Son Of Murder Victim Teams Up With Former White Supremacist To Spread Message Of Compassion

Pardeep Singh Kaleka and Arno Michaelis know where the enemy prowls.

They know how it thinks. They know how it grows, and what it feeds on. They know its face.

And they think they’ve figured out how to stop it.

The enemy is hatred. Hatred of those who are more conservative, or more liberal, or whose god speaks through a different book, or whose skin may simply contain more or less melanin.

Michaelis and Singh Kaleka – a former white supremacist and a man whose father was murdered by a white supremacist – are uniquely situated to grapple with the issue. They could have been consumed in conflagrations of outrage. Yet somehow, they weren’t.

They say the answer is simple: compassion. They chose to starve the enemy, rather than feed it.

“People say, how could you be so naïve? Do you not see the troubles of the world?” explains Singh Kaleka. “But I come from a country where people are starving, and when I came here I worked as a cop in one of the worst neighborhoods in Milwaukee, and now I’m a trauma therapist. So yes, I see the troubles of the world. But I’m grateful.”

“We are spiritually inclined to suffer, and to learn from our pain,” he continues. What he has learned is to see light inside the darkest monsters.

“If you saw god in people, how differently would you treat them?” wonders Singh Kaleka. “If you could see the man who shot your father and five others that way, how would you see him?”

This is not some vague hypothetical question. Because the man who shot and murdered Singh Kaleka’s father was not some vague, hypothetical man. He was flesh and blood, and he was angry. 

“The shooter was so miserable,” explains Michaelis. “He lost all faith in humanity, and he wanted other people to lose their faith. The best thing you can say to that is, ‘I’m not going to lose my faith in humanity.’ I call it ‘Weaponized Compassion.’”

Michaelis remembers that back when he was a skinhead, his goal was simply to make liberals angry. The more outraged they became, the more he fell in love with his own anger. The thing that shattered his hatred was not opposing anger; it was love, and forgiveness. 

Today, the two are in a car together, winding through heavy traffic on their way to yet another speaking engagement. They speak from completely different places and experiences, yet they have found themselves inexorably linked by what they’ve seen and felt. They’ve both looked outrage and hatred in the eye, and they have both decided that they can only be defeated with love and an acknowledgement of the fundamental humanity of every human being, from political opponents to cold blooded killers. 

“You can be compassionate and fight for justice,” Singh Kaleka says.

“You have to see the suffering on the far left or the far right, and understand that they want to cause pain, and what I realize when I see it, is that they are suffering,” adds Michaelis.

 “The political extremes are identical. The left is just as fear-driven as the right, and on both ends, rational thinking goes out the window,” Michaelis continues.

“Forgive. It’s crucial, and it applies to both sides,” he says. “The only way to disarm someone on the far right is with compassion.”

The same is true for the other side, he adds.

“A lot of social justice warriors just want to fight,” Michaelis says. “They are done with compassion. What I try to do is show them what they are actually doing, try to show them that what they want is actually vengeance. And that’s what the man who shot Pardeep’s father wanted - to destroy.”

For compassion to work, it must be extended to everyone, they say. To people who commit the worst imaginable crimes. This compassion, he says, must go to those who common sense tells us deserve it least.

Michaelis remembers seeing people rejoicing on social media because a criminal had been beaten to death. His crimes were horrific, but Michaelis said that when he learned of his death, he tried to remember that his life, which ended on the receiving end of rage, probably started out that way, as well.

“I thought that the terrible things he did, they were probably done to him when he was a child,” Michaelis says. “Monsters aren’t born. They are created. We must not lose sight of that fact, that the worst monsters were once innocent children.”

“The two poles literally cannot exist without each other,” he adds. “You can’t talk about the self without defining non-self elements; … what we want is to show people we’re interdependent.”

‘No Place for 

Righteous Anger’

One truth, according to many philosophies and religions, is that the only constant in the world is change. Nothing is forever. What people who embrace extreme ideologies struggle to come to terms with, is this simple fact, they say. Singh Kaleka says that’s why research into “fixed” mindset people – who essentially stop changing their mind at a certain age – and “growth” mindset people, who continue learning, is so vital.

“The middle is actually the biggest growth mindset group of people,” says Singh Kaleka. 

But people in the middle have been drowned out by those on the far right and the far left, whose rhetoric has made being angry and extreme the norm, he continues. 

“What we want to do is give a voice back to the middle,” he states.

“The one truth is that everything changes,” continues Singh Kaleka. “Me and Arno, hopefully we realize that we live in that duality. We are both good and bad.”

They believe that this understanding will lead to compassion and forgiveness, rather than righteousness and anger.

“Dealing with change is the human condition,” Michaelis says. “I think all spiritualities, the Abrahamic, eastern, secular – are about finding peace with change.”

“Peace is a process,” he adds. “It’s something you go through.” 

Michaelis even talks about the opportunity for “Post Traumatic Growth” following violence and tragedy.

 “In western society, I think we need a bit more compassionate rule,” Singh Kaleka agrees. “It has to be compassion. There is no place for righteous anger.”

Research shows that extreme rhetoric tends to make ideological opponents dig in their heels, becoming further entrenched in their initial beliefs. 

“I ask people, do you just want to be right, or do you want to be effective?” Singh Kaleka says.

‘I See God Within You’

After the death of his father, Singh Kaleka’s own research began showing him “deeper psychological mechanisms” that come into play in society.

“People think if they are compassionate, they are weak, and if they are weak they won’t survive,” he says.

“Maybe it’s time to redefine what strength looks like,” he comments. 

Singh Kaleka finds wisdom both in modern psychology and sociology, and in ancient faith traditions.

He quotes Kabir, the 15th century poet and saint, who said that when he went out into the world and looked for the worst person, he found that person in his own heart.

Kabir saw the divine in everyone, as well. “I am in the next seat,” he wrote. “My shoulder is against yours. You will not find me in the stupas, not in Indian shrine rooms, nor in synagogues, nor in cathedrals; not in masses, nor kirtans …When you really look for me, you will see me instantly — you will find me in the tiniest house of time.”

Kabir called this divine “the breath inside the breath” and he wrote that “the river which flows in you also flows in me.”

This understanding is now, after his father was murdered, Singh Kaleka did the seemingly unfathomable. He looked for that breath, that point of light, inside Wade Michael Page, the radicalized U.S. Army veteran who walked into a house of faith and gunned down the innocent people worshiping peacefully there. 

“I didn’t avoid [feeling anger],” Singh Kaleka explains. “I felt it. But I didn’t let it lead me.” 

Singh Kaleka says he played Nietzsche’s ideas about the “death” of god.

“Maybe it’s not the death of god,” he explained. “Maybe it’s the death of seeing god outside oneself. Maybe the answer is to go around saying: ‘I see god within you.’”

Singh Kaleka directly echoes a passage by the Catholic monk Thomas Merton, a champion of contemplative theology and interfaith dialogue, who wrote: “In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world.” 

“This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud, I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate,” Merton continued. “As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

But that is exactly what Singh Kaleka and Michaelis are doing. Walking (and driving) around telling people they are shining like the sun.

‘It Works’

Michaelis says he recently saw this concept in action. The results were astounding. In “White Right: Meeting the Enemy,” a documentary currently streaming on Netflix, journalist Deeyah Khan, a woman of Punjabi and Pashtun decent, sits down with white supremacists. She walks away filled with hope, and some of them come away completely disarmed by the one-on-one connection they have forged with someone they thought they hated. 

“She just eviscerates every single person with compassion,”  Michaelis says. “This is a ‘brown, lefty woman’ and she does it, with them, and it works.”

Both Michaelis and Singh Kaleka say it’s important to only work to bring down ideologies, never the people who currently hold them. Vengeance on a neo-Nazi will not prompt the neo-Nazi to give up his beliefs. But kindness, well, it just might, they believe. 

“In Milwaukee, in the worst neighborhoods, you’ll see every lamppost with teddy bears there for someone who died,” explains Michaelis. “If you want to feel hopeful, in that neighborhood, in a war-torn neighborhood, you just have to go to a block party for peace. It gives you a moment of peace. Then a full day. Then a full month. Then something happens and you have to start all over again.”

But that is the process.

“There is something very spiritual happening within the world,” says Singh Kaleka. “You build and build and build, and then it comes down.”

Then you start all over again. 

And that is why Pardeep Singh Kaleka and Arno Michaelis are giving this interview, while driving to another speaking engagement. Because they know their enemy, and it is not a person, or a type of person. It’s simply an idea that sometimes possesses people. And it can jump from one person to the next. And therefore their work never ends. 

“It is exhausting,” says Singh Kaleka. “But it is purposeful. And a purposeful life perhaps is better than an easy one.”

 “I look at it as an opportunity to walk the talk that I’m talking,” agrees Michaelis. “And to remind people that existence is basically good.”

“We try to meditate on gratitude and work toward happiness,” concluded Singh Kaleka. “We have to.”