Mohsin Hamid dropped by Stanford a few weeks ago to give a talk about his new book, the Reluctant Fundamentalist.

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Some tidbits:
His mother was at a restaurant in Islamabad when she saw the CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour sitting across from her; right then she knew it was ‘all over,’ as a year ago Amanpour was covering Bosnia…

He started writing under Toni Morrison’s tutelage at Princeton. His thesis at Harvard Law was the draft of his first book, which his advisor agreed to because he was so sick of reading the regular fare.

He would call his book a bestseller, except that it was extensively pirated.

When he showed up to vote in the presidential referendum in Pakistan, he discovered he was the only person at the poll station. As he was voting, a person came over to him and asked him to hurry up, even though they were 10 other empty booths. He said even Musharraf had to disown the results because they were so preposterous.

In his belief American patriotism has led to ’self-censorship.’

As an investigative journalist he went to Gwadar (a small port town) and stayed in a truck drivers’ motel, buying tea for anyone who wanted to talk. Reminds me of a person I saw once at a Model UN conference in the Hague, sitting alone at a table with a sign saying “an American willing to listen.”

Made mention of how at one time, the news in Pakistan was broadcast in Arabic (even though virtually no one understood it) and how air conditioning separates the “masses from the elite.”

Recounted how he was forced to vacillate when an immigration officer asked him what the title of his book was, saying “I have my own idea, but the publisher disagrees.”

the following piece was submitted to The Stanford Daily for publication. Seeing as how the paper was only willing to print 3 of the 6 paragraphs, I decided not to go through with a watered-down version:

In a rather tragic unfolding of Prof. Huntington’s ‘democracy paradox,’ the Palestinians, sick of their corrupt leadership, voted the ‘wrong’ way in a free election (Op-Ed, May 3). Bush decided to take a breather from trumpeting the spread of democracy in the Middle East for just long enough to punish the intransigent Palestinians by stanching nearly all essential aid. Not to be outdone, Israel then proceeded to bomb Gaza’s only power station and cut off water sources, plunging the million inhabitants of the world’s most densely-populated area into misery. The intention being, as the New York Times noted, to make the Palestinians “so unhappy with life under Hamas that they will” be forced to exercise greater discretion by “return[ing] to office… a reformed and chastened” leadership. Given that Hamas no longer insists on the destruction of Israel and has expressed its willingness to accept a two-state solution, you’d be excused for thinking the strategy of targeting the citizens of a government for their responsibility in it’s actions is working, and thus, justified. But alas, while these tactics may ring true to the actions of the U.S. and Israel , they are borrowed from the ideology of their morally decrepit erstwhile ally, Osama bin Laden. The emperor truly has no clothes.

Israel’s “concession” (Letter to the Editor, May 2) of forcibly withdrawing settlers from Gaza made for sensational television news, but should not be construed as progress; it occurred alongside an expansion of settlements in the West Bank - some of which, as detailed by the Israeli group Peace Now, are slated to house the very people evicted from Gaza. As Prof. Noam Chomsky stated in an interview, “What is called `the disengagement plan’ was an expansion plan… it was perfectly overt” and later formalized by Israeli Prime Minister Olmert with the express ‘green light’ of our Bush administration.

While the inverse of the statement “Israeli independence = Palestinian catastrophe” (Letter to the Editor, May 2) would correctly imply the Israelis not having independence, it is first of all not logically equivalent to the original statement, and secondly, isn’t the point; there’s no sense in debating whether or not it has a right to exist, because it already does. What it was trying to convey was that it’s offensive to us that the Stanford Israel Alliance should be celebrating this day all hunky-dory, glossing over the simultaneous creation of millions of refugees and the destruction of hundreds of Palestinian villages (”Celebration and protest of Israel,” Apr. 24). It’s akin to celebrating the end of British rule in the subcontinent without recognizing the millions that were evicted and slaughtered on both sides as they crossed the border between India and Pakistan . The reason you don’t see people from these countries protesting the others’ independence is perhaps that they both achieved it, and paid the same price in the suffering that accompanied it. Until the Palestinians gain their independence, it is likely to be the case that Israel’s will continue to be seen as a source of discontent.

The statistics on the violence bandied around by both sides seem to suggest that it’s a non-zero-sum conflict, with tit-for-tat violence leading to increasing suffering on both sides. Assuming both parties are equally committed to peace, the realpolitik way to shift to the other end of the spectrum would be for one side to have the temerity to declare a unilateral ceasefire, and for the other to reciprocate in kind. The Hebrew saying ‘ha possel be-mumo posel‘ implies that if you mistrust people, the tendency is for you to expect others to mistrust you. Yet there is no concept of trust inherently necessary to the model: it is built up over time as each side sticks to their end of the bargain. Unfortunately for the Palestinians, who are currently preoccupied with an internecine power struggle fueled by American military aid to Fatah (not to be confused with Fatah al-Islam, the group the Lebanese army is fighting with American support), the factions not in power keep sabotaging any attempt at striking a peace deal. When the stars do manage to align themselves, the BBC reports that the Israeli government, “consistently rejected ceasefire offers by Palestinian militants, saying it refuses to do deals of any kind with…terrorist organizations.” Such a rejection may make sense if you’re being asked to turn over your first-born child, but an end to aggression would not entail the lowering of Israel’s defensive shields. It would, however, spell the end of the occupation, which can only remain tenable with the continued use of force. It is likely that the potential cost incurred by ending its neo-colonialist ambitions that underlies Israel’s reluctance to put an end to hostilities.

Why is it that we’re constantly accused of ’singling out’ Israel and whitewashing the other side? This is not the first time a divestment campaign has targeted the policies of a specific government; no one accused the groups pushing for divestment from Sudan and South Africa of having ‘other motives’ - what puzzles me, is that for the most part, our detractors do not deny that the violations of international law (the occupation, separation barrier, settlements, and home demolitions as stated in our petition) are taking place. People have trotted out a litany of facts about how well Israel treats its minorities as opposed to Arab countries; we don’t consider these to be skeletons in our closet, but simply outside our focus on Occupied Palestine and not Israel proper.

If students and faculty feel strongly about changing the status quo in other regions of the globe, we fully encourage them to take up such causes, but we should not be expected to blunt our campaign to accommodate them. As Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu opined, “Divestment from apartheid South Africa was certainly no less justified because there was repression elsewhere on the African continent.” The reason we choose to focus on Israel is because of America’s direct support of the continuing occupation and the role that Stanford may have, through its investments, in supporting the aforementioned violations.