Panthic Weekly

She slung an M 16 rifle on her shoulders for the first time when she was 17. Now at 20, she is patrolling the streets of Kabul. Ranbir Kaur of the U.S National Guards first hit headlines in 2003 after becoming the first Sikh girl to join the U.S. armed forces that consists of over 200,000 women soldiers.

Presently on active duty in Afghanistan, Specialist Kaur is on a one-and-a-half-year mission in the war-torn country. She was initially recruited to be a supply clerk during the Iraq war, as rules didn’t permit women to fight frontline. However, she says in a situation like Afghanistan, “everything is frontline”.

Born in Nijjran, village of Jalandhar district, the young warrior reached the U.S as a seven year old after her father Mahan Singh secured a green card in 1990.

Brought up in the isolated town of Earlimart California, her brush with the uniform dates back to 2001 when she was a freshman in high school at Delano, which was the closest city.

“I would see [officers of the] army, marines, air force and the navy standing outside the career center of the school distributing fliers to students. I thought the uniform was awesome.”

During the 2005 Katrina hurricane in New Orleans, the devout Sikh was instrumental in the recovery of the Sri Guru Granth Sahib after the New Orleans Gurdwara was submerged.

United Sikhs, an organization, had sought her assistance and Ranbir had helped get things moving after she was told that that saroops of Guru Granth Sahib Ji ned to be retrieved from the submerged Gurdwara Sahib.

Sacramento Bee

Two years after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and for the first time in its 229-year existence as an independent nation, America is fighting a war with a military machine that is dependent on women. The women span a universe of backgrounds. There are women like Ranbir Kaur, a 19-year-old part-time college student from the obscure San Joaquin Valley town of Earlimart. By summer’s end, Kaur expects to trade her textbooks for an M-16 rifle and head for Iraq.

Sikhism.com

During the recent flooding in New Orleans, Louisiana due to Hurricane Katrina, Ranbir Kaur played a pivotal role in obtaining Zodiac Boats to secure Sri Guru Granth Sahib which had been feared submerged. A curfew was in effect and residents were banned from re-entering the area. Roving gangs were looting nearby businesses and homes, resulting in sporadic bursts of gunfire. The rescue operation took over 22 hours but successfully prevented any further desecration to Sri Guru Granth Sahib. Miraculously, Sri Guru Granth Sahib was found untouched by the 9-foot deep water due to the buoyant materials on which it by chance had been resting.

This is where the universe was born:

photo copyright Michael Totten

Michael Totten continues his reporting from the Kurdish north of Iraq.

In Northern Iraq there is a place called Lalish where the Yezidis say the universe was born. I drove south from Dohok on snowy roads through an empty land, seemingly to the ends of the earth, and found it nestled among cold hills.

I went there because the President of Dohok University told me to go. “I am a Muslim,” he said. “But I love the Yezidis. Theirs is the original religion of the Kurds. Only through the Yezidis can I speak to God in my own language.”

Read the entire article.

My present route to and from my office takes me through a significant portion of the northeast part of the city. Along my route there must be ten, or more, storefront churches. The Church of Christ as the Word Worldwide Ministries kind of thing.

By the names of the pastors, or the use of Spanish, I quickly deduce that some are Latino. The others are probably black, because that’s what our inner city is, black and Latino.

I break churches down into three categories, mainstream Churches, almost mainstream (they have an actual church building), and these guys. And I wonder… what do they provide their congregants that all the other churches don’t?

I understand how Latinos drift from the Catholic Church. In Latin America, the Church is either a strong supporter of the power structure, or so revolutionary it can barely be recognized. In the United States, the Church has been ultra slow in giving immigrant Latinos pastoral care in their own language and recognizing their own customs.

The Catholic Church left the traditional ethnic parish behind in the 1960′s, and went out of their way to disrupt that life. The Polish parish lost its Polish priests, so did the Italians and the Irish. I recall a young black priest assigned to my parish, perhaps the only black person in forty miles ort so. He was a great guy and people generally welcomed him warmly, but he was out of place. He was put there as a lesson, to him and to us, a lesson that the Church had no way of knowing was even needed.

Back to the storefronts. Some of these must only have a dozen adult parishioners. Some are directly across the street from others. How are they different, and why? I doubt that it’s doctrine, the differences in Evangelical doctrines are not that big. It’s a care and comfort thing, I expect.

In Alfred, where I worked for nearly a dozen years, there were three such churches. Each a splinter from the one before. Number two broke away when the pastor of number one pissed off one family, one large extended family, and they left. Number three formed when a part of this family got pissed off at number two and left.

How sad is it that anger or pride causes you to create a new church?

Michael Yon is on assignment in Northern Iraq, and decided to track down one of the most interesting yet little known peoples of the region. I wrote about them here.

Michael Yon

The sun approached apex above clear skies, warming and drying the air as we entered the Yezdinar village. Several Yezidi men welcomed me graciously, and though my interpreter was Sunni Muslim, they welcomed him, too. None of the men had ever met an American.

The Headman invited me into his home, where small children darted here and about, clearly excited yet smiling shyly at the foreigner in strange clothes. The men took off their shoes and as I started to unlace my boots, the Headman motioned that I could leave them on. I recognized this as an honor, but smiled and removed my battered boots before following them into a rectangular room. Pillows cushioning the floor and propped up against the walls were the only furniture, but at one end of the room a television flickered silently while an air conditioner hummed steadily at the other.

There were six men in the room, all sitting cross-legged. Four Yezidi men sat along the wall across from me, the Headman smoked a home-rolled cigarette.

My interpreter sat to my left, and we began with customary civilities:

“Thank you for inviting me into your home,” I said through the interpreter.

“You are my honored guest,” said the Headman, who told me his name was Mr. Qatou Samou Haji Aldanani.

The conversation thus launched, we meandered across tenses and back again as we talked about the village and the forces that had shaped its fortunes.

Mr Qatou said there were twenty families in the village, some with nine or ten children; while some men in Yezdinar have up to five wives, others keep only one. They had sheep, cows and ducks, he said, though I hadn’t seen a pond.

The village had come back strong after being destroyed by Saddam in 1978. The people were completely unhinged, Mr. Qatou said, when Saddam’s Army bombed the village flat, then came and stole absolutely everything; sheep, cows, ducks, everything. Even a dog.

“You had a dog?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“And they took the dog?” Silence expressed the residue of disgust.

Mr. Qatou described how Saddam’s army grabbed two men, each twenty years old, shot them, and then forced the families pay for the bullets.

At times throughout our conversation, the chronologies loosened and grew confusing. I remain unsure about whether the men were killed during that same attack, or at some other time. But it seemed both impolitic and impolite to try to pin down the date when the mention of the memory cast a shadow over our thoughts.

I wanted to know more about Mr. Qatou’s life. He said he was born in 1949, and after being drafted into the Army, was sent to fight the Iranians for 7 years before being captured and imprisoned in Iran for 10 years. When it came to time sequences, I questioned the competence of my interpreter, for the numbers and years never seemed to completely adhere to history; and though the interpreter was kind, he was less than fastidious. His English wasn’t entirely fluent. [snip]

An Iraqi. A Kurd. A Yezidi. A village Headman. Whatever the label, more than forty years after his birth, this man came home. Only now, after the latest war, does Mr. Qatou finally have confidence in the peace, after more than a half century of life lived under orders or under sentence.

This seemed like the moment to ask the question, “What do you think of the United States?”

“We cry when America loses one soldier. We pray for the soldiers every night.”

Many Kurds had expressed the same sentiment. One had said poetically: “For every drop of American blood, we shed one thousand Kurdish tears.”

BBC

A team of senior Israeli rabbis is due to rule soon on whether thousands of Indians who say they are members of one of the lost tribes of Israel can settle there. Shlomo Amar recently led a delegation of rabbis to the north-eastern Indian states of Manipur and Mizoram where members of the Benei Menashe tribe live and practise Judaism.

At the Beith-el Synagogue in the Manipur capital, Imphal, nine men wearing knitted skull caps read silently from the Old Testament. Four others stand on a wooden platform in the centre of the room as a young man reads from the holy book under the supervision of an elderly priest.

These people claim to be one of the lost tribes of Israel.

Tongkhohao Aviel Hangshing is the leader of the Benei Menashes in Imphal. “We are Benei Menashe, because we belong to the Menashe tribe,” he says.
“Menashe is the son of Joseph, who was one of the 12 sons of Jacob. So we are the lost tribe of Israel.”

Mr Hangshing says for thousands of years they did not know they were lost. “We found out only 27 years ago,” he says. “When the Bible was translated into our language, in 1970s, we studied it. “And we found that the stories, the customs and practices of the Israeli people were very similar to ours. So we thought that we must be one of the lost tribes.”

Saturdays are observed by Jews the world over as the Sabbath, the day of rest, and the members of the Benei Menashe community meet for morning prayers at the synagogue in Imphal. A lamb-skin scroll of the Torah, is unrolled and then rolled up again as each reader finishes his part.

There are more than 300,000 Benei Menashes in Manipur but most of them follow Christianity. Only about 5,000 have converted to Judaism, most of them during the 1970s.

UPDATE 2005: They made it. I’ve seen a news story that the Israelis have recognized them.