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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
How the murder of a Muslim boy in Houston fanned the flames of anti-Americanism in Pakistan.
Mar 3, 2003 | They convicted young Osama's murderer a few weeks back. The Pakistani boy had died in Houston over a year ago, but the crime got sparse attention at the time. After all, homicides occur by the thousands in American cities; even murders of small children are not rare. I'd been troubled by this case for months, though, ever since I first heard of it in Pakistan.
A few weeks before the first anniversary of Sept. 11, I was in Islamabad reporting on Pakistanis' views about America. One of the first people I talked to was a defense specialist named Shireen Mazari, director of a think tank that advises President Pervez Musharraf. Shireen, who's round and loud, boasts a degree from Columbia, speaks fast, sardonic English, and delights in brash debates on public policy. The revelation that she brought me, though, had barely anything to do with politics. And everything to do with what it feels like to be American now.
Her country's alliance with the U.S. didn't impress her, Shireen started. We were sitting in her office. A young woman in a fluttering kameez, or tunic, offered tea. A crisp map of Kashmir unfurled beside me like a high school teaching aid. After the Cold War, Shireen continued, the United States lost interest in Pakistan; likely this would happen once again, and to her country's disadvantage.
Meanwhile, Americans were killing Muslim immigrants.
"I just wrote a column on a case in Houston, Texas," she continued. "A 6-year-old boy named Osama, a Pakistani immigrant, was stabbed to death inside his house just because of his name."
"What?" I asked, looking up sharply from my little notebook. I was shocked. I live in Houston. And because I often write on immigrants, I thought I would surely have heard of this. "Did the Houston newspaper report it?"
"I don't know," Shireen said. "I got an e-mail about it from someone who knew the family, asking for help. The boy's father was attacked too. He now is in intensive care. The boy was killed, the father's throat was slashed -- and the police did not cooperate at all. They didn't want to investigate." And when the neighbors heard the boy was dead, added Shireen, "they celebrated. They distributed sweetmeats."
"Sweetmeats?" I echoed. It's a British term for bonbons. But the custom she described was pure subcontinent: Indians and Pakistanis both give sweetmeats to their friends when there's a wedding, boy baby, or something else to celebrate.
"I thought you might not want to hear this, because you're American," Shireen said.
No, no, I tried explaining. The story just didn't sound right.
Shireen shrugged, promising to send a copy of the e-mail.
True to her word, the fax arrived at my hotel the next day. It said exactly what she said it was, even including a contact person and a Houston phone number.
Over my next few days in Pakistan, I brooded over Shireen's story. Well, "brood" is not quite right. I kept picking at it, feeling a childish triumph each time I spotted an inconsistency. First of all, I told myself, Americans don't distribute candy, no matter how happy we feel. Generally speaking, police follow procedure when investigating murders. And though we certainly have done so in the past, Americans don't tend to kill kids for political reasons. I thought of 14-year-old Emmett Till, lynched in Mississippi almost 50 years ago. His murderers, acquitted, later smiled and bragged about their crime. But lynching culture has long since died. Even when they killed schoolboys, moreover, lynch mobs pretended they were actually attacking sexually mature adults.
Today, we kill children collaterally, or by accident, in other countries. We kill them by neglect, bad policy and abuse in the United States. But despite other forms of violence that saturate our culture, harming children for political ends just isn't our tradition. It is more common in other cultures, including some immune to more typically American pathologies. Ansar Haroun, an Indian- American psychiatrist who writes about communal hatred, thinks children become targets in communities where people still identify with tribe or caste more than with a larger state. Metaphorically and literally, attacking children shatters a rival group's future.
Just a few weeks before I met Shireen, a remote tribal council in Pakistan ordered the gang-rape of a young girl. It was punishment for a crime her brother supposedly committed against a higher caste. To many Pakistanis, as to Westerners, what was most appalling was not even the rape: It was the higher caste's consensus that it was just.
But targeting children is not in any way a Muslim trait. Far from it: One of the most horrifying of these kinds of attacks recently victimized Muslims. The same summer I visited Islamabad, I also worked in India, writing about a pogrom in which Hindu extremists killed more than 1,000 Muslims. Some rioters, survivors told me, took special pains to catch and burn alive Muslim infants and children. In the aftermath, some police protected the killers by refusing to record victims' complaints.
Stonewalling police, the moblike Houston neighbors, the singling out of a small boy -- it seemed obvious to me that some fabulist had shellacked details from another culture onto a pip of truth from Texas.
