Ethnic innuendo
In a front-page article on the recent roundup of a spy ring operating allegedly for the benefit of Beijing ("Investigators credit tip for spy charges," Aug. 7, page 1), the reporter includes the following sentence: "In addition, of Yeh's three marriages, two of them were to Chinese women."
The unattributed comment comes at the end of a paragraph summing up statements by investigators. Regardless of who uncovered this detail, it deserves no mention in the article. Nowhere does the article state that either of Yeh's Chinese wives is a suspect in the case.
Two paragraphs above, the reporter has already mentioned that: "Yeh and his Chinese wife's residence is above his office." (Is she not a Taiwanese resident through marriage to Yeh? Or, perhaps the point is that she is ethnically Chinese along with nearly 98 percent of the general population of Taiwan.)
The mention of his wife and her nation of origin already borders on the irrelevant, but explicit statement that an ex-wife and his current wife are both from China points to some connection between marriage to Chinese and espionage.
Could it not be that Yeh's first Chinese wife left her husband because she thought that he was too sympathetic to a government that didn't allow her the freedoms she could enjoy in Taiwan? This is of course speculation, but there's the rub.
The rigors of journalism require not only that facts are stated accurately, but that they are placed in context as well. Those 13 words tacked onto a paragraph summing up the investigators statements can be considered nothing more than innuendo.
Is there something unpatriotic about marriage to a Chinese bride? Would the paper have added the same sentence if the bride were waishengren, a term used for ROC citizens who arrived with the defeated armies of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and are generally thought to favor eventual reunification with China? My guess is that it would be handled more carefully, so as not to defame a portion of the population and stoke local prejudices.
According your paper, one-quarter of all Taiwanese men who married last year chose to wed foreign brides, the majority of which came from China. Perhaps it's time to start giving them the benefit of the doubt and leave the suspicions to the police.
Robert Green
Taipei
Multicultural Muslims
Lord Bhikhu Parekh in his article ("Does Islam threaten democracy?,"Aug. 3, page 9) asserts that the Muslim conviction of absolute superiority of Islam is a problem in a multi-cultural society.
Doesn't every person of sincere faith believe in the absolute superiority of his own faith or ideology? Would Lord Parekh condemn the Americans because they are so convinced of the superiority of their brand of democracy that they are exporting it to other parts of the world?
Logically speaking, there can be only one truth and it is the belief of Muslims, Christians, Jews and others that only their respective belief system contains absolute truth. Making self-contradictory and shallow claims like, "All religions are one," are politically correct statements which do not hold any value when it comes to personal faith.
Yes, Muslims believe in the absolute superiority of their religion and yet they are also tolerant of others because Islam orders them to have friendly relations with others and not to promote hatred and intolerance.
Muslims do not have any problem with a multicultural society because, following the dictum of the Koran, they say to those professing other faiths: "You have your own faith and I have my [own] faith," and move on.
Mohammed Ayub Ali Khan
Mississauga, Ontario
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