Insurance agent inspired to break silence, seek peace

Before the towers fell and calls for war began, Dan Yaseen was an insurance agent, just a man with a workaday job who didn't spend time protesting anything.

"I was doing the regular things. I'd been an insurance agent for 32 years. I was trying to make a living, pay my taxes. Then all of the sudden this happened and I was right in the middle of it."

Yaseen, now 57, is a native of Pakistan, where he still has family. After the Sept. 11 attacks, there was talk that the United States would bomb Afghanistan, which shares a border with Pakistan. Bombing would change lives in the whole region.

He had never believed in war, had always quietly embraced nonviolence.

Further troubling to him were news reports of hate crimes against Saudis or Sikhs or Pakistanis, anyone who happened to look like the Arab terrorists who had attacked the U.S.

"It affected me on every level," Yaseen said. "But especially the tension of the building rhetoric. I felt that the U.S. would attack and violence was going to perpetuate violence."

Days after the attacks of Sept. 11, at a panel discussion on terrorism at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Fresno, Yaseen met activists who were planning peace protests at the corner of Shaw and Blackstone avenues.

Their original demonstrations were in remembrance of the victims of the terrorist attacks. After the U.S. bombed Afghanistan in October 2001, the demonstrations turned to protests against war in Afghanistan. Later they were protests against the Iraq war.

From these protests the group Peace Fresno was born. Its members still rally for peace at the same corner on the first Friday of every month.

"In the beginning, there was a lot of hostilities. Passing cars would throw things at us. But slowly it is changing," said Yaseen, who participates each month.

"It takes time. But there have been protests like ours all over the country, and slowly it does matter. I am a good student of history and protests matter. They mattered for women's rights and civil rights and they will matter for peace."

On a personal level, Yaseen says protesting makes him feel less helpless in the face of world events. He says it makes him feel he is living up to the oath he took when he became an American citizen 10 years ago.

"Being an activist, you are not always going to be popular. People will call you unpatriotic. But if your cause is just and you speak the truth and stand up for what you believe in, then there is nothing more American than that," he said.

"After everything that's happened since 9/11, I can be silent no more."