Dear Miss Malia Obama:
You should not be surprised to receive this letter. Your father, the President of the United States, should have told you.
You see, Malia, your father is a very powerful man. In fact, there is no dispute that he is the most powerful man on earth. A man that powerful can do a lot of things, the most important of which is making peace -- as long as he is willing. I am sure you love peace. That's part of the reason I am writing you and through you, to youth all across America. (I will get to the subject of peace a bit later. -- Added Aug 8.) For now, I just want you to know that your powerful father is almost able to read my mind.
On Thursday July 9, I stumbled on one of your pictures wearing a peacenik T-shirt at the G8 Summit in Italy on drudgereport.com, an Internet news website I visited often. That night I couldn't fall asleep. I got up and visited Drudge Report again offline. Although I never clicked on the news about you either online or offline, I believe your father knew from my computer activities that day that I would likely write about you or to you. (Indeed I did get the idea that night.) -- That's probably why the next time I visited Drudge Report, your picture had been replaced by a teddy bear, and the Drudge headline had changed from "Wrong Way" with a graphics of your father's declining poll numbers to "It's Working" with a picture of your father looking very serious and stern.
Why did your father, who obviously knew me very well, know that seeing that picture of yours would make me tick?
There were several reasons. For one thing, I knew why your father brought you and your sister along with him to Europe. He basically used both of you as his potential political cover. Indeed, it was for the same consideration that he brought both of you along with him last time to Paris. For another, your father could imagine my sense of profound irony seeing you wearing that peacenik T-shirt, especially at a time when I had to watch those bloody pictures of Urumqi Riot, knowing that it was your father's CIA who orchestrated the violence on Urumqi streets. But most important of all, that picture of yours reminded me of Cecilia Zhang, who, as your father surely must have known, largely defined who I am today.
Watching you wearing that peacenik T-shirt, I got a sense that you probably had heard of me, as defined by your father. But he probably hasn't told you about Cecilia Zhang. That's just not fair. So let me tell you a little bit about her first.
Cecilia was a kind, beautiful and talented girl. Born in China, she moved to Toronto, the largest city here in Canada, when she was 4 years old. By all accounts, she was like an angel who brought great joy to her loving family. In the cruel early darkness of October 20, 2003, however, she was kidnapped from her bedroom while everyone else in her household was asleep. An AMBER Alert was issued. But nobody could find her, including the police. One hundred and sixty-one long, agonizing days later, her remains were founded in a wooded area by a passer-by. Until today, the authorities had to hedge as to how she died. -- She was just nine years old, not much younger than you are today.
I had never met Cecilia. I lived in Greater Vancouver, another metropolis in Canada. The first time I heard of her was on the day when she was kidnapped. It was a big news here in Canada. (Her abduction was also featured in America's Most Wanted on TV later.) But I did not see anything suspicious at the time. After more information of her case came out in the summer of 2004, though, I noticed too many "coincidental" connections between her case and my personal experience to ignore the possibility that Canadian government might at least have prior knowledge of her abduction and murder. Indeed, I believe that it was my filing of a lawsuit in November 2002 against some of my professors and their Wall Street friends that set in motion the criminal conspiracy against her, because Canadian bureaucrats had previously taken side and protected these privileged people who had bullied and harassed me and sabotaged my career.
I am a cautious person. At first, I did not want to believe that Canadian government had anything to do with such a horrible crime. But I am a firm believer in facts and logic, and my facts and logic pointed me to the Canadian government. In the end, It was because I felt that taking a life as innocent as Cecilia's was such a clear-cut right-and-wrong issue that, even with 25% confidence about my conclusion at the time, I went against my reticent nature to not only protest, but also to fast. That's how I started my journey to seek justice for Cecilia Zhang.
However, my efforts to try to bring Cecilia Zhang murder cover-up to public awareness were met with indifference, disdain, even outright attack from our political class, which included politicians and the mainstream media. Ironically, political parties would fight with each other over my story - but always keep my story at the background and away from public eye. Eventually I learned that although they knew my cause was valid - they in fact knew more than I did about her case - they never had the intention to actually take on my cause because doing so would undermine the political class themselves. Your government, whether it was under former President George W. Bush or under your father, unfortunately, also supported Canadian political class throughout the years.
My journey, therefore, is a frustrating one. Frustration aside, however, my confidence in my cause actually increased over time. This is because my confidence in my cause is built on facts and logic. As additional information became available along my journey, these facts not only did not contradict my previous analyses and conclusions, they actually augmented my previous analyses and conclusions. Indeed, I believe any objective person who takes the time to read the extensive facts and analyses on my websites would agree with my conclusions about Cecilia Zhang case.
However, many politicians tend to view facts through various political glasses. What come out are distortions or worse, pure propaganda. Take, for example, your father. When I risked my life to root for him during last year's presidential campaign, he appeared to be for my cause. He talked about how being unemployed was a dignity issue, which resonated deeply with me as I have been unemployed for most of my adult life because of deliberate sabotage and harassment. He also played with the word "indifference", which was from a quote by Elie Wiesel that I had used in one of my blogs on racism.
However, once your father became the president, he viewed me as his enemy (even though I had always had sympathy towards him and many of my actions were meant to build up trust with him - unfortunately my niceness had been taken advantage of by him.) As such, his view of my cause changed. That's why he used the phrase "subject to date and statistics" in his inauguration speech. That's also basically why he brought you and your sister along twice to Europe. Both times, there was a increased probability that my story would become public, as I had shown in my previous blogs. In essence, by bringing both of you along, your father was making a unspoken statement that my cause of seeking justice for Cecilia Zhang was invalid.
Another thing your father tended to do when he sensed that my story had a increased chance of becoming public was to hold a prime time news conference because he is a good orator and he also possesses the world's loudest speaker. The latest one was held last Wednesday July 22. Many people said that your father slipped when he accused Cambridge Police "acted stupidly" in arresting Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. I don't believe so. I believe it was a calculated political move on the part of your father to have uttered those words in anticipation of immediate breaking of my story. It was because my story did not break immediately as he anticipated that he appeared to have created such a mess with the Gates-Crowley debacle.
Indeed, if my story had become public, not many people would have paid much attention to the Gates-Crowley row anyways, even with your father's inflammatory comment. In that situation, your father's comment at the news conference would have been shrewd. On the one hand, he would have successfully appeared to be firmly on the side of minorities in terms of race relations - one of the issues in my story. On the other hand, he also sent out a subtle message to the elitist/political class - another issue in my story - that he is one of them.
And these messages are very powerful because, just like the message implicit in the appearance of you and your sister on the international stage, they're political. As I said before, while many people objectively would agree with my analyses and conclusions about Cecilia Zhang case, for political reasons they would just consciously ignore their objectivity at the urging of your father. In that sense, what your father did may be called political leadership. But it's cynical political leadership. And it's wrong political leadership.
I don't know why, but writing about Cecilia Zhang still gets me going. I guess deep inside me, I still hold my cause dearly and never regard money as my ultimate objective. For me, money really is not everything. Perhaps I should rethink my decision I made in my last blog. Maybe I should get back to politics to show what is true political leadership - by demonstrating my continued pursuit of Cecilia Zhang cause. Yes, I think I should take on the 5th generation of Chinese leadership. That should give me ample time to get the truth of Cecilia Zhang case out here in Canada.
Truth is not only the foundation of justice, but also the foundation of pragmatic politics. When I heard on American TV people equated pragmatism with opportunism, I could not help but laugh. After all, pragmatism is an indigenous American thought. Precisely because it pays great attention to facts, pragmatism is much more ethical and moral than the politics as usual we see everyday.
Warren Buffett once said: "In looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if they don't have the first, the other two will kill you." I guess the same can be said about hiring in politics. And it is high time that we inject some integrity and morality into our politics.
