poor people. By all means, declare Sept 16th a public holiday, but remember it in it's real context, where we made a promise to our brethren in Sabah and Sarawak to treat them as equals in Malaysia , and give them the development they've been long denied.

Another Doctor | Sep 8, 08 5:11pm

Source    http://www.malaysiakini.com/letters/en/8