Najam in the Media on California Shootings
Prof. Adil Najam, Dean of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, was interviewed on Pakistan’s leading TV channels (DawnTV and GeoTV) on the possible impact and outfall of the horrible mass shootings in San Bernardino, California, on the Muslim and Pakistani communities living in USA.
Dean Najam was interviewed on the TV news show InFocus with host Jawad Ahmed Siddiqui on DawnNews TV (Thursday, December 3, 2015) on the December 2 mass shooting in San Bernardino, CA. The shooting had left 14 people dead and 21 injured, and implicated in it were a young Muslim couple of Pakistani origin. He was also interview on the same topic in the TV news Show Naya Pakistan with host Talat Hussain on GeoNews TV (Friday, December 4, 2015).
The focus of both discussions was the political and societal reaction to the California shootings in the United States and the possible outfall on, and reaction of, Muslims and Pakistanis living in the United States. Discussion focused on why the US media’s reaction to this shooting has been markedly different from other such shootings.
Najam explained that these shootings have to be contextualized within what is going on within US domestic politics (a heated Presidential debate that includes a major focus on immigration as well as gun control) and also what is going on in global politics (in particular, the rise of ISIS and its ability to attract young Muslims born and raised within Western societies). He also pointed out that while the rhetoric from Muslim communities as well as those spewing anti-Muslim messages has now becomes ‘routinized’, there is also a third important voice in this conversation: that of reasonable Americans, including President Barack Obama, who caution against the religious polarization of society along lines of bigotry.
Adil Najam is a global public policy expert who also served as the Vice Chancellor of the Lahore University of Management Sciences, Lahore, Pakistan. Among other books, Najam is the author of Pakistanis in America: Portrait of a Giving Community (Harvard University Press, 2006) and a number of academic papers on the Pakistani diaspora in the United States.
Read more on Prof. Adil Najam, here. Watch full episode of Infocus (Dec 3, 2015) here. Watch full episode of Naya Pakistan (Dec 4, 2015) here.