Antiwar.com Blog

Following up on the brief detention of Shahrukh Khan, one of India’s most famous actors, at a US airport, the star of the upcoming “My Name Is Khan,” which explores the treatment of people with Muslim surnames in the United States, says that he will never again visit the US.

His detention, which has created something of an international incident and a major headline story in India, stems from his surname allegedly matching one on one of the assorted US watchlists. Khan says he has never been treated so shabbily, and that the airport officials refused to let him contact anyone for over an hour despite several Indian and Pakistani travelers on the scene vouching for his identity as one of the most famous men on the subcontinent.

His mistreatment may in the long-run be good for him in the US, as it will no doubt draw attention to the American release of his next movie, which is expected sometime next year. The outcry from the Indian population will no doubt fade over time as well, because Khan’s detention lasted only a couple of hours.

But ultimately this isn’t about Khan or his movie, or about Newark Airport employees not recognizing an international celebrity who, among the non-Indian population of the US, is lets face it, relatively unknown.

Rather it draws attention to something that is happening to hundreds, perhaps thousands of people on a daily basis across the US. People get hauled out of line, on the basis of a name, or a nationality, or a religion, and subjected to God-knows-what behind closed doors. Khan’s detention was no doubt considerably shortened by the Indian embassy springing into action the moment it discovered one of the nation’s favorite sons was in custody. Suppose this didn’t happen to Shahrukh Khan the actor, but Shahrukh Khan the small business owner, or Shahrukh Khan the dentist. Would we even be talking about it? Would he still be in custody?

We don’t know the full details of what happened to this fellow yesterday, and maybe we never will. But his story is common enough that it seems unlikely the airport officials broke any serious rules with what they did. It’s business as usual in the US these days, and instead of chastising these people for not treating an international celebrity with due decorum, shouldn’t we be asking whether or not these rules need a major rethink?

Indian Press Slams “American Paranoia” in Wake of Detention

The Indian government has formally demanded an explanation from the US for the detention of Shahrukh Khan, one of India’s most famous actors, at a Newark Airport. Khan was traveling to Chicago to attend an event related to India’s independence day.

Khan, who ironically enough has just finished production of the much-hyped movie “My Name Is Khan,” which details racial profiling of people with Muslim surnames in the United States, was held by immigration officials for an undisclosed reason and was only released after the Indian embassy had been informed of his mysterious capture.

The strange case of life imitating art has caused enormous outrage in India, and Indian newspapers are chastising it as a case of “American paranoia.” The incident comes with last month’s public frisking of former Indian President APJ Abdul Kalam when he tried to board of flight to the US still fresh in the minds of many Indians.

US Ambassador to India Timothy Roehmer said the embassy was looking into the incident but denied that anything untoward had occurred, insisting Khan is “a very welcome guest in the United States.” It just didn’t seem like that when they were dragging him into a back office for interrogation.

Former Forward editor in chief J.J. Goldberg has a fairly positive reputation among progressive Jews, and although he has never been a radical about Israel or the Middle East, neither is he a reflexive hawk or neoconservative. Hence it is particularly disappointing to read his recent hit piece on Roger Cohen in the Forward, a piece that is long on condescension and sanctimony but short on any real engagement with the issues. Goldberg’s thesis is that Cohen is cynical, or naive, or both – that his writing on Iran has been motivated fundamentally by a careerist desire to “sound provocative,” but that he is an amateur “in over his head.” It is not clear whether this analysis applies equally to anyone else fighting back against the alarmism of the “bomb Iran” crowd. Does he feel that Cohen’s anatagonists – the Abe Foxmans and Jeffrey Goldbergs of the world – are models of subtlety and expertise? Last I checked Foxman was defending East Jerusalem settlements and (Jeffrey) Goldberg was arguing that Iran is the new Amalek.

I won’t try to respond to (J.J.) Goldberg’s arguments, principally because he does not see fit to make many actual arguments as opposed to ad hominem dismissals. I would, however, just like to highlight one passage that was immediately picked up by some of the usual suspects, in which he discusses Cohen’s treatment of Obama Middle East advisor Dennis Ross, known as the administration’s foremost Iran hawk:

Ross’s role in the administration raises many questions in Cohen’s mind, but the one that comes up over and over throughout the article, “a recurrent issue with Ross, who embraced his Jewish faith after being raised in a non-religious home by a Jewish mother and a Catholic stepfather, has been whether he is too close to the American Jewish community and Israel to be an honest broker with Iran or Arabs.” In the crisis atmosphere following the Iranian election, “Can this baggage-encumbered veteran… overcome ingrained habits and sympathies?” Indeed, “Will the Iranians be prepared to meet with Ross?” – a “reasonable question given Ross’s well-known ties with the American Jewish community.”

That, in effect, is the dilemma facing American policy toward Iran at this pivotal moment: Is there too much Jewish influence? We’ve heard the question before in Hamas sermons, in Al Qaeda videos and on some left-wing blogs. Now it’s been incorporated into the nation’s newspaper of record.

Of course, Roger Cohen is far from the first person to question whether Dennis Ross is too closely associated with Israel to be an effective Middle East policymaker. It was Aaron David Miller, Ross’s former colleague on the Clinton administration peace process team, who famously claimed that the U.S. had been acting as “Israel’s lawyer” under Ross’s leadership. Another Clinton administration colleague, former ambassador to Israel Dan Kurtzer, published a book containing complaints from both American and Arab participants in the peace process that Ross was “biased towards Israel and not ‘an honest broker'” (as Time magazine put it).

Are Aaron David Miller and Dan Kurtzer fomenting propaganda cribbed from “Hamas sermons” and “al Qaeda videos”? Could Miller and Kurtzer be closet al Qaeda sympathizers? Goldberg is off in Commentary/ZOA territory here, and it is beneath him.

The current government is Iran is a bunch of damn rascals and thugs, and there are boatloads of questions about the honesty of their last election.

The regime’s brutal crackdown on protestors reveals its true character. (But the Iranian government is not novel in this sense: the Syrians have been as brutal with their dissidents, and the Israelis have been more oppressive in Gaza).

What is even more shocking is that the Iranian government admits that it is torturing the protestors rounded up in recent weeks.

How can we ever trust a government that won’t lie about its atrocities?

No wonder so many Americans are convinced that the Iranian government is morally inferior to the U.S. government.

In a new film—released both on DVD and Youtube–Jimmy Carter, James A. Baker, Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski make the case that it is time for the Obama administration to put forward a conflict-ending resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The senior statesmen make the case that a U.S. plan will not address all Israeli or Palestinian interests, but that if the U.S. exerts leadership and its allies support the plan, the majority of Israelis and Palestinians will see the opportunity for a genuine and long-lasting peace.

The Foundation for Middle East Peace supported the production of the film–New Hope for Peace: What America Must do to end the Israel-Palestine Conflict–and described its release as coming ”at a time when the Obama administration and Mitchell risk repeating another failed ‘peace process’ by pushing interim ‘confidence-building’ measures like a settlement freeze and goodwill gestures by Arab governments which are not making much progress.”

At a time when the Netanyahu government and its allies in the U.S. have urged the Obama administration to back off its push for an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement, this bipartisan intervention by four elder statesmen demonstrates that there is still a strong constituency within the foreign policy establishment for aggressive U.S. leadership in the peace process.

Carter, Baker, Scowcroft and Brzezinski argue that a U.S. led plan which supports Israel’s right to exist, engages Hamas and Palestinian leadership, and provides a clear road map based on “land for peace” would be pivotal in winning over the majority of Israelis and Palestinians as well as gaining the support of Arab regional partners and allies around the world.

Although perhaps overly simplistic—which is unavoidable in a twenty minute film—it give one pause to think about what would happen if the US proposed a comprehensive plan for a two-state-solution which the rest of the world could support. Would Israel or the Palestinians be able to resist such an offer?