"Terror Profiling" and other American rights

”Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters” (Isaiah 55:1)

2010-06-13T09:31:00.006-05:00

The Hebrew and Christian scriptures, as joined together in the Bible of Christians, refer continually to water both as a metaphor and as the physical necessity that has played an enormously important role in the advancement of societies throughout history.

You visit the earth and water it, you greatly enrich it;
          the river of God is full of water;
you provide the people with grain, for so you have prepared it.
Psalm 65:9

Jesus said to her, ‘Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty
again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will
never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them
a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.’
John 4:14

Residents of the Holy Land in Biblical times and in contemporary times contemplate(d) these images of water, both physical and spiritual, with a deep understanding that only those who live in desert lands can appreciate.

A friend, whom I love but with whom I disagree on many (most?) political issues, and I have carried on correspondence for nearly fifty years. He says we are, in the best sense of the words, the classic “liberal” and “conservative.” I think those terms are meaningless, but will accept them for the sake of argument. He recently wrote me an email in which he made the comment,

By changing the image of the Palestinians from helpless victims to successful entrepreneurs the region could soon rival Israel in economic strength. After all, hard work and industry is what built Israel into a vibrant, powerful nation where none existed before 1947.

This analysis of the difference between the Palestinians and the Israelis has nothing to do with “conservatism” or “liberalism.” It is simply wrong.

Without any claim to expertise, either political or scientific, I have a one word partial explanation of the difference between the Palestinian “victims” my friend writes of and the “vibrant, powerful” society he claims Israel to be: WATER. That the control and distribution of water in the West Bank (indeed in the entire Holy Land) is one of the keys to Israel’s ability to subjugate Palestinian culture and society is not a proposition open to discussion. It simply is.

When I was a child (this was around 1955), the custodian of our church in Western Nebraska presented a program of projected slides his son had left in his care when he was home on leave from the Navy. He was stationed on a submarine. Somehow he ended up on shore leave in the new state of Israel—just where, I have no idea.

My memory of the presentation is spotty (I remember the custodian, and I remember that the presentation was in the church sanctuary with the screen in front of the pulpit). The image I remember from the slides is of orange groves with water running in irrigation channels between the trees. I remember the custodian marveling aloud at the industry of the citizens of the new country that they had already managed to begin to make the desert bloom in the eight years since 1947.

There are at least two problems with both the presentation as our custodian made it and my memory of it. The first problem is that the Israelis had not, in fact, made the desert bloom in a short eight years. That happened before Israel was made a state. The first Jewish orange groves in Palestine date from 1870, planted in the vicinity of Mikveh Israel, a Jewish agricultural school near Tel Aviv (1). The school was important to the Jewish immigrants to Palestine during and after the holocaust (2). According to “Years of Citrus in Israel,” by the time of World War I, Palestine had “7500 acres of orchards, 2500 of which were owned by Jews.” After World War I, “[b]etween 1926 and 1936, the Jewish population had planted 35,000 acres of orchards.”

The citrus industry continued its growth after the founding of Israel until after the 1967 War. “Production reached 1.7 million pieces of fruit, out of which 1 million were marketed under the brand name Jaffa” ("Years of Citrus"). This growth of the Israeli citrus industry was made possible by one commodity: WATER. It is emblematic of all agriculture in Israel.

The second problem with our custodian’s presentation was that it avoided the most important implication of the industry of the Israeli farmers: the ownership of the water of the Palestinian Territories is one of Israel’s most powerful tools for maintaining control/occupation of the Territories. According to Harald Frederiksen,

The objective of Zionist and subsequent Israeli actions over the past 90 years has not been in response to any evolving water shortage that arose before or after the creation of the Israel. It has been a strategy, confirmed in Israeli documents, to garner control of the water resources of Palestine and some of those belonging to neighboring riparians as a means to attain a quite different goal: ownership of all of Palestine (3).

Garnering control of the water resources of the region has insured the growth of the Israeli agricultural industry, as well as all other industry, and of the building and maintenance of settlements in the Occupied Territories to expand control of the land.

Apparently even the 1967 War of expansion had as one of its main goals the control of the most important aquifer in the Palestinian Territories:

Menachem Begin and others later confirmed that the 1967 war was launched not because of Egypt, but as a cover to occupy the Golan Heights, and the rest of Palestine. . . .Israel promptly nationalized the water resources of the Occupied Territories in order to control all West Bank uses (4).

Israeli settlers continue to arrive in the Occupied Territories, taking more and more of the land on which the Palestinians’ hope for a homeland rests. The shrinking land of the Palestinian people is remarkable in many ways. It was, according to the Biblical record, the “land of milk and honey.” It is, today, a land parched and unable to sustain the people left on it. The situation cannot change until a political solution to the plight of the Palestinians is reached because the “water issue in the West Bank is complicated, in part due to the political situation, as the aquifers are controlled by Israel” (5).

This political situation was part of the earliest plan of the Zionist settlement in Palestine. The control of the aquifers of the region of the British Mandate of Palestine was their goal from the beginning, their goal of claiming the right to the land because they were the ones who built a “vibrant, powerful nation where none existed.”

Without access to water, there would be no large-scale agriculture and thus no economic basis for absorbing the world's Jews in Palestine. And without settlement, the Jews would have no hope of changing the demographic balance in Palestine in their favour and hence laying the basis for a claim to sovereignty over Palestine. Water therefore was not regarded merely as another economic resource, but rather as an important vehicle for creating a new Jewish society based on kibbutzim and other forms of communal agricultural settlements. The selection of one water project over the other was not determined by economic utility, but rather on the basis of its fitting within the overall ideological worldview of the Zionists. In keeping with this view, irrigating the deserts of southern Palestine also became a national goal as part of the overall Zionist ethos of `making the desert bloom' and thus strengthening Jewish claims to Palestine on the basis of the fact that it was the Jews who were developing the country (6).
__________
(1) http://www.jaffa.co.il/main.asp?id=62 history – “Years of Citrus in Israel”
(2) See the story of the Netzer Family in: Ofer, Dalia. "The march of
     memory: survivors and relatives in the footsteps of the Kladovo-
     Sabac refugees." Israel Studies 12.3 (2007): 134+
In addition, the importance of Mikveh Israel can hardly be overstated:

The creation of the State was made possible by the founding of Mikveh Israel. If Mikveh Israel had not been founded, I doubt that the State of Israel could have come into being. Everything started at that time; we came only to extend the work in its political and national aspects.

Interview quoted in: Paz, Moria. "A non-territorial ethnic network and the making of human rights law: the case of the Alliance Israelite Universelle." Interdisciplinary Journal of Human Rights Law 4.1 (2009): 1+ (146). Quoted in Silberman, Paul. An Investigation of the Schools Operated by the Alliance Israelite Universelle from 1862-1940 (PhD dissertation) (1973).
(3) Frederiksen, Harald D. "The world water crisis and international security." Middle East Policy 16.4      (2009): 76+.
(4) Fredericksen, op. cit. "I know how at least 80 percent of all ..." quoted in "Aggression, Expansion and       Israel's Terriorism, Part II." Found at
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/7891/index_zion2.html
(5) Nazer, Dima W., et al. “Optimizing irrigation water use in the West Bank, Palestine.” Agricultural Water Management 97 (2010) 339–345 (340).
(6) Morag, Nadav. "Water, Geopolitics and State Building: The Case of Israel." Middle Eastern Studies     37.3 (2001): 179.

Thoughts on the Rachel Corrie

2010-06-10T06:50:00.004-05:00

Somewhere I have a picture of myself standing at the altar of an Episcopal Church chapel, not a remarkable chapel except for the gaping hole in the ceiling and the unexploded bomb lying in front of the altar.

The picture was taken in 2003. The hole in the ceiling and the bomb had been part of the chapel since 2000. The bomb had been bequeathed to the church by the Israeli “Defense” Force. The chapel is (or was—I have no way of knowing if it still stands) the place of worship for the staff and the Christian patients at Al Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, a ministry of the Anglican Church. Exactly what the hospital was doing that Israel needed to “defend” itself against is not clear.

The American government might refer to the bomb as “collateral damage,” one of the unpleasant side-effects of war.

The late summer of 2003 was (compared with the situation of the last two years) a relatively peaceful time for the Palestinians of Gaza. Our group stayed in an elegant new hotel. It was built about the same time as the Yasser Arafat International Airport was built with funding from Japan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Germany, and Morocco’s King Hassan II. Our hotel (we were, I think, the only guests) had been built by a Saudi Arabian company in preparation for the influx of tourists Gaza City expected as it reemerged as a major city on the Riviera-like coast of Gaza, a natural tourist destination.

We were lucky to have gained entrance to Gaza. Tourists were unheard of at that time—or since. Our Inter-Faith Peace Builders Delegation was in Palestine/Israel August 5-14, 2003. The Second Intifada was ending. But hostilities were a real possibility. Less than six weeks earlier, the I“D”F had killed four people in Gaza City, including the Hamas leader Amran al-Gul. We were in Bethlehem a scant five weeks after the I“D”F officially withdrew from the city of Jesus’ birth—leaving a force large enough to control the city.

Of images from nine days in Palestine, those of the thirty-six hours we spent in Gaza remain most vivid in my memory. The images are, I am afraid, only that. My notes are stored away, unpacked from moving, so I cannot check facts.

The contrasts in Gaza were riveting. Gaza City itself, though obviously a war zone, seemed to be a city capable of returning to some kind of “normalcy.” Automobiles drove in the street. A building of UN offices was visible from our hotel windows, with the huge letters “UN” painted blue on all sides as if to persuade combatants to avoid it when they were engaged in hostilities. Our guide said Gazans referred to it as the “United Nothing” because it did nothing to enforce its own resolutions.

We played on the beach at Gaza City. We threw a Frisbee with some boys in the sand exactly as any group of kids would do at Santa Monica or Ipanema. Mothers in hijabs and jilbabs watched their children play. Other watchful mothers wore western clothing. For the first time in our trip we relaxed and simply enjoyed the natural beauty of Palestine. Our hosts were over-generous and helpful. That evening we had dinner at a seafood restaurant. We must have had a dozen courses of seafood, mostly varieties we had never eaten before—an astounding feast! After dinner we went to a night club, that is, a large open courtyard (perhaps in a hotel) where a noisy crowd, even families—Christian and Muslim—enjoyed themselves together listening to music and smoking hookas.

And then, suddenly the next day, with preparation by lecture only, we were in the Refugee Camp at Rafah. No American can hear enough lectures to prepare for that reality. Who goes camping for 60 years? The Camp is a honey-comb of houses built with common walls between them and layers on top of layers, built up as new generations of refugees create their own families. We entered the camp by the door of a home that faced the perimeter street, went through the home—a dark space of several rooms virtually bare of anything Americans would think of as necessities—furniture, for example.

We went out the back door and into the street—the narrow walkway between rows of three-storey houses. Without our host, we would immediately have been lost in the maze. A group of kids gathered to stare at these Americans trooping through their city. We did not go far. A camp resident approached us; he wanted us to see his home's kitchen wall that had been destroyed by an I“D”F bomb—his privacy now visible to the guard tower a couple hundred yards away, kitchen utensils still buried in the rubble. I am perplexed by what I remember (rather, do not remember) about the camp. Memory does not last in discomfort. Our host explained to us why raw sewage ran in the streets. Every time the people of the neighborhood managed to get a pump to drain the streets, the Israeli soldiers in the guard tower destroyed it with gunfire.

All of the details of my memory may not be accurate. My affective understanding is absolutely clear. The Refugee Camp was a dehumanizing, uncompromisingly difficult and oppressive habitat for anyone. That it exists at all is an indictment of the world’s supposed beliefs about justice, freedom, and the rights of human beings. That it exists by resolution of the United Nations and by tacit permission from the United States is incomprehensible.

And that the devastation inflicted by the Israelis in January of 2009 must surely have destroyed almost anything that made the camp habitable for human beings is hardly a matter for discussion.

I hear on the news these days defenders of the Israeli blockade of Gaza say that there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Gazans are not starving. Gazans have plenty of the materiel necessary for human existence. That is simply, with no qualification necessary, a lie. The citizens of Rafah did not have the basic requirements for civilized existence in 2003, and their situation has, if anything, worsened since then. The Rafah Refugee Camp is not a war zone, contrary to Israeli propaganda. It is the most densely populated spot on the globe where people live in poverty and a kind of closeness that no American or resident of Tel Aviv would tolerate for one day. That they will use whatever force they can muster to change their situation is surprising only in its lack of resources.

And to Rachel Corrie. To the Rachel Corrie. We stood at the spot where Rachel Corrie had died five months earlier trying to protect the home of a Rafah family—not in the camp, but living in almost the same poverty, and certainly with the same restrictions imposed by the Israelis—from destruction by an Israeli bulldozer. The man whose home Rachel helped save didn’t allow us into his home for fear of reprisals from the I“D”F. We left quickly when Israeli tanks appeared on the periphery of the neighborhood—Palestinians running between us and the tanks for unrequested protection.

Unsurprisingly, the Irish ship, the Rachel Corrie, has been intercepted by the Israeli “Defense” Force as it tried to land somewhere near that beautiful Gaza City beach to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza. Everyone in the world who keeps up with what passes for news knows the context of this interception:

The citizens of the Rafah Refugee Camp must be prevented from any kind of uprising that will threaten the Israeli “liberal democracy.” They must be left with only their desperate poverty, their lives totally bereft of the accoutrement Americans and Israelis are certain make this life worth living. Otherwise, they might interfere with the Israeli goal of an Israel without Palestinians.

The Runway to Nowhere

2009-09-17T08:40:00.018-05:00

2003. A building in the desert. Almost fabulous (as in fable, “a short, comic tale making a moral point about human nature”), planted mirage-like by itself in the barren countryside. Columns and arches in earth colors. I thought the building looked Moroccan or Tunisian (what do I know of architecture?). Of the desert. Cool inside without air conditioning. Expansive, elegant. A slight musty fragrance, perhaps from disuse. Once we were inside, my fervid imagination went to the ridiculous Hollywoodesque places an American's mind might go—a visualization of some scene of a deserted building in the desert in some blockbuster movie, meant to create fear before some great battle. We looked at the sales counter (apparently still being used although no one was there at that moment). A ghostly scene, almost creepy, supernatural. I remember wondering how this was possible. How could we, foreigners, simply drive up to this place, dismount our comfortable air-conditioned bus, walk a few yards in the August heat, and wander into this building without so much as a “by your leave?”

I have rummaged through my computer for pictures I took of the place (they must be on my old computer sitting unused in the corner—a cruelly fitting repository). I have found only two, but many such pictures lurk on the internet. The images are well-known.

Bill Clinton helped dedicate this building in 1998 (he must have approved its construction; how could he not have?). A reminder of historical reality: “….Netanyahu….had to give up something concrete—land, access, jobs, an airport—in return for something far less tangible: the best efforts of the PLO to prevent terrorist attacks….I had to keep reminding Arafat that I was committed to the peace process....” (1) Commitment was not obvious.

The PLO could not have prevented the Israeli terrorist attack that made this building redundant in 2001. It is now, of course, destroyed (2). The Yasser Arafat International Airport in Rafah was built by Japan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Germany and Morocco at a cost of $85,000,000. The Israelis did not destroy the runways in 2001, but rendered them cruelly useless. The PLO was powerless. A couple of days before our dreamlike stroll through the airport, we had seen what was left of the headquarters of the “legitimate representative of the Palestinian people,” a pile of rubble in Ramallah where Yasser Arafat was holed up, barely escaping assassination by the Israelis.

Photos by Harold Knight, 2003

Arafat was unable to control any terrorism—Israeli or Palestinian. How could he when the President of the United States insisted that the violence that destroyed the only airport of the Palestinians was “retaliation for,” not the cause of, more cruel violence?

The question for today is whether or not that runway, even if it were restored, might still be the Runway to Nowhere. Netanyahu is again Prime Minister of Israel and even less likely to “give up something concrete.” That the new United States President is still powerless to do anything other than Israel's bidding, even in the impotent UN, is daily more obvious. The Bill Clinton attitude is apparently one of the concrete realities that Netanyahu will never have to give up.

In 2003 at the far end of the Runway to Nowhere stood the remains of the tower of The Yasser Arafat International Airport. I took a picture of the skeleton of the tower. Perhaps it's there even now. I have no way of knowing. Whether or not the tower still stands, the mangled radar equipment is obviously useless—a fitting symbol of the seemingly ever more useless search for justice for the people the airport was built to serve. A continuation of the cruelly “comic tale making a moral point about human nature.”

The cruelty of the Runway to Nowhere has come full circle.

(1) “ The hard-liners in his [Netanyahu's] coalition knew this and were making it difficult for him to keep moving toward peace by opening the Gaza airport or even letting all the Palestinians from Gaza come back to work in Israel. Psychologically, Netanyahu faced the same challenge Rabin had: Israel had to give up something concrete--land, access, jobs, an airport--in return for something far less tangible: the best efforts of the PLO to prevent terrorist attacks.
I was convinced Netanyahu wanted to do more, and afraid that if he couldn't, Arafat would find it more difficult to keep the lid on violence. To further complicate matters, whenever the peace process slowed, or the Israelis retaliated for a terrorist attack or began another building program in a West Bank settlement, there was likely to be a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israel for its continued violation of UN resolutions, and doing so in a way that suggested what the negotiated settlement should be. The Israelis depended on the United States to veto such measures, which we normally did....I had to keep reminding Arafat that I was committed to the peace process...”
Clinton, Bill. My Life: The Presidential Years, Vol. 2. New York: Vintage, 2005 (372-373).

(2) See the following:
The Telegraph.Co.Uk
By Tim Butcher in Gaza
Published: 12:01AM GMT 14 Dec 2006
"Israelis accused of vandalising airport."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1536933/Israelis-accused-of-vandalising-airport.html

Jerusalem Post
Jan 2, 2009 19:10
"Hamas TV: IAF strikes target Gaza airport; 1 dead, 5 wounded."
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1230733148636&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

Making Sense of the Previous Post

2009-09-08T21:51:00.003-05:00

The following are excerpts from two journal articles with background for understanding the previous post. The "round and round" refers to the "singular acts of discretion that are often undertaken in secret and are thus effectively insulated from public view..."

Zaring, David, and Elena A. Baylis. "Sending the bureaucracy to war." Iowa Law Review 92.4 (May 2007): 1359(70). David Zaring is Assistant Professor, Legal Studies Department, Wharton School of Business.

"Second, these anti-terrorist measures diminish administrative effectiveness by going to extraordinary lengths to privilege agency discretion, thereby reducing agency accountability and, predictably, resulting in increasingly arbitrary and unreviewable agency action. We call this the problem of overdiscretion. It is a maxim of administrative law that the authority delegated to administrative agencies should be paired with safeguards on the abuse of that authority. Accordingly, administrative agencies have traditionally operated publicly and openly and usually pursuant to a tested and established framework of rules. Agency rulemaking is governed by requirements for public notice and comment, while agency adjudication is subject to judicial review or, at a minimum, to supervision by senior executive branch officials. But the administrative initiatives against terror routinely reduce what have traditionally been participatory, reviewable rulemaking or adjudicatory processes to singular acts of discretion that are often undertaken in secret and are thus effectively insulated from public view and from judicial, or even supervisory, review. Furthermore, these measures often place this decision-making authority in the hands of mid-level or even street-level bureaucrats, such as office directors in the Department of the Treasury in the case of the terrorist financing programs, or low-level state employees in the case of the drivers' license programs created by the REAL ID Act. The allocation of discretion to bureaucrats who are all but insulated from oversight has, at least in the case of anti-terrorism regulation, become a license for arbitrariness."

Ward, Ian. "Terrorists and equivocators." Law and Humanities 1.1 (Summer 2007): 111(21). Ian Ward is Professor of Law at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

"This rhetoric, of testament and crusade, is as reckless as it is ignorant and perverse. Slavoj Zizek warns against 'our warriors on terror' seemingly 'ready to wreck their own democratic world' out of a visceral 'hatred for the Muslim other'. He is right. There is little to be gained by situating Islam as an enemy, just as there is little to be gained by constructing fantastical bogey-men. But we continue to do so all the same. Islamophobia has become a hallmark of modern western popular culture, the image of the devious, rapacious, endemically violent Islamic terrorist a staple of our cinematic and literary diet. Where the 'chosen people' were once terrified by the dreaded papist, they are now terrified by the dreaded Islamist. It is a fear, as Edward Said suggests, that has, over the centuries, become 'woven into the fabric' of western cultural 'life'. Here again, our craving for terror, and to be terrified, seems to be unquenchable. We live, as Benjamin Barber has rightly suggested, in an 'empire of fear, possessed of a terror that we have essentially 'conjured' for ourselves. . . .
Ultimately, the presumed, or contested, acuity of the 'clash' of civilisations thesis is less important than the insinuation. There maybe no necessary association between militant jihad and the philosophy or jurisprudence of Islam. It may well be the mutant figment of an orientalist, even racist, political and cultural imagination. But it does not need to be accurate or apposite. What matters, sadly, is that so many are deluded by the supposition. Again, the prophecy fulfils itself. On the one hand, there are plenty of disenchanted and dispossessed young Muslims who are all too easily persuaded into thinking that theology justifies terror. To them, bin Laden's rhetoric 'makes sense', in the same way as Borromeo's Testament impelled young Catholics such as Robert and Thomas Catesby to risk their lives 400 years ago. On the other there is a 'western' populace that appears to be all too ready to embrace the rhetoric of the apocalypse, to suppose that the 'blatant Beast' is abroad once more, to believe that America and its allies have a moral duty, a divine calling even, one which justifies the presence of their crusaders across vast tracts of the Middle East, from Qom to Kabul. The alternative fantasies, as is so often the case, are mutually sustaining. They nurture the terror, and the tragedy."

ROUND AND ROUND SHE GOES

2009-09-08T15:35:00.002-05:00

From 1934 to 1970, in a total of 1,651 broadcasts, Americans loved THE ORIGINAL AMATEUR HOUR.

Ellen Druda describes our reaction to the phenomenon (does America REALLY have talent?) as, “It's fun to see ourselves from this gentler time, when the corniest family and the nuttiest novelty act held our attention and competed equally for viewers' votes” (Druda, Ellen. “The Original Amateur Hour.” Library Journal 131.4 March 1, 2006: 132).

Ted Mack made us believe that all these nice folks could be stars. The contestants were chosen by the spin of a huge wheel. While the wheel was spinning, Ted Mack repeated the words:

ROUND AND ROUND SHE GOES, AND WHERE SHE STOPS NOBODY KNOWS.

We Americans will believe in anything as long as it's either funny or scary enough.

We also have a tendency to believe anything we hear repeated enough times, regardless of the source. We (at least Americans in general, and the entire Congress and executive branch of government) have been lulled into not paying attention to a small cadre of terror-mongers and Muslim-bashers who are in charge of the day to day policy making at the “street level” in our government. Matthew Levitt and Stuart Levey are prime examples although Levitt no longer works directly for the government.

The “round and round” is obvious enough. What makes it scary is that these people are amateurs who have come to positions of incredible power.

Let me demonstrate (this is tedious; ROUND AND ROUND SHE GOES, AND WHERE SHE STOPS NOBODY KNOWS).

In their article, “The U.S. campaign to squeeze terrorists' financing,” in the Journal of International Affairs 62.1 (Fall-Winter 2008), Matthew Levitt and Michael Jacobson report that, “Stuart Levey, undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence at Treasury, emphasized that 'counterterrorism officials place a heavy premium on financial intelligence' in part because 'money trails don't lie.' (Their footnote 2)
(2) Testimony by Stuart Levey, Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, U.S. Dpartment of the Treasury, before the United States House Financial Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, 109th Congress, 2nd Session, 11 July 2006, http://www.treas.gov/press/releases/hp05.htm.
U.S. Department of the Treasury, “Statement of Under Secretary Stuart Levey on the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program,” 23 June 2006, http://www.treas.gov/press/releases/js4334.htm.

Levey begins his testimony by saying, “This is my fifth time appearing before your Committee in the past two years in what has been an ongoing and fruitful discussion of our government's efforts to track and combat terrorist financing. These sessions have advanced our shared mission to undermine terrorist networks and disrupt their vicious objectives. “ Levey's fifth time appearing.

Interestingly enough, Levitt quotes another of these Levey testimonies before Congress as a source in his book, Hamas: Politics, Charity and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad. (Yale University Press, 2006). On page 301, note 49, Levitt cites Levey's testimony before the same committee on May 4, 2005. The citation is, however, more interesting than that.

Levitt also cites: Israeli 2004 report CSS Special Information Bulletin. "IRFAN, A Hamas Front Organization Operating in Canada to Enlist Financial Suuport for Hamas Institutions in the Palestinian Authority-Administered Territories," November 2004. http://www.intelligence.or.il/eng/sib/11_04/irfan.htm

CSS is the Israeli Center for Special Studies. This “information bulletin” is based on a report by the Israel Security Agency. The CSS is a non-governmental agency that is fed information by the Israeli government and issues reports based on the secret information, information that can never be corroborated. The original sources are, of course, “classified” information of the Israeli government to anyone else.

One might well ask here if these articles, books, footnotes, and sources (to say nothing of Levitt and Levey) are connected in any significant way. I'm not sure. But there is definitely a pattern here. One quotes the other and the other quotes the first, and neither of them relies on any information that does not come from a closed coterie of informants, “scholars,” and government operatives. I invite you to read the articles I have referenced for yourself.

However, I want to take this one step farther.
ROUND AND ROUND SHE GOES AND WHERE SHE STOPS NOBODY KNOWS

Sometime after April of 2008, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy published an op-ed piece by Matthew Levitt that was originally published in the CTC Sentinel at West Point. (The CTC Sentinel 1.5 April 2008). The Combating Terrorism Center “is an independent educational and research institution based in the Department of Social Sciences at the United States Military Academy, West Point.” http://www.ctc.usma.edu/sentinel/ Levitt's article, “Al-Qa'ida's Finances: Evidence of Organizational Decline?” is at http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC06.php?CID=1150

Levitt says: “Speaking before congress in February, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Michael McConnell commented that during the previous 12-18 months the intelligence community noticed that “al Qaeda has had difficulty in raising funds and sustaining themselves.” In early April, Undersecretary of the Treasury Stuart Levey echoed the DNI's assessment, adding that the government's efforts to combat terrorist financing “are more integrated than ever before” and have enabled the government to disrupt or deter some sources of al-Qa'ida financing and make “significant progress mapping terrorist networks.” This statement comes from yet another Levey testimony, this one on April 1, 2008 before the Senate Committee on Finance. http://www.treas.gov/press/releases/hp898.htm

WINEP reprints an article in a quasi-governmental (Army) publication by Levitt in which he quotes Sturat Levey (one is tempted to say, “of course”) in support of the Director of Nation Intelligence. Or, one might ask, is the DNI relying on the work of Matthew Levitt and Stuart Levey?

One more go ‘round. From the Israeli newspaper Haaretz:

WASHINGTON - The effort to apply economic pressure on the regime in Tehran through divestment has intensified in the United States. The pressure, which involves divestment on the part of international firms, is being carried out in parallel with continuous efforts at the United Nations Security Council to impose a second round of sanctions against Iran in response to its failure to abide by the world body's call to end uranium enrichment. . . . A senior U.S. Treasury official, Stuart Levey, has recently returned to Washington from a visit to the Middle East, which included a visit to Israel. His team has revealed that in coming months banks and credit companies may decide to freeze their ties with Iran after having been presented with data on the types of activities supported by the Iranian financial transactions. . . . Dr. Matthew Levitt of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who worked on Levey's team at the Treasury, said Sunday that, “If the effort is focused on several dozen corporations, it will be sufficient,” because this is the number of firms invested in Iranian petroleum, the critical area of that country's economy. (Shmuel Rosner. “U.S. campaign calls for major Iran divestment.” Haaretz.com. Tue., March 13, 2007 Adar 23, 5767.) http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/836468.html

Daniel PIPEs' Xenophobic DREAM

2009-09-07T16:20:00.003-05:00

Xenophobia has a long and (dis)reputable history in the United States.

“In short unless the stream of their importation could be turned [away], as you very judiciously propose, they will soon so outnumber us, that all the advantages we have will not in My Opinion be able to preserve our language, and even our Government will become precarious.” (1)

“…and are they not, with the sickness of hope deferred, waiting for our downfall? It is the light of our republican prosperity, gleaming in upon their dark prison house, which is inspiring hope….By fleets and armies they cannot [extinguish our light]. But…a foreign influence acting efficaciously on the councils of a republic, has always been regarded and always proved itself to be among the most fatal to liberty” (2).

“The increased stature, and affluence, and enfranchisement of American Muslims...will present true dangers to American Jews…”(3). “The Palestinians are a miserable people...and they deserve to be…”(4). “All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most.”(5).

Americans have always found reason to fear and hate the “stranger” –from 1753 to 2009, from a Founding Father to the most famous 19th-century Protestant preacher in the country, to a modern-day hate-monger.

Daniel Pipes has, for reasons that have been thoroughly discussed in academic literature, likely become the most outspoken and influential xenophobe in our history. His dream is to crush anyone who speaks Arabic and all Muslims. But the learned discourse about Pipes’s vitriol has made not a dent in the armor the mainstream media and government operatives have wrapped around him. Virtually nothing he says is ever questioned in the media, and judges and other government operatives accept anything he says as “truth.”

A random example from scores I have documented:

According to Daniel Pipes, the central task of the United States is to reinforce moderate Islam as a counterbalance to Islamism. Pipes postulates the central conflict in the GWOT is the one waged between militant and moderate Islam. “While Washington can help in this struggle by providing assistance to the moderates and working to establish reforms in areas locked in a self-defeating bargain with the militants (such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan), the actual battle will be won or lost within the Islamic world itself” (6).

Daniel Pipes is, of course, entitled to his opinion about the “central task of the United States.” I have mine, too (and it has to do with protecting liberties). But Pipes's opinion is part of the evidence in a paper published by the US Army War College. I am not privy to the workings of the US Army War College, but I suggest that an article written by the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, a Senior Intelligence Analyst for the Middle East and North Africa for the Deputy Chief of Staff, and an analyst of West Africa and Islamism—all three stationed at the Headquarters of US Army Europe and Seventh Army, in Heidelberg, Germany—is intended to influence decision-makers.

The US Army War College, in this paper designed to “demystify the radical Islamist threat,” gives the weight of authority to the work of a person so caught up in xenophobia that he dreams that “...there are no Palestinian refugees or land dispossession and [who] has advocated the leveling of Palestinian villages, while also pronouncing, without empirical support, that half of the Muslims residing in the United States 'despise American politics and ethics’” (7).

This Xenophobe led the charge against Debbie Almontaser.

This is not, or should not be, a surprise to anyone because Daniel Pipes has made himself (rich and) famous as the one-man demolition team for all things Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim in America. What is surprising is that none of his vitriolic nonsense has ever been challenged in government or the mainstream media. No, I was not born yesterday. It's not surprising at all.

Those of us in Dallas have a special connection to Daniel Pipes's Xenophobic dream. Pipes is an adjunct scholar at WINEP, where Matthew Levitt is director of the Stein Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence. He also founded the Middle East Quarterly in which Matthew Levitt frequently publishes articles. I have no way of knowing what the personal or professional relationship between Daniel Pipes and Matthew Levitt is. Anyone can plainly see, however, that they are cut from the same Xenophobic mold.

This is not original thinking on my part.

“…Levitt constructed a vast terrorist conspiracy out of paranoid Zionist fantasies trying to explain the refusal of Muslims to acknowledge that it was just to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. In Levitt’s delusions, to which other lesser ranking government officials like Daniel Pipes and Rachel Ehrenfeld contributed, Islamic finance and Islamic charity serve as a many-headed hydra of evil. Through vast numbers of meetings and internal dissemination of documents Levitt and Levey spread Zionist doctrine throughout government bureaucracy until practically every official from Ashcroft down could, on cue, reflexively repeat the whole litany of the sins that Levitt had fabricated about each charity or financial entity that was targeted for demonization” (8).

In Dallas we twice saw the results of Levitt's fantasies (dreams) played out in a courtroom. It could not have happened without the twenty-year unchallenged Xenophobic rantings of Daniel Pipes.

(1) Benjamin Franklin, Letter to Peter Collinson, Philadelphia, May 9th, 1753 (referring to German immigrants)
(2) Lyman Beecher. A Plea for the West Edition 2. New York: Leavitt, Lord & Co. 1835: 54.
(3) STATEMENT OF SENATOR HARKIN. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions
Wednesday, July 23, 2003. http://www.middleeast.org/forum/fb-public/1/1130.shtml
(4) Kelley, Elaine. "Daniel Pipes’ Acrimonious Remarks Embarrass Organizers of Portland Panel on 'Healing Words.'” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (July 2001): 57. Northwest News.
http://www.wrmea.com/archives/july01/0107057.html
(5) Pipes, Daniel. "The Muslims are coming! The Muslims Are Coming!” National Review. November 19, 1990.
(6) Daniel Pipes and Graham Fuller, “Combating the Ideology of Radical Islam,” Special Policy Forum Report, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 10 April 2003. Quoted in:
Harvey, Andrew, Ian Sullivan, and Ralph Groves. “A clash of systems: an analytical framework to demystify the radical Islamist threat.” Parameters 35.3 (Autumn 2005): 72(15).
(7) Pipes, Daniel. “In Muslim America.” National Review, February 21, 2000. Quoted in:
Goodman, Robin Truth. “Terrorist Hunter: Walter Mosley, the urban plot, and the terror war.” Cultural Critique 66 (Spring 2007): 21(37).
(8) Friedmann, Karin. “Conspiracies involve lower officials.” Online Journal. July 30, 2009.
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_4964.shtml

James Madison's "shaking off" of religious tyranny

2009-09-05T20:13:00.002-05:00

An explanation: The verdict in the Holy Land Foundation trial destroyed something in me. The shock was too much. A great mystery to me is how the families and friends of the defendants have managed to carry on since November 24. The community of which Shukri, Mohammad, Ghassan, Mufid, and Abdulrahmen are such an important part have always welcomed me, for which I am more grateful than I can say. But my own community was completely unavailable to me at the time of the conviction. Many Christians of Dallas seemed to be much like the Jewish temple officials in Jesus’ story about the man attacked by thieves. They could not be sullied by touching anyone unclean. It was left to a hated Samaritan to care for him. Through the ordeal of the trial and conviction, I learned a lesson I did not expect – “respectable” people do not associate with friends and families of convicted felons, no matter how unjust the convictions.

For ten months I have been unable to write with this space in mind.

However, this week, I read two items, one from the news and one a "scholarly" article, that have reminded me why I followed the HLF trial in the first place, and came to know and love the defendants and their families and friends. Both pieces stirred up my grief at the injustice that motivates much of the public life of the United States.

James Madison set out the role of religion in American public life in his Memorial and Remonstrance in 1785:

It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage and such only as he believes to be acceptable to him. This duty is precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society. Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governour of the Universe: And if a member of Civil Society, [he must be so only by] a saving of his allegiance to the Universal Sovereign. We maintain therefore that in matters of Religion, no man's right is abridged by the institution of Civil Society and that Religion is wholly exempt from its cognizance.

It is clear. One owes allegiance to God "only as he believes to be acceptable to him." And that allegiance cannot be "abridged by the institution of Civil Society."

The supposedly scholarly article I read begins with this sentence:

Jews and evangelicals have made important strides in understanding each other in recent years. (1) Issues such as America's Christian heritage, (2) the legitimacy of the State of Israel, (3) and the need for evangelical pro-Israeli support in the midst of Israel's struggle for survival have been discussed. (1)

This article purports to be about "religious liberty" as it has been agreed to by Jews and Evangelical Christians at the Air Force Academy in Colorado. In actuality it is a propaganda piece for two ideas: 1) The United States is a “Christian nation;” and 2) Jews and Evangelicals, because they are both dedicated—for their own and conflicting reasons—to the survival of the State of Israel, must work together to maintain the preeminence of Evangelical Christianity in America.

The other piece I read is about the firing of Debbie Almontaser as the principal of the Kalil Gibran International Academy in New York. The Academy was founded as an Arabic-language public school. Daniel Pipes and his minions stirred up a controversy to get Ms. Almontaster fired. She sued. Two days ago, her lawsuit was thrown out by a judge who said that the Department of Education “had not abridged Almontaser's First Amendment protections in forcing her resignation over idiotic statements made in the course of her job.” (2)

I will write more about Ms. Almontaser’s case in a succeeding post. Suffice it to say that the case turns on her use of the phrase “shaking-off” instead of "uprising" to translate “intifada” (as the Merriam Webster Dictionary does--see my new Blog heading) which Pipes and the American media prefer to further their decades-long character assassination of all Palestinians and Muslims.

The obvious anti-Muslim, anti-Arab undercurrent in both the “scholarly” article and Ms. Almontaser’s case is this: When Evangelical Christians are called to task for practicing their religious indoctrination at the academy where US Air Force officers are trained, they are, with the help of Zionist sympathizers, allowed to dictate what “religious liberty” means. On the other hand, a Muslim Arab-American educator is not allowed even to explain the actual meaning of an Arabic word because it does not please the most rabid defender of Israel in this country.

The underlying injustice of the Holy Land Foundation trial is ubiquitous.

(1) Lillback, Peter A. "Pluralism, postmodernity, and religious liberty: the abiding necessity of free speech and religious convictions in the public square." Journal of Ecumenical Studies 44.1 (Winter 2009): 26-57.
(2) NYDailyNews.com Thursday, September 3rd 2009.

An interim report - RESEARCH on "why"

2008-11-28T17:43:00.004-06:00

The tediousness of research sometimes yields ideas and explanations that simply must be shared. Such a find is a recent article by Dr. Ian S. Lustick, who is the Chair of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. The article is "ABANDONING THE IRON WALL: ISRAEL AND 'THE MIDDLE EASTERN MUCK'." It is in the current issue of MIDDLE EAST POLICY XV.3 (FALL 2008).

This article provides a way of thinking about the background of the Holy Land Foundation trial as part of a broad, desperate and irrational means for Israel to defend itself in a situation which more and more Israelis are coming to understand is untenable. Israel's reaction, however, is not to adopt a rational approach, but to "hunker down" and live in a world of constant violence in order to put off the inevitable. The tragedy for all Americans, especially Muslim Americans and Arab Americans, and most particularly for the leaders of the HLF, is that our government aids and abets the Israeli government in this irrationality rather than insisting that reason prevail. And we have seen this irrationality, and the absolute wrong-headed conviction that it is what it isn't (that is, reasonable) played out in first Judge Fish's court, and then in Judge Solis's court.

Professor Lustick explains the earliest thinking of the Zionist leaders regarding the use of force in the beginning of the takeover of Palestine in the 1940s:

From page 30:
"But day-to-day experience and their own nationalist ideology gave Zionist leaders no reason to expect Muslim Middle Easterners, and especially the inhabitants of Palestine, to greet the building of the Jewish National Home with anything but intransigent and violent opposition. The solution to this predicament was the Iron Wall — the systematic but calibrated use of force to teach Arabs that Israel, the Jewish 'state-on-the-way,' was ineradicable, regardless of whether it was perceived by them to be just. Once force had established Israel’s permanence in Arab and Muslim eyes,negotiations could proceed to achieve a compromise peace based on acceptance of realities rather than rights."

Dr. Lustick goes on to explain that the Zionists never expected the Palestinians to accept the justness of the Jewish state, but their goal was simply to force the Arab world to accept the existence of Israel as a "fact."

From page 32:
"Thus a corollary of the Iron Wall strategy was that Zionism would not demand Arab recognition of the justice of the Zionist project. It would demand only that eventually Arabs would accept the reality and permanence of a Middle East that included Jewish immigration and a Jewish polity. With characteristic eloquence, Foreign Minister Abba Eban put this point very clearly in a speech in1970, identifying the root cause of the continuation of the Arab-Israeli conflict as:

'....the refusal or the inability of Arab intellectual and political leadership so far, to grasp the depth, the passion, the authenticity of Israel’s roots in the region….The crux of the problem is whether, however reluctantly, Arab leadership, intellectual and political, comes to understand the existential character of the Middle East as an area which cannot be exhausted by Arab nationalism alone. There are some governments which in a benevolent spirit, offer to secure the consent of the Arab states to the recognition of our right to exist. It is sometimes my duty to say that we do not ask any recognition of our right to exist, because our right to exist is independent of any recognition of it' (Abba Eban, Speech to Commonwealth Club of California, November 14, 1970).

That is, according to Dr. Lustick, the Israeli position is that the entire problem in the Middle East is the refusal of the "Arab intellectual and political leadership" to understand Israel's right to exist, quite apart from any just or peaceful explanation of it. And so, because the Palestinians will not accept the fact that Israel has the right to exist, the only alternative for the Israelis is to consider the Palestinians as violent, less than civilized people.

From page 34:
A natural feature of this overall outlook is an image of the Arab/Muslim world, and the Palestinians in particular, as irrational, brutal and violent, imbued with intractably anti-Semitic hatreds fortified by deeply anti-Western, Muslim- fundamentalist fanaticism. Against such an enemy deterrence is only barely possible, and only by suppressing the natural human instincts of Israelis. Consider, for example, the work of Efraim Inbar, director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University. Inbar is a much published scholar and commentator on military, political and security affairs who identifies with and has long reflected the thinking of right-of-center politicians, including the once and perhaps future prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Referring to the Palestinians’ “psychotic hatred of Jews,” Inbar has urged an end to Israeli apologies for accidentally killing Palestinian civilians:

'We are confronted by a society that is mesmerized by bloody attacks, relishes the sickening sights of Palestinian militias playing with the severed limbs of dead Israeli soldiers, and savors gory images of maimed Israeli bodies, victims of a bus explosion. Tragically, Palestinian society seems to enjoy even the sight of its own dead. Rather than break away from the psychological mold the Palestinian national movement has propagated so successfully for years it seems to prefer the role of victim. Israel’s apologies only reinforce such a dysfunctional preference….The Palestinians do not deserve any apologies — just condemnation for their outrageous behavior. These repeated apologies are also counterproductive in a strategic sense. Expressing sorrow and extending sympathy projects softness, when what is required is an image of determination to kill our enemies. Only such an image can help Israel acquire a modicum of deterrence against the bestiality on the other side" (Efraim Inbar, “Stop Saying Sorry,” Jerusalem Post, May 30, 2004).

Professor Lustick asserts that this hardening attitude toward the Palestinians has even become standard in the thinking of the "new historians" in Israel who had begun in the 1990s to study and write openly about the realities of the history of Israel rather than the myths. Professor Lustick offers a lengthy quotation from a newspaper interview with Benny Morris.

From page 35:
Benny Morris is the dean of Israel’s“new historians.” He laid the groundwork for widespread recognition of Israeli policies of Arab expulsion in 1948. During the first Intifada, he went to prison for refusing to serve in the army in the occupied territories. More recently, Morris has joined in the despair and fury that marks so much of Israeli public commentary across much of the political spectrum. In a lengthy interview with Ari Shavit, Morris portrayed the Palestinian people as a whole as a “serial killer” and called for them to be treated accordingly:

Morris: The barbarians who want to take our lives. The people the Palestinian society sends to carry out the terrorist attacks, and in some way the Palestinian society itself as well. At the moment, that society is in the state of being a serial killer. It is a very sick society. It should be treated the way we treat individuals who are serial killers…. Something like a cage has to be built for them. I know that sounds terrible. It is really cruel. But there is no choice. There is a wild animal there that has to be locked up in one way or another. . .
Morris: I think there is a clash between civilizations here [as Huntington argues]. I think the West today resembles the Roman Empire of the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries: The barbarians are attacking it, and they may also destroy it.
Shavit: The Muslims are barbarians, then?
Morris: I think the values I mentioned earlier are values of barbarians — the attitude toward democracy, freedom, openness; the attitude toward human life. In that sense they are barbarians. The Arab world as it is today is barbarian….
Shavit: Is it really all that dramatic? Is the West truly in danger?
Morris: Yes. I think that the war between the civilizations is the main characteristic of the twenty-first century. I think President Bush is wrong when he denies the very existence of that war. It’s not only a matter of Bin Laden. This is a struggle against a whole world that espouses different values. And we are on the front line. Exactly like the Crusaders, we are the vulnerable branch of Europe in this place (Ari Shavit, “Survival of the Fittest? An Interview with Benny Morris,” Haaretz, January 16, 2004).

Professor Lustick argues that the movement from a Zionist rationale for violence as a method of "teaching a lesson" that Israel exists and will not be moved has become virtually violence for its own sake as a means of punishing the "barbarians." He says that Israel's use of violence since the First Intifada has been a desperate escalation of fear and isolation.

As I have stressed, Zionism’s use of violence against Arabs was traditionally conceived as a pedagogical device to convince Arabs of the Jewish National Home’s indestructibility, and then to persuade some among them to negotiate mutually acceptable deals based on the alternative of suffering painful defeats. It is natural, then, that, as images of a future in which Arabs and Muslims can come to accept the Jewish state fade from Israeli consciousness, the rationale for violence also changes. Instead of being conceived as a persuasive instrument in service of political or diplomatic aims, force against Arabs and Muslims is increasingly treated as a kind of rattonade. This was the term used to characterize the French practice in Algeria [in the 1950s when the Algerians fought for their independence] of entering casbahs and other Muslim quarters, killing inhabitants, and then quickly returning to European areas or bases. Its literal meaning is “rat hunt.” More generally, it refers to a violent strike against the enemy “on the other side of the wall” for purposes of punishment, destruction and psychological release. While Sharon and other Israeli military leaders in the 1970s and 1980s made the slogan sbang ve’gomarnu (“smash and we’re done”) popular, and while . . . many Israeli military operations can be understood as at least in part motivated by the desire to satisfy psychological or domestic political requirements, Israel’s long-term strategy for moving Arab-Israeli relations closer to peace by the use of force has never been more conspicuous by its absence than in the years since 2000. . . . Of course, the most regular expressions of this (strategically) nonrational use of Israel’s coercive capacity are Israeli policies: targeted assassinations of Palestinian leaders, entry into Palestinian zones by Israeli intelligence agents and reconnaissance units to capture or kill particular individuals, missile attacks, bombing raids and temporary, but devastating search-and destroy ground incursions. Even during the Oslo period, the irrationality of conducting strikes that destroyed the credibility and efficacy of Palestinian leaders while demanding more effective governance by the Palestinian Authority never became important, let alone decisive, in Israeli political discourse. Today, moral or strictly“professional” military criticism of particularly cruel or “disproportionate” raids in Gaza, the West Bank, or Lebanon can still be heard. However, specific evaluation of these measures based on their political rationality — i.e., the likelihood that they might enhance or undermine chances for progress toward a peace settlement — is almost entirely absent.

A Thanksgiving Greeting to John Ashcroft, Judge Fish, Judge Solis, and Persecutor Jacks

2008-11-27T10:20:00.002-06:00

GRATEFUL TO LIVE IN A COUNTRY WHERE

BANKERS WHO RAPE OUR ENTIRE ECONOMY

RECEIVE 100'S OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN THANKS

WHILE HUMANITARIANS WHO FEED STARVING CHILDREN

ARE SENT TO JAIL

I WISH MR. ASHCROFT, THE JUDGES,

AND THE ENTIRE PERSECUTION TEAM

A BLESSED THANKSGIVING, FILLED WITH JOY
AND FREEDOM OF CONSCIENCE.

This is my blog and I can be as bitter as I want to be.
Grief makes one do strange things, I'm sure,
except for the noble friends and families of the defendants
whose faith in right and justice is greater than mine,
and whose spiritual grace would never allow them to be this unkind.

An Open Letter to my fellow Christians

2008-11-25T09:12:00.001-06:00

My assumption is (I know making assumptions is dangerous) that most of my friends think I'm a Cassandra ("Or am I prophet of lies, a babbler from door to door?" Cassandra. Aeschylus, Agamemnon, line 1194).

Be that as it may, I am mystified, startled, dumbfounded and constantly---day by day---grieved by my friends' reactions to my friendship with and support of the Palestinian-American and Muslim communities of North Texas.

On the day after yet another political trial in America, a trial which violated the basic premises of our historical jurisprudence, I pray that somehow, some day our nation may once again be a beacon of liberty and justice for all. The conviction of my friends Shukri Abu-Baker, Mohammad El-Mazein, Ghassan Elashi, Mufid Abdulqader, and Abdulrahmen Odeh on charges of an alleged conspiracy to provide material support to Hamas---and their absurd immediate imprisonment---will some day be seen as exactly the same kind of bigotry and terrorism against a minority in America as the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

Americans, by and large, are so hoodwinked by the terrorism industry that has our government in a stranglehold that truth cannot emerge from its dicta. That is especially so when the truth that struggles to emerge concerns the Palestinian people. Americans believe there is a terrorist behind every bush in Israel. Americans believe that the Palestinian people terrorize the Israeli people (without, of course, pausing to ask themselves how a people who have been ethnically cleansed from all but about 10% of their land, who have no effective government or armed forces, who live in cities with 60% unemployment, whose farmland has been confiscated, and who are packed together in enclaves without sufficient water or electricity or gasoline or food can possibly be a threat to anyone). Americans are simply brainwashed to believe that what is not true is true. And the prosecution in the HLF case made sure that the jury abandoned all ability to think through twisted evidence to find the truth. I will be glad to sit with you and explain exactly how that is true, or you may wait until the appeals court throws the case out.

You will, I assume, say that I am once again railing about my obsession. But consider this one tidbit of fact that I pull from the infinite number I could quote. Speaking about his book, The Bin Ladens (Penguin, 2007), Steve Coll reports that, "Mohamed Bin Laden [Osama bin Laden's father] bought a house in East Jerusalem during the early to mid-1960s, while he was supervising a renovation project at the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem's Old City. The property was in territory overwhelmed by Israeli forces in the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war; the house was ultimately taken over by Israel's land authority. Mohamed died in September 1967 and the family never reclaimed the property. In a legal sense, at least, although they are not native to Palestine, the Bin Ladens actually are part of Palestine's displaced population." Do you really think the status of the Palestinian people is just "another one of those world problems?"

Americans, blithely and remarkably ignorant of their own self interest, believe what our government says about "terrorism," without having a clue (or caring to understand) about the background of our diminishing place in the world. And Americans refuse to understand the importance of the Palestinian struggle for existence. As long as Americans believe that Israel's interests are our interests and that the Palestinians, the VICTIMS of sixty years of Holocaust-like destruction of their persons and their society, are the PERPETRATORS of the violence in the area, we will never have peace in Iraq or Afghanistan, or with the Iranians, or in any other part of the world where people feel themselves religiously or ethnically related to the Palestinians. This is, of course, true even aside from the moral issues of our unthinking support of Israel.

I challenge you to read the following excerpts from the monograph "The Ethics of Belief" of 1877 by the English philosopher and mathematician William K. Clifford (1845-79), and as you read, think about where your beliefs about the Palestinians, the Israelis, and terrorism in general came from. Do you believe for worthy or unworthy reasons? Are you helping our entire society to suffer “…from the maintenance and support of false beliefs and the fatally wrong actions which they lead to…?”

Yours in hope,
Harold

No real belief, however trifling and fragmentary it may seem, is ever truly insignificant; it prepares us to receive more of its like, confirms those which resembled it before, and weakens others; and so gradually it lays a stealthy train in our inmost thoughts, which may some day explode into overt action, and leave its stamp upon our character for ever. . . .
And no one [person's] belief is in any case a private matter which concerns [himself or herself] alone. Our lives are guided by that general conception of the course of things which has been created by society for social purposes. Our words, our phrases, our forms and processes and modes of thought, are common property, fashioned and perfected from age to age. . . .
Into this, for good or ill, is woven every belief of every [person] who has speech of [his or her] fellows. An awful privilege, and an awful responsibility, that we should help to create the world in which posterity will live. . . .
It is not only the leader of men, statesmen, philosopher, or poet, that owes this bounden duty to mankind. Every rustic who delivers in the village alehouse his slow, infrequent sentences, may help to kill or keep alive the fatal superstitions which clog his race. Every hard-worked wife of an artisan may transmit to her children beliefs which shall knit society together, or rend it in pieces. No simplicity of mind, no obscurity of station, can escape the universal duty of questioning all that we believe. . . .
And, as in other such cases, it is not the risk only which has to be considered; for a bad action is always bad at the time when it is done, no matter what happens afterwards. Every time we let ourselves believe for unworthy reasons, we weaken our powers of self-control, of doubting, of judicially and fairly weighing evidence. We all suffer severely enough from the maintenance and support of false beliefs and the fatally wrong actions which they lead to, and the evil born when one such belief is entertained is great and wide. (William K. Clifford, 1877)

Holy Land Foundation VERDICT: to "say true" does not "make true"

2008-11-24T17:18:00.001-06:00

Are the Daughters of Zion rejoic[ing] greatly? (Zechariah 9:9)

They might well be. The guilty verdicts in the Holy Land Foundation trial are a gift for the daughters of Zion. But the jury's saying their decision is true (verdict comes from Old French, ver - "true," plus dire - "to say") does not make it true.

We Americans have now stooped so low as to condemn American citizens for seeking to give food to the hungry, to provide something to drink for the thirsty, to welcome the stranger, to give clothing to the naked, to provide care for the sick, and to minister to those in prison.

Purely at the behest of the State of Israel, we have condemned these good men and the tens of thousands of Muslim Americans who gave their resources to provide for their sisters and brothers in Palestine.

The State of Israel was founded in violence, established in ethnic cleansing, and in terror and occupation has nearly completed its obliteration of any hope for a homeland for the Palestinian people, and the United States "justice" system operates as an arm of that regime of terror. Yes, I might as well go completely over the top and say what I think: mene, mene, tekel, parsin. America will be "weighed on the scales and found wanting." (Daniel 5)

Ah, you destroyer, who yourself have not been destroyed;
you treacherous one, with whom no one has dealt treacherously!
When you have ceased to destroy, you will be destroyed;
and when you have stopped dealing treacherously,
you will be dealt with treacherously. . . .
Listen! the valiant cry in the streets;
the envoys of peace weep bitterly. (Isaiah 33)
.

The Holy Land Foundation (re)trial: the prosecution's narrative of HATE.

2008-11-13T08:21:00.001-06:00

Mr. Jim Jacks, Assistant District Attorney for the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas—not surprisingly—epitomizes those who accept without question the American narrative regarding the founding, buttressing, and expansion of the “Jewish” State of Israel. This well-known narrative (or is it well-known? how many Americans understand that this is not a “religious” or “cultural” struggle that has lasted for centuries?) begins with Jacob Herzl in the 1890s, agitating for a Jewish state—meeting with the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, holding the first international Zionist Congresses, and establishing ties with governments as disparate as Great Britain, Egypt, and Russia.

The narrative will reach its climax with the expansion of the “Jewish” State of Israel to encompass the entire area from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, from the Golan Heights to the Sinai. And perhaps even farther in any given direction. Israel will include what its Jewish citizens refer to as “Judea and Samaria,” what all other nations know are the Occupied Palestinian Territories of the West Bank.

This narrative has been conflated in the American consciousness with the narrative “fear of terrorism.” The two narratives are conflated for the purpose of making an (absurd) association in Americans’ minds between a perceived threat to the final solution of Israel’s expansionism and the (amorphous) “terrorism” threat to American society. This combined narrative is kept alive by the American “terrorism industry” (1).

Professor Mueller asserts that the first and most important membership of the “terrorism industry” are the Bureaucrats. In his closing argument of the Holy Land Foundation (re)Trial, Mr. Jacks proved beyond reasonable doubt that he is part of the “terrorism industry.” Indeed, Mr. Jacks is the consummate bureaucrat. Agents Burns and Miranda are also effective and valuable members of the same “terrorism” bureaucracy.

In his closing argument in the Holy Land Foundation (re)trial, his voice dripping with disdain, Mr. Jacks told the jury, “We have heard over and over again—all we’ve heard about—is the ‘Occupation.’” He then recited his worn out litany of the “terrorist” activities of Hamas, and, by extension, of all Palestinians whether in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Gaza, Dallas, or Richardson. Chief of these are, of course, “suicide bombings.” Mr. Jacks asked the jury if this meant two or three bombings, reminding the jurors of the bogus American narrative that Hamas carries out a suicide bombing every day.

(Here is a meaningless statistic— meaningless because the death of any civilian is an atrocity. However, the Israeli Defense Force website itself contravenes Mr. Jacks’ attempt to harness this narrative—it lists 167 suicide bombings since 1993—the year of the first such attack in Israel. That’s an average of 11.83 per year, but almost half of those were perpetrated during the two to three years of the Second Intifada. I do not need or intend to get into a statistics battle here; all of the statistics anyone needs to support her or his particular narrative are at http://www.ifamericansknew.org/ )

As part of the Terrorism Industry, Mr. Jacks can do nothing other than to conflate narratives, one on top of the other in order to obscure every thread of information that might lead to Truth. Mr. Jacks, Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush, Rahm Emmanuel—even Barak Obama—or any other person in authority can try all they want (and succeed with the American people, perhaps including jurors, as the great American Tragedy of our time) to make obscurity into truth. But this conflation of narratives makes “terrorists” of those who resist the obliteration of their culture (to say nothing of their families) and rewards the oppressor with protection, investment, and permission to expand its state by destroying others. Because of the entrenchment of layers of narrative, all of the rhetorical devices are on the side of tyranny, both Israeli and American.

There is, however, one device that is not rhetorical. Even Mr. Jacks cannot obliterate the truth of one picture—a photograph of the Palestinian hillside across the valley from the Salesian Brothers Cremisan Winery at Beit Jala near Bethlehem, cradled in the hills between Occupied East Jerusalem and the rest of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The winery itself would long since have been taken by Israeli expansionism were it not for its powerful friend in the Vatican City.

Stretched out from Bethlehem as far as the eye can see toward Jericho, arrogantly perched on hilltops for “protection” and for insult, are expansionist Israeli settlements. They were not there five years ago. Neither Mr. Jacks nor anyone else can argue the importance of the Occupation to the Palestinian people. It is not a mere "narrative."

Photo by Harold Knight, June, 2008

Yes, Mr. Jacks, that’s all we need to hear about: The Occupation. Because that’s all there is, and no narrative that you fabricate can excuse it or make it anything other than a monstrous affront to human decency.

______

(1) Mueller, John. “Fear Not: Notes from a Naysayer. Politicians, bureaucrats, and the media all have a vested interest in exaggerating the threat of terrorism—which is exactly what Al Qaeda wants.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 63.2 (Mar/Apr2007): 30-37.

A LITTLE WONDERMENT IS A DANGEROUS THING in the Holy Land Foundation (re)Trial

2008-10-25T09:40:00.000-05:00

Any university professor of writing knows nothing is more absurd than a first-year university student’s attempt to make an “argument” about a subject that she has only just discovered and researched for one evening. With this writing, I am not unlike my students.

A little learning is a dang'rous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again. (1)

A layperson’s reading of legal opinion is a dangerous thing. I don’t have a clue. All I can do is read and wonder. I wonder why courtroom proceedings (in the HLF trial, at any rate) seem to devolve into nonsense. Don’t take my wonderings for anything like knowledge; that would be a dangerous thing.

I wonder why the US District Court of the Northern District of Texas seems to have adopted the rules of evidence of a foreign country.

“Israeli judges and legal scholars [argue] that rules of admissibility [are] conceptually alien to the Israeli legal system: they were devised primarily for juries, to shelter lay fact finders from exposure to unreliable evidence and data that would unfairly bias their decision. Israeli judges [voice] frustration with . . . .rigid admissibility rules that often [force] judges to disregard . . . evidence” (2).

The HLF prosecutors (and the court itself) seem to believe that the Israeli model of admissibility of evidence that might be “unreliable” applies to US trials. Never mind that the Israeli system does not have juries, but has only “professional” judges. Because the Israeli system allows professional judges “exposure to unreliable evidence,” assuming they are capable of sorting it out, the HLF prosecutors think US courts should follow the Israeli example and hope the “lay fact finders” (the jury) can sort out unreliable from reliable evidence. I wonder.

“American judges citing foreign law already bear a considerable burden to prove why the United States. . . . should care or follow what others say or do. . . .it may be useful (and humbling) to pause and wonder why the United States should be different and whether, when standing alone on a legal issue, it is on the proper side of the debate” (3).

It is no wonder to me. The reason our legal system is different is we have a constitution (which Israel, for example, does not) that guarantees certain rights to all citizens (and to foreigners living in the US). Among those rights are trial by a jury of one’s peers, the right to confront witness against oneself, and the right of protection from unlawful search and seizure, that is, the right—as interpreted by the Supreme Court—to be accused of crimes based only on evidence which is gathered by certain inviolable rules.

“The standard of cross-examination required…ultimately seeks to assure the reliability at trial of statements previously made by witnesses. Since that reliability depends on the perception, memory, and veracity of a witness whose credibility may be wholly unknown, effective cross-examination of the witness assures that the evidence may be sufficiently probed” (4).

I wonder why, if the Supreme Court has ruled that “effective cross-examination of the witness assures that the evidence may be sufficiently probed,” a District Court in Texas can allow anonymous witnesses (agents of a foreign government testifying under the government’s claim that their work is “classified” for “security” purposes) to testify since there is no way the defense can “sufficiently probe” their testimony. Of course, I’m not alone in wondering this. And many of us have been wondering about this for a couple of years. It is indeed perplexing (to say nothing of frightening).

And then there is the overarching wonder that evidence and testimony that is imprecise, nuanced, and completely subjective permeates this trial so as to make it, as I have said before, “surreal.”

“Although [translators] describe themselves as ‘neutral mouthpieces,’ ‘invisible,’ or mere ‘bridge[s] of communication,’ they are actually none of these; the act of interpretation invariably alters the meaning of a speaker’s utterance . . . . Despite the high stakes involved, legal scholars and practitioners remain largely unaware of the way interpretation works and of the effect of interpretation on testimony. Instead, they view interpretation merely as a technical issue” (5).

Almost all of the evidence in this trial involves translation. My wonder reaches the point of stupefaction. Am I, lowly professor of rhetoric—that is, merely someone who is interested in words and what they mean and how they are used—the only one who believes that translation is more than trying to make a word in one language equal a word in another? When a German speaker in the middle of a sentence says ja, does she mean yes or Ummm? When my mother said she wanted pop, did she mean she’d like a Coke or was looking for my dad?

“What makes interpretation so difficult is that it is useless to translate words into their literal equivalents because people do not communicate only by the strict denotative meanings of words. Ideally, all interpretation aims to achieve an “integral communication of meaning” that centers on ideas expressed rather than individual words uttered. Specifically, an interpreter. . . . [does] his or her best to preserve the import of the speaker’s words, phrases, colloquial expressions, gestures, and the like” (6).

Matthew Levitt, Agent Burns, Agent Miranda, Bruce Hoffmann, and the Israeli Mystery Guests all rely on translations that may or may not give any real sense of what was actually said or written.

“The U.S. Supreme Court has given legal force to this notion: ‘Language permits an individual both to express a personal identity and membership in a community, and those who share a common language may interact in ways more intimate than those without this bond.’ Of course, some of this misunderstanding is due to bias and ethnic, religious, or racial prejudice of trial participants. Bias on the part of translators may also contribute…” (7).

I wonder.
_____________
(1.) Pope, Alexander. (1688 - 1744) in An Essay on Criticism, 1709. (In Greek mythology, Pieria was the home of Mount Olympus and the seat of worship The Muses. Drinking at the “Pierian Spring” would give one great knowledge and inspiration.
(2.) Blum, Binyamin. “Doctrines without Borders: The ‘New’ Israeli Exclusionary Rule and the Dangers of Legal Transplantation.” Stanford Law Review 60.6 (Apr2008): 2146.
(PhD candidate, Stanford School of Law. The Hebrew University BA, JD, Law. Law Clerk, Supreme Court of Israel, 2003-2004.)
(3.) Blum 2163
(4.) “The Supreme Court, 1969 Term.” Harvard Law Review 84.1 (Nov70): 113.
(5.) Karton, Joshua. “Lost in Translation: International Criminal Tribunals and the Legal Implications of Interpreted Testimony.” Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law 41.1 (Jan2008): 3-4.
(PhD Candidate, University of Cambridge; Columbia University School of Law, Juris Doctor, 2005; Yale University, Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and Humanities, 2001.)
(6.) Karton 26
(7.) Karton 28

ENTER THE FT. DIX FIVE or "gimme a break!"

2008-10-20T16:39:00.002-05:00

With apologies to Shukri, Abdulrahman, Mohammad, Ghassan, and Mufid, I have just come to a startling realization: the main problem with “terrorists” in America is that they are just not very smart.

I mean, if I were going to plan an attack on a US army base to kill American soldiers, I would not—I repeat, I would NOT—take my training film to be transferred to DVD at Circuit City. Dritan Duka, Shain Duka, Eljvir Duka, Mohamad Ibrahim Shnewer, and Serdar Tartar surely should have learned a lesson from the HLF: don’t keep legal records of your "illegal" activities. Don’t file IRS form 990, don’t keep years of credit card and bank statements, and STAY OUT OF CIRCUIT CITY!

There is no way to express in words the dismay and incomprehension any sane American should have that these two trials are happening at the same time. In his essay “Notes from a Naysayer,” John Mueller says, “Perhaps the most common reaction to terrorism is the stoking of fear by members of what might be called the ‘terrorism industry.’” Both the HLF Trial and the Ft. Dix Five Trial are the result of the stoking of fear by the governmental arm of the “terrorism industry.”

Even now, with our economy in meltdown, the government arm of the “terrorism industry” is producing another spectacle, while the media arm of the “terrorism industry” gives it full coverage, framing it exactly as the rest of the “terrorism industry” hopes they will:
guilty of “jihad” until proven innocent.

Dr. Mueller, who is the Woody Hayes Professor of National Security Studies at Ohio State University, where he teaches courses in international relations, makes the point far better than I can. I quote from his article:

....Threat exaggeration is encouraged, even impelled, because terrorism bureaucrats have an incentive to pass along vague and unconfirmed threats to protect themselves from later criticism should another attack occur. And the result, as statistician Bart Kosko points out, is a situation in which “government plays safe by overestimating the terrorist threat....”

This is tidily illustrated by the FBI’s “I think, therefore they are” spookiness when the purported terrorist menace is assessed. In testimony before the Senate Committee on Intelligence in February 2003, FBI head Robert Mueller proclaimed, “The greatest threat is from Al Qaeda cells in the U.S. that we have not yet identified.” [Emphasis added.]

He rather mysteriously judged the threat from those unidentified entities to be “increasing in part because of the heightened publicity…” and he claimed somehow to know that “Al Qaeda maintains the ability and the intent to inflict significant casualties in the U.S. with little warning.”

However, if the bad guys had both the ability and the intent in 2003 and if the threat they had presented was somehow increasing, they had remained remarkably quiet by the time Director Mueller testified before the same committee two years later (2005). Despite that posited ability, intent, and increasing threat; despite continued publicity about terrorism; and despite presumably severe provocation attending the subsequent U.S. invasion of Iraq, no casualties (significant or otherwise) were suffered in any attacks in the United States. Nonetheless, Director Mueller remained unflappable, calmly retreating to his comfortable neo-Cartesian mantra: “I remain very concerned about what we are not seeing,” a profundity this time dutifully rendered in bold type in his published script.

He failed to mention a secret FBI report that in the meantime had noted that after more than three years of intense, well-funded hunting, the agency had been unable to identify a single true Al Qaeda sleeper cell anywhere in the country—rather impressive given the 2002 intelligence estimate that there were as many as 5,000 people “connected” to Al Qaeda loose in the nation. For Mueller, absence of evidence apparently is evidence of existence.

Not to be left behind in the fearmongering sweepstakes, CIA analysts, convinced that Al Qaeda already had a nuclear weapon, responded to the observation that no abandoned nuclear material was found when the terrorist organization was routed in Afghanistan with the artful riposte, “We haven’t found most of the Al Qaeda leadership either, and we know that they exist.” We also know that Mount Rushmore exists; by their logic, that could be taken to suggest the tooth fairy does as well.

Mueller, John. “Fear Not: Notes from a Naysayer. Politicians, bureaucrats, and the media all have a vested interest in exaggerating the threat of terrorism— which is exactly what Al Qaeda wants.” BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS 63.2 (Mar/Apr2007) 30-37.

Facts, Fishing, and Monkey-Business

2008-10-18T05:55:00.009-05:00

Associated Press
updated 9:49 a.m. CT, Fri., Oct. 17, 2008
Monkey photo fails to fool Los Angeles officials
Told to surrender pet, owner tries to make court believe ape is in Mexico

LOS ANGELES - A California man is headed back to court after trying to use a photo of his pet monkey alongside a Mexican newspaper to fool a court commissioner into believing the animal had been sent south of the border. David Grigorian had been ordered to surrender his [monkey] Cheeta because he did not have a permit for the animal…. His proof: a photo of Cheeta beside a recently dated Mexican newspaper…. Grigorian eventually admitted that Cheeta was in downtown Los Angeles. He has agreed to hand Cheeta over to federal officials.

One of the painfully obvious actualities of courtroom drama is that prosecutors are sworn to present ONE version of events—no matter what—even if that version is not the only version (or, worse, is fabricated).

When David Grigorian presented a picture of his monkey reading a Mexican newspaper, he was not fabricating reality. Both the monkey and the newspaper did exist, and they were together. Desperate, Mr. Grigorian tried to convince the court that, because the two were at a given moment side by side, they were both in Mexico.

____

Dawn Goldberg, IRS agent since 1985, testified for the prosecution in the HLF trial on October 16. The government spent tax money to fly her from Cincinnati, where the IRS Tax Exempt Entities office is located, for her fifteen minutes of fame. She was to prove that the HLF conspired with “the Terrorist Marzook.” “The Prosecutor Jonas” showed “the Agent Goldberg” HLF's form 990 (charitable organizations use 990 to report fund-raising) for 1992. The HLF form—filed and a matter of public record—showed a contribution of $210,000 from “the Terrorist Marzook.”
Enter Cheeta the monkey. The Terrorist Marzook, living legally in this country at the time (he filed an income tax return) claimed on his 1040 that he had given $25,000 to the Holy Land Foundation and attached a receipt for $25,000 from the HLF as evidence. The Prosecutor Jonas showed the receipt to The Agent Goldberg and entered it as evidence. The Defence Attorney Theresa Duncan , in cross examination, asked The Agent Goldberg a simple question. “Is the receipt signed?” “No.” “Pass the witness.”

The prosecution's attempt to fool the jury was as desperate as Mr. Grigorian’s attempt to keep his monkey. Everyone there—perhaps except the jury—saw the gallows humor (unfortunately some in the audience snickered). It was a ridiculous performance. Taxpayer money spent to bring The Agent Goldberg to Dallas to present a receipt that would not be acceptable as evidence in any other court in the United States. The Terrorist Marzook may have been less than truthful about his contribution (whatever his reason), but the HLF’s public records show that the HLF had nothing to do with his deception. There is, however, a much more serious—and frightening—aspect to all of this: when fiction becomes fact, no one is safe.

In his article, “A Pragmatic Guide to Qualitative Historical Analysis in the Study of International Relations,” (1) Dr. Cameron G. Theis (Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Missouri) wrote:

In our search for facts we must always remember that their meaning is never objectively obvious—facts never speak for themselves. As Levy (2) states, it is “the conventional wisdom in both history and political science that all empirical observations are filtered through a priori mental frameworks, that all facts are ‘theory laden.’” Levy continues this line of reasoning by recalling an analogy originally made by E. H. Carr….between facts and fish swimming in the ocean. What the fisherman catches depends on chance, the part of the ocean he fishes in, and what kind of tackle he uses, the latter two depending entirely upon what kind of fish he is looking to catch. (3) The moral of the story is that the facts we find are dependent upon the facts we seek based upon our implicit or explicit theoretical orientation.

The “facts” found by the prosecution are blatantly and horrifically the “facts” they seek. From Matthew Levitt’s shameless and unscholarly bias to Agent Burns’s gathering of partial facts and unreliable translations to Agent Miranda’s rhetorical deceptions, the entire case is based on the explicit theoretical orientation, given to the prosecution by Presidents Clinton and Bush at the behest of Israel, that Palestinian Resistance to tyranny is terrorism.

The reality of Israeli domination of the Palestinian people does not figure in the “facts [the prosecutors] seek.” The “facts” they present are “filtered through a priori mental frameworks” of the Zionist project of ethnic cleansing, reported most eloquently by Ariel Sharon’s close friend, Norman Podhoretz:

Sharon…always referred to the territories as Judea and Samaria, never as 'the West Bank' and certainly never as 'occupied.' For how could the very heartland of the biblical land of Israel be considered foreign to the present-day children of Israel? (4)

Mohamed Shorbagi (who lived the first 18 years of his life in Gaza), the former HLF volunteer whose prison sentence has been reduced for his testimony that attempts to connect his perception of the HLF’s activities to support for Hamas, visibly infuriated prosecutor Jacks when he said too much in answer to a question, declaring that Palestinians know the tyranny of the Israeli soldiers in their land every day. He said his son, who was born after his father went to jail and does not know him, has spent time in Gaza. He does not know his father, Shorbagi said, but he knows the tyranny of the occupation.

The prosecution was shaken when facts that were not “filtered through [its] a priori mental frameworks” crept into testimony.

There seemed to be a rip in the newspaper Cheeta was reading.
__________

(1) Theis, Cameron G. “A Pragmatic Guide to Qualitative Historical Analysis in the Study of Internatinal Relations.” International Studies Perspcetives (2002): 3, 353.
(2) Levy, J. S. “Explaining Events and Developing Theories: History, Political Science, and the Analysis of International Relations.” In Bridges and Boundaries, Historians, Political Scientists, and the Study of International Relations, edited by C. Elman and M. F. Elman. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001, p 51.
(3) Carr, E. H. What is History? Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1964.
(4) Podhoretz, Norman. "Bush, Sharon, My Daughter, and Me." Commentary (Apr2005): 119.4, 40.

The illogic of the case against the Holy Land Foundation

2008-10-14T09:03:00.000-05:00

The insidious and vicious little article that this responds to is the one signed (anonymously) by "darrell" found as a response to Jason Trahan's misguided "crime blog" posting at the Dallas Morning News at:
http://crimeblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2008/10/holy-land-case-plays-role-in-d.html

See also my posting on Mr. Trahan's blog of a few passages from “Complex Inequalities: The Case of Muslim Americans After 9/11.,” by Dr. Michelle D. Byng, Temple University, as background for what follows.
_____
My comments on Jason Trahan’s writing and on the purloined piece by “Darrel T” (has he neither the honesty nor the courage to let us know who he is?). Darrel’s piece, by the way is from a website that exists for the sole purpose of smearing CAIR.

1. The use of the word “radical” to describe the Muslim Brotherhood is a “frame” (see passages from Dr. Byng's article) that has no merit. It is a “genetic fallacy” – a conclusion based on an argument that the origins of a person, idea, institute, or theory determine its character. There is much evidence that the Muslim Brotherhood is NOT a “radical” organization.

“Jihadists loathe the Muslim Brotherhood (known in Arabic as al-Ikhwan al-Muslimeen) for rejecting global jihad and embracing democracy. These positions seem to make them moderates, the very thing the United States, short on allies in the Muslim world, seeks. But the Ikhwan also assails U.S. foreign policy, especially Washington's support for Israel…”

From “The Moderate Muslim Brotherhood.” Leiken, Robert S. (Director, Immigration and National Security Programs, Nixon Center) and Brooke, Steven (Research Associate, Nixon Center) Foreign Affairs, Mar/Apr2007, Vol. 86 Issue 2, p107-121. (One could assume, I trust, that scholars from the Nixon center are neither un-American nor dangerous liberals.)

2. Saying that all of the Philadelphia participants are “Hamas members or sympathizers” is the logical fallacy of “Straw Man,” —oversimplifying an opponent’s viewpoint and then attacking the opponent for holding a view that she does not hold. Many people (even non-Muslim, non-Arab Americans; for example, the largely American Jewish “US Campaign to End the Occupation”) sympathize with many of the goals of Hamas—such as the end of the Israeli Occupation of the Palestinian Territories. It is also physically impossible for an American citizen living in the United States to be a “member” of Hamas. Neither the writer of this purloined post nor the FBI defines what, exactly, they mean by “being a member of Hamas.”

3. Lara Burns’s testimony is her opinion and the opinion of the FBI. Most of what she says is the logical fallacy of “begging the claim” wherein the conclusion that needs proof is stated as the thesis of the argument. She interprets conversations that took place (at least partly) in a language that apparently none of the people who have drawn these conclusions understand. Lara Burns has never been to Palestine and does not speak Arabic, and her testimony under oath demonstrates that she has no understanding of the Palestinian-American community—or of the ways in which Americans support all manner of foreign causes (the hundreds of millions of dollars the Jewish community in the United States gives in support of the illegal “settlements” in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, for example; or the Lutheran World Federation support for its hospital in East Jerusalem; or the Episcopal Church support of its hospital in Gaza). Her testimony is, of course, intended to “prove a point” not to disclose TRUTH.

4. “There is a clear reason Omar Ahmad is listed as an ‘unindicted co-conspirator’ in the Holy Land Foundation trial.” Once again—and this is much more egregious—Darrel's scurrilous piece uses the logical fallacy of “begging the claim.” Stating that the “reason” is the “assertion” is clearly not an argument. What is the “clear reason?” Is it that Mr. Ahmad has committed an act of terrorism—or urged anyone else to do so? Is it that Mr. Ahmad opposes US/Israeli policies regarding the occupation of Palestine? Is it that Mr. Ahmad has taken part in the political processes of the United States in order to advance the cause of Islam in America? What is it?

5. And here we have the most problematic logical fallacy in this entire piece, and perhaps the most insidious argument of the Holy Land Foundation trial—even though it has, as far as I know, never been stated precisely. It is the logical fallacy of “the slippery slope.” The writer of this article presents the following statement (presumably by Mr. Ahmad, but without attribution): “This can be achieved by infiltrating the American media outlets, universities and research centers ... if Muslims engage in political activism in America and started to be concerned with Congress and public relations we will have an entry point to use them to pressure Congress and the decision-makers in America.”

Note: John McCain has “infiltrated American media outlets, universities, and research centers.” It would difficult to find an organization that fits this description more closely than “Campus Watch,” a rabid right-wing pro-Israel group that harasses American professors who say anything in favor of the Palestinians. The Log Cabin Republicans “engage in political activism.” The AFL-CIO is “concerned with Congress and public relations.” The ADL and AIPAC exist for the very purpose of “pressur[ing] Congress and the decision-makers in America.” That’s how politics works in this country. For a Muslim organization to become aware that they must engage in the political process is a positive development for American democracy—the inclusion of a marginalized minority in "business as usual" in our country.

Finally, it is absurd to use as proof of some sort of conspiracy Shukri Abu-Baker’s 1993 statement that Hamas “is classified a terrorist (organization). By constitution, by law, if I wanted to adopt its work, they kick me out, they kick me out of this country...” Whatever Mr. Abu-Baker meant, it could not have been that they were doing anything illegal—because they were not! The designation of Hamas as a terrorist organization did not happen until 1995. It is true that many Americans “classified” Hamas as a terrorist organization (no one I know would argue the point). But supporting Hamas, even openly, was not illegal in this country in 1993. It would have been terribly, terribly unwise because of popular opinion against any Palestinian resistance to Israeli ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, BUT IT WAS NOT ILLEGAL. Ask Vanessa Redgrave, for example, how unwise support of the Palestinians was (is). She has been vilified for her support of the Palestinians. As far back as 1982, her performances with the Boston Symphony were cancelled because of pressure from the pro-Israeli community of Boston (she sued the BSO and won, by the way). Shukri Abu-Baker was simply stating the “facts on the ground.”

The proliferation of pseudo-intelligent and pseudo-logical diatribe, posing as discourse, in this country is terrifying. Darrel’s posting is designed (just as is Lara Burns’s testimony is) to prove preconceptions based in bigotry and xenophobia, not to enlighten or search for truth. Americans seem often to forget that the religion that most of us—probably including Darrel—espouse with our lips but not with our hearts tells us that, “You shall know the TRUTH, and the TRUTH will make you free.”

"the TERRORIST Marzook"

2008-10-11T08:49:00.010-05:00

FBI agent Robert Miranda has tried his best to add another defendant to the Holy Land Foundation trial—Mousa Abu Marzook, deputy head of the political wing of the Islamic Resistance Movement. This is no surprise: the preparation for this change in the prosecution has been obvious from the beginning—and for many years before the trial.

As early as 1993, President Bill Clinton was preparing Americans to believe that a deadly force was rampant in the world. The Soviet Union had disintegrated; the threat to American freedom from “godless communism” had disappeared. Americans could breathe easy that the arch-enemy had fallen. Even so, Clinton declared in his 1993 inaugural address that, “the new world is more free (sic) but less stable.” Almost on cue, terrorists, on February 26, 1993, bombed the World Trade Center in New York. Random “terrorist” attacks have continued around the globe.

For example, on February 25, 1994, Zionist terrorist, U.S. citizen Baruch Goldstein, machine-gunned Muslim worshippers at the Abraham Mosque in the Palestinian West Bank city of Hebron, killing 29 people.

On April 19, 1995, Christian terrorist Timothy McVeigh bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City. Terrorist attacks continued in far-flung areas of the world, but there was not another terrorist attack on US soil until September 11, 2001. Since 2001 there has not been another. Terrorists have been operating in other parts of the world, but not in the United States.

In the years 1994-2007 (after President Clinton made his declaration) 512,621 Americans died violently at the hands of automobile and truck drivers. But that's life as usual and not to be noticed—and certainly not to be thought of as highway “terrorism.”

Even without terrorism in the US, in 1995, President Clinton signed an executive order naming The Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) a Specially Designated Global Terrorist organization, and persons associated with The Islamic Resistance Movement as Specially Designated Global Terrorists. * Among them is Mousa Abu Marzook.

In 2001, President George W. Bush, building on President Clinton’s original designations—and on the wishes of a foreign government—named several organizations and persons as Specially Designated Terrorists. Among them was the Holy Land Foundation.
(See my posting here of August 31, 2007, for a discussion of that Executive Order.)

The results of that designation are obvious. Enter FBI agent Robert Miranda.

“The Terrorist Marzook” is Miranda's mantra. The prosecution is building a case based on events that took place years before any of the “designations” above. The prosecution is subtly building a case based on guilt by association (not so subtly to anyone who understands the facts of the case). The defendants had dealings with “The Terrorist Marzook” when he lived legally in the United States, long before he became “The Terrorist Marzook” in the eyes of US Presidents, ergo, long before such dealings had a hint of “illegality.”

“The Terrorist Marzook” is irrelevant to the case. The prosecution counts on constantly harping on the irrelvant to sway the jury to conviction. Every decent American is “Terrified by [the] War on Terror,” as Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in 2007. (1) Agent Miranda means his mantra to convince decent Americans that actions that predate the laws on which the trial is based were illegal. Fear is his best tool.

This fear is irrational (there are rational fears—of rattle snakes, of house fires, of earthquakes, of tornadoes). Americans’ fear of “terrorists” is not rational:

Even with the September 11 attacks included….the number of Americans killed by international terrorism since the late 1960s….is about the same as the number killed over the same period by lightning—or by accident-causing deer or by severe allergic reaction to peanuts. In almost all years, the total number of people worldwide who die at the hands of international terrorists is not much more than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States. (2)

The government’s intention in prompting Agent Miranda’s mantra is simple: to use this trial of American citizens to aid in the Israeli subjugation of the Palestinian people and to help the Israelis make forever impossible the realization of the return to their homeland (or even a portion of it) for the Palestinians.

The intention is to use United States laws to do what the Israeli government has not been able to do—destroy once for all the Palestinian desire for a homeland and self-determination. The legal system has been so corrupted that even US professors of law accept the corruption as fact:

This suit is an example of how using the prosecutors’ tools, that new mission to fight terrorism and prevent the next terrorist attack is being taken seriously by the Justice Department…This is a criminal case. We are governed by laws. The only reason this criminal case could be brought is because the government alleged those laws were violated. (3)

Agent Miranda is convinced he is helping to “prevent the next terrorist attack.” The entire US security apparatus (armed forces, intelligence agencies, homeland seurity) has been so taken over by one point of view that no other interpretation of events can be considered. President Clinton’s declaration was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Every event in the world, every word heard on a FISA wiretap, every meeting of Muslims must be interpreted as conspiring to terrorize. Otherwise justification of much US foreign policy would have to be reconstructed.

This is not to say that no terrorist is a threat to the US. But bundling the Palestinian Resistance Movment together with, for example, Al-Qaeda, is absurd and counter-productive. On August 2, 2006, Phyllis Starkey, a Labour Member of the British Parliament, after one of her several visits to the West Bank said:

I do not believe the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the war in Lebanon and the siege of Gaza are all part of the same struggle. Nor do I think it helpful to bundle together all the varieties of political Islam in the Middle East and treat them as indistinguishable. Life is more complicated and the Middle East cannot be reduced to whether you are ‘for us or against us’, or a war between democracy and the forces of reaction. (4)

It would be remarkable if the US Justice Department or US lawmakers had a modicum of MP Starkey's clarity. One lawmaker apparently had that clarity until his run for the presidency clouded his judgment:

Get on the damn elevator! Fly on the damn plane! Calculate the odds of being harmed by a terrorist! It’s still about as likely as being swept out to sea by a tidal wave . . . . Suck it up, for crying out loud. You’re almost certainly going to be okay. And in the unlikely event you’re not, do you really want to spend your last days cowering behind plastic sheets and duct tape? That’s not a life worth living, is it? (5)

"The Terrorist Marzook" is neither relevant to this trial nor a threat to any American. Period.
_____
* Discussing the reasoning behind President Clinton’s designation should not, by this time, be necessary, but facts need reiteration. 1) The designation came at the request of a foreign government (Israel) and has nothing to do with “terrorism” against the United States. 2) The designation was meant to end the resistance of Palestinians to the Occupation of their land by Israel AND to punish any group or person who jeopardized the implementation of the Oslo Accords. President Clinton chose to overlook the fact that Israel was building “squatterments” all over the West Bank in contravention of those accords as well as against international law. That the squatterment movement was sanctioned at the highest levels of the Israeli government cannot be doubted:

“[Ariel] Sharon… always referred to the territories as Judea and Samaria, never as 'the West Bank' and certainly never as 'occupied.' For how could the very heartland of the biblical land of Israel be considered foreign to the present-day children of Israel? And it was both as a Jew and as a military man that, through the various ministerial offices he held in past governments, Sharon had done so much to increase the number and size of the Jewish settlements in those territories that he became known as the ‘father of the settler movement.’" (6)
(See my posting here of August 28, 2007, for a detailed account of the designation.)

(1) Brzezinski, Zbigniew . “Terrorized by 'War on Terror.' How a Three-Word Mantra Has Undermined America.” Washington Post. Sunday, March 25, 2007; Page B01.
(2) Mueller, John. “Simplicity and Spook: Terrorism and the Dynamics of Threat Exaggeration.”
International Studies Perspectives 6 (2006) 208–234. John Mueller is Professor of Political Science at Ohio State University.
(3) Kahn, Jeffrey. Statement on “Holy Land Trial’s Outcome Carries a Lot of Weight.” Bill Zeeble, KERA reporter on KERA radio, September 23, 2007. Jeffrey Kahn is Assistant Professor of Law, Southern Methodist University.
(4) Starkey, Phyllis. “I could support Blair on Iraq, but not over this.” The Independent Online. Wednesday, 2 August 2006. Phyllis Starkey is Labour MP for Milton Keynes SW.
(5) McCain, John and Marshall Salter. Why Courage Matters: The Way to a Braver Life. New York: Random House (2004): 34.
(6) Quoted in: Podhoretz, Norman. "Bush, Sharon, My Daughter, and Me." Commentary 119.4 (Apr2005): 40.

The Holy Land Foundation (re)Trial. THE PROSECUTION: OUR UNALIENABLE RIGHTS UNDER ATTACK (I pray that my Christian Sisters and Brothers take heed)

2008-09-26T08:20:00.008-05:00

The Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate . . . (concluded below).

I grossly understate the obvious: In the Middle East, just as in the United States, tensions mount from time to time between Christians and Muslims, Christians and Jews, Jews and Muslims.

Atef Shafik is a senior language analyst for the FBI. He is an Egyptian-American, a Coptic Christian. His testimony in the trial concerned the methodology of translating the years of telephone conversations among the defendants and their colleagues and families (he surely knows every time Mr. Baker took his daughter to the doctor and every time Mr. Abdulqader met with Dallas Mayor Laura Miller).

The prosecution tried to bring into Mr. Shafik’s testimony blatantly un-American aspects of his personal prejudices and angry beliefs. They wanted permission to prompt him to say that when a Muslim uses religious phrases in speech—As God wills it; In the name of God, the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful; Peace be Upon You; Praise be to God—he is using code phrases of “Islamism.” Mr. Shafik believes that such religious expressions mean the speaker is fomenting terrorism and ultimately working for the obliteration of Israel (and presumably the United States). The judge disallowed this line of testimony—for now.

However, the prosecution brought into his testimony (inadvertently and largely unnoticed) Mr. Shafik's own impeachment of his own expertise as a witness: that he relies on internet searches and newspapers for the formation of his opinions and his understanding of the defendants’ language. Yes, he said he reads a variety of writings, but apparently he does not have any concept of reseach that stands up under scrutiny through vetting and review. This is particularly outrageous because he is prepared to present un-tested internet-inspired opinions about what Mr. Odeh and Mr. El-Mezain mean when they say, “Peace be upon you.”

Mr. Shafik, the government’s primary linguistic “expert,” grew up in an Arabic-speaking country—Egypt. That does not mean he understands Arabic as Palestinians speak it. (Sidebar: for Americans: do you know what someone from Great Britain means by a “fancy dress party?")

The government’s witnesses (be they Matthew Levitt, Lara Burns, or Mr. Shafik) bring so much personal baggage and so many unfounded opinions to their work that they have no way to be objective or to tell the truth. Their entire purpose is to “prove” their preconceptions, not to discover reality. I am sure they tell their own personal truths, but they make no attempt to ferret out Truths.

Mr. Shafik's proposed bigoted testimony is based, it seems likely, on his experience as part of the Christian minority in Egypt. I have no intention of discussing his experience because I do not, of course, know him. Just as I expect the prosecution to do, I refrain from commenting on something I know nothing about. I do wonder, however, if the Egyptian Christian minority experience can be very different from that of minorities in this country, Muslims for example.

Finding on the internet and in newspapers individual, angry and prejudiced “truths” about the well-known conflicts between Coptic Christians and Muslims in Egypt is easy. To begin to discover truth, one must be willing to research writings that attempt to be even-handed and explore more deeply than the untested private opinions (such as this one) available on the internet. Mr. Shafik (and the prosecutors, if they wished their work to be other than not-so-veiled character assasination) might read some of the voluminous scholarship in the area of Christian-Muslim relations in Egypt. For example:

“Al-Damīr, Human Conscience and Christian–Muslim Relations,” by Oddbjorn Leirvik, published in the journal Islam & Christian-Muslim Relations, Vol. 14, No. 3, July 2003. Dr. Leirvik is a Lutheran theologian and Professor of Interreligious Studies at the Faculty of Theology, University of Oslo.

Or, perhaps:
“The Egyptian Coptic Christians: the conflict between identity and equality,” by Randall Henderson, published in the journal Islam & Christian-Muslim Relations, Vol. 16 Issue 2, April 2005. Dr. Henderson is from Edgewood College, Madison, WI, USA.

Hatred and prejudice spoken in anger by biased witnesses makes for good courtroom drama. That kind of testimony may, of course, sway jurors, many of whom in this case may well be predisposed to fear or hatred of the defendants.

However, this attempt at courtroom drama for the purpose of obscuring the truth ought to be a wake-up call for all Americans who cherish their religious freedom.

The conclusion of the quotation I began at the outset is:

. . . .This right is in its nature an unalienable right. It is unalienable, because the opinions of men, depending only on the evidence contemplated by their own minds cannot follow the dictates of other men: It is unalienable also, because what is here a right towards men, is a duty towards the Creator. It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage and such only as he believes to be acceptable to him. This duty is precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society.

This explanation of Freedom of Religion, of our unalienable right to freedom of conscience, and of the absolute truth that no one can force us to follow the spiritual dictates of any but our own hearts was written by James Madison as part of his successful efforts to prevent the establishment of religion in Virginia (see his “Memorial and Remonstrance”).

Madison's writing became the lynch-pin of American understanding of the absolute Freedom of Religion codified in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Any American, Muslim, Christian, Jew, or any other faith, ought to be terrified and outraged by the attempt of our government, through the offices of the US District Attorney for North Texas, to encroach on our FIRST freedom, the freedom that has made our nation the “gold standard” for liberty of conscience.

The desire to infer from private religious speech some kind of political message would be, as Madison said, a "first experiment on our liberties."

The Holy Land Foundation (re)trial: NOT about a link between the HLF and “terrorists” BUT about the link between the US government and “terrorists”

2008-09-25T07:49:00.004-05:00

“Where there is no vision, the people perish.” Proverbs 29:18

The prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation can be summed up in a burlesque of this oft-quoted Biblical proverb: “Where there is no terrorism, the US administration perishes.”

“Terrorism” is the most direful concept in Americans’ thought. Even the collapse of our capitalist economy may not strike such dread in the hearts of Americans. Economic collapse is easily fixed—the federal government rushes in and, for $700 billion, saves teetering institutions, changing the US to a socialist nation overnight, with the government owning the largest mortgage and insurance companies in the world saving our livelihood. But “terrorism” is not so easily disposed of—as star witness Matthew Levitt set out (again) to prove in the HLF trial.

The intractable problem of “terrorism” persists because the government needs it. Without “terrorism” Americans would never have gone along with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and freedom-loving Americans would never have given a cabal of power-hungry intellectual misfits the authority to pillage our civil rights while transforming our representative democracy into an oligarchy of like-minded demagogues.

In popular mythology “terrorism” became a major issue after 9/11. However, these demagogues were patient and cunning in their long climb to oligarchy. The ascendancy of “terrorism” to its position of power began shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, which necessitated a new “enemy” to replace the Soviet Union. In 1986, Arthur Rovine reported on the annual meeting of the American Bar Association:

President Reagan told ABA lawyers in his speech opening the annual meeting that ‘a confederation of terrorist states run by the strangest collection of misfits, looney tunes and squalid criminals since the advent of the Third Reich’ was ‘trying to expel America from the world.’ Anthony Lewis wrote of the speech in the New York Times, The lawyers laughed and applauded: a shameful sign of the popular mood.’ Is anti-terrorism becoming the McCarthyism of the 1980s? The ugly ‘popular mood’ to which Lewis referred may not be far from that of another era, when McCarthy said of the term he inspired: ‘McCarthyism is Americanism with its sleeves rolled’ (1).

We would do well to understand the roots of the “war on terror.” It was, at the beginning, part of the bizarre neo-conservative “might-makes-right” theory of men who have been floating around in government since even before the administration of the first President Bush. Many of these people were students of Albert Wohlstetter at the University of Chicago or his colleagues at the Rand Corporation.

Uncertainty was the enemy, and the perceived consequences of failure to prepare for all eventualities were apocalyptic in scale . . . [Wohlstetter wrote a] seminal essay “The Delicate Balance of Terror,” which both [Paul] Wolfowitz and [Richard] Perle have cited for its transformative effect on their young minds . . . with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the new enemy was clear . . . the “clash of civilizations” was . . . global theory based on the empirically weak proposition of discrete and oppositional civilizational blocks. This concept gave theoretical panache to the stereotypes of Muslims and Arabs that continued to circulate in the popular culture and imagination . . . The strategic paradigm of knowledge founded by [Wohlstetter] has had a catastrophic success. Its offspring have multiplied, built institutions, purveyed information to the American political machine, and had little effective competition (2).

Students of Wohlstetter have been in the forefront of the “clash of civilizations” philosophy at the heart of the neo-con world view. They include Wolfowitz and Perle, with Daniel Pipes, “Scooter” Libby, Zalmay Khalilzad (current United States Ambassador to the United Nations and the highest ranking Muslim in government), and Ahmad Chalabi (the discredited Iraqi, friend of Wolfowitz, and source of much of the misinformation that led to the Iraq invasion).

Among the activities of these men is the formation and direction of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) of which Matthew Levitt is a “research expert.” That Matthew Levitt’s scholarship is driven by personal belief could hardly be more obvious listening to his testimony—or reading his books. Many people will cry, “Foul! Anti-Semitism!” if anyone points out that his undergraduate education was at Yeshiva University, an academically superb university that is unabashedly Jewish, and, according to its Mission Statement, “…bring[s] wisdom to life by combining the finest, contemporary academic education with the timeless teachings of Torah.”

WINEP boasts that Perle, Wolfowitz, and Pipes are on its Board of Advisors (Perle and Wolfowitz resigned when they became part of the Bush II administration, but their names are still listed as Advisors). But WINEP does not act alone:

Through their overlapping staffs, WINEP is closely associated with the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. The longtime director of the Jaffee Center was Maj. Gen. Aharon Yariv, former Israeli government minister and director of intelligence who died in 1994. Funds for the Jaffee Center were "provided mainly by members of Jewish communities of the United States who have proved aware of and sensitive to the need for such an institution in Israel." According to Jaffee's website, the center conducts research on Israeli national security and aims "to contribute to the public debate and governmental deliberation of issues that are—or should be—at the top of Israel's national security agenda" (3).

Once again the prosecution of American citizens exercising their constitutionally protected freedom of religious expression is linked with the “fatal attraction” between our government and the necessary threat of “terrorism.” Even the US District Court for the Northern District of Ohio at Cleveland has fallen prey to this attraction. “The district court also described Levitt’s methodology as ‘the gold standard in the field of international terrorism’” (4).

So once again the HLF trial begins with the testimony of a so-called “expert” or “scholar” whose entire academic and professional career has been shaped by men who believe that the United States government must pursue “terrorists” on every hand—as a substitute for the “communist threat” that once energized them. The struggle of the Palestinian people for self-determination—and, more importantly, for survival—against the tyranny of occupiers of their homeland becomes the pretext for continuation of the “war on terror.” And American citizens, none of whom has ever committed any act of “terror” or advocated “terrorism” against the United States (or any other nation) are designated as pawns in the “terrorism” game without which “the US administration perishes.”

(1) Rovine, Arthur. “Will anti-terrorism become the McCarthyism of the 1980s?” ABA Journal 72.1 (Jan1986): 36.
(2) Hudson, Leila. “The New Ivory Towers: Think Tanks, Strategic Studies and “Counterrealism.’” Middle East Policy 12.4 (Winter2005): 118-132.
(3) Right Web. http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/1568.html (Accessed 23 Sept 2008).
(4) United States v. Damrah. Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio at Cleveland. Decided and Filed: March 15, 2005.

Is this Eccentric?

2008-09-18T22:50:00.003-05:00

“There’s a bullet out there for each one of us. But you can always die. At least his [the speaker’s son’s] death here would sanctify God’s name. . . [they] will never understand.”

Judging from the prosecution's insistence on beginning the retrial of the Holy Land Foundation within the week after the anniversary of 9/11, and judging from questions the government asked prospective jurors, one can surmise that the government plans to make “terrorism,” and especially the specter of “Palestinian Suicide Bombers” the central ploy of their case. The suicide bombers who believe, or so the American mythology asserts, that their deaths would somehow sanctify God’s name.

In her article “Experts in Terror,” Petra Bartosiewicz reports on a “post-9/11 phenomenon in which self-styled experts service the government’s need for assistance in terrorism cases. These experts furnish law-enforcement agencies, the media and the public with their insights on Muslim extremism, and they have emerged to significantly affect the way the ‘war on terror’ is framed, investigated and prosecuted. . . . these new experts are frequently unabashedly ideological.” (1)

Ms. Bartosiewicz describes a congressional briefing she attended in Washington last December. One of the panelists was Jeffrey Breinholt, the Justice Department official who managed cases in the Counterterrorism Section that prosecutes “material support crimes” (under which the HLF case falls). Breinholt said, “Don’t be mistaken about what happens when Sharia law establishes a foothold in this country… [Muslims] don’t want any part of American law.”

Is this the official position of the prosecutors? That American Muslims “don’t want any part of American law?” Is this what the prosecution is determined to prove to the jury? Is this the kind of unprincipled, unsubstantiated, vicious accusation that will be, if not spoken, at least in the background of the case against five American citizens?

Can there be any hope of a fair trial for the Holy Land Foundation, for Ghassan, Shukri, Abdulrahman, Mohammad, and Mufid?

It might be noted that Mr. Breinholt’s disparagement of civil liberties and his venom is not reserved only for Muslims. He recently wrote an article referring to those who value privacy and civil liberties as “eccentric.” He said, “In thinking about personal security, we should not be bound by Luddite [one who opposes technical or technological change] beliefs. Over time, history exposes them for what they are: eccentric cranks.” (2)

It is, of course, an easy—but absurd—step from Jeffrey Breinholt’s assertion that Muslims “don’t want any part of American law” to the all-out assertion that all Muslims are “terrorists.” The Prosecution will undoubtedly waste no time associating the Holy Land Foundation with the dreaded “suicide bombers” of Hamas—as they tried to do last summer. And that bizarre and nonsensical association will make it easy for them to step over the line of sanity and declare that American citizens “don’t want any part of American law,” and, therefore, the Holy Land Foundation supported terrorism.

If it were not so tragic, if it were not such a plague on our nation, if it were not evil, it might be comic.

The real tragedy, however, is that the prosecutors depend on the likes of Mr. Breinholt to provide them with their ammunition. At least Mr. Breinholt is a college graduate (yes from George W. Bush’s alma mater). Most of the “Experts in Terror” have no credentials except their ability to surf the internet and find every possible mention (documented or not) of any kind of “terrorist” act or any defamation of Islam or any absurd translation from MEMRI or any article by Matthew Levitt that Steve Emerson quotes as proof for some foolish, racist, and xenophobic idea.

Michael Fechter was another of the leaders of the briefing Ms. Bartosiewicz attended. Michael Fechter is perhaps the most outrageous of all of the “experts in terror.” He works for Steve Emerson, who can find a terrorist and a potential suicide bomber behind every tree in Dallas, to say nothing of the West Bank. Ms. Bartosiewicz’s description of the end of that briefing is worth quoting here in full:

After the briefing members of the Holy Land Foundation prosecution team filed up to the podium to greet Michael Fechter… The prosecutors wanted Fechter’s advice on how they might do better next time. Fechter obligingly launched into a quick critique.
“You know Kristina [one of the jurors]—she’s still haunted by the videos,” Fechter told prosecutor Barry Jonas, referring to a series of videos that depicted Palestinian children chanting anti-Israeli slogans and calling for jihad. “OK, that’s good to know,” Jonas said.
The two men chatted about possible jury room malfeasance during the trial, the subject of a story Fechter had just published. Jonas passed along a tip about another juror in the case and urged Fechter to investigate. “We could look into it ourselves, but you can probably do it faster,” Jonas said. “Bureaucracy, you know.” (3)

And so we have a prosecutorial team dedicated to the proposition that American citizens “don’t want any part of American law,” while they, at the same time, are asking for advice about how to “uphold” the law from an “expert” whose qualifications are the ability to surf the internet and the ability to write scurrilous pieces about his fellow American citizens, pieces that often have no basis in fact.

The purpose of the entire charade is to prove that somehow, in some mysterious and malicious way, American citizens are responsible for suicide bombers. And in the process, 99% of the truth about the “terrorism” of which such bombings are a part will be covered over. And, if this fall is a repeat of last summer, agents of the Israeli government will testify for the prosecution to prove that American citizens support suicide bombers—the very government of the woman from the Israeli settlement in the center of the Palestinian city of Hebron who thinks that her son’s dying there would “sanctify God’s name.” (4) Who, one might ask, is the terrorist?

(1) Bartosiewicz, Petra. "Experts in Terror." The Nation. February 4, 2008
(2) Breinholt, Jeffrey A. (US Department of Justice) "Getting Real About Privacy: Eccentric Expectations in the Post-9/11 World." bepress Legal Series, paper 770, 2005
(3) Bartosiewicz.
(4) Israeli settler in Hebron/Khalil quoted by Jeffrey Goldberg, “Among the Settlers: Will they destroy Israel?” The New Yorker (31 May 2004), 48.

THE ILLOGIC OF THE HLF PROSECUTION SUMMED UP IN ONE QUESTION.

2008-09-17T08:06:00.003-05:00

Yesterday during jury selection one prospective juror said “I don't understand why we're trying this case in this country. It should be tried in Israel, shouldn't it?”

“Attempts to disrupt the Middle East peace process through terrorism by groups opposed to peace (sic) have threatened and continue to threaten vital interests of the United States (sic), thus constituting an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security… of the United States . . . I have authorized the Secretary of State to designate additional foreign persons who have committed, or pose a significant risk of committing acts of violence that have the purpose or effect of disrupting the Middle East peace process, or who assist in, sponsor, or provide financial . . . services in support of, such acts of violence. . .” (President Clinton’s Message to the Congress on Terrorists Who Threaten to Disrupt the Middle East Peace Process, Exec. Order No. 12,947, 3 C.F.R. 319, 31&-320, 1996.)

Committing “acts of violence that have the purpose or effect of disrupting the Middle East peace process?”

Some information gleaned from the website If Americans Knew:

At the moment Hamas is holding 1 (that's ONE) Israeli prisoner, and Israel is holding 10,756 Palestinians—that we know of—as prisoners; since 1967, 0 (that's ZERO) Israeli homes have been demolished by Palestinians, while the Israelis have demolished 18,147 Palestinian homes; Israel has 223 "settlements" on confiscated Palestinian land (which both the UN and the World Court have decreed are illegal) while the Palestinians have 0 (that's ZERO) settlements on Israeli land. According to The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, 4,719 Palestinians and 1,044 Israelis have been killed since 2000.
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/

One killing is too many, and to argue a point by counting the dead is macabre, but imbalance is imbalance.

The question is not, after all, why the case is not being tried in Israel. The question is, “Why is the State of Israel not on trial?" Is a religious/charitable organization “disrupting a peace process” by providing aid to a people whose homes are being demolished, whose land is confiscated, whose neighbors are being murdered and imprisoned, and whose lives are daily less tenable? Is it not the perpetrators of this massive violence who are interrupting the peace process?

Our government has succumbed to the narrative that feeding children constitutes an act of war against the United States rather than the narrative that perpetrators of violence on a nation unable to defend itself. Prosecution of benefactors has taken the place of prosecution of state-sponsored terrorism. As Richard Jackson says,

“Discursively reconstructing terrorist attacks as ‘acts of war’ functioned to justify a military-based rather than a criminal justice response, and conferred on the state all the extensive powers reserved for wartime; in effect, the public language worked to thoroughly normalize a military response for society – a ‘war on terrorism’ – and to transform the administration into a ‘war presidency.’” (1)

“War presidencies” are empowered to make irrational decisions for the sake of “security” that have nothing to do with the “facts on the ground.” One irrational decision is declaring resisters to tyranny to be “terrorists.” An even more reprehensible irrationality is declaring that American citizens who give generously to better the lives of the innocent people caught in the middle of this struggle between tyranny and resistance to be an extraordinary threat to the United States..

Israel is the “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security” of the United States. Israel should be on trial, not the American citizens of the Holy Land Foundation.

(1) Jackson, Richard. “Genealogy, Ideology, and Counter-Terrorism: Writing wars on terrorism from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, Jr,” Studies in Language and Capitalism 2 (May 1 2007).

BACKGROUNDER: academic understanding of the Holy Land Foundation prosecution (support for yesterday's posting)

2008-09-15T06:33:00.003-05:00

Preamble: "We will oppose those who would deny us or denigrate our love for and pride in our national traditions, who bear our name but do not belong to our nation, who do not understand our customs, our morality and our faith, who try to convince us that we should not want ourselves any more. We want ourselves and our national traditions with our collective will and sacred blood. We go to battle against parasites and mongrels as to a holy war that God’s holy will demands. The objective power of race breaks through, we understand it, and we place ourselves in its light and at its service..." German Lutheran Pastor Joachim Hossenfelder, 1933, Unser Kampf (Berlin, 1933), p.8 (quoted in Gailus, 463).

Gailus, Manfred.
(Professor of History, Technische Universität Berlin)
"Overwhelmed by their own Fascination with the 'Ideas of 1933: Berlin's Protestant Social Milieu in the Third Reich." German History 20.4 (Dec2002): 462-493. Trans. Pamela Selwyn.
__________

"One of the most important functions of the discourse of ‘Islamic terrorism’ is to construct and maintain national identity, primarily through the articulation of a contrasting, negative ‘other’ who defines the Western ‘self ’ through negation. Given the extent to which the discourse has penetrated the politics and culture of Western societies, it can hardly be doubted that ‘Islamic terrorism’ now functions as a negative ideograph. Directly related to this...the elaboration of an external threat such as that posed by ‘Islamic terrorism’ is crucial to maintaining internal/external, self/other boundaries and the ‘writing’ of national identity. In fact, some have argued that Western identity is dependent on the appropriation of a backward, illiberal, violent Islamic ‘other’ against which the West can organize a collective liberal, civilized ‘self’ and consolidate its cultural and political norms" (page 420).

"Linked to this, the analysis of public discourse by politicians clearly demonstrates that elites in the USA and Britain frequently deploy the discourse of ‘Islamic terrorism’ to legitimize or ‘sell’ a range of international and domestic political projects, including: regime change in states like Afghanistan and Iraq; the expansion of a militarypresence to new regions such as Central Asia; the control of strategic resources like oil; increased military and political support for allies in strategic regions like the Horn of Africa and Central America; increased resources and power for the military establishment; the construction of domestic and international surveillance systems; thecontrol of international institutions and processes; and more broadly, the preservation and extension of a Western-dominated liberal international order. The frequency of narratives of ‘Islamic terrorism’ in contemporary political speeches suggests that, following earlier patterns, 105 the discourse is being used in a deliberative fashion as apolitical technology" (page 422).

Jackson, Richard
(Senior Lecturer in international politics at the Centre for International Politics, the University of Manchester, where he teaches courses in critical terrorism studies, war studies, and security studies; also the convener of the British International Studies Association Working Group, ‘Critical Studies on Terrorism’)
"Constructing Enemies: ‘Islamic Terrorism’ in Political and Academic Discourse." Government and Opposition 42.3 (2007): 394–426.
__________

"The success of these institutions [THINK TANKS] in drowning out the voices of academic Middle East studies has contributed to a culture in which serious inquiry into the real world is pushed aside in favor of fear, imagination and faith. It is a culture in which investigation into the historical background of the crimes of September 11, 2001, is systematically avoided. It is the culture in which the Iraq War was justified by a series of lies and forgeries. It is the culture in which intelligence professionals from Coleen Rowley to Valerie Plame are sidelined, in which torture is seen as a defensible and logical means of intelligence gathering. It is a culture in which academic researchers are silenced in the name of free speech. It is a culture in which the mainstream media have forsaken their constitutional role of checking government. It is a culture of looming logical inconsistencies in which the public is assured by the chattering elites that no price is too high to pay for the illusion of Iraqi freedom, while no American political freedom is too dear to be sacrificed to the illusion of homeland security.

The strategic paradigm of knowledge founded by [the Rand Corporation] has had a catastrophic success. Its offspring have multiplied, built institutions, purveyed information to the American political machine, and had little effective competition. The erstwhile members of the Project for the New American Century quietly form and implement their policies in the shadowy, oblique, informal bases of the Bush administration’s Office of the Vice President, the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, the Defense Policy Advisory Board and the American Enterprise Institute’s Wohlstetter Conference Room. They got their improbable and shocking war in Iraq."

Hudson, Leila.
(Asst. Prof., Near Eastern Studies, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, University of Arizona)
"The New Ivory Towers: Think Tanks, Strategic Studies and 'Counterrealism.'" Middle East Policy XII.4 (Winter2005): 118-132.
__________

"Politicians, bureaucrats, and the media all have a vested interest in exaggerating the threat of terrorism— which is exactly what Al Qaeda wants."

"Politicians are the terrorism industry’s lead players. Unwilling to be seen as soft on terrorism, they engage in a process of outbidding, which has the effect of enhancing fears. In addition, the industry includes risk entrepreneurs, pork-barrelers, and bureaucrats, as well as most of the media. They all have an incentive to exaggerate the risk terrorism presents and to find extreme and alarmist possibilities much more appealing than discussions of broader context, much less of statistical reality.This is tidily illustrated by the FBI’s “I think, therefore they are” spookiness when the purported terrorist menace is assessed. In testimony before the Senate Committee on Intelligence in February 2003, FBI head Robert Mueller proclaimed, “The greatest threat is from Al Qaeda cells in the U.S. that we have not yet identified.” He rather mysteriously judged the threat from those unidentified entities to be “increasing in part because of the heightened publicity” surrounding such episodes as the 2002 Beltway sniper shootings and the anthrax letter attacks of 2001, and he claimed somehow to know that “Al Qaeda maintains the ability and the intent to inflict significant casualties in the U.S. with little warning.” He failed to mention a secret FBI report that in the meantime had noted that after more than three years of intense, well-funded hunting, the agency had been unable to identify a single true Al Qaeda sleeper cell anywhere in the country—rather impressive given the 2002 intelligence estimate that there were as many as 5,000 people “connected” to Al Qaeda loose in the nation. For Mueller, absence of evidence apparently is evidence of existence."

Mueller, John.
(John Mueller holds the Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies at Ohio State University, where he teaches courses in international relations)
"Fear Not: Notes from a Naysayer." Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 63.2 (Mar/Apr2007): 30-37

A dangerous post

2008-09-14T06:55:00.006-05:00

The following is a very dangerous and foolish post. I wrote it in a completely different context. PLEASE, if you read this, keep two things in mind:

A. I am not likening anyone to the Nazis. “Nazism” and “fascism” have specific definitions that many people (including President Bush) ignore as they throw the words around without care and without, apparently, understanding the meanings. I am not likening anyone to Hitler. I do not believe such a comparison with anyone is valid, and if I did I would be EXTREMELY careful how I wrote about it.
B. While this is an indictment of my own religious institutions, I do not necessarily mean to single the church out from any other institution (religious or otherwise) in this country. All institutions in this country are guilty.

For this posting, an item number 16 belongs at the end; it would read: The prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation is possible only because of the Islamophobia I describe here.

1) The threat of "terrorism" in this country is so highly overstated that the exaggeration would be laughable if it were not a cancer destroying our nation from within.
2) The purpose of the exaggeration of the threat of terrorism is to keep the American people in a state of fear.
3) The (conscious and deliberate, not accidental) purpose of that fear is to make the American people willing to do anything to be "secure."
4) Living in that fear, the American people acquiesce in trusting the government and allowing the powerful elite to make decisions that are monolithic, tyrannical, and of benefit only to those who are in power—even though those decisions have the appearance of making the people "safe."
5) In order maintain that fear, the powerful elite must be able to point to an enemy that is the source of the evil that the people must fear in order to be brought to submission to the power elite.
6) There are two enemies that must be feared and/or hated: "illegal aliens" and so-called "Islamofascists" (so called by the President and other unprincipled "pundits").
7) Illegal aliens have no power to wreak the havoc of "terrorism" (George W. Bush has never spoken about "Latinofacscism”).
8) The distinction between hatred and fear is a difficult one. But hatred can go only so far to allowing an illegitimate government to carry out its own designs. FEAR, on the other hand, will make even the strongest citizenry docile and cooperative. Hating Jews was not enough in 1933 Germany; the people had to be taught to fear them.
9) It is necessary for the powerful to maintain fear in order to use hatred as a tool in their own determination to hold onto power.
10) Our people live with constant reminders of the necessity to fear one enemy and to hate the other.
11) The American church [PLEASE READ HERE: “ANY AMERICAN INSTITUTION”] is unable, unwilling, and too frightened itself to speak the truth of the false god of the fear of "terrorism" to the fearmongers because the church [EVERY AMERICAN INSTITUTION] is struggling to hold onto its own tiny slice of the power pie.
12) Without some voice rising up somewhere at some time to counter the hatred, and, more importantly, the fear by which our government subdues the people, our nation is lost, both as a political and a spiritual entity.
13) The American church [EVERY AMERICAN INSTITUTION] has lost its way so completely and become such a tag-along to the powerful elite that controls our national and international agenda that it has no will or means to speak truth to power.
14) That is most obvious in the church's [EVERY AMERICAN INSTITUTION’S] silence on the Islamophobia rampant in this country that is the main tool of fear that the government, the military, and the dominant corporate structures need in order to maintain fear and hatred so that they can hold onto power.
15) This is not a political problem or issue. It is spiritual.

A Decent Respect, Part III

2008-09-07T07:29:00.008-05:00

As a matter of law, Hamas will not be the defendant when the retrial of the Holy Land Foundation begins in two weeks. But the prosecutors will do everything they can to make the guilt of Hamas the central claim of their case.

Unless they can demonstrate that Hamas belongs on the US list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists, the prosecutors will once again find conviction of the defendants impossible. This time around, they may well attempt to make the case that Hamas is somehow a part of an international network of “terrorists” headed by Al-Qaeda. The prosecutors must make the case that the wrong-headed designation of Hamas as a Global Terrorist organization by Presidents Clinton and Bush is both moral and strategically important to the United States. Otherwise, the case will once again turn on whether or not the State of Israel can dictate the guilt or innocence of American citizens.

Of course, the prosecutors have had another year to listen to the family conversations of the American citizens on trial. They will know more of the intimate details of the appointments with doctors, the hopes of once again being with relatives spread around the world in the diaspora of the Palestinian people, and even the political views of five American families. Engaging in this bizarre kind of voyeurism (one might wonder how certain FBI agents will have a life when the trial ends, having spent their entire careers living vicariously through the lives of other American citizens), the government will have been able to cull through more badly translated statements, taken out of context, to “prove” that these American citizens have broken the law.

No one—least of all the defendants—would claim that American citizens can pick and choose which laws do and which laws do not apply to them. The law of the land is the law of the land. However, the prosecutors must find a truthful answer to a two-fold question: what, exactly, IS the law (based on executive order, not on legislation) regarding material support of “terrorists,” and did these American citizens intend to break it?

There is no doubt that the prosecutors believe absolutely and with great fervor that they are upholding the law, and, in the process, saving all of us American citizens from some kind of horrible fate at the hand of Specially Designated Global Terrorists. Theirs is an absolute certainty based on a view of the world in which everything is black and white, right or wrong, or—in our President’s words—good or “evil.” The truth is, the prosecutors are simply in lock-step with a world view promulgated by individuals at the top of our nation’s power structures, power structures that have become increasingly inverted as power has moved away from government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” toward a rigid governance by the few to further their own interests and ideology.

We have come to be a people acquiescing to a government and political elite that proclaims to the world, “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” (1). No American citizen wishes to be terrorized. American citizens of all backgrounds want our government to protect us from attack. Even the most peace loving Americans understand that the defense of our homes might at some time be necessary. On the other hand, American citizens ought to be—and are becoming again—a people who reject government by individuals who, before they are elected, declare that “adversaries like Iran, Iraq and North Korea are rushing” to do our nation harm (2) and then, after they are elected, declare that these countries constitute an “axis of evil” and invasion of them is justified. In order to defeat this “evil” with “good,” they then designate anyone in the world who disagrees with the “good” people as “terrorists,” no matter what the cause and meaning of that disagreement or how it is expressed.

This kind of thinking has led to a kind of “the-enemy-of-my-friend-is-my-enemy” world view. This thinking has ultimately ended in the inability (or unwillingness) to see the world with any nuance, with any understanding of the difference of situations, with anything other than a “shock and awe” mentality toward everyone.

For example, Hamas is the enemy of My Friend Israel. Black and white. Good and evil. And anyone who, by the blessing of birth, comes from a people at odds with Israel is obviously My Enemy. Anyone, even an American citizen, who gives basic humanitarian aid (food) to people in the land of My Enemy, is somehow a pariah.

In fact, Hamas will not be on trial in two weeks. Neither will the Holy Land Foundation. The real defendant is the stark vision of the world that the powerful in this country have adopted. The prosecutors will present more “experts” to explain the connections between My Enemy and the vast conspiracy of “terrorists” in the world. They will then attempt to explain how five American citizens are intimately involved with My Enemy and hope the jury will conclude that these American citizens are also, therefore, My Enemy.

The prosecutors will again distort facts, rely on the word of My Friend to prove that My Friend’s Enemy is My Enemy. The prosecutors will once again attempt to prove guilt by association. The prosecutors may even again allow My Friend to give anonymous evidence without vetting the information, without allowing five American citizens opportunity to defend themselves against this evidence gathered without care for our American rules of evidence.

The tragedy of the entire debacle is that it is not necessary. The tragedy is the mentality that gives carte blanche to a foreign country to determine who is My Enemy. The tragedy is the inability of the powerful to understand that people struggling for independence and self governance, struggling to have a homeland as guaranteed by the United Nations and the International Declaration of Human Rights, are not My Enemy. The tragedy is the inability of the powerful to listen to those in our government who are in a position to know and appreciate the gray areas between the black and white, the not-so-certain good versus evil realities of the world.

“I'm actually at the Strategic Studies Institute which belongs to the Army, so I have to say that I'm expressing my own views and not those of the Army or the Department of Defense. The movement of the Islamic resistance, Hamas, reflects the unique circumstances marking the Palestinian experience; namely, their lack of sovereignty, the occupied territories, Bantustans status, the deplorable condition of the Palestinian refugee communities throughout the Middle East, the factionalization of their leadership, and it is also one of the Palestinian responses to the Islamic awakening or revival that took place throughout the Muslim world. I will reflect on certain continuities in Hamas' history, but I will also point out that the movement has evolved and has been very flexible indeed” (3).

Her views, and not those of the Department of Defense. An American tragedy.

(1) Bush, George W. Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People. September 20, 2001.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html
(2) Donnelly, Thomas, Principal Author. "REBUILDING AMERICA’S DEFENSES: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century." A Report of The Project for the New American Century, September 2000 p.4.
http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf
(3) Zuhur, Sherifa, Panelist. “Hamas and the Two-State Solution: Villain, Victim or Missing Ingredient?” Middle East Policy Council. Fifty-second in the Capitol Hill Conference Series on U.S. Middle East Policy. April 11, 2008. Dr. Zuhur is Research Professor of Islamic and Regional Studies, Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College. Her books include, Precision in the Global War on Terror: Inciting Muslims through the War of Ideas.

A break in my series: TWO ITEMS OF (on the surface) GOOD NEWS: A move to drop charges (HLF) and a pro forma release (Sami Al-Arian)

2008-09-03T05:52:00.008-05:00

Yesterday, news of developments not widely reported by national media (see below for details) in two cases should have brought satisfaction and relief. However, the two developments are limited in scope. Each would be, if the justice system were operating freely rather than as a political entity, a matter of course that did not deserve attention from the media.

The first: the prosecution has admitted 1) that it never had a strong case in the Holy Land Foundation debacle, and 2) that the ending of the trial last summer was a clear violation of the rights of the defendants. That the government has chosen to drop charges is proof that Mr. Jacks and company feared having the entire case thrown out (as it should be) for violation of the principle of “double jeopardy.” Both Mr. Abdulqader and Mr. Odeh were, in fact, acquitted on the charges, and it was only because of Judge Fish’s incompetence and obvious bias that they were about to be tried a second time on the same charges. This is no victory.

The second, the release of Sami Al-Arian from his inhumane and illegal imprisonment is simply the right action of a court system that has stumbled along making a series of wrong decisions for years. That anyone (especially an immigrant in this country legally) should be subjected to persecution first by the courts, and then by the Immigration Service simply because he was active in efforts to promote the Palestinian cause over and against the enormous Israeli lobby in this country is unconscionable. Trial by jury of one’s peers, habeas corpus, double jeopardy, the right to free speech and free assembly are among the American principles of Constitutional law violated by the government in its frenzy to fight the so-called “war on terror.” If the judicial system had not made itself an arm of the politicized Department of Justice, Al-Arian’s release would not be newsworthy. Only because it is a victory of law and order and human rights over persecution, is it newsworthy.

From the Dallas Morning News
"Federal prosecutors seek to drop some charges against 2 Holy Land defendants"
12:00 AM CDT on Wednesday, September 3, 2008
By JASON TRAHAN / The Dallas Morning News jtrahan@dallasnews.com

Federal prosecutors in the Holy Land Foundation case have asked a judge to drop the bulk of the charges against two of the defendants, who still face conspiracy charges alleging they lent support to the terrorist group Hamas.

The 29 counts each that prosecutors want to dismiss against Mufid Abdulqader and Abdulrahman Odeh are ones jurors largely acquitted both men on last year, following a two month-long trial and nearly a month of deliberations. Those acquittals were tossed after the judge declared a last-minute mistrial Oct. 22. . . .

From the website Free Sami Al-Arian
“Fairfax, VA - September 2, 2008 - After five-and-a-half years of harsh and gratuitous detention, former Florida professor and civil rights activist Dr. Sami Al-Arian was released on bond, reuniting with his family for the first time since his ordeal began in 2003. Earlier today (Tuesday), the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) filed an order for the release of Dr. Al-Arian from their custody. Judge Brinkema originally granted Dr. Al-Arian bail on July 10 and reaffirmed that decision last month, but the ICE continued to detain him until today on the pretext that they were completing deportation procedures. . . .”