{"id":125,"date":"2003-09-10T11:49:41","date_gmt":"2003-09-10T15:49:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/wordpress\/?p=125"},"modified":"2003-09-10T11:49:41","modified_gmt":"2003-09-10T15:49:41","slug":"minority-issues-in-the-military","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=125","title":{"rendered":"Minority issues in the military"},"content":{"rendered":"

[LINK<\/a>]<\/p>\n

Fizoon Ashraf lost her 21-year old son Rasheed Sahib on May 18 when he was shot in the chest by another soldier in his unit while serving in Iraq.<\/p>\n

The DoD has declared it an accident, yet three months later Fizoon Ashraf is still waiting for an autopsy that has yet to be performed. She doesn’t even know at this point if her son died instantly.<\/p>\n

Rasheed loved being in the military, but it wasn’t always easy for him. During a training incident in spring 2001, he was accidentally shot in the leg and had to spend time in the hospital. After 9\/11, he confided in Louie that other soldiers in his unit (then at Fort Hood, Texas) admitted they felt like jumping him simply because he was Muslim. Although he was not a devout practitioner of Islam who prayed five times a day, his mother believes Rasheed found time to pray each night before bed and read the Quran. <\/p>\n

“He sounded scared on the phone when he told me about [the soldiers threatening him],” Louie says. “[When Rasheed joined the Army] nobody had fears about him being Muslim. He was an American soldier. But you never know about ignorant people.”<\/i> <\/p>\n

[LINK<\/a>]<\/p>\n

37, 401 non-US citizens joined the military in exchange for an American passport. Are they, as British MP George Galloway and others are charging, being assigned to the most dangerous missions deliberately?<\/p>\n

Galloway stated this is the reason there are more Latino names among the casualties.<\/p>\n

Galloway, Al Jazeera, I must be kidding?<\/p>\n

According to the Independent;<\/a><\/p>\n

Recruitment efforts have also extended to non-citizens, who have been told by the Bush administration that they can apply for citizenship the day they join up, rather than waiting the standard five years after receiving their green card. More than 37,000 non-citizens, almost all Latino, are currently enlisted. Recruiters have even crossed the border into Mexico – to the fury of the Mexican authorities – to look for school-leavers who may have US residency papers.<\/p>\n

The aim, according to Pentagon officials, is to boost the Latino numbers in the military from roughly 10 per cent to as much as 22 per cent. That was the figure cited recently by John McLaurin, a deputy assistant secretary of the army, as the size of the “Hispanic … recruiting market”, and it has also been bandied about in the pages of the Army Times.<\/i><\/p>\n

and…<\/p>\n

Recent statistics from the Pew Hispanic Centre, a non-partisan think-tank, show that Latinos are already doing the most dangerous combat jobs in disproportionate numbers. While they are still under- represented in the armed forces as a whole – they made up 9.4 per cent of enlisted men in 2001, compared with 13.4 per cent of the general population – they are over-represented in jobs that involve handling weapons (17.7 per cent).<\/p>\n

In Iraq, the first US casualty was a Latino non- citizen, a Guatemalan orphan raised in Los Angeles called Jose Gutierrez. Although a precise breakdown of ethnic numbers is not available, the Pentagon’s list of dead and wounded has included dozens of Spanish names. At least 10 out of almost 300 dead have been non-citizens.<\/p>\n

An ethnic group has never before been the target of such a recruitment drive.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[LINK] Fizoon Ashraf lost her 21-year old son Rasheed Sahib on May 18 when he was shot in the chest by another soldier in his unit while serving in Iraq. The DoD has declared it an accident, yet three months … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdXTf-21","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=125"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}