THE DEADLY CASE OF MISTAKEN IDENTITY!

I found the above picture doing the rounds on the internet. It symbolizes Sikh-Muslim unity in the wake of the a bloody tragedy that shook Sikhs in Oak Creek, Wisconsin when a redneck American entered a gurdwara and opened fire on the devotees killing six and gravely injuring three, including a police officer.

Wade Michael Page was wounded when a police officer shot him in the stomach but the FBI said he subsequently died from a self-inflicted gun shot wound to the head.

So, about this picture, I am all for Sikh-Muslim-Hindu-Christian-Jews-etc.-etc. unity but the fact remains that many Americans just do not know the difference between a Sikh or an Afghan. The beard and the 
turban is all that they see. For them the two are the same.

There are abundant cases post 9/11 where Sikhs were killed or racially abused by Americans because of mistaken identity. If they would have known the difference, I am sure many lives could have been saved.

The sad part is that even Hollywood or the American film industry is in a way adding fuel to the fire by not differentiating between the ethnic groups which are so different in their culture, language etc.

I can site two examples here. 

In the movie Iron Man 1 a Jehadi terrorist group kidnaps Tony Stark aka Robert Downey Jr. aka Iron Man and holds him captive in a cave in Afghanistan and surprisingly the Jehadi leader talks in Hindi or Urdu whatever. WTF??? No Afghan would ever talk in Hindi or Urdu. 

Secondly, in the popular TV show Scrubs I once saw an Indian Sikh portraying the character of a Turkish doctor. This ignorance is surely not bliss.

This clearly shows that they can't differentiate between an Irani, Iraqi, Afghan, Turkish or Indian.

However, to some extent they cannot be blamed completely because if you are walking down the road in downtown Pahar Ganj and you see a group of white backpackers, would you be able to tell, by just looking at them, who is a Britisher and who is a Russian? or for that matter a Chinese or Japanese. Absolutely Not!

But the fact is that the worst that can happen with a white here is that he may be fleeced by an auto-rickshaw driver or robbed—petty crimes-- but a Sikh who is understood to be an Irani or Afghani, from the land of Osama Bin Laden can have serious consequences.

And here lies the problem, instead of educating the west that Sikhs and Muslims are different, such pictures will further confuse them. But it has to be done in a way so that it doesn’t appear as if Sikhs are okay with Muslims being killed if in return their lives are spared.

Sikhs are brave, we all know and majority of Muslims are peace loving people. However, it does not justify someone getting killed because of a silly case of mistaken identity.

These pictures may look good on Facebook or the newspaper but will no way help the Sikhs.

However, on the flipside Page was no country side redneck chewing tobacco and playing the banjo. He was an army veteran and definitely knew that Sikhs are Indians.

He suffered from severe case of white supremacy, a neo-nazi he was. He played for a band called ‘End Apathy’ that in its songs warned the browns, blacks, Asians, Hispanics in short everyone who was not a white that “they all would have to pay for their sins.”
  

In a nutshell, he was a nutcase.

All said and done, there will be some who will argue that minorities should remain united and together but frankly, this is certainly not the way to go about it.