“I was attacked because I am a Sikh and because I look like a Sikh. Justice should be served so that no one else goes through what I have been through. We need to create a world without hate.”–Sandeep Sing

SCISSION

The Sikh community turned the heat up Tuesday on the NYPD to find the lead-footed bigot who ran down a Queens businessman with a pickup truck after yelling, “Go back to your own country, Bin Laden!”  The Sikh’s are demanding federal intervention in the case…and for good reason (though, personally, I’m not sure the feds are all that better an answer).
 

    The New York Daily News reports:

…the Sikh Coalition says it wants the feds involved because the group is not convinced the police department is doing enough.
    “The NYPD needs to address the perception that it doesn’t care about Sikhs,” the coalition said in a statement. “The NYPD doesn’t allow turbaned Sikhs to serve in the police force. The same police force that is supposed to protect us is also discriminating against us.”

The Sikh Coalition yesterday wrote sadly,

    Two years to the day of the Oak Creek, Wisconsin Gurdwara massacre, the Sikh American community of New York City is organizing a rally this morning to draw attention to the plight of Sandeep Singh, a Sikh father who remains hospitalized after a driver in a pick-up truck ran him over on a public street last week and dragged him for 30 feet.
    Only moments earlier, the driver had used racial and religious slurs against Sandeep, calling him a “terrorist” and telling him to “go back to your country.” While Sandeep recovers at a hospital, his attacker is still at large, and the Sikh Coalition is calling on city and federal agencies to investigate the attack on Sandeep as a hate crime.

Hate crimes against Sikh are nothing new, obviously.  They wear turbans and have beards.  They must be terrorists, right?  America, land of the free, home of the brave….

 In February 2013, a Sikh business owner was shot and injured in Port Orange, Florida. In May 2013, a Sikh grandfather was beaten with a steel rod in Fresno, California. In September 2013, a Sikh professor at Columbia University was assaulted in New York City.

Sandeep Sing was just crossing a street when the man in the truck started screaming at him.  Sing was having none of it. The driver returned to his vehicle and Singh stood in front of it in protest.  The truck driver ran right over him and dragged him thirty feet down the street.

Sing said,

“I was attacked because I am a Sikh and because I look like a Sikh. Justice should be served so that no one else goes through what I have been through. We need to create a world without hate.”

Only in America (well, some other places, too, I suppose) do people on the street just randomly attack Sikhs because they get them confused with the racist attacks they really want to make.  Incredible…

Gotta go…

The following is from the Village Voice.

Tensions Flare Between Queens Sikhs and NYPD After Racially Motivated Hit and Run

 It was shortly after midnight on Wednesday, Sandeep Singh and three of his friends were crossing 99th Street at 101 Avenue in Richmond Hill, Queens when they crossed paths with a man in a pick-up truck. Witnesses say the driver called Singh a “terrorist,” and yelled at him to “go back to your country.” Singh, a Sikh, stood in the truck’s path to keep the driver from leaving while his friends called the police, but the driver gassed his pick-up into Singh, hitting the 29-year-old and dragging him some 30 feet before he came loose.

A week later, Singh, a father of two children and owner of a construction business, is still in the hospital. “He clung to the bottom of the pick up truck, so most of his injuries are along his back and his side,” says Amardeep Singh, director of programs for the Sikh Coalition. At this point, he’s had between 20 and 30 stitches, and Amardeep Singh says he will likely need a skin graft as well.

The driver, meanwhile, remains at large. The incident was captured by multiple security cameras and while investigators have been able to determine the make and model of the truck, they’ve had no luck turning up a license plate number, and none of the witnesses have been able to identify the driver through police photos.

“There’s a lot of outrage in the community. It’s a tightly knit Sikh community and they’ve experienced a lot of hate crimes,” Amardeep Singh says. “There is this frustration about lack of action [on the part of the NYPD].”

Members of the Queens Sikh community, Singh says, feel the police are not doing enough to address this crime in particular, and crime against Sikhs in Richmond Hill, generally.

Twelve leaders of the Sikh community, including the presidents of two major houses of worship in Richmond Hill as well as representatives from the Sikh Coalition, met with the commander of the 102 precinct yesterday at the request of the U.S. Department of Justice’s community relations service.

In addition to hate crimes, Sikh leaders cited experiences being robbed, mugged or physically attacked that they feel have not been adequately investigated by local police.

“There’s a sense that there is a real apathy in the 102 percent in Richmond Hill, as it applies to this community,” Singh says.

That feeling is compounded by the fact, that the NYPD–unlike police forces in London, Toronto and Washington D.C.–prohibits officers from wearing turbans, a rule that prevents observant Sikhs from serving in the police force.

“When these hate incidences occur, the community wants action from the police, and in the back of our minds is the fact that we can’t even serve in the police,” Singh says, noting that Sikhs are inclined to police and military service: they account for less than two percent of India’s population, but more than 20 percent of its army.

Sikh leaders, Singh says, left yesterday’s meeting so frustrated they organized a rally for 10:30 a.m. Tuesday morning–incidentally the two year anniversary of the massacre at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin–at intersection where Sandeep Singh was run over.