The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Origins Podcast: A Call For Support To Save A Family

Episode Date: September 9, 2024

PLEASE CONSIDER DONATING NOW TO SAVE THIS FAMILY!There are many tragedies in Afghanistan, and thousands of people who need help. We cannot right all the wrongs, but we can save these 8 people. We can save a woman who fought for human rights and now faces execution in Afghanistan if she were to return. We can save 5 young girls who have no access to education, or freedom if they were to return to Afghanistan. Already, during the past 2 years in Afghanistan, they have learned much English, and one of the young girls has been selected for a prestigious online scholarship to study at an English speaking Afghan University now run outside of that country. We can do something concrete and positive to help them.It isn’t everything, but it is something. I can tell you from my last experience of saving the life of a young girl from Afghanistan so she could study in the United States and eventually pursue and advanced degree that not a day goes by when I don’t think about how that feels to me like one of the most important things I have done. I hope you will consider donating, and if you cannot, that you will pass this podcast along to others who may be interested. DONATIONS:The JIAS has kindly created two different direct PayPal donation links.* The first is specifically linked to the family, and if for some horrible reason the family were not able to arrive in Canada under this program, all funds would be returned to donors. Because the funding relates to this family uniquely, any donations made to this site are not tax deductible for Canadian residents. This is the preferred site for all those who are not concerned about receiving a Canadian tax receipt for their donations.Here is the direct link:  https://www.paypal.com/donate?campaign_id=VBKBGBFZ5G5FE* The second is a link to a fund which will provide for the family if they arrive, but if for some reason they cannot arrive, the funds will not be returned but will be allocated to others on the sponsor’s waiting list. Donations to this fund are however tax deductible for Canadian residents, and donors will receive a tax receipt.Here is the link: https://www.paypal.com/donate?campaign_id=H49YGR3E5QMBY Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi, and welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host Lawrence Krause. This is a special edition of the podcast because I'm reaching out to you at an important time to ask for your help. For your help to save an Afghan family, the lives of eight people. The mother who was a human rights lawyer in Afghanistan who helped abused women. The father who worked for a French NGO, the son who was studying computer science, and five young girls who were hoping to have a future in which they could be. educated and have full lives. That family suffered tremendously.

They were hoping to leave under a French airplane flight when Kabul Airport was bombed. And they reached out to my colleague Claire Balinski, a journalist, an American journalist living in Paris. And she took up their case. And their lives were in danger because after the Taliban took over and after Kabul fell, not only were the people who she'd put in jail released from jail, but the Taliban actually went through the offices of the Afghan Bar Association, getting the names of various lawyers and hunting house-to-house looking for them.

And the family had to hide in various locations in order to survive, not just for the safety and life of the mother and father, but the young girls, of course, were in danger of being married off to Taliban fighters at a young age. It was a harrowing experience clearly for them. happily with primarily Claire's help and her readers who provided some funds to support them, they managed to escape to Pakistan where they've been for almost the last two years. And following that, Claire reached out to me because there's a program, a Canadian program, that allows agencies to sponsor refugees if five people in a location will commit to doing so.

And the agencies get a quota of slots. and Claire knew that I'd moved to Canada and also knew I had a fairly wide group of acquaintances and also that earlier I had helped a young girl from Afghanistan who was literally trapped in her house and watched the internet and had been watching my videos about science and had learned English and learned mathematics and wanted to be a scientist and I'm very happy to say that with the help of many others including Nicholas Christoph at the Times and others We managed to get her to the United States.

I managed to get my university to give her a full scholarship. She ultimately studied and got a degree in physics and then went on to graduate school. And saving her life was for me one of the most, I think, satisfying and important things I feel I've ever done. And now we have the opportunity to save this family, this deserving family, who want a chance to thrive and succeed. And what happened was when Claire reached out to me, we tried various agencies. had various false starts. It was heartbreaking. And eventually, we decided that where I lived here in Prince Edward Island wouldn't work, that Toronto was a greater opportunity. And there again, we went through the forms and various agencies were very sympathetic, but there's so many refugees trying to come in.

They couldn't sponsor them, given their number of slots they had. Finally, to our immense relief and exaltation, the Jewish International, the Jewish Immigrant Aid Society, I'm sorry, in Toronto, listened to their story and our story and agreed to allocate eight slots for the family with their allocation this year. Now, in addition to that, we had to get five people and found five wonderful people in that area, willing to commit the time and effort to support the family when they come with housing, helping them find housing and schooling and all the rest. But the biggest commitment is by the regulations of the government, the agencies need to guarantee one full year of support. So, and those amounts are determined by the government, by the agencies. And Toronto

was not a cheap place to be. So we had to guarantee in advance before the the application could be sent to the government to get one full year of support for a family of eight in Toronto. And that's a non-trivial amount of money, as we physicists like to say. We've been in the midst of trying to do that. Claire with her GoFundMe account has raised a significant amount of money in the last few weeks to try and help us. But we're under the gun here. We have till September 30th now to raise the funds for a family of eight. And the Jewish immigrant Aid Society has created two donation sites,

one of which involves tax deductible donations, one which doesn't. And you can go to those by following the link from Critical Mass, my Substack site, our substack site, Lawrencecrouse.

Subsdack.com and the piece is entitled We can now save this Afghan family with your support. And you can find the direct links there in that article. It's free for want to look at. Or you can go to my, my ex-account, L. Krause 1, and you can link to it from there. Happily, we've begun to raise some money and also a very generous donor has agreed to match any donation up to $50,000. And I decided to add on to that and say, in addition to that,

any donation up to additional $5,000, I will match. And with all that, if we can raise that money by the end of this month, we can then put in the application and try the next phase to get Canada to approve visas for the family. That process could take up to two years. And even though the family is safe right now in Pakistan, at any moment they could be deported and their lives could end, both literally and metaphorically. I'm hoping you'll help us support this family. There's a saying that someone just told me, one of the donors I spoke to yesterday, just told me in his religion that says, saving one life is like saving the world. And this is a chance to save eight lives.

And I hope you'll consider helping us save them. And if you can't donate, I hope you'll help pass the word on. Of all of our podcasts, I hope you'll let people know about this and distribute it so that people can help us. In addition to what I'm recording right now, Claire Balinski recorded a beautiful video, which we're appending to the end of this podcast, talking in more detail about the family,

the history, their history, and the history of working with us. If you can't watch it, if you're listening to this on a podcast site, the audio is equally compelling as the video. So I hope you'll listen to that as well. And after that, or even during that, I hope you'll consider going to the sites, our critical mass site, clicking the link and donating some money for this family

before the deadline is September 30th or letting your friends know about it. Either way, I really appreciate you're listening to this and considering helping us now. Thank you very much. I'm Claire Berlinski. I'm an American journalist, and I'm in Paris. And I edit a magazine called The Cosmopolitan Globalist. I want to introduce you to a family from Afghanistan.

They're a family of eight, five girls, one boy, and their parents. Some of my readers know this family already. I'm not using their real names here, because, their lives would be in danger. And that's also why I've blurred their faces. I'll just call them Mr. and Mrs. Anonymous and their children. Beautiful and intelligent daughters, super-intelligent daughters. And they also have a hardworking, completely charming and resourceful son.

Before Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, Mrs. Anonymous, who is a lawyer, was a woman's rights activist and a children's rights activist. especially girl children. She also received counter-narcotics training from the U.S. State Department, and she received a diploma from them. She defended women who had been abused, who had been forced into marriage, who didn't even know they had such a thing as right.

And she put the men who abused them behind bars. Now the Taliban is in control. The men she imprisoned have all been released. And they want her dead. So does the Taliban. which since the fall of Afghanistan has been ruthless in persecuting women's rights defenders and lawyers like her. I made this video to ask for your help in helping this family reach safety in Canada. When Kabul fell, the Taliban raided her office and seized a database,

which contained her names and all of her identifying details, along with the details of all of her children and her husband. Her husband used to work for a French NGO. Women like her have already been murdered. Tawrykawaii do you have on the general of the Ukaals of Afghanistan they were to the cusp of the noadhae of the government and guise of government

that of that, from that jimannes of Afghanistan in the time of 24 November 20261 They were in GERC-Qed-in-shaired in the Azzar of the anjumanah and the carmena of the Khomew and the warred Latoqub, dowry and taverns they were out of the Enjumans, and as the database of the Anjuman

in the Injublans in the process of our took place, that the database, badbuthan, in the United States Taliban, and by the amount of the A number of our members of our Ahead of our own, as to beckh

Ours, and they're, some of the same, tawhine and taked, latuk, and chicanjah, and a taut of al-a-Modafi, a lot of my shadow received,

a lot of the of our own security and are in a lot of mediatia, were in the Daukhanes, they're in

some of the There are five girls and young women in this family, and before Kabul fell, they were all in school. They had big dreams. One wanted to be a lawyer like her mother, and a woman's rights defender, another one wanted to be a journalist. Their son was studying computer science at university. The girls and the boys alike, their education stopped. But worse, they feared that they would see their parents execute. before their eyes, and the girls feared they would be forcibly married to Taliban fighters.

So that's why I'm working with the Canadian physicist Lawrence Krause, whose name you might know because he's a very famous theoretical physicist, but for our purposes, he's just a guy with a really big heart and a remarkable team of volunteers in Toronto to bring this family to Canada. Let me tell you the story. Their father used to work for a French NGO called Abigene that did vaccination campaigns in the Afghan countryside, and they wrote very enthusiastic letters of commendation for him. They don't exist anymore, but the fact that he used to work for, in the Taliban's

eyes, France, put the family at even greater risk. Right after Kabul fell, the French government completely agreed that this family was at risk. French government put their names on their flight list for immediate evacuation. When the bomb went off at Abbey Gate, their son was there. He was trying to secure his family's place on the flight, and he escaped the last minutes. And after the bombing, the flight stopped. And to their horror, the family realized that they had been left behind in Afghanistan. And that's how I met them. Their eldest son, who at the time spoke the best English in the family, knew that I lived in Paris, because he followed me on Twitter. And he saw that I was closely following the terrible news from Afghanistan, and he also saw that I was deeply worried

about all of our Afghan allies. But he didn't really understand who I was. He didn't realize I was just a journalist and not even a French journalist, an American journalist. He mistook me for someone who might have the power to intercede with the French government. So in a case of mistaken identity, he contacted me and he begged me to ask them to send another flight to rescue them. and I always remember that conversation. He told me that the terrorists had taken over his city. He'd never seen them before. He wasn't old enough to remember them.

And he wrote that they looked like wild animals. He and his family were so terrified. You could hear it in their voices. His mother feared she would be killed in front of her children and the girls would be raped and forcibly married off or killed. Of course, I couldn't help because the last plane had taken off. I'm a lot less important than apparently I'd. seemed on Twitter. I'm not a French official and I have no pull with the French government. I'm just a

journalist. But I was, of course, horrified by what they were telling me and by their predicament. And it honestly reminded me of the plight of Jews who were desperately trying to escape France after it fell to the Nazis, including my grandparents. And I could hear this family's absolute terror. So, of course, I said, I would see. if I could do anything to help. So I began making phone calls and getting in touch via email with everyone I could think of.

And if you'll remember, everyone with any connection to Afghanistan was trying to do the same thing. There were U.S. military personnel who were trying to organize rescue operations, private rescue operations, for the people they served with whose lives were now in immediate danger.

And people were exchanging information on Twitter. None of us knew what to do. France had established a crisis hotline, which I called over and over and over again. And meanwhile, I'm speaking to this family, and they are hiding and waiting for the knock on the door and just absolutely terrified. It was just terrible to speak to them and to wonder if they were just going to disappear. All of my calls to French officials and to American ones, too, but unreturned. So I quickly realized that the French government was like everybody, and completely overwhelmed by the scale of this catastrophe.

Among other problems, they had suddenly been made unemployed, and none of the women in the family even dared to leave the house. They were in hiding. They needed to eat. So I started a GoFundMe campaign to help them. I wasn't even sure how I would get money to them in Afghanistan. I wasn't sure if it was even possible, but I figured if they make it through the next few weeks,

they're going to need money to get out of there. I explained the story, and my readers were as horrified as I am. and who wouldn't be, and they made an incredibly generous contribution to the GoFundMe campaign to help them. Meanwhile, I tried to figure out how to get them out of Afghanistan, where they could go, who would take them? Cobble was in complete chaos, and they hadn't been expecting this, not at all. It came as a complete shock, and they didn't have passports. So it took months. It took agonizing months. Before services were restored and coupled to a degree sufficient to allow them to get passports. Meanwhile, the girls are living like prisoners. They've never experienced anything

like this. They'd been in school before. They were normal teenagers, normal girls. They were studying, and now they're all living and hiding and, in fact, moving from house to house because they're so scared. There was one point where they had travel documents for everyone but one daughter. So they were trying to decide whether their mom, who was most at risk, should leave with one remember the family and who should stay behind or whether they should wait until they could all leave. It was an unbearable situation. But they determined they weren't leaving without the whole family. And when they finally got passports for everyone, my readers again helped them to escape to Pakistan,

where they went overland, the whole family of eight. One day, after they managed to get across the border, that border crossing was closed. Since then, they've been in Islamabad. My readers have helped them to rent an apartment and put food on the table since then. But unfortunately, they're not safe there either because Pakistan is deporting Afghans. And so, again, they're living in fear. They've been waiting for the UN to give them refugee cards that certify their status, according to the Geneva Conventions. And that would allow them to make an asylum claim.

the UN's bureaucracy is also overwhelmed by the scale of the crisis, and we've learned that getting those cards can take years, by which point they might be deported, back to Afghanistan, where they face death. The refugees from Afghanistan are welcome nowhere. The United States hasn't even given asylum to Afghans who risked their lives for us in battle. Europe is already groaning under the weight of a refugee crisis that's so severe that it's left much of Europe politically destabilized. So I had to figure out where this family could go to have a shot at a decent life.

Pakistan was better than Afghanistan. It was a lot better, but they still weren't safe, and the girls still couldn't go back to school because Pakistan won't let refugees use their public services. The more research I did, the worse it looked. It's just nearly impossible if you're an Afghan refugee to legally enter another country. We've just made it impossible. But I finally discovered that Canada has a program that could actually work. It allows a community in Canada to sponsor a refugee family. You had to find a sponsorship group, a sponsorship group of at least five people who all lived in the city or the town where the family would be living and would agree to welcome them and help them in their first year.

So that was challenge one, finding the group. And the second challenge is the group has to have enough money to cover their expenses for a year. And you need to have all of that money in place. So this sounded hard, but it didn't sound impossible. It was the first thing that wasn't impossible. If I could figure out a way to make those two things happen, so I started going through my contact list, trying to figure out who I knew in Canada,

who had written for us. Everyone I'd ever met in Canada, I think, got a call from me, including my friend Lawrence Krause, the famous theoretical physicist. And he got it immediately. He understood immediately. He understood the danger they were in and why it was so important to bring them there.

and he had actually worked to bring another young Afghan woman to safety. So he understood how difficult it was too. But he heard about this and he immediately said, yeah, we have to get them there. We figured there had to be a group somewhere in Canada who would consider sponsoring a family of eight. It's an unusually a large number, but he started working his contact list. We worked on it and we worked on it and we had several heartbreaking false starts. We found groups that thought they could help, but who in the end couldn't, And then we found partners in Toronto.

I made new friends in Toronto, and they joined our team. During this time, and I was really moved by this, my readers, the readers of the Cosmopolitan Globalist, supported them, and the family, of course, is incredibly grateful. They will never forget the generosity. Finally, their son had a suggestion. He discovered the Jewish Immigrant Aid Society, and he sent us their telephone number and said, What about them? Maybe they could sponsor us. So we got in touch with them, and it turns out, yes, they could.

They were the solution. They were the solution. They told us they would be willing to act as sponsors for the entire family. And it's really hard to describe the joy we all felt when we heard this. I was fighting back tears when they said, yes, we can confirm. We have eight places for them in 2024. So one hurdle down. And then the next one, money, which is, of course, where you come in. We need to show by September that we've raised enough money to cover the entire

family's living expenses for one year in Toronto. And we've already secured a really significant part of it, but we haven't got all of it and we need to raise the rest. And we just have to do it. They have come all this way. We can't let them down at this last stage. So I'm asking you for help again. And again, we are really close. We've come so far. We've already secured a very significant part of it. But we need to raise the rest.

We would be grateful for any amount you can give. There's no such thing as a donation too small. There's certainly no such thing as a donation too big. So please just help them in any amount you can afford. Let's get them over the finish line. There's really something remarkable about this family. are so resilient and they are so industrious. I'm so impressed by them. The girls didn't speak any English when Kabul fell. I only spoke to them through their son because he was the only one who

spoke any English. And think about how they've been living since then. They haven't been in an English language immersion environment. They've been living and hiding in Kabul or basically in hiding in Islamabad, no access to school. And yet they've taught themselves English, just through discipline, just through hard work every day, no matter what stress they face. To the extent that one of their daughters has won a full scholarship for a distance learning university degree program at the Afghan University in Doha, a program that was set up for refugees like her,

it's hugely competitive. She beat thousands of other girls, and she didn't even speak English when she began studying for it. My readers so far have, without exaggeration, literally, saved their lives. How often do you have the satisfaction of saving a life or a whole family's life? And in the meanwhile, I've come to know this family. They are so motivated, they are so smart. They've been through so much. I'm so certain they will thrive if they can just get a break, a place where they can be safe from the Taliban and go to school. In the West, most people don't. want to think about Afghanistan. It's just too painful. But this family doesn't have that luxury.

The world has really washed its hands of Afghanistan's women and girls. They have nowhere to go. This is their only hope. And we're really close to getting there. They've got support from my friends, from Lawrence's friends, from me and from Lawrence. We just need to get them over the last hurdle. So I really hope you'll help them again. Or for the first time, if this is the first time you've heard this story. You can contribute to their GoFundMe page and the link is below. The money you contribute goes to changing their lives completely, saving their lives, literally saving their lives and they are grateful beyond any words for your support. And so am I, so am I.