On this day nine years ago Dr. Sami Al-Arian was snatched from his family and community by the U.S. authorities in a pre-dawn raid that the professor described in a poem. Thus, tomorrow marks the beginning of the tenth year of the incessant persecution of a voice of conscience for freedom in Palestine, and equal justice for all in America. This injustice against Dr. Al-Arian and his family has lasted now more than the entire tragic Iraqi war, launched one month after the arrest of Dr. Al-Arian.

Throughout his ordeal, Dr. Al-Arian spent over 5 ½ years in prison (3 ½ years in solitary confinement), and an additional 3½ years under house arrest that is still continuing.

Despite a trial, an acquittal, and a subsequent plea agreement, the government continues to pursue Dr. Al-Arian in an effort to punish him and once again jail him, due to his political and religious beliefs in a country that prides itself on the bill of rights that purportedly guarantees freedom of beliefs, opinions, and associations.

Tragically many American Muslim families have suffered since the dreadful events of September 11, 2001 in the name of the so-called war on terror. It has claimed many innocent casualties, as the government pursued many individuals, such as Dr. Al-Arian, based on their thoughts, opinions and beliefs. In many cases the government targeted individualsby manufacturing charges against them as the government planned, financed, and executed the crimes.

Whether it was thought crimes like Dr. Al-Arian’s, or manufactured charges, the government employed a tactic called “preemptive persecutions,” in which the government reversed the system of justice: first choose the targets then match them with a crime to secure convictions. Although this tactic failed with Dr. Al-Arian, far too many individuals and families have fallen victims to this blatantly unjust and unconstitutional practice.

Today Americans of good conscience must show concern by questioning these underhanded tactics used by the government. They must reject the practice of targeting individuals like Dr. Al-Arian as well as many other hundreds, because of their religious or political beliefs.

On this day all Americans must renew their utmost commitment to the constitutional promise of the bill of rights and its protections of equal rights, civil liberties, and political freedoms. Our pledge of “Justice and Liberty for all” is not a cliché but the principle under which our country was founded, and our system of justice has endured. We must live up to it for the sake of the future of our Republic.

Behind the NYPD’s beating of Jateik Reed and the killing of Ramarley Graham is a long history of police harassment.

A series of incidents last year, in some cases where police broke the law, has sullied the reputation of the NYPD. From the department’s handling of Occupy protesters and journalists, to officers’ participation in illegal gun sales and a ticket-fixing scandal, to rape charges and reports that allege the targeting of Muslims, the NYPD’s pattern of abuse, law-breaking, and poor judgment is raising questions about whether some of New York’s finest are operating as rogue units. A disturbing series of events, including beatings and the shooting death of an unarmed teenager in the Bronx, are causing some to wonder whether Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and Mayor Michael Bloomberg are condoning the behavior or are unable to impose discipline on the department.

Along with the patterns of violence, new reports show that stop-and-frisk rates went through the roof in 2011, making it a record-breaking year for the controversial practice. Stop-and-frisks may only legally be used when police have reasonable suspicion someone has a gun, but they are widely abused, and have been targeted as the source of aggressive, race-based policing and what many consider to be illegal marijuana arrests.

So far, 2012 has proven no better. Already, six NYPD officers have already been stripped of their badges and placed on modified duty for their involvement in two incidents that took place early this year. On January 26, Bronx NYPD officers beat 19-year-old Jateik Reed after allegedly seeing him hold drugs. Jateik Reed was with two friends at the time of his arrest. For one of them, the beating was his introduction to police brutality.

In a previously unreported connection, a man named Will, who did not give his last name, was arrested and allegedly roughed up with Reed’s family when they want to the police department to inquire about Reed on the day of his beating.

One week later, while Jateik Reed was still locked up, cops gunned down 18-year-old Ramarley Graham, making him the third young black man killed by the NYPD in one week. Graham’s grandmother and 6-year-old brother were inside the apartment where he was fatally shot. Police say they shot Graham, who was unarmed, while pursuing a small-time pot arrest. Will says he is Ramarley Graham’s cousin.

Video of Reed’s arrest shows shocking brutality: Police kick, stomp, and hit Reed with night sticks as he cries for help, slamming him against a wall and beating him even after he falls to the ground outside of his home. His mother says the injuries required four stitches in his arm, and two in his head.

I first met up with Reed’s friends and neighbors on 168th and Third Ave. Standing where Reed was beaten, witnesses explained what they saw on the 26th. But perhaps more telling than their accounts of Reed’s beating are stories from their day-to-day lives. For this group of teenagers, being arrested for trespassing in their own buildings, or biting their tongues as an officer puts his or her hands down their pants during a stop-and-frisk, is nothing shocking. Reed’s beating was the climactic culmination of a long history of police harassment.

Police stopped Reed after allegedly seeing him ditch marijuana and crack cocaine. Next, they allege, he punched and headbutted an officer, opening a wound that required stitches. Witnesses say they never saw police recover any kind of contraband from Reed, and no one has been able to confirm police reports that Reed headbutted a police officer.

Allegations of abusive behavior that occurred following Reed’s arrest raise questions about police intimidation. In addition to the death of Ramarley Graham and arrest of the Reed family, a neighbor who witnessed the beating, Javin James, told AlterNet that police entered his home and beat him after other cops arrested Jateik Reed.

Witness Testimony

Twenty-year-old Trevor, who did not want to give his last name, is a friend and neighbor of Jateik Reed’s. He filmed the video that helped bring attention to Reed’s case.

Standing in the spot where Reed was beaten, Trevor told me that he, Reed, and Will “were coming home from the store, and they just stopped us for no real reason.” Returning from the corner deli, they had walked about a half-block over to the building where Reed and Trevor live.

“I told them we’re coming home — it’s not like we’re hanging here just to hang here — and they come out of the paddy wagon, frisk us,” Trevor told me. He said he was standing in the alcove in front of his apartment, unable to see Reed, when the officer searching him hurried away. Then, he said, “They just jumped on my friend, started beating him. I got nervous and pulled out my camera, recorded the whole situation.”

At one point, the video Trevor filmed shows an officer approach him with mace. “I guess he didn’t want to be seen,” said Trevor, who said he and Will were both hit with a small stream of mace.

Eighteen-year-old Garnell also watched the arrest and beating from across the street.

“The cops were talking to Jateik,” he told me, while another cop was in the street. “He said something, I’m not sure what. And then you see them start trying to frisk him, put him on the floor.”

But Garnell, who like other boys in the neighborhood have been stopped by the cops regularly for years, said this time was different.

“They were trying to shove him down, but they weren’t trying to do it using their skills. They were trying to do it forcefully, like harm him,” he explained, “They weren’t trying to get him into hand cuffs. They were trying to get him on the floor and really beat him.”

“He was yelling out ‘Help me, help me!’’ said Garnell, but “There’s nothing I could’ve done about that because if I had jumped in, they would’ve beat me too.”

Neither Garnell, Trevor, nor James could identify what cut the officer’s nose.

“I don’t even know why they started getting violent,”  said Garnell, “I know they harass us all the time, though, just for being out here. They harass us all the time.”

“There’s been plenty of times he got arrested or stopped, and nothing like that ever happened,” Jateik Reed’s 17-year-old brother Jashawn Walker told me.

“Struggling” With Graham

Police initially cited a “struggle” that occurred in the bathroom where Ramarley Graham was shot, but Graham was unarmed, and even Police Commissioner Ray Kelly no longer claims that an incident occurred.

Police also said Graham ran after they pursued him for participating in a marijuana deal, but in video of Graham entering his home, he does not appear to be on the run. The video footage, obtained by New York One, also shows that several minutes passed between when Graham walked into his home and police gained entry. The officers then followed Graham into his second-floor apartment, before knocking and kicking open the door. Inside, they found Graham in the bathroom, where he was shot moments later.

As WPIX reported,

It was the NYPD who was on the run, chasing after Ramarley Graham, 18, who — seconds earlier — casually closed the door behind him as he entered his home. The surveillance video is dramatic and telling. The family released it Saturday afternoon, approximately 48 hours after the shooting.

The video clearly shows Graham walking into his home on East 229th Street in the Bronx Thursday, shortly after 3:00p.m. The NYPD then jump into the screen seconds later. Two officers rush toward the door, with one trying to kick down a locked door. He had no search warrant. Seconds later another officer holds up his gun and aims it at one of the residents who — coincidentally — was on the side of the home. A total of four officers are seen on the video.

PIX11 spoke to one resident who, was cooking during the forced entry and said that the NYPD did not identify themselves: “…they did not scream ‘police.’”

Even though the police did not have a warrant, Graham’s landlord, Paulette Minzie, said police put a gun in her face and searched her home for weapons. “What’s clear,” Minzie’s attorney, Neville Mitchel, told NY1, “is that there was enough time for them to reflect on what is happening, and this tragedy should not have happened.”

Intimidation

Javin James, 31, was in his apartment when something drew him to the window. He watched police officers stop and frisk Jateik Reed and two of his friends. Sitting with me in a neighbor’s car, James told me what he saw.

“They’re searching the guys, then I see one of them get dropped,” James told me. Pointing to his window, across the street from where Reed was beat, James explained that after police dropped him, Reed was behind an NYPD van, and James could not see what happened behind it. Then he said, the violence escalated. He said he saw police beat Reed as he hung off the curb, before picking him up and dragging him over toward the wall. “I was yelling that they could have cuffed him five minutes ago,” he told me.

When James heard a cop ask what apartment number he was in, he walked away from the window. James told me that some other police officers then busted down his door.

As James told New York One:

“When they surrounded me and looked at me with gloves on, I knew what was going to happen. I just had time to pull my glasses off. And by the time I did that, it was ‘boom’ [with a punch]. I did [put up my hands] like that to shield my face immediately. I tried to protect my face. I’m shielding my face and this is exposed. He uses his right leg and stomps me here [in the torso].”

Then, Javin James says an officer tried to intimidate him into silence. “I can’t remember exactly what he said, but it was something like ‘Tell me now that you saw something,’” James said. He told me that he needs physical therapy twice a week to treat the muscle spasms in his neck and back.

But no amount of physical therapy can undo the harm that police have inflicted on Patricia Hartley. After she watched her grandson, Ramarley Graham, die, police who fired far too fast did not make an attempt to comfort her.

Instead, according to the New York Daily News:

Patricia Hartley said police threw her to the ground and stuck a gun in her face after Ramarley Graham, 18, was killed inside the bathroom of his family’s Bronx apartment.

Then, the Daily News says, Hartley was held in police custody for seven hours.

Assemblyman Eric Stevenson, D-Bronx, told the Daily News that Hartley was also being denied access to her heart medication. “I asked the district attorney a simple question: ‘Is this woman being held against her will?’” he told the Daily News. “Within 10 minutes, she was released.”

When Reed’s family went to the 42nd Precinct to find out why he was so badly beaten, police arrested and allegedly roughed them up as well.

Schuan Reed, Jateik Reed’s mother, and his brother, Jashawn, told me the violence started when they were on their way out. Schuan had been asking the officers if she could speak to the captain, but they would only give her the sergeant. “I didn’t want to speak to the sergeant. The sergeant was involved in the incident,” she told me.

Finally, they got ready to leave. “If you open the gate, it slams,” Schuan said. “I went through the gate.” Then, she says, officers came up behind them, asking her son Jashawn, “Did you slam the fucking gate?”

“I’m a grown woman,” she said, “That’s my son. If you have something to say to him, you say it to me.” Frustrated, Reed said she replied, “No, he didn’t slam the gate. He didn’t slam the fucking gate.”

Jashawn said one cop pushed him. Schuan said the officers egged on Jashawn, and “took the handcuffs off him like they wanted my son to fight them.”

“I told another cop I’m going to press charges on this officer because he pushed me,” Jashawn said. That’s when they say police dropped them. “He threw me on the floor, put his foot on top of my head, punched me in the face,” Jashawn said. “They also threw my friend [Will] on the floor —  that was at the scene when they beat up Jateik — stepped all over him. The cop slapped my mom, called her a black bitch.”

Schuan said the officer’s name who hit her is Ferguson, but he wasn’t the only one who went after her.

After they were arrested and put behind bars, “There was another officer — a Spanish lady —  came in the cell, like to jump me [with Ferguson],” she said, “The girls that were already in the cell ran out.” When another officer put himself between them, Schuan said, “I guess they knew to back off.”

Schuan Reed’s 4-year-old son Jyaire had witnessed the arrest, and police took him into the office when they arrested the others. “I’m sitting there, wondering if they’re being mean to my baby,” Schuan told me, fighting back tears.

While Schuan Reed is familiar with the power of the police, she challenges those who charged her with disorderly conduct, obstruction of justice and child endangerment to prove she and her family were acting belligerently. “You all got cameras in there, right?” she said, “So, show it.”

Between the precinct and central bookings, the Reed family was locked up for 26 hours. The whole time, Schuan was terrified for Jateik.

Later, her fears were realized, when Jateik told her that police beat him in the van, and hit and maced him at the precinct.

She added, “When he was in central booking, he kept asking them to take him to the hospital because his head and everything was hurting, and they wouldn’t take him to the hospital. By law, you are supposed to take him to the hospital, so why didn’t they? What if he had internal bleeding? God forbid if he passed out and dropped dead in there.”

“I know he’s scared,” she said, choking up. “He told me “Ma, they’re going to do something to me.”

Schuan Reed and her family were finally released, but they still couldn’t go home. Schuan and Jashawn claim that the officers kept Jashawn’s phone, and both their sets of apartment keys. “I haven’t been sleeping in my house. I can’t go to my house because I don’t know if they’ve been there,” said Schuan, who has only had time to change one of her locks. “They could come plant something, do anything — drugs, bugs, anything. If i come in my house to get clothes or something, I feel like somebody’s been in there. It might just be me being paranoid, but I don’t know,” she said. “The whole situation is just real scary.”

She said she feels like she’s always looking over her shoulder. “They might lose their jobs. You don’t know if they’ll come in the house and kill all of us. How can I sleep peacefully not knowing if someone will come in and kill me and my kids? Do you know what it’s like, to feel scared like that?”

Schuan worries about the emotional consequences the beating will have on her son.

“Jateik is going to have to have therapy. He’s going to feel threatened, be emotionally damaged for the rest of his life. I just wish there was something I could do,” she said, “but they have all the authority. They can falsify documents, they can falsify evidence, they can do basically whatever they want, and nobody will ever know.”

There are cameras outside the housing projects where the incident occurred. Footage from them may show what Trevor’s video doesn’t.

Bogus Charges

“The police complaint alleges that the cops observed him with a bag of a substance that they recognized, based on their training and experience, was crack, and that he threw it away, along with two bags that they recognized as marijuana,” Reed’s lawyer, Gideon Orion Oliver, told me at Reed’s bail hearing, adding, “They’re basically alleging that what he had was some crack residue.”

“That sort of superhuman sensory perception,” Oliver noted, “is very typical in drug prosecutions.”

Those who know Jateik Reed call the crack charges a transparent technique to stereotype and criminalize him.

“I heard that the newspaper said cocaine, weed,” Trevor said, “They don’t got the story straight. I’ve known Jateik my whole life, and he don’t even touch crack, so that just sounds crazy,” he said. Trevor claims he saw, “No drugs at all” during the stop.

Garnell said, “Jateik is not the rowdy type to do crack, none of that. That’s not Jateik.”

“If you see the police standing there, why would you have something in your hands like that?” Schuan said. “That’s not even logical. And for people to say he’s a drug dealer! A mother knows what her son does. I would know if my son was a drug dealer. I’m not stupid. If he’s a drug dealer, then why does he come to me, asking for $5, $2, every day?”

If Jateik Reed’s friends are right, and he never touched crack, it wouldn’t be the first time the NYPD planted drugs.

The recent trial of former NYPD detectives accused of planting drugs on suspects reveals what could be a widespread pattern of corruption. This fall, eight officers were arrested for planting drugs on people, causing Police Commissioner Kelly to order widespread transfers in Brooklyn South and Queens narcotics units. In November, Jason Arbeeny, a 14-year NYPD veteran, was found guilty of eight counts of falsifying records and official misconduct for planting crack on suspects. At his own trial in November, Stephen Anderson, a former NYPD detective, indicated that high pressure to meet quotas makes “flaking,” or placing some previously confiscated drugs on an innocent person, common among all ranks. Anderson testified in court that, “It was something I was seeing a lot of, whether it was from supervisors or undercovers and even investigators.”

Although Jason Arbeeny admitted to planting crack cocaine on a woman and her boyfriend in 2007, the judge let him off with probation last week.

But planting drugs is not the only way cops keep arrests up. As data from the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services shows, even after Commissioner Ray Kelly issued an internal memo ordering police to follow the law on pot arrests, 2011 saw more low-level pot arrests — more than 50,000  – than any other year in the past decade. Research by Queens sociologist Harry Levine and the Drug Policy Alliance interprets the numbers as proof that the NYPD continued using controversial stop-and-frisks to remove marijuana from pockets or bags and improperly charge people, overwhelmingly black and Latino youths, with marijuana “in public view,” which is a more severe misdemeanor than personal possession and can be cause for arrest and booking.

In the last five years, the NYPD under Mayor Michael Bloomberg made more marijuana arrests than in the 24 years from 1978 through 2001.

Many link the NYPD’s marijuana arrest crusade to Ramarley Graham’s murder. Tony Newman, spokesperson for Drug Policy Alliance, wrote:

While details of the tragedy are still unfolding, it appears that [Graham] had a small amount of marijuana on him, so walked home to get away from the cops because he didn’t want to be arrested. The cops followed him, broke into his home and killed him in his bathroom while he was trying to flush a small amount of marijuana down the toilet. The police officer who shot Graham said he believed the young man had a gun. He did not – no weapons were found.

The bottom line is that an 18-year-old is dead because of the insane marijuana arrest crusade by the NYPD…

Ramarley Graham’s “god sister,” Makeba Johnson, said she knew “Marley” her whole life. Johnson told me she wants people to know that, despite reports that make Graham out to be little more than a criminal, “Marley is not what they say. Marley is not a person that robs people or a drug dealer. Marley is a person that, at times, he probably smoked marijuana, which a lot of kids do — I don’t say that it’s right, but a lot of kids do. He didn’t deserve to die.”

Police Harassment

The boys from Jateik Reed’s block say they are stopped from three to four times a week, though it could be as often as every day. They complain that police are rough and smart with them, but as teenagers, what seems to bother them most about the frisks is how intrusive they feel.

“They go in my pants. You’re not supposed to go in my pants,” said Jashawn Reed.

Garnell agreed. “It’s annoying because it doesn’t matter what kind of cop it is, female or male, they’re gonna frisk you. if you say something to the female about it, the female says something to you like ‘What? I can do what I want.’ And they still frisk you. You can’t say sexual harassment, nothing,” he said, “And they go hard, grabbing stuff they’re not supposed to.”

“The way they search these kids — oh my God, it’s like they found a weapon on them. To me, it’s like sexual harassment,” said Julissa Lawrence, a neighbor and close friend of the Reeds who is sick of seeing her teenage son and his friends constantly stopped by police.

Stop-and-frisks are a mechanism by which the NYPD can more easily snatch people up on drugs charges. While they are only supposed to be conducted when there is reasonable suspicion a person is carrying a gun, less than 2 percent of total stops result in the discovery of any weapon or contraband. The practice is widely abused, with police regularly neglecting to fill out the required paperwork. Since 2002, stop-and-frisks have increased by 600 percent.

What’s worse, the numbers on race make Jateik Reed look like just another statistic: In 2011, 85 percent of the NYPD’s stops were blacks or Latinos. Stop-and-frisks that involve force are much more likely to involve black or Latino people.

While marijuana arrests are the most common charge for arrests in New York City, all misdemeanor arrests are spiraling out of control. In 2010, the NYPD reported 391,892 misdemeanor charges. On Jateik Reed’s block, teenagers say they have been arrested for petty crimes so many times they have lost track.

“They’re always misjudging something, and picking people up for stuff they didn’t do. They’ll lie to you, too,” Jashawn claimed.

“Trespassing and disorderly conduct are the two mains,” Jashawn Reed said, “and jaywalking.” Jashawn claims that in October he was arrested three or four times in the span of three weeks. “I have to go court for them, pay little fines. You always gotta go to court at the end of the day, but sometimes they let you out of the precinct.” Most of the time, however, “They send you through central booking, everything. It could be as long as three days.”

“Since I was like 15, they’ve been harassing me,” he said.

For Garnell, the cops started with him when he first grew facial hair. “I guess that means I’m a bad guy,” he said.

Every kid on the block could tell you stories about police snatching them up on some charge, but trespassing is what they reference most often, perhaps because the circumstances seem so ridiculous.

Jashawn said he and a friend once walked from one building to another across the street, where they stood for inside for “10 seconds,” and “as soon as we came out of the building, the police cars stopped right in front of us.” Jashawn said an officer told him they got a call about two people wearing red and blue jackets.

“How’d they get a call if we just got to the building?” Jashawn wonders.

But police didn’t take them for trespassing. “They said they were going to take us for jaywalking, and then when they finally let us out, they gave us a ticket for disorderly conduct,” he said.

Garnell, too, was arrested for trespassing, while on his way out of a friend’s building. He spent three days in jail before the judge dismissed the case.

“These kids are not out there antagonizing people, robbing people, selling drugs. They go to school and hang out together because they grew up together and there’s nowhere to go. There’s no recreational centers because they shut everything down. So what else can they do?” said Julissa Lawrence.

In an article called “House Arrest, Redefined,” the Village Voice explained how one man’s arrest for trespassing in his own home is part of a pattern:

“This kind of policing is exactly what the New York Civil Liberties Union is targeting in a new lawsuit. The group claims that the NYPD’s controversial stop-and-frisk program, which stops an overwhelming majority of black and Latino suspects, is also taking place in private buildings.

Landlords citywide can sign up for a program called “Operation Clean Halls,” which is intended to prevent drug use and sales through indoor patrolling.

Alexis Karteron, NYCLU senior staff attorney, told the Voice, “We were hearing directly from people that building residents were being subjected to pretty intense police practices—getting stopped in lobbies, stopped at the mailbox, at the garbage chute, in the hallway.”

Julissa Lawrence calls the all-too-common arrests “bogus charges, just to get their name and address in the book.”

Jashawn told me some of his cases catch up with him. “There’s so many I forget about it. I just had court last week because of something, and I had a bench warrant for one of those cases,” said Jashawn, who did not realize he had missed court. “It’s just too much stuff, too many tickets, too many summonses.”

Garnell says that most of the arrests and stop-and-frisks happen “right in the middle of the week,” and noted Wednesdays as the worst, with Friday also busy, “because they want you to spend the weekend in bookings. All the other days they’re not really looking for anybody.”

His observations are consistent with data that shows the NYPD follows a schedule of days designated for desk work or aggressive policing. The trend in arrests thus stems from the NYPD’s own pattern of policing, not fluctuations in actual crimes.

According to CUNY Professor K. Babe Howell’s report, Broken Lives from Broken Windows:

“The differences in the numbers  of misdemeanor  arrests  can  be attributed  to  decisions  made  regarding  the deployment of police resources. In  order  to arrest people for minor offenses, teams of officers are  organized to observe  people  buying  drugs, to do sweeps of particular buildings, or to  watch  for  people jumping  turnstiles. “Busy  arrest  days,” therefore, are the result  of aggressive  order-maintenance  policing  targeted at  particular locations. Other  days are  ”slow  arrest  days”  because  of less aggressive  policing of  these offenses.

According to statistics, the least serious offenses “make up the lion’s share of the additional arrests on busy days.”

Justice for Jateik Reed and Ramarley Graham

Private donors and the Occupy Wall Street bail fund donated the $10,001 the Reed family needed to post for Jateik Reed to be released, and he walked out of jail, to the relief of his mother, last week. He still faces drug and resisting arrest charges.

While Reed’s family described his release as “wonderful,” they still want police to be held responsible for their actions, and seek more accountability from the NYPD, overall. Prosecutors demanded Reed give up his right to the 5th Amendment and cooperate with police to investigate the officers who beat him. On the advice of his lawyers, who said the relationship between the NYPD and the District Attorney’s office makes a fair investigation impossible, Reed didn’t take the deal. His attorneys are pushing for a special prosecutor to open up the investigation.

Makeba Johnson explained to me why it is too late for Ramarley Graham, but not for other youths. “I just want them to realize that because they’re police they can’t just shoot somebody and then just go on desk duty and it’s okay, because it’s not fair. If we shoot somebody we go to jail. And if they shoot somebody they get desk duty,” she said, “He had no life yet, not a heartbreak yet in life.”

Schuan Reed said while she knew police harassment was bad, she did not realize how far it went until her own son became a victim. “I feel bad that it took me so long,” she said, “But I think I found my calling.”

The aggressive policing has inspired a movement, grown from the neighborhoods and communities affected, with a mission to end stop-and-frisk. Jose Lassale, a New Yorker who has been subject to stop-and-frisk himself, said being stopped is “just another day in the hood, and that’s sad that we feel that way.”

Lassale and other members of the Stop Stop-and-Frisk coalition are mobilizing, policing the police and passing out “Stop Stop-and-Frisk” buttons to empower communities and let police know they are standing up for themselves.

Jateik Reed’s friends have been wearing the buttons on their jackets, and said they, too, are ready to take a stand against racist policing, and fight back before the NYPD claims another victim.

“We just think that there needs to be a legitimate reason why they’re stopping these kids. Don’t just stop them because they’re black or their pants are sagging or they’re walking with a group of kids. They’re not hurting anybody,” Julissa Lawrence said, “Stop treating our kids like they’re the enemies. How about those people that walk around Wall Street with tuxedos and briefcases? Those could be bombs. They don’t stop them. But they stop our kids.”

The NYPD did not respond to requests for comment.

 

by : Kristen Gwynne, AlterNet .

Back in May 2007, I stumbled across online sketches at the website of a Kansas architectural firm hired to build a monster U.S. embassy-cum-citadel-cum-Greater-Middle-Eastern command center on 104 acres in the middle of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.  They offered an artist’s impressions of what the place would look like — a giant self-sufficient compound both prosaic (think malls or housing projects) and opulent (a giant pool, tennis courts, a recreation center).

Struck by the fact that the U.S. government was intent on building the largest embassy ever in the planet’s oil heartlands, I wrote a piece, “The Mother Ship Lands in Iraq” about those plans and offered a little tour of the project via those crude drawings.

they then began to run around the Internet and soon a panicky State Department had declared a “security breach” and forced the firm to pull the sketches off its website.

Now, more than five years later, we have the first public photos of the embassy — a pool,basketball court, tennis courts, and food court to die for — just as the news has arrived that the vast boondoggle of a place, built for three-quarters of a billion of your tax dollars, with a $6 billion State Department budget this year and its own mercenary air force, is about to get its staff of 16,000 slashed.  In a Washington Post piece on the subject, Senator Patrick Leahy is quoted as saying: “I’ve been in embassies all over the world, and you come to this place and you’re like: ‘Whoa. Wow.’ All of a sudden you’ve got something so completely out of scale to anything, you have to wonder, what were they thinking when they first built it?”

The answer is: in 2004, when planning for this white elephant of embassies first began, the Bush administration was still dreaming of a Washington-enforced Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East and saw it as its western command post.  Now, of course, the vast American mega-bases in Iraq with their multiple b

us routes, giant PXes, Pizza Huts, Cinnabons, and Burger Kings, where American troops were to be garrisoned on the “Korean model” for decades to come, are so many ghost towns, fading American ziggurats in Mesopotamia.  Similarly, those embassy photos seem like snapshots from Pompeii just as the ash was beginning to fall.  Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the news is similarly dismal with drawdowns and withdrawals suddenly the order of the day.  Something’s changing.  It feels tectonic.  Certainly, we’re receiving another set of signs that American imperial plans on the Eurasian mainland have crashed and burned and that the U.S. is now regrouping and heading .

What a moment then for Noam Chomsky to weigh in on the subject of American decline.  (His earlier TomDispatch post “Who Owns the World?” might be considered a companion piece to this one.)  For him, a TomDispatch first: a two-day, back-to-back two-parter on imperial hegemony and its discontents.

“Losing” the World……….

American Decline in Perspective, Part 1 

Significant anniversaries are solemnly commemorated — Japan’s attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, for example.  Others are ignored, and we can often learn valuable lessons from them about what is likely to lie ahead.  Right now, in fact.

At the moment, we are failing to commemorate the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s decision to launch the most destructive and murderous act of aggression of the post-World War II period: the invasion of South Vietnam, later all of Indochina, leaving millions dead and four countries devastated, with casualties still mounting from the long-term effects of drenching South Vietnam with some of the most lethal carcinogens known, undertaken to destroy ground cover and food crops.

The prime target was South Vietnam.  The aggression later spread to the North, then to the remote peasant society of northern Laos, and finally to rural Cambodia, which was bombed at the stunning level of all allied air operations in the Pacific region during World War II, including the two atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  In this, Henry Kissinger’sorders were being carried out — “anything that flies on anything that moves” — a call for genocide that is rare in the historical record.  Little of this is remembered.  Most was scarcely known beyond narrow circles of activists.

When the invasion was launched 50 years ago, concern was so slight that there were few efforts at justification, hardly more than the president’s impassioned plea that “we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence” and if the conspiracy achieves its ends in Laos and Vietnam, “the gates will be opened wide.”

Elsewhere, he warned further that “the complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft societies are about to be swept away with the debris of history [and] only the strong… can possibly survive,” in this case reflecting on the failure of U.S. aggression and terror to crush Cuban independence.

By the time protest began to mount half a dozen years later, the respected Vietnam specialist and military historian Bernard Fall, no dove, forecast that “Vietnam as a cultural and historic entity… is threatened with extinction…[as]…the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size.” He was again referring to South Vietnam.

When the war ended eight horrendous years later, mainstream opinion was divided between those who described the war as a “noble cause” that could have been won with more dedication, and at the opposite extreme, the critics, to whom it was “a mistake” that proved too costly.  By 1977, President Carter aroused little notice when he explained that we owe Vietnam “no debt” because “the destruction was mutual.”

There are important lessons in all this for today, even apart from another reminder that only the weak and defeated are called to account for their crimes.  One lesson is that to understand what is happening we should attend not only to critical events of the real world, often dismissed from history, but also to what leaders and elite opinion believe, however tinged with fantasy.  Another lesson is that alongside the flights of fancy concocted to terrify and mobilize the public (and perhaps believed by some who are trapped in their own rhetoric), there is also geostrategic planning based on principles that are rational and stable over long periods because they are rooted in stable institutions and their concerns.  That is true in the case of Vietnam as well.  I will return to that, only stressing here that the persistent factors in state action are generally well concealed.

The Iraq war is an instructive case.  It was marketed to a terrified public on the usual grounds of self-defense against an awesome threat to survival: the “single question,” George W. Bush and Tony Blair declared, was whether Saddam Hussein would end his programs of developing weapons of mass destruction.   When the single question received the wrong answer, government rhetoric shifted effortlessly to our “yearning for democracy,” and educated opinion duly followed course; all routine.

Later, as the scale of the U.S. defeat in Iraq was becoming difficult to suppress, the government quietly conceded what had been clear all along.  In 2007-2008, the administration officially announced that a final settlement must grant the U.S. military bases and the right of combat operations, and must privilege U.S. investors in the rich energy system — demands later reluctantly abandoned in the face of Iraqi resistance.  And all well kept from the general population.

Gauging American Decline

With such lessons in mind, it is useful to look at what is highlighted in the major journals of policy and opinion today.  Let us keep to the most prestigious of the establishment journals, Foreign Affairs.  The headline blaring on the cover of the December 2011 issue reads in bold face: “Is America Over?”

The title article calls for “retrenchment” in the “humanitarian missions” abroad that are consuming the country’s wealth, so as to arrest the American decline that is a major theme of international affairs discourse, usually accompanied by the corollary that power is shifting to the East, to China and (maybe) India.

The lead articles are on Israel-Palestine.  The first, by two high Israeli officials, is entitled “The Problem is Palestinian Rejection”: the conflict cannot be resolved because Palestinians refuse to recognize Israel as a Jewish state — thereby conforming to standard diplomatic practice: states are recognized, but not privileged sectors within them.  The demand is hardly more than a new device to deter the threat of political settlement that would undermine Israel’s expansionist goals.

The opposing position, defended by an American professor, is entitled “The Problem Is the Occupation.” The subtitle reads “How the Occupation is Destroying the Nation.” Which nation?  Israel, of course.  The paired articles appear under the heading “Israel under Siege.”

The January 2012 issue features yet another call to bomb Iran now, before it is too late.  Warning of “the dangers of deterrence,” the author suggests that “skeptics of military action fail to appreciate the true danger that a nuclear-armed Iran would pose to U.S. interests in the Middle East and beyond. And their grim forecasts assume that the cure would be worse than the disease — that is, that the consequences of a U.S. assault on Iran would be as bad as or worse than those of Iran achieving its nuclear ambitions. But that is a faulty assumption. The truth is that a military strike intended to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, if managed carefully, could spare the region and the world a very real threat and dramatically improve the long-term national security of the United States.”

Others argue that the costs would be too high, and at the extremes some even point out that an attack would violate international law — as does the stand of the moderates, who regularly deliver threats of violence, in violation of the U.N. Charter.

Let us review these dominant concerns in turn.

American decline is real, though the apocalyptic vision reflects the familiar ruling class perception that anything short of total control amounts to total disaster.  Despite the piteous laments, the U.S. remains the world dominant power by a large margin, and no competitor is in sight, not only in the military dimension, in which of course the U.S. reigns supreme.

China and India have recorded rapid (though highly inegalitarian) growth, but remain very poor countries, with enormous internal problems not faced by the West.  China is the world’s major manufacturing center, but largely as an assembly plant for the advanced industrial powers on its periphery and for western multinationals.  That is likely to change over time.  Manufacturing regularly provides the basis for innovation, often breakthroughs, as is now sometimes happening in China.  One example that has impressed western specialists is China’s takeover of the growing global solar panel market, not on the basis of cheap labor but by coordinated planning and, increasingly, innovation.

But the problems China faces are serious. Some are demographic, reviewed in Science, the leading U.S. science weekly. The study shows that mortality sharply decreased in China during the Maoist years, “mainly a result of economic development and improvements in education and health services, especially the public hygiene movement that resulted in a sharp drop in mortality from infectious diseases.” This progress ended with the initiation of the capitalist reforms 30 years ago, and the death rate has since increased.

Furthermore, China’s recent economic growth has relied substantially on a “demographic bonus,” a very large working-age population. “But the window for harvesting this bonus may close soon,” with a “profound impact on development”:  “Excess cheap labor supply, which is one of the major factors driving China’s economic miracle, will no longer be available.”

Demography is only one of many serious problems ahead.  For India, the problems are far more severe.

Not all prominent voices foresee American decline.  Among international media, there is none more serious and responsible than the London Financial Times.  It recently devoted a full page to the optimistic expectation that new technology for extracting North American fossil fuels might allow the U.S. to become energy independent, hence to retain its global hegemony for a century.  There is no mention of the kind of world the U.S. would rule in this happy event, but not for lack of evidence.

At about the same time, the International Energy Agency reported that, with rapidly increasing carbon emissions from fossil fuel use, the limit of safety will be reached by 2017 if the world continues on its present course. “The door is closing,” the IEA chief economist said, and very soon it “will be closed forever.”

Shortly before the U.S. Department of Energy reported the most recent carbon dioxide emissions figures, which “jumped by the biggest amount on record” to a level higher than the worst-case scenario anticipated by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  That came as no surprise to many scientists, including the MIT program on climate change, which for years has warned that the IPCC predictions are too conservative.

Such critics of the IPCC predictions receive virtually no public attention, unlike the fringe of denialists who are supported by the corporate sector, along with huge propaganda campaigns that have driven Americans off the international spectrum in dismissal of the threats.  Business support also translates directly to political power.  Denialism is part of the catechism that must be intoned by Republican candidates in the farcical election campaign now in progress, and in Congress they are powerful enough to abort even efforts to inquire into the effects of global warming, let alone do anything serious about it.

In brief, American decline can perhaps be stemmed if we abandon hope for decent survival, prospects that are all too real given the balance of forces in the world.

“Losing” China and Vietnam

Putting such unpleasant thoughts aside, a close look at American decline shows that China indeed plays a large role, as it has for 60 years.  The decline that now elicits such concern is not a recent phenomenon.  It traces back to the end of World War II, when the U.S. had half the world’s wealth and incomparable security and global reach.  Planners were naturally well aware of the enormous disparity of power, and intended to keep it that way.

The basic viewpoint was outlined with admirable frankness in a major state paper of 1948.  The author was one of the architects of the New World Order of the day, the chair of the State Department Policy Planning Staff, the respected statesman and scholar George Kennan, a moderate dove within the planning spectrum.  He observed that the central policy goal was to maintain the “position of disparity” that separated our enormous wealth from the poverty of others.  To achieve that goal, he advised, “We should cease to talk about vague and… unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization,” and must “deal in straight power concepts,” not “hampered by idealistic slogans” about “altruism and world-benefaction.”

Kennan was referring specifically to Asia, but the observations generalize, with exceptions, for participants in the U.S.-run global system.  It was well understood that the “idealistic slogans” were to be displayed prominently when addressing others, including the intellectual classes, who were expected to promulgate them.

The plans that Kennan helped formulate and implement took for granted that the U.S. would control the Western Hemisphere, the Far East, the former British empire (including the incomparable energy resources of the Middle East), and as much of Eurasia as possible, crucially its commercial and industrial centers.  These were not unrealistic objectives, given the distribution of power.  But decline set in at once.

In 1949, China declared independence, an event known in Western discourse as “the loss of China” — in the U.S., with bitter recriminations and conflict over who was responsible for that loss.  The terminology is revealing.  It is only possible to lose something that one owns.  The tacit assumption was that the U.S. owned China, by right, along with most of the rest of the world, much as postwar planners assumed.

The “loss of China” was the first major step in “America’s decline.” It had major policy consequences.  One was the immediate decision to support France’s effort to reconquer its former colony of Indochina, so that it, too, would not be “lost.”

Indochina itself was not a major concern, despite claims about its rich resources by President Eisenhower and others.  Rather, the concern was the “domino theory,” which is often ridiculed when dominoes don’t fall, but remains a leading principle of policy because it is quite rational.  To adopt Henry Kissinger’s version, a region that falls out of control can become a “virus” that will “spread contagion,” inducing others to follow the same path.

In the case of Vietnam, the concern was that the virus of independent development might infect Indonesia, which really does have rich resources.  And that might lead Japan — the “superdomino” as it was called by the prominent Asia historian John Dower — to “accommodate” to an independent Asia as its technological and industrial center in a system that would escape the reach of U.S. power.  That would mean, in effect, that the U.S. had lost the Pacific phase of World War II, fought to prevent Japan’s attempt to establish such a New Order in Asia.

The way to deal with such a problem is clear: destroy the virus and “inoculate” those who might be infected.  In the Vietnam case, the rational choice was to destroy any hope of successful independent development and to impose brutal dictatorships in the surrounding regions.  Those tasks were successfully carried out — though history has its own cunning, and something similar to what was feared has since been developing in East Asia, much to Washington’s dismay.

The most important victory of the Indochina wars was in 1965, when a U.S.-backed military coup in Indonesia led by General Suharto carried out massive crimes that were compared by the CIA to those of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.  The “staggering mass slaughter,” as the New York Times described it, was reported accurately across the mainstream, and with unrestrained euphoria.

It was “a gleam of light in Asia,” as the noted liberal commentator James Reston wrote in the Times.  The coup ended the threat of democracy by demolishing the mass-based political party of the poor, established a dictatorship that went on to compile one of the worst human rights records in the world, and threw the riches of the country open to western investors.  Small wonder that, after many other horrors, including the near-genocidal invasion of East Timor, Suharto was welcomed by the Clinton administration in 1995 as “our kind of guy.”

Years after the great events of 1965, Kennedy-Johnson National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy reflected that it would have been wise to end the Vietnam war at that time, with the “virus” virtually destroyed and the primary domino solidly in place, buttressed by other U.S.-backed dictatorships throughout the region.

Similar procedures have been routinely followed elsewhere.  Kissinger was referring specifically to the threat of socialist democracy in Chile.  That threat was ended on another forgotten date, what Latin Americans call “the first 9/11,” which in violence and bitter effects far exceeded the 9/11 commemorated in the West.  A vicious dictatorship was imposed in Chile, one part of a plague of brutal repression that spread through Latin America, reaching Central America under Reagan.  Viruses have aroused deep concern elsewhere as well, including the Middle East, where the threat of secular nationalism has often concerned British and U.S. planners, inducing them to support radical Islamic fundamentalism to counter it.

The Concentration of Wealth and American Decline

Despite such victories, American decline continued.  By 1970, U.S. share of world wealth had dropped to about 25%, roughly where it remains, still colossal but far below the end of World War II.  By then, the industrial world was “tripolar”: US-based North America, German-based Europe, and East Asia, already the most dynamic industrial region, at the time Japan-based, but by now including the former Japanese colonies Taiwan and South Korea, and more recently China.

At about that time, American decline entered a new phase: conscious self-inflicted decline.  From the 1970s, there has been a significant change in the U.S. economy, as planners, private and state, shifted it toward financialization and the offshoring of production, driven in part by the declining rate of profit in domestic manufacturing.  These decisions initiated a vicious cycle in which wealth became highly concentrated (dramatically so in the top 0.1% of the population), yielding concentration of political power, hence legislation to carry the cycle further: taxation and other fiscal policies, deregulation, changes in the rules of corporate governance allowing huge gains for executives, and so on.

Meanwhile, for the majority, real wages largely stagnated, and people were able to get by only by sharply increased workloads (far beyond Europe), unsustainable debt, and repeated bubbles since the Reagan years, creating paper wealth that inevitably disappeared when they burst (and the perpetrators were bailed out by the taxpayer).  In parallel, the political system has been increasingly shredded as both parties are driven deeper into corporate pockets with the escalating cost of elections, the Republicans to the level of farce, the Democrats (now largely the former “moderate Republicans”) not far behind.

A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute, which has been the major source of reputable data on these developments for years, is entitled Failure by Design.  The phrase “by design” is accurate.  Other choices were certainly possible.  And as the study points out, the “failure” is class-based.  There is no failure for the designers.  Far from it.  Rather, the policies are a failure for the large majority, the 99% in the imagery of the Occupy movements — and for the country, which has declined and will continue to do so under these policies.

One factor is the offshoring of manufacturing.  As the solar panel example mentioned earlier illustrates, manufacturing capacity provides the basis and stimulus for innovation leading to higher stages of sophistication in production, design, and invention.  That, too, is being outsourced, not a problem for the “money mandarins” who increasingly design policy, but a serious problem for working people and the middle classes, and a real disaster for the most oppressed, African Americans, who have never escaped the legacy of slavery and its ugly aftermath, and whose meager wealth virtually disappeared after the collapse of the housing bubble in 2008, setting off the most recent financial crisis, the worst so far.

The Imperial Way
American Decline in Perspective, Part 2 

In the years of conscious, self-inflicted decline at home, “losses” continued to mount elsewhere.  In the past decade, for the first time in 500 years, South America has taken successful steps to free itself from western domination, another serious loss. The region has moved towards integration, and has begun to address some of the terrible internal problems of societies ruled by mostly Europeanized elites, tiny islands of extreme wealth in a sea of misery.  They have also rid themselves of all U.S. military bases and of IMF controls.  A newly formed organization, CELAC, includes all countries of the hemisphere apart from the U.S. and Canada.  If it actually functions, that would be another step in American decline, in this case in what has always been regarded as “the backyard.”

Even more serious would be the loss of the MENA countries — Middle East/North Africa — which have been regarded by planners since the 1940s as “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.” Control of MENA energy reserves would yield “substantial control of the world,” in the words of the influential Roosevelt advisor A.A. Berle.

To be sure, if the projections of a century of U.S. energy independence based on North American energy resources turn out to be realistic, the significance of controlling MENA would decline somewhat, though probably not by much: the main concern has always been control more than access.  However, the likely consequences to the planet’s equilibrium are so ominous that discussion may be largely an academic exercise.

The Arab Spring, another development of historic importance, might portend at least a partial “loss” of MENA.  The US and its allies have tried hard to prevent that outcome — so far, with considerable success.  Their policy towards the popular uprisings has kept closely to the standard guidelines: support the forces most amenable to U.S. influence and control.

Favored dictators are supported as long as they can maintain control (as in the major oil states).  When that is no longer possible, then discard them and try to restore the old regime as fully as possible (as in Tunisia and Egypt).  The general pattern is familiar: Somoza, Marcos, Duvalier, Mobutu, Suharto, and many others.  In one case, Libya, the three traditional imperial powers intervened by force to participate in a rebellion to overthrow a mercurial and unreliable dictator, opening the way, it is expected, to more efficient control over Libya’s rich resources (oil primarily, but also water, of particular interest to French corporations), to a possible base for the U.S. Africa Command (so far restricted to Germany), and to the reversal of growing Chinese penetration.  As far as policy goes, there have been few surprises.

Crucially, it is important to reduce the threat of functioning democracy, in which popular opinion will significantly influence policy.  That again is routine, and quite understandable.  A look at the studies of public opinion undertakenby U.S. polling agencies in the MENA countries easily explains the western fear of authentic democracy, in which public opinion will significantly influence policy.

Israel and the Republican Party

Similar considerations carry over directly to the second major concern addressed in the issue of Foreign Affairs cited in part one of this piece: the Israel-Palestine conflict.   Fear of democracy could hardly be more clearly exhibited than in this case.  In January 2006, an election took place in Palestine, pronounced free and fair by international monitors.  The instant reaction of the U.S. (and of course Israel), with Europe following along politely, was to impose harsh penalties on Palestinians for voting the wrong way.

That is no innovation.  It is quite in accord with the general and unsurprising principle recognized by mainstream scholarship: the U.S. supports democracy if, and only if, the outcomes accord with its strategic and economic objectives, the rueful conclusion of neo-Reaganite Thomas Carothers, the most careful and respected scholarly analyst of “democracy promotion” initiatives.

More broadly, for 35 years the U.S. has led the rejectionist camp on Israel-Palestine, blocking an international consensus calling for a political settlement in terms too well known to require repetition.  The western mantra is that Israel seeks negotiations without preconditions, while the Palestinians refuse.  The opposite is more accurate.  The U.S. and Israel demand strict preconditions, which are, furthermore, designed to ensure that negotiations will lead either to Palestinian capitulation on crucial issues, or nowhere.

The first precondition is that the negotiations must be supervised by Washington, which makes about as much sense as demanding that Iran supervise the negotiation of Sunni-Shia conflicts in Iraq.  Serious negotiations would have to be under the auspices of some neutral party, preferably one that commands some international respect, perhaps Brazil.  The negotiations would seek to resolve the conflicts between the two antagonists: the U.S.-Israel on one side, most of the world on the other.

The second precondition is that Israel must be free to expand its illegal settlements in the West Bank.  Theoretically, the U.S. opposes these actions, but with a very light tap on the wrist, while continuing to provide economic, diplomatic, and military support.  When the U.S. does have some limited objections, it very easily bars the actions, as in the case of the E-1 project linking Greater Jerusalem to the town of Ma’aleh Adumim, virtually bisecting the West Bank, a very high priority for Israeli planners (across the spectrum), but raising some objections in Washington, so that Israel has had to resort to devious measures to chip away at the project.

The pretense of opposition reached the level of farce last February when Obama vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for implementation of official U.S. policy (also adding the uncontroversial observation that the settlements themselves are illegal, quite apart from expansion).  Since that time there has been little talk about ending settlement expansion, which continues, with studied provocation.

Thus, as Israeli and Palestinian representatives prepared to meet in Jordan in January 2011, Israel announced new construction in Pisgat Ze’ev and Har Homa, West Bank areas that it has declared to be within the greatly expanded area of Jerusalem, annexed, settled, and constructed as Israel’s capital, all in violation of direct Security Council orders.  Other moves carry forward the grander design of separating whatever West Bank enclaves will be left to Palestinian administration from the cultural, commercial, political center of Palestinian life in the former Jerusalem.

It is understandable that Palestinian rights should be marginalized in U.S. policy and discourse.  Palestinians have no wealth or power.  They offer virtually nothing to U.S. policy concerns; in fact, they have negative value, as a nuisance that stirs up “the Arab street.”

Israel, in contrast, is a valuable ally.  It is a rich society with a sophisticated, largely militarized high-tech industry.  For decades, it has been a highly valued military and strategic ally, particularly since 1967, when it performed a great service to the U.S. and its Saudi ally by destroying the Nasserite “virus,” establishing the “special relationship” with Washington in the form that has persisted since.  It is also a growing center for U.S. high-tech investment.  In fact, high tech and particularly military industries in the two countries are closely linked.

Apart from such elementary considerations of great power politics as these, there are cultural factors that should not be ignored.  Christian Zionism in Britain and the U.S. long preceded Jewish Zionism, and has been a significant elite phenomenon with clear policy implications (including the Balfour Declaration, which drew from it).  When General Allenby conquered Jerusalem during World War I, he was hailed in the American press as Richard the Lion-Hearted, who had at last won the Crusades and driven the pagans out of the Holy Land.

The next step was for the Chosen People to return to the land promised to them by the Lord.  Articulating a common elite view, President Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes described Jewish colonization of Palestine as an achievement “without comparison in the history of the human race.” Such attitudes find their place easily within the Providentialist doctrines that have been a strong element in popular and elite culture since the country’s origins: the belief that God has a plan for the world and the U.S. is carrying it forward under divine guidance, as articulated by a long list of leading figures.

Moreover, evangelical Christianity is a major popular force in the U.S.  Further toward the extremes, End Times evangelical Christianity also has enormous popular outreach, invigorated by the establishment of Israel in 1948, revitalized even more by the conquest of the rest of Palestine in 1967 — all signs that End Times and the Second Coming are approaching.

These forces have become particularly significant since the Reagan years, as the Republicans have abandoned the pretense of being a political party in the traditional sense, while devoting themselves in virtual lockstep uniformity to servicing a tiny percentage of the super-rich and the corporate sector.  However, the small constituency that is primarily served by the reconstructed party cannot provide votes, so they have to turn elsewhere.

The only choice is to mobilize tendencies that have always been present, though rarely as an organized political force: primarily nativists trembling in fear and hatred, and religious elements that are extremists by international standards but not in the U.S.  One outcome is reverence for alleged Biblical prophecies, hence not only support for Israel and its conquests and expansion, but passionate love for Israel, another core part of the catechism that must be intoned by Republican candidates — with Democrats, again, not too far behind.

These factors aside, it should not be forgotten that the “Anglosphere” — Britain and its offshoots — consists of settler-colonial societies, which rose on the ashes of indigenous populations, suppressed or virtually exterminated.  Past practices must have been basically correct, in the U.S. case even ordained by Divine Providence.  Accordingly there is often an intuitive sympathy for the children of Israel when they follow a similar course.  But primarily, geostrategic and economic interests prevail, and policy is not graven in stone.

The Iranian “Threat” and the Nuclear Issue

Let us turn finally to the third of the leading issues addressed in the establishment journals cited earlier, the “threat of Iran.” Among elites and the political class this is generally taken to be the primary threat to world order — though not among populations.  In Europe, polls show that Israel is regarded as the leading threat to peace.  In the MENA countries, that status is shared with the U.S., to the extent that in Egypt, on the eve of the Tahrir Square uprising, 80% felt that the region would be more secure if Iran had nuclear weapons.  The same polls found that only 10% regard Iran as a threat — unlike the ruling dictators, who have their own concerns.

In the United States, before the massive propaganda campaigns of the past few years, a majority of the population agreed with most of the world that, as a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has a right to carry out uranium enrichment.  And even today, a large majority favors peaceful means for dealing with Iran.  There is even strong opposition to military engagement if Iran and Israel are at war.  Only a quarter regard Iran as an important concern for the U.S. altogether.  But it is not unusual for there to be a gap, often a chasm, dividing public opinion and policy.

Why exactly is Iran regarded as such a colossal threat? The question is rarely discussed, but it is not hard to find a serious answer — though not, as usual, in the fevered pronouncements.  The most authoritative answer is provided by the Pentagon and the intelligence services in their regular reports to Congress on global security.  They report that Iran does not pose a military threat.  Its military spending is very low even by the standards of the region,minuscule of course in comparison with the U.S.

Iran has little capacity to deploy force.  Its strategic doctrines are defensive, designed to deter invasion long enough for diplomacy to set it.  If Iran is developing nuclear weapons capability, they report, that would be part of its deterrence strategy.  No serious analyst believes that the ruling clerics are eager to see their country and possessions vaporized, the immediate consequence of their coming even close to initiating a nuclear war.  And it is hardly necessary to spell out the reasons why any Iranian leadership would be concerned with deterrence, under existing circumstances.

The regime is doubtless a serious threat to much of its own population — and regrettably, is hardly unique on that score.  But the primary threat to the U.S. and Israel is that Iran might deter their free exercise of violence.  A further threat is that the Iranians clearly seek to extend their influence to neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan, and beyond as well.  Those “illegitimate” acts are called “destabilizing” (or worse).  In contrast, forceful imposition of U.S. influence halfway around the world contributes to “stability” and order, in accord with traditional doctrine about who owns the world.

It makes very good sense to try to prevent Iran from joining the nuclear weapons states, including the three that have refused to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty — Israel, India, and Pakistan, all of which have been assisted in developing nuclear weapons by the U.S., and are still being assisted by them.  It is not impossible to approach that goal by peaceful diplomatic means.  One approach, which enjoys overwhelming international support, is to undertake meaningful steps towards establishing a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East, including Iran and Israel (and applying as well to U.S. forces deployed there), better still extending to South Asia.

Support for such efforts is so strong that the Obama administration has been compelled to formally agree, but with reservations: crucially, that Israel’s nuclear program must not be placed under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Association, and that no state (meaning the U.S.) should be required to release information about “Israeli nuclear facilities and activities, including information pertaining to previous nuclear transfers to Israel.” Obama also accepts Israel’s position that any such proposal must be conditional on a comprehensive peace settlement, which the U.S. and Israel can continue to delay indefinitely.

This survey comes nowhere near being exhaustive, needless to say. Among major topics not addressed is the shift of U.S. military policy towards the Asia-Pacific region, with new additions to the huge military base system underway right now, in Jeju Island off South Korea and Northwest Australia, all elements of the policy of “containment of China.” Closely related is the issue of U.S. bases in Okinawa, bitterly opposed by the population for many years, and a continual crisis in U.S.-Tokyo-Okinawa relations.

Revealing how little fundamental assumptions have changed, U.S. strategic analysts describe the result of China’s military programs as a “classic ‘security dilemma,’ whereby military programs and national strategies deemed defensive by their planners are viewed as threatening by the other side,” writes Paul Godwin of the Foreign Policy Research Institute.  The security dilemma arises over control of the seas off China’s coasts.  The U.S. regards its policies of controlling these waters as “defensive,” while China regards them as threatening; correspondingly, China regards its actions in nearby areas as “defensive” while the U.S. regards them as threatening.   No such debate is even imaginable concerning U.S. coastal waters.  This “classic security dilemma” makes sense, again, on the assumption that the U.S. has a right to control most of the world, and that U.S. security requires something approaching absolute global control.

While the principles of imperial domination have undergone little change, the capacity to implement them has markedly declined as power has become more broadly distributed in a diversifying world.  Consequences are many.  It is, however, very important to bear in mind that — unfortunately — none lifts the two dark clouds that hover over all consideration of global order: nuclear war and environmental catastrophe, both literally threatening the decent survival of the species.

WASHINGTON — A feared wave of homegrown terrorism by radicalized Muslim Americans has not materialized

, with plots and arrests dropping sharply over the two years since an unusual peak in 2009, according to a new study by a North Carolina research group.

The study, to be released on Wednesday, found that 20 Muslim Americans were charged in violent plots or attacks in 2011, down from 26 in 2010 and a spike of 47 in 2009.

Charles Kurzman, the author of the report for the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security, called terrorism by Muslim Americans “a minuscule threat to public safety.” Of about 14,000 murders in the United States last year, not a single one resulted from Islamic extremism, said Mr. Kurzman, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina.

The report also found that no single ethnic group predominated among Muslims charged in terrorism cases last year — six were of Arab ancestry, five were white, three were African-American and two were Iranian, Mr. Kurzman said. That pattern of ethnic diversity has held for those arrested since Sept. 11, 2001, he said.

Forty percent of those charged in 2011 were converts to Islam, Mr. Kurzman found, slightly higher than the 35 percent of those charged since the 2001 attacks. His new report is based on the continuation of research he conducted for a book he published last year, “The Missing Martyrs: Why There Are So Few Muslim Terrorists.”

The decline in cases since 2009 has come as a relief to law enforcement and counterterrorism officials. In that year, the authorities were surprised by a series of terrorist plots or attacks, including the killing of 13 people at Fort Hood, Tex., by an Army psychiatrist who had embraced radical Islam, Maj. Nidal Hasan.

The upsurge in domestic plots two years ago prompted some scholars of violent extremism to question the conventional wisdom that Muslims in the United States, with higher levels of education and income than the average American, were not susceptible to the message of Al Qaeda.

Concerns grew after the May 2010 arrest of Faisal Shahzad, a naturalized American citizen, for trying to blow up a sport utility vehicle in Times Square. Mr. Shahzad had worked as a financial analyst and seemed thoroughly assimilated. In a dramatic courtroom speech after pleading guilty, he blamed American military action in Muslim countries for his militancy.

The string of cases fueled wide and often contentious discussion of the danger of radicalization among American Muslims, including Congressional hearings led by Representative Peter T. King, a Long Island Republican and chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security.

But the number of cases declined, returning to the rough average of about 20 Muslim Americans accused of extremist violence per year that has prevailed since the 2001 attacks, with 193 people in that category over the decade. By Mr. Kurzman’s count, 462 other Muslim Americans have been charged since 2001 for nonviolent crimes in support of terrorism, including financing and making false statements.

The 2011 cases include just one actual series of attacks, which caused no injuries, involving rifle shots fired late at night at military buildings in Northern Virginia. A former Marine Corps reservist, Yonathan Melaku, pleaded guilty in the case last month in an agreement that calls for a 25-year prison sentence.

Other plots unearthed by law enforcement last year and listed in Mr. Kurzman’s report included a suspected Iranian plan to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States, a scheme to attack a Shiite mosque in Michigan and another to blow up synagogues, churches and the Empire State Building.

“Fortunately, very few of these people are competent and very few get to the stage of preparing an attack without coming to the attention of the authorities,” Mr. Kurzman said.

by : SCOTT SHANE, nytimes .

The movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel — long painted as a fringe group by the Israel advocacy community — is seeking to wrap itself in the mantle of the mainstream American left. At the movement’s first-ever national conference, presenters and attendees compared BDS to the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott, the Cesar Chavez grape boycott and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, from which it draws inspiration.

But Penn’s Israel advocacy community greeted all this with a cold shoulder. Rather than protest the event, Rabbi Mike Uram, director of Penn Hillel, urged the group’s pro-Israel member organizations to steer clear of the program, lest they legitimize the BDS movement by drawing attention to it.

“On Penn’s campus, people don’t know what BDS is,” Uram said. “To engage in a conversation is to raise them to a level that they are not at.”

“Spending our time and resources and efforts standing outside, protesting the event, says that this is mainstream political discourse,” added Noah Feit, a sophomore who is president of Penn Friends of Israel. “We decided not to stage a protest, because we prefer not to legitimize radical political discourse. We think there are better and more effective forums to express our opinions.”

This contrast — a nascent pro-Palestinian movement craving legitimacy, with the Jewish establishment ignoring it — was a surprising outcome of what some had expected to be a volatile few days on an Ivy League campus with a large percentage of Jewish students and graduates. Area Jewish leaders had signed on to advertisements decrying the conference; some criticized the university for even allowing it to occur.

For the Israel advocacy community, BDS represents a threat to Israel’s sovereignty as a Jewish state. The movement was founded by Palestinian civil society organizations in 2005 after the International Court of Justice, the judicial body of the United Nations, deemed Israel’s separation barrier to be illegal. The barrier, which Israel justifies as a security measure, departs at numerous points from Israel’s pre-1967 border to take in land deep in the occupied West Bank. BDS centers on three demands: an end to the occupation of Palestinian territories and the dismantling of the barrier, the recognition of rights of Palestinians living in Israel proper and the right of return for Palestinian refugees.

To Israel’s supporters, this third stipulation would tip the demographic balance of Israel’s population, spelling demise for a Jewish state. Israel advocates also balk at the comparison to apartheid-era South Africa, saying that BDS’s focus on Israel alone presents a perilous double standard, giving other Middle Eastern countries with poor human rights records a free pass.

At the conference, which was organized by the 15-member Penn BDS group, there was talk of positioning the initiative as a democracy movement. A student activist media handbook circulating at the conference admonished BDS proponents to “infuse our language with values like freedom, equal rights, democracy, etc. This allows you to speak to Americans in terms they understand. Most can’t define Zionism, but freedom and equality are easy terms for most people to conceptualize. Emphasizing shared values also allows you to connect with Americans on both an emotional and intellectual level.”

That message was echoed by Ali Abunimah, a Palestinian rights activist and co-founder of the Electronic Intifada website. “We are fighting for rights people have fought for all over the world,” Abunimah said in his well-attended keynote speech. “We have to link this struggle to so many other struggles in this country and around the world.”

In formulating a response to Penn BDS, Philadelphia’s Jewish community at first split on whether it should ask the university to reject the conference outright or counter the initiative with its own programming.

Some, like Rabbi Neil Cooper of Temple Beth Hillel-Beth El in Wynnewood, railed against the university for allowing BDS to come to campus. “I believe that, in the future, this conference at the University of Pennsylvania will be identified not only as a political gathering but as a movement grounded in and supported by the worldview of academia,” he wrote in an email to his congregants. According to Penn’s student newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian, several major donors threatened to withdraw their support of the university should the conference go forward there.

Though a staunch supporter of Israel, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz affirmed the BDS movement’s right to be on campus, saying that had the university rejected it, he would have defended it on free speech grounds.

Dershowitz spoke before an audience of 900 people at Penn the night before the BDS conference was scheduled to begin, in an event hosted by the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia along with several other on- and off-campus Jewish groups. “We are going to win this encounter,” with BDS, he said.

After the Dershowitz speech, Penn Hillel threw a fundraiser for an Israeli charity at a bar near campus; the next night it ran a series of dinnertime conversations about Israel, “Israel Across Penn.”

A brief flare-up occurred when Ruben Gur, a Penn psychiatry professor, wrote an op-ed in The Daily Pennsylvanian, calling the BDS proponents “Nazis” and their Jewish backers “Capos”— a slam that Abunimah and others said only distracted from the issues.

But when Penn BDS kicked off, there was nary a protester in sight. And that was a good thing, said Geri Palast, head of the Israel Action Network, a group countering delegitimization on campus and beyond. “While we may disagree with people, it is not in our interest to try to squelch the speech,” she said. “It really turns the opposition into a martyr, and we don’t need that.”

Even Cooper has since changed his tune, writing about BDS in another upcoming newsletter that he shared with the Forward: “When our enemies attack, we might, at times, be better advised to strengthen and build up ourselves rather than engaging in battle.”

They also worried about how to brand themselves in easily accessible sound bites.

“Palestine has to become part of the American vocabulary in the way Americans learn about and digest information, like in the kinds of magazines you read in the laundromat,” said Sarah Schulman, a professor of English at the City University of New York who spoke at the conference, held at the University of Pennsylvania the first weekend in February. “We have to brand BDS as something alive, progressive, increasingly available, with a human face, something Americans can relate to.”

by :  Naomi Zeveloff.

the year before, bringing the total since 9/11 to 193, or just under 20 per year (see Figure1). This number is not negligible – small numbers of Muslim-Americans continue to radicalize each year and plot violence.

However, the rate of radicalization is far less than many feared in the aftermath of 9/11.

In early 2003, for example, Robert Mueller, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, told Congress that “FBI investigations have revealed militant Islamics in the US. We strongly suspect that several hundred of these extremists are linked to al-Qaeda”.

Fortunately, we have not seen violence on this scale.

The scale of homegrown Muslim-American terrorism in 2011 does not appear to have corroborated the warnings issued by government officials early in the year.

In March 2011, Mueller testified to Congress that this threat had become even more complex and difficult to combat, as “we are seeing anincrease in the sources of terrorism, a wider array of terrorist targets, and an evolution in terrorist tactics and means of communication”.

Janet Napolitano, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security echoed Mueller’s concern in her 2011 “State of America’s Homeland Security Address: “the terrorist threat facing our country has evolved significantly in the last ten years and continues to evolve – so that, in some ways, the threat facing us is at its most heightened state since those attacks.”

Congressman Peter King, chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security in the U.S. House of Representatives, held four hearings in 2011 to alert Americans to the “the extent of Muslim-American radicalization by al-Qaeda in their communities today and how terrible it is, the impact it has on families, how extensive it is, and also that the main victims of this are Muslim-Americans themselves.”

These and similar warnings have braced Americans for a possible upsurge in Muslim-American terrorism, which has not occurred.

Instead, terrorist plots have decreased in each of the past two years, since the spike of cases in 2009. Threats remain: violent plots have not dwindled to zero, and revolutionary Islamist organizations overseas continue to call for Muslim-Americans to engage in violence. However, the number of Muslim-Americans who have responded to these calls continues to be tiny, when compared with the population of more than 2 million Muslims in the United State and when compared with the total level of violence in the United States, which was on track to register 14,000 murders in 2011.

Of the 20 Muslim-Americans accused of violent terrorist plots in 2011 (Figure 2), only

one, Yonathan Melaku, was charged with carrying out an attack, firing shots at military buildings in northern Virginia (Figure 3). 

Nobody was injured. This figure represents a significant decrease from 2010, when six Muslim-Americans carried out terrorist attacks, five of them joining militants in Somalia and Yemen and one carrying out a domestic attack: Faizal Shahzad’s attempted car-bomb near Times Square in New York City , which would have killed hundreds of people, perhaps more than a thousand, if the bomb had been constructed properly.

Another three individuals were arrested in 2011 after gathering explosives: Roger Stockham, who was arrested with fireworks in his car trunk after bragging to a bartender that he intended to blow up a Shia Muslim mosque in Michigan; Joseph Jeffrey Brice, who injured himself testing explosives near a highway in eastern Washington; and Naser Jason Abdo, who bought explosives for an alleged plot to attack Fort Hood in Texas. The other 16 suspects — none have been convicted yet–were arrested at an early stage in their plots.

Two suspects in 2011 received terrorist training abroad, down from eight in 2010 and 28 in 2009: Waad Ramadan Alwan and Shareef Hammadi, who were arrested in Kentucky for plotting to send weapons and money to Iraqi insurgents they allegedly served with before coming to the U.S. in 2009.

In terms of the potential for casualties, the bulk of the suspects in 2011 appeared to have been limited in competence. The first terrorism-related arrest of a Muslim-American in 2011, for example, involved Emerson Begolly, a 21-year-old former white supremacist who converted to Islam and posted violent-sounding material on the Internet. When his mother tricked him into meeting with FBI agents outside a fast-food restaurant, he got into a tussle and bit them.

The second case of the year involved Roger Stockham, who stopped at a bar on the way to his attack and bragged to the bartender about his hostility toward Shia Muslims and his plan to attack a local Shia mosque. The bartender, an Arab-American, called the police. The third case involved Alwar Pouryan, an Iranian-American who allegedly conspired with a Jewish Israeli-American, Oded Orbach, to sell weapons in Romania to an agent of the Taliban, who was actually an undercover agent of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency.

The fourth case involved a Saudi student in Texas, Khalid Aldawsari, who tried to buy a large amount of chemicals over the Internet from a company in North Carolina. The company called the FBI. These and other cases do not appear to be the actions of sophisticated, well-trained Islamist revolutionaries.

As in previous years, 2011’s Muslim-American terrorism suspects did not fit any particular demographic profile (Figure 4). 30 percent were age 30 and older, as compared with 35 percent of all cases since 9/11. 70 percent were U.S. citizens, as compared with 68 percent of all cases since 9/11. The suspects came from a variety of ethnic backgrounds – 30 percent Arab, 25 percent white, and 15 percent African-American. 40 percent were converts, as compared with 35 percent of all cases since 9/11.

One demographic difference in 2011’s cases as the absence of Somali-Americans, as compared with three in 2010, 18 in 2009, and three in the years 2003-2008. Public concern over Somali-American radicalization continued to echo throughout the year, including a Congressional hearing on the subject,8 but there were no new cases of Somali-American terrorism in 2011.

Muslim-Americans continued to be a source of initial tips alerting law-enforcement authorities to violent terrorist plots. Muslim-Americans turned in 2 of 14 individuals in 2011 whose initial tip could be identified, bringing the total to 52 of 140 since 9/11.

One of 2011’s 20 suspects had prison experience: Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif, who was arrested for plotting to attack a military induction center. Abdul-Latif was incarcerated in 2002-2004 for robbery and assault. Since 9/11, fewer than one tenth of suspects and perpetrators (17 of 193) had been incarcerated, 14 in American prisons and three overseas. Prison does not seem to be a major source of Islamic radicalization.9

An unusually large ratio of suspects in 2011 (4 of 20) had military experience. Since 9/11, fewer than one tenth of suspects and perpetrators (15 of 193) had served in the United States military.

Support for Terrorism

In addition to the decline in violent plots, the number of Muslim-Americans indicted for support of terrorism — financing, false statements, and other connections with terrorist plots and organizations, aside from violent plots — fell from 27 individuals in 2010 to 8 in 2011, bringing the total to 462 since 9/11 (Figure 5).

These statistics, analyzed here for the first time, include 256 Muslim-Americans whose cases were classified as “terrorism-related” in a 2010 report by the U.S. Department of Justice, but who were not charged with terrorism-related offenses, and whose connection to terrorism was not made public.10 Some of these cases seem somewhat removed from actual terrorist threats – for example, Zameer Nooralla Mohamed, who was convicted for making a hoax call to the FBI claiming that four acquaintances, including an ex-girlfriend and a colleague who owed him money, were planning an attack. In other cases, the government may have chosen to prosecute a lesser crime rather than make terrorismrelated intelligence public.

In cases where the connection to terrorism is publicly known, 151 individuals were prosecuted for financing terrorist plots or organizations; 12 individuals were accused of making false statements during terrorism investigations; and 43 individuals had other connections with terrorism, such as producing a video for a foreign terrorist organization, sending cassette tapes or raincoats to members of a terrorist organization, or personal associations with members of terrorist organizations.

These statistics were supplemented with information from the Terrorist Trial Report Card produced by New York University School of Law’s Center on Law and Security, which generously made its dataset available for this project;11 the Investigative Project on Terrorism, which lists terrorism-related court cases;12 and Mother Jones magazine’s online dataset of terrorism investigations.13

The decline in prosecutions of Muslim- Americans for support of terrorism over the past decade is particularly notable in view of the heightened scrutiny that terrorism financing now receives from law enforcement agencies, which “have established an increasingly difficult environment within which terrorist financiers can operate undetected,” and “have made the concealment and transfer of terrorism related funds more difficult,” according to Congressional testimony by the acting assistant director of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division.

In recent years, terrorist financing cases have involved smaller amounts of money (Figure 6).

Of the 16 cases involving more than a million dollars, only five occurred in the last four years, and none in 2011. By contrast, most cases in the past four years — 13 of 23 cases in which the estimated value of the financing was made public, and all four cases in 2011 involved less than $100,000. The scale of the financing is not known for six cases. (Note that Figure 6 counts cases, while previous charts counted individuals.)

The number of Muslim-Americans indicted for support for terrorism is more than double the number indicted for violent plots – perhaps not surprising, since it would appear to be far less of a commitment to engage in financing than to engage in violence. Nonetheless, this finding underscores the relatively low level of radicalization among Muslim-Americans.

By: Charles kurzman

A report found that since President Obama took office between 282 and 535 civilians have been reported as killed in Pakistan, including more than 60 children.

AMY GOODMAN: The CIA’s drone campaign in Pakistan has killed dozens of civilians who had gone to rescue victims or were attending funerals. So concludes a new report by the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism. It found, since President Obama took office three years ago, between 282 and 535 civilians have been reported as killed, including more than 60 children. The investigation also revealed at least 50 civilians were killed in follow-up strikes when they had gone to help victims. More than 20 civilians have also been attacked in deliberate strikes on funerals and mourners.

The report was published days after President Obama defended his administration’s use of armed drones during a “virtual interview” conducted last week via Google+ and YouTube. He also acknowledged the United States was carrying out drone strikes inside Pakistan. President Obama made the comments after he was asked how he feels about the large number of civilians killed by these drones since he took office.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I want to make sure that people understand, actually, drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties. For the most part, they have been very precise precision strikes against al-Qaeda and their affiliates. And we are very careful in terms of how it’s been applied. So, I think that there’s this perception somehow that we’re just sending in a whole bunch of strikes willy-nilly. This is a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists who are trying to go in and harm Americans, hit American facilities, American bases, and so on. It is important for everybody to understand that this thing is kept on a very tight leash.

AMY GOODMAN: President Obama, discussing the drones program in a virtual interview.

Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a case last week to force the Obama administration to release legal and intelligence records related to the targeted killing of U.S. citizens in drone attacks in Yemen last year. The lawsuit charged the Justice and Defense Departments and the CIA with illegally failing to respond to requests made in October under the Freedom of Information Act.

To find out more about drone strikes, we go to London to speak to the lead author of the Bureau report. Chris Woods is an award-winning reporter with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. He leads the Bureau’s drones investigation team.

Talk about your research and exactly what you found, Chris.

CHRIS WOODS: We’ve been looking at this since August of last year. When we were putting together our massive database on CIA drone strikes in Pakistan, we noted that there were repeated reports at the time, contemporaneous reports in publications like the New York Times, news agencies like Reuters, by CNN, that there were these strikes on rescuers, that there were reports that there had been an initial strike and then, some minutes later, as people had come forward to help and pull out the dead and injured, that drones had returned to the scene and had attacked rescuers. Now, we didn’t take that at face value when we began a major investigation, that’s been ongoing for many months now, that we just published in conjunction with the London Sunday Times, where we looked at those 18 original reports, and we’ve been able to confirm, through our researchers on the ground in Waziristan, that a dozen of those attacks on rescuers, and also two attacks on funerals, have taken place in Waziristan. And we’ve been able to name just over 50 civilians that we understand have been killed in those attacks. In total, we think that more than 75 civilians have been killed, specifically in these attacks on rescuers and on mourners, on funeral-goers.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to read to you an excerpt of a quote that just appeared in the New York Times. “A senior American counterterrorism official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, questioned the report’s findings, saying ‘targeting decisions are the product of intensive intelligence collection and observation.’ The official added: ‘One must wonder why an effort that has so carefully gone after terrorists who plot to kill civilians has been subjected to so much misinformation. Let’s be under no illusions—there are a number of elements who would like nothing more than to malign these efforts and help Al Qaeda succeed.’” So said an unnamed senior American counterterrorism official in response to your report, Chris Woods.

CHRIS WOODS: I think, obviously, that is a disgraceful comment from an unnamed U.S. official. We’ve presented our findings in good faith. It’s all available on TBIJ’s website. Our data is transparent. We have linked to all of our sources. Our field investigators have put up their findings. We have eyewitness testimonies. We have a supported interview with the national security correspondent of the Washington Post confirming that his U.S. intelligence sources confirmed to him that CIA drones willingly and predictably carried out an attack on a funeral in Pakistan deliberately targeting people there. If the CIA’s response—or rather, unnamed security official’s response—to that is simply to accuse us of aiding al-Qaeda, then something is going significantly wrong at the CIA and in the wider U.S. intelligence community.

AMY GOODMAN: Where do you go from here now with this report? And especially, what do you understand is the scope of the drone program? How much is it expanding?

CHRIS WOODS: The drone program right now really does seem to have changed. There were a number of incidents at the back end of last year. The last year was a bad year for U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan. Many things went wrong. A lot of civilians were killed. There was a lot of bad publicity that was generated for the administration. And then, not actually a drone strike, but aNATO air strike which killed 24 Pakistani soldiers last November, effectively ended the drone campaign for about 55 days. It’s resumed again, beginning January 12th, but so far this year we’ve seen four strikes, and the targeting does appear to have changed on the ground.

And just to be clear, the attacks on rescuers and mourners that we note, they’ve all occurred under the Obama administration between 2009 and July 2011. I think that date is quite interesting, because that’s also when Leon Panetta stepped down as head of CIA. You have an interim CIA leader, and then David Petraeus comes in. We haven’t had any reports from Pakistan since July of last year of attacks on rescuers. So there’s an indication of a policy change, and there’s also an indication of a targeting change on the ground. So, things may be changing at the moment. We’re still trying to get a clearer understanding of what’s taking place in Pakistan.

I think the comments that these unnamed officials make really are unhelpful in these circumstances. I think the CIA should be looking—we’ve given them the names of 53 people on this occasion, named individuals, their tribes, the villages in which they died, the dates on which they died. Their response to that should be to go and have a look at that and to look at their own evidence and to challenge it against what we’re putting forward and to see whether they’ve perhaps got it wrong or perhaps have been misled. This does need an inquiry from CIA into their past targeting practice.

AMY GOODMAN: During President Obama’s virtual interview last week with Google+ and YouTube, he also said the drones program was a less intrusive way of targeting al-Qaeda.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We have to be judicious in how we use drones. But understand that probably our ability to respect the sovereignty of other countries and to limit our incursions into somebody else’s territory is enhanced by the fact that we are able to pinpoint strike an al-Qaeda operative in a place where the capacities of that military in that country may not be able to get them. So, obviously, a lot of these strikes have been in the FATA and going after al-Qaeda suspects who are up in very tough terrain along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. For us to be able to get them in another way would involve, probably, a lot more intrusive military actions than the one that we’re already engaging in.

AMY GOODMAN: Chris Woods, your response?

CHRIS WOODS: I think he does raise an interesting point. Of course, we know that U.S. boots on the ground in Pakistan is far more inflammatory than these drone strikes, which almost certainly have been taking place with the secret collusion of the Pakistan government. Boots on the ground would be a disaster for both Pakistan and the United States. And so, the President’s view is that the drone strikes, I suppose, are the least worst way of engaging with al-Qaeda.

But I think the President also slightly misrepresents the case in terms of the strikes themselves. Although al-Qaeda are sometimes the target of these drone attacks, in the majority of occasions the targets are actually Afghan Taliban who are fighting an insurgency across the border in Afghanistan. So what we’re actually seeing is a counterterrorism organization, the CIA, a civilian organization, carrying out counterinsurgency operations, military operations, relating to the war that’s across the border. And that’s a problem for the President and for the United States. This isn’t just about going for al-Qaeda, which I think Pakistan would have a great deal of support for. Al-Qaeda is no friend to Pakistan. Pakistan has been absolutely key in tracking down and capturing and killing hundreds of al-Qaeda operatives within the country. This is also about the war across the border and about counterinsurgency. And that blurred line is part of the problem, I think.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the difference between attacking Pakistan and Afghanistan, legally?

CHRIS WOODS: When a drone strike occurs in Afghanistan and, for example, a wedding party is hit or civilians are accidentally killed, there is an automatic inquiry. These are military operations carried out by the U.S. military or their allies, and there’s a line of accountability. And although people may not be happy with the conclusions that those investigations reach, there is a clear level of accountability.

The moment a drone goes across the border, even if it’s targeting the same militant, if a civilian is killed, there is no accountability that we’re aware of. Even CIA agrees that it’s killed at least 50, and perhaps as high as 60, civilians. Their figures and ours are very different, and I think that’s based on how they interpreted “civilian.” But nevertheless, CIA agrees that they’ve killed 50 to 60 civilians. There’s not been an investigation into a single one of those civilian deaths, and there’s not been a cent of compensation ever paid to anyone who’s been killed accidentally in Pakistan. And that’s a problem. When you have a covert intelligence agency running a military campaign, your accountability effectively collapses. And I think it’s worrying. And recently, the President announced more money going into covert drone strikes and U.S. Special Operations activities. Both of these elements are unaccountable. They’re not held to the same levels of accountability as the regular U.S. military. And I think that should be raising concerns. As we’ve seen with these attacks on rescuers and funeral-goers in Pakistan, when there’s an absence of accountability, things happen. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these attacks on rescuers and funeral-goers have taken place without accountability. They’re doing it because nobody’s stopping them from doing it and nobody’s holding them to account for it.

AMY GOODMAN: Chris Woods, we have to leave it there. . I want to thank you for being with us, award-winning reporter with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London, leads the Bureau’s drones investigation team.

By : Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!

Terri Ginsberg was a visiting film studies professor at North Carolina State University when she was dismissed after sharing views critical of Zionism and the state of Israel.

She filed a grievance with the university, which denied her a hearing – three times. So she took her case to the courts. Two lower courts have decided against her, and she is now appealing to the Supreme Court of North Carolina.

In the words of an open letter co-sponsored by The British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP), the Center for Constitutional Rights, JVP-Westchester and others:

At North Carolina State University, shortly after Dr. Terri Ginsberg made supportive political comments at a screening of a Palestinian film in 2007, she went from being the favored candidate for a tenure-track position to being denied even an interview. Her efforts at redress were summarily rejected by NCSU and two courts.

A jury should be permitted to decide whether NCSU’s real reason for firing Dr. Ginsberg was its hostility to her political views, but this legal right has been denied.

While the judgments against Ginsberg have been disappointing and frustrating, the litigation process forced the university to go on record citing their suppression of Ginsberg’s free speech. As Ginsberg writes in her blog,

The case entered litigation in December 2009. In May 2010, the parties underwent a mediation hearing mandated by the State of North Carolina at which no settlement was reached. A week of depositions followed, during which NCSU admitted that it suppressed my speech critical of Zionism and supportive of the Palestine liberation struggle while I was under its employ as a visiting professor, and that it chose not to interview or hire me for a tenure-track position because of my scholarship focusing on Palestine/Israel, the Middle East, and the “Jewish.” Amazingly, the University claims that it has the right to suppress, refuse and reject on the basis of these considerations!

Ginsberg’s Supreme Court appeal makes it clear that this case has implications on multiple levels: this is an issue of academic freedom, in which the university dismissed an instructor because they disliked their politics. It’s also a case of employee protections, or lack thereof, because it was Ginsberg’s politics, and not her performance, that led to her dismissal.

In her own words,

On December 20, 2011, we filed a Petition for Discretionary Review with the North Carolina Supreme Court of this outrageously cursory and dismissive  opinion. The petition argues that the Appellate Court decision, like that of the lower court before it, changes the standard of proof in summary judgment employment decisions, wrongfully preventing the case from a hearing before a jury. The ruling thereby eviscerates the academic freedom protections which North Carolina’s constitution provides, and gives employers carte blanche to discriminate on employment decisions. It also sets a bad example for other states in failing to protect the academic freedom of professors and, in effect, narrowing the scope of speech to which students may be exposed.

The news here is that Ginsberg is NOT giving up. The university has admitted that they objected to her views on Israel and Palestine. Ginsberg has lost her job and lost countless other job opportunities because of this experience, and young people in North Carolina and at other schools are missing the opportunity to study with this courageous scholar. But Ginsberg is fighting back. You can support her.

by : Cecilie Surasky, muzzlewatch .

Should Mitt Romney make it to the White House, his Middle East policy and plan for Iran may be as hawkish as that of Bush Junior, thanks to
Eliot Cohen.

In 2005, a group of graduate students at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced and International Studies (SAIS) participated in the school’s annual diplomatic simulation. The high-pressure scenario required the students to negotiate a resolution to a standoff with a nuclear-armed Republic of Pakistan. Mara Karlin, a student known for her hawkish politics on Israel and the Middle East, played President of the United States.

Though most of the participants were confident they could head off a military conflict with diplomatic measures, Karlin jumped the gun. According to a former SAIS student, not only did Karlin order a nuclear strike on Pakistan, she also took the opportunity to nuke Iran. Her classmates were shocked. It was the first time in 45 years that a simulation concluded with the deployment of a nuclear weapon.

That year, Karlin received a plum job in the Bush administration’s Department of Defense where, according to her bio she was “intimately involved in formulating U.S. policy on Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel-Palestinian affairs.” Lebanon was a special area of focus for Karlin. She claims to have helped structure the Lebanese Armed Forces and coordinated relations between the US and Lebanese militaries.

According to the former SAIS student, Karlin was a favorite of Eliot Cohen, an ultra-hawkish professor of strategic studies at SAIS, which is regarded in American foreign policy circles as a training ground for the neoconservative movement. Through Cohen’s connections among the neocons occupying key civilian posts in Bush’s Defense Department, the former student claims Cohen was able to arrange an attractive sinecure for Karlin. Besides Karlin, the ex-SAIS student told me Cohen has promoted the career ambitions of many former pupils, including Kelly Magsamen, who worked under Cohen in the Bush administration and now oversees the Iran portfolio in the Obama administration’s State Department.

Today, Cohen is among Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney’s top campaign advisers. He is the primary author of Romney’s foreign policy white paper, which attacks Obama for “currying favor with [America’s] enemies” and “ostentatiously shunning Jerusalem.”

The paper urges a policy of regime change in Iran including possible coordination with Israel on military strikes to prevent the Iranian regime from developing a nuclear weapon. It is an aggressive Republican election season document presenting a concoction of post-9/11 unilateralism and unvarnished neo-imperialism as the antidote to a sitting president Cohen accused of “unilateral disarmament in the diplomatic and moral sphere.” More importantly, it suggests that a Romney administration’s foreign policy might look remarkably similar to – and perhaps more extreme than – that of the
Bush administration.

Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard University’s School of Government who has been on the receiving end of aggressive attacks by Cohen, called Cohen “a classic neoconservative.” Walt said, “He is constantly fretting about alleged U.S. vulnerabilities, consistently supportive of increased defense spending, and generally inclined to favor U.S. intervention in other countries. Second, like virtually all neoconservatives, he is also
deeply attached to Israel, as well as to the United States. I do not question his patriotism, but I think he tends to see U.S. and Israeli interests as more-or-less identical and doesn’t see a trade-off between support for one and support for the other.”

Cohen rose through the ranks of the Republican foreign policy elite as a protégé of Paul Wolfowitz, the former Assistant Secretary of Defense who is credited with playing a central role in the push for invading Iraq. In 1990, Wolfowitz secured a position for Cohen working beside him on the policy planning staff of the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Three years later, when Wolfowitz was appointed dean of SAIS, he began using his influence to propel Cohen’s career. According to a former State Department official who graduated from SAIS, it was through the beneficence of Wolfowitz that Cohen earned an endowed teaching position at SAIS as the Robert E. Osgood Professor of Strategic Studies.

In 1997, Wolfowitz and Cohen joined forces to form the Project for a New American Century, a neoconservative umbrella group that served as the key non-governmental vehicle for promoting the case for invading Iraq after 9/11. In the immediate wake of al-Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., Cohen took to the media to map out the next phase of a grand global military venture that he coined, “World War IV.”

Describing Iraq as “the big prize,” Cohen urged a unilateral invasion of Iraq that would advance the ambitions of the now-discredited political charlatan Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress. Like so many of his neoconservative peers, Cohen claimed Saddam Hussein’s regime maintained “a connection with the 9/11 terrorists.” With the war deteriorating into a chaotic bloodbath and as his own son was called up for duty, Cohen criticized the Bush administration for “happy talk and denials of error.” However, he refused to admit fault for his role in selling Americans on the invasion.

Despite mildly dissenting from the White House line, Cohen continued his ascent, replacing Philip Zelikow as counselor to then-Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice in 2007. According to the former State Department official, Rice had almost no role in Cohen’s appointment. Instead, Cohen was recommended for the position by Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz. Cheney’s daughter headed the Iran Syrian Operations Group, a newly created, neoconservative-inspired initiative burrowed within the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. At the time of Cohen’s appointment, Rice was attempting to open diplomatic lines to Iran, North Korea, and Syria – a move Cohen and the Cheneys fiercely opposed.

A few months after Bush left office, the former State Department official said Cohen and Wolfowitz rewarded their neoconservative fellow traveler Eric Edelman – a former Defense Department official during the later Bush years – with a visiting scholarship at SAIS. In private, Johns Hopkins alumni expressed outrage at the installment of Edelman, a career diplomat with no academic background, accusing the neoconservatives of exploiting SAIS to create a system of political patronage.

Cohen’s extensive web of foreign policy and military connections forms a seamless line to Tel Aviv. There, on the top floor of one of the office buildings known as “HaKirya,” is the office of one of Cohen’s former pupils, Aviv Kochavi. Kochavi is now the director of Israeli military intelligence, making him one of the most quietly influential figures in the country. In 2006, Kochavi, who also holds a philosophy degree, boasted to the Israeli architect and anti-occupation activist Eyal Weizmann about how he and his troops crushed Palestinian resistance cells in Nablus through the use of “inverse geometry” and “micro-tactical actions” inspired by the theories of post-structuralist philosophers like Deleuze and Guattari. On February 2, Kochavi appeared at the annual Herzliya Conference to issue grave warnings about the rapid progress of Iran’s nuclear program, suggesting that sanctions and diplomacy have failed, and that more aggressive action might be required.

Despite Cohen’s deep Israeli ties, he has proven extremely sensitive to critiques of the connection. When Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, the latter a professor of International Relations at the University of Chicago, published their widely debated paper on the Israel lobby in 2006, Cohen authored one of the first attempts to discredit their thesis about a loose coalition of individuals and organizations creating political pressure to move US foreign policy in
a pro-Israel direction. In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Cohen accused the authors of “kooky academic work” and “obsessive and irrationally hostile beliefs about Jews.”

“Cohen’s rather hysterical reaction to our work was both typical and easy to explain,” Walt remarked. “Given that he and other neoconservatives had played a key role in convincing George Bush to invade Iraq in 2003, he was understandably upset when we pointed this out and provided extensive documentation of their role in the run-up to this disastrous war. He could not refute our logic or our evidence, however, so he chose to misrepresent our views and smear us falsely as anti-Semites and conspiracy theorists.”

With the last battalions of US troops preparing to redeploy from Iraq to other conflict zones, Cohen is homing in on Iran. In a September 2009 editorial for the Wall Street Journal, he dismissed diplomacy and sanctions as feasible means of curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions. “Pressure, be it gentle or severe, will not erase that nuclear program,” he wrote. “The choices are now what they ever were: an American or an Israeli strike, which would probably cause a substantial war, or living in a world with Iranian nuclear weapons, which may also result in war, perhaps nuclear, over a longer period of time.” While not ruling out the necessity of an American strike on Iranian facilities, Cohen advised that the “US actively seek the overthrow of the Islamic Republic…through every instrument of U.S. power, soft more than hard.”

As tensions between Israel and Iran rise to unprecedented levels, and Israel’s leadership beseeches the US to join a military strike on Iran, Cohen’s visions of regime change seem closer to realization than ever before. For him and the neoconservative policy elite, a Romney victory in November might deliver the next “big prize.”

by : Max Blumenthal, al-akhbar.

George Orwell coined the useful term “unperson” for creatures denied personhood because they don’t abide by state doctrine. We may add the term “unhistory” to refer to the fate of unpersons, expunged from history on similar grounds.

The unhistory of unpersons is illuminated by the fate of anniversaries. Important ones are usually commemorated, with due solemnity when appropriate: Pearl Harbor, for example. Some are not, and we can learn a lot about ourselves by extricating them from unhistory.

Right now we are failing to commemorate an event of great human significance: the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s decision to launch the direct invasion of South Vietnam, soon to become the most extreme crime of aggression since World War II.

Kennedy ordered the U.S. Air Force to bomb South Vietnam (by February 1962, hundreds of missions had flown); authorized chemical warfare to destroy food crops so as to starve the rebellious population into submission; and set in motion the programs that ultimately drove millions of villagers into urban slums and virtual concentration camps, or “Strategic Hamlets.” There the villagers would be “protected” from the indigenous guerrillas whom, as the administration knew, they were willingly supporting.

Official efforts at justifying the attacks were slim, and mostly fantasy. Typical was the president’s impassioned address to the American Newspaper Publishers Association on April 27, 1961, where he warned that “we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence.” At the United Nations on Sept. 25, 1961, Kennedy said that if this conspiracy achieved its ends in Laos and Vietnam, “the gates will be opened wide.”

The short-term effects were reported by the highly respected Indochina specialist and military historian Bernard Fall – no dove, but one of those who cared about the people of the tormented countries.

In early 1965 he estimated that about 66,000 South Vietnamese had been killed between 1957 and 1961; and another 89,000 between 1961 and April 1965, mostly victims of the U.S. client regime or “the crushing weight of American armor, napalm, jet bombers and finally vomiting gases.”

The decisions were kept in the shadows, as are the shocking consequences that persist. To mention just one illustration: “Scorched Earth,” by Fred Wilcox, the first serious study of the horrifying and continuing impact of chemical warfare on the Vietnamese, appeared a few months ago – and is likely to join other works of unhistory. The core of history is what happened. The core of unhistory is to “disappear” what happened.

By 1967, opposition to the crimes in South Vietnam had reached a substantial scale. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops were rampaging through South Vietnam, and heavily populated areas were subjected to intense bombing. The invasion had spread to the rest of Indochina.

The consequences had become so horrendous that Bernard Fall forecast that “Vietnam as a cultural and historic entity … is threatened with extinction … (as) … the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size.”

When the war ended eight devastating years later, mainstream opinion was divided between those who called it a “noble cause” that could have been won with more dedication; and at the opposite extreme, the critics, to whom it was “a mistake” that proved too costly.

Still to come was the bombing of the remote peasant society of northern Laos, with such magnitude that victims lived in caves for years to try to survive; and shortly afterward the bombing of rural Cambodia, surpassing the level of all Allied bombing in the Pacific theater during World War II.

In 1970 U.S. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger had ordered “a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves” – a call for genocide of a kind rarely found in the archival record.

Laos and Cambodia were “secret wars,” in that reporting was scanty and the facts are still little-known to the general public or even educated elites, who nonetheless can recite by heart every real or alleged crime of official enemies.

Another chapter in the overflowing annals of unhistory.

In three years we may – or may not – commemorate another event of great contemporary relevance: the 900th anniversary of the Magna Carta.

This document is the foundation for what historian Margaret E. McGuiness, referring to the Nuremberg Trials, hailed as a “particularly American brand of legalism: punishment only for those who could be proved to be guilty through a fair trial with a panoply of procedural protections.”

The Great Charter declares that “no free man” shall be deprived of rights “except by the lawful judgment of his peers and by the law of the land.” The principles were later broadened to apply to men generally. They crossed the Atlantic and entered into the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, which declared that no “person” can be deprived of rights without due process and a speedy trial.

The founders of course did not intend the term “person” to apply to all persons. Native Americans were not persons. Neither were slaves. Women were scarcely persons. However, let us keep to the core notion of presumption of innocence, which has been cast into the oblivion of unhistory.

A further step in undermining the principles of the Magna Carta was taken when President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act, which codifies Bush-Obama practice of indefinite detention without trial under military custody.

Such treatment is now mandatory in the case of those accused of aiding enemy forces during the “war on terror,” or optional if those accused are American citizens.

The scope is illustrated by the first Guantanamo case to come to trial under President Obama: that of Omar Khadr, a former child soldier accused of the heinous crime of trying to defend his Afghan village when it was attacked by U.S. forces. Captured at age 15, Khadr was imprisoned for eight years in Bagram and Guantanamo, then brought to a military court in October 2010, where he was given the choice of pleading not guilty and staying in Guantanamo forever, or pleading guilty and serving only 8 more years. Khadr chose the latter.

Many other examples illuminate the concept of “terrorist.” One is Nelson Mandela, only removed from the terrorist list in 2008. Another was Saddam Hussein. In 1982 Iraq was removed from the list of terrorist-supporting states so that the Reagan administration could provide Hussein with aid after he invaded Iran.

Accusation is capricious, without review or recourse, and commonly reflecting policy goals – in Mandela’s case, to justify President Reagan’s support for the apartheid state’s crimes in defending itself against one of the world’s “more notorious terrorist groups”: Mandela’s African National Congress.

All better consigned to unhistory.

by : Noam Chomsky, Truthout.

New revelations have emerged about the New York City Police Department’s secret program to spy on Muslim communities. The Associated Press has just uncovered a confidential NYPD plan from 2006 to engage in targeted surveillance of Shiite mosques following increased tensions between the U.S. and Iran; the latest revelation on its secret intelligence operations focused on Muslim neighborhoods. On Thursday a coalition of Muslim and civil rights organizations reiterated their call for the immediate resignation of NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly. We’re joined by reporter Matt Apuzzo, who has helped break the NYPD spying story for the Associated Press; and Imam Talib Abdur-Rashid, spiritual leader at the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood and president of the Islamic Leadership Council of New York. [Includes rush transcript]

JUAN GONZALEZ: Welcome to all our listeners and viewers around the country and around the world. A new report by The Associated Press has revealed the New York Police Department recommended increasing surveillance of the Shiite Muslim community in 2006 as tensions between the United States and Iran escalated. The report is based on a series of interviews and a confidential 10-page police document recently obtained by AP. The May 2006 NYPD intelligence report is called “U.S.-Iran conflict: The Threat to New York City” and it makes several recommendations including increasing monitoring of specific Shiite mosques and centers in New York and surrounding areas. The report is just the latest revelation by The Associated Press into secret intelligence operations set up by the New York Police Department following September 11th attacks targeting Muslim neighborhoods. Hundreds of mosques and Muslim student groups were investigated and dozens were infiltrated. Police monitored and catalog daily life in Muslim communities from where people ate and shopped to where they worked and prayed. According to The AP, many of these operations were built with help from the CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans. On Thursday, a coalition of Muslim and civil rights organizations reiterated their call for the immediate resignation of New York City police Police Department Commissioner Ray Kelly. The groups released a press statement saying such acts of surveillance undermine trust between the Muslim community and the NYPD. These measures are merely the latest in the well documented history of NYPD’s targeting of communities of color through discriminatory policing practices.

AMY GOODMAN: The AP report comes on the heels of another controversy surrounding the New York Police Department and the Muslim community, the police department’s admission that it aired an anti-Muslim film, The Third Jihad to nearly 1500 officers during training. To talk more about the report, we go to Washington, D.C. to speak with Associated Press reporter Matt Apuzzo who co-wrote the piece, “Document Shows NYPD Eyed Shiites Based on Religion.” Earlier this week, he and his colleagues at The AP were named finalists for the 2012 Goldsmith Prize for investigative reporting for their ongoing reporting on the New York Police Department’s intelligence unit. So, Matt, welcome to Democracy Now!. Tell us what you found in this latest report you did. Tell us exactly what this document is.

MATT APUZZO: This document is an NYPD secret memo prepared for Police Commissioner Ray Kelly by the Intelligence Division, this is the unit that was set up and beefed up after 9/11 to basically root out terrorists and be the eyes and ears in the city for the NYPD. What the document does is, it says there are ongoing tensions between the U.S. and Iran and if those tensions were to escalate, what are the threats to New York, and what can we be doing now to mitigate those threats and try to get ahead of the curve? That type of analysis, that goal is the kind of analysis that frankly every intelligence agency does and everybody expects should be done. But what happens is, is they then say, this is the threat and they go through and they say this is the demographics of our city. They make note of the number of Iranians who live in the northeast and then they talk a little bit about the makeup of Iran and the political nature of Iran, and then they list a bunch of recommendations. And the recommendations go from the obvious—-we should try to recruit more sources who speak Farsi, to things like, as you mentioned at the top of the show, we need to be increasing our intelligence gathering at Shiite mosques. I mean, it is very hard to read that document as saying anything other than, you’re doing religious profiling. What that document says is, we should look at all Shiite mosques because we need to know about Iranian terrorists. They might be there, so—-Iran is Shiite country, Iran sponsors terrorism. We have Shiites in the United States. That’s where we should be, where the Shiites are in America.

That was really striking for us because Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said the NYPD doesn’t even consider religion in its policing. So, we’ve asked the mayor if he still thinks that’s true, but his office had no comment. Ray Kelly has said they only follow leads. But, there are no leads at all in this document that suggests this is why we’re going into these mosques, this is why we’re spying on Shiite mosques here. There are no leads other than they’re Shiites. Ray Kelly downplayed that at a news conference yesterday and said, well, this is a contingency plan. If hostilities were to break out between the U.S., this is our contingency plan. That was confusing to us because it doesn’t say that anywhere in the document. There’s no indication what would trigger this contingency plan. And also, what we haven’t been able to really get an answer for, if this is a good idea, if this is sensible police work, why wait? Why make a contingency plan? Why not just do it. And if it’s not a good idea, if it’s not something then why would you even have it as your contingency plan? If it’s not sensible then why would it be your contingency plan? So, we haven’t been able to get answers to those questions. But, the document has really, for us, been a little bit of a window into the analysis that drove a lot of the programs we have been reporting on for the last six months; the demographic unit which monitors conversations and coffee shops and hookah bars and social clubs, to the mosque crawlers that go to the mosques. We knew this was going on. We had documents showing it was going on. For the first time now, we have documents backed up by interviews showing, well this is why it was going on, and at least in this instance, the logic wasn’t to follow the lead, it was follow Muslims.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Matt, once again, the document shows the extraordinary reach of the New York Police Department. It’s talking not just about surveillance in New York City, but also of mosques up and down the North East. You’ve seen this before, the New York Police Department basically conducting operations wherever it feels it needs to do so.

MATT APUZZO: Right. So, in this instance, they’re talking about suburban Philadelphia and West Hartford, Connecticut. Those are the southernmost and northernmost reaches on the list—-of the mosques on the list. What’s interesting here, is this is so far outside the New York Police Department’s actual physical jurisdiction. Some of what they do, they actually are able to pick up undercover federal jurisdiction because this unit is technically part of a federal high intensity drug trafficking taskforce set up under the auspices of the federal government. At least some of these documents we’ve obtained were actually done on federal computers. But, we’ve not been able to get any answer from the Obama administration. The Justice Department wants nothing to do with this. They haven’t answered our questions for months on this about whether this is OK. We just want to know—-the Obama administration has been really clear about where it comes down on what police departments and what the federal government should be doing as far as outreach to communities and how we should be building those bridges. They’ve not said whether—-we want you doing that, but we also what you doing this stuff that the NYPD does.

The federal government spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on the NYPD. A lot of this stuff was done in collaboration with senior CIA officers. The CIA has trained NYPD officers. They get federal money for these programs. They’re using federal computers for these documents. But, ask Tom Perez from the Civil Rights Division what he thinks about this—-it was frustrating for us. He literally does not even answer the questions, he just walks away. It’s hard to get an answer. A lot of people who find this troubling have said, Pete King, Congressman from New York, he’s been so against it, he’s come out so in favor of the NYPD. He’s saying what he believes and you have to give somebody credit for being willing to engage in this. These are hard conversations. This is uncharted waters we’re in. You have to give people credit for coming forward and saying, this is what I believe, and if it’s not popular on either side, fine. This is what I believe. What we’ve been trying to do from the very beginning is let people know what’s going on so people can have—-so people can make informed decisions. A lot of people, I think, are just—-we don’t even want to get involved in this; we don’t want to know, we don’t want to talk about it, we don’t want to have anything to do with it.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Even getting this document—-the NYPD is notorious for resisting Freedom of Information requests. How difficult was it to get them to turn over this document?

MATT APUZZO: Oh, they didn’t turn it over. In the course of this reporting, we’ve receive documents from a variety of sources who’ve done so, frankly, probably with some risk to their careers, and lot of people inside the department. The majority of people talking about this—-Ray Kelly has said repeatedly, this is disgruntled FBI guys. The FBI didn’t even know about these programs. We’ve been building these reports on dozens and dozens of interviews with people inside the Intelligence Division, people with intimate knowledge of these programs, many of whom say, no, we’re not ashamed of this. This is the way you should be doing it. And some of whom who say, this is not with the police department should be doing. And again, we’re just trying to get that discussion going, and, frankly, here we are, six months after the first story came out and we’re still talking about it and we think it is a topic worth talking about and certainly a topic worth exploring.

AMY GOODMAN: Matt Apuzzo, we have to break, but we’re going come back to this discussion. We’ll also be joined by a Harlem imam to talk about the effect of the release of the report on the surveillance on the Muslim community in New York. This is Democracy Now!, Democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. We’re speaking with Matt Apuzzo, the AP reporter among the team who has broken the story of a New York Police Department report saying they would be surveilling the Muslim community.

AMY GOODMAN: Matt Apuzzo is still with us, reporter for The Associated Press, co-author of the report called, “Document Shows NYPD Eyed Shiites Based on Religion.” We are going to link to that at our website, Democracynow.org. We’re also joined by Imam Talib Abdul-Rashid, spiritual leader at The Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood and a member of The Islamic Leadership Council of New York. Matt Apuzzo, I just want to go back to the issue of the CIA and the New York Police Department relationship. News recently, the CIA saying they did not approve this relationship, though a top official within the CIA, David Cohen, after September 11th, came to New York and worked high up in the—-became one of the top officials in the New York Police Department.

MATT APUZZO: Right. So, after 9/11, David Cohen, who’s one of the top intelligence officers of the CIA, came to the NYPD as the head of intelligence and one of the first things he did was in collaboration with George tenet, who was the CIA director, arranged for another CIA officer, Larry Sanchez, to come to New York. Now, it is a very murky arrangement. So, George tenet sent Larry Sanchez to New York as his personal representative. So, he’s still on the CIA payroll, he still has his CIA badge. He starts the morning at the station, reads all the intelligence, and then goes over to the NYPD and shares it. And that is what, I think—-intelligence sharing is absolutely supposed to happen, and post 9/11, that was the focus. But, what Larry also did was, Larry was also the architect of a lot of these programs. New York was trying to figure out how to find these things; how to get these leads, how are we going to get these informants, where are we going to put our undercovers? And Larry was able to bring a lot of the expertise, and a lot of the officers that we’ve interviewed said, Larry was invaluable in helping us build these programs, reviewing our records. And now, that is what we’ve focused on, the CIA relationship. The CIA has also trained an NYPD detective at the farm, which is the spy school in Virginia. Just most recently, there was another senior—-one of the most senior CIA officers in the country, went to New York on what the federal government called a management sabbatical, but, what Ray Kelly said was information sharing. So, we don’t, still, really know what his job was there, but we do know it’s ending early—-nine months—-into a one-year stint. It sounds like from what David Petraeus said yesterday before Congress yesterday, that sort of relationship isn’t going to continue. They’re going to find some new way to collaborate and share information. but, it doesn’t sound like they’re going to be sending anybody back.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to bring the Imam into the conversation. Your reaction to this continued exposure of what the New York Police Department is doing in the Muslim community, not only in New York City but up and down the East Coast?

IMAM TALIB ABDUR-RASHID: We’re not surprised at all. Those of us who are familiar with the history of the NYPD, we know that there has been a long-standing tension not just between the Muslim community, but between communities of peoples of color here in New York City. We view these latest programs, programs that are focused on Muslim New Yorkers as being directly related to NYPD intelligence programs of the past, the Red Squads of the 1950’s and 60’s, focused in on political activists except now instead of just focusing on the political community, there’s focusing on our religious community.

AMY GOODMAN: Have you experienced the surveillance at your mosque, at the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood, and also the fact you’re the President of the Islamic leadership Group here in New York, what people are saying, other imams?

IMAM TALIB ABDUR-RASHID: Other imams throughout the city, we are positive they are on their list. We have lawyers in our communities who have seen the list. We know for a fact that there are mosques throughout the city that have been targeted under this program.

JUAN GONZALEZ: One of the sentences in this report that The AP uncovered says “FBI officials have suspected that the Alavi Foundation is using its Islamic centers as a means of penetrating the Black Muslim community to recruit sympathizers.” The Alavi Foundation being an association that has connections with the Iranian government. This effort to paint the black community as being infiltrated by foreign forces?

IMAM TALIB ABDUR-RASHID: That’s an old theme going all the way back to the 1930’s. Government still doesn’t get it, that the African-American community is capable of its own analysis of problems, capable of organizing itself as a community. When one looks at that document under “Ancestries of interest,” which was one the NYPD documents, African Americans are the only American-born or indigenous group on that list. The whole premise is a fallacy. The African-Americans, we do not have any kind of history of terrorist activity in America, in spite of the circumstances under which we came here in the first place.

AMY GOODMAN: Matt Apuzzo, you are nodding your head. Talk more about that.

MATT APUZZO: Yeah, so, one of the documents that we were able to obtain along the way was their “Ancestries of interest,” and the Imam’s absolutely right. It’s 28 countries, almost all of them are Muslim countries, and then American-Black Muslim. There clearly is a concern or a viewpoint that the NYPD about Muslim converts and about African American Muslims. One of the programs we uncovered along the way was the name change program. The NYPD, basically, they data mine everybody in New York who changes their name. If you change your name, I am Matt Apuzzo my name and I take the last name Muhammad, I’m going to get looked at. If the Imam changes his name to Matt Apuzzo, he’s going to get looked at because the concern is, well, is he trying to go undercover?. Is he going to try to obscure his identity? The feeling on that is that, well, if somebody’s taking a Muslim name, maybe they’re becoming more religious, becoming potentially more violent. If there Americanizing their name, just as generations of immigrants have done, if they are Americanizing their name, well then maybe that Muslim is trying to avoid scrutiny and try to blend in. And so, you’d get a background check, you’d get put in a police database, and depending on who was doing the analysis and what time in the program this was, you might get a visit from the NYPD just to ask about why you were changing your name.

IMAM TALIB ABDUR-RASHID: Listening to this, this helps me to understand that one of the basis for this current activity is actually the 2007 NYPD report on the so-called homegrown radicalization. Back then, the Muslim-American Civil Liberties Coalition challenged many of the premises that are in that report as to how they identify Muslims who were being “Radicalized.” They fought the coalition then—-those of us in the Muslim community who were you’re saying to them, this is not right, this gives the wrong impression. They smugly dismissed our criticisms. Now we find out they actually built programs based on these false premises in the first place.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Matt, I’d like to ask you just briefly, am I wrong or have I been witnessing a increasing sort of division between the FBI and the New York Police Department? Several times that the New York Police Department has arrested so-called terrorist suspects where the FBI has almost disdained them as real entrapment efforts, not real terrorism cases. Do you see a growing division between the FBI and the NYPD on these matters?

MATT APUZZO: There is a rift, but I actually think it gets a little—-I mean, the rift between the NYPD and the FBI is a oversimplified thing. There is a rift between the FBI and the NYPD’s Intelligence Division, but, I actually think this most recent case, the Pimentel Case, I mean, I think that that might be a case of just some bruised egos on both sides. If the NYPD wants to bring a case that the FBI doesn’t want to bring a case on, I mean, certainly the NYPD can bring a case. Now, the the FBI—-if they didn’t want the case to be brought, they didn’t bring it. I mean if the NYPD decides they want to bring it, I mean, that in and of itself I don’t think is indicative of the rift. Certainly there is a division between the Intel Division and the FBI in New York. But to the Imam’s point, which is, I think, fascinating about the idea of building these programs and what is effective policing—-I mean, how we’re going to the Department of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano and Barack Obama have talked about this very issue globally or nationally about how we’re going to—-about what are best practices for policing, and they’re very eager to talk about it as long as you don’t talk about New York. We’ve asked for months to try to talk to them about the NYPD’s programs, which federal money finances, but we can’t get Homeland Security to say, yeah, we’re for this. This is what we want. This done in every city. Or, no, we are actually against that, we don’t want it done in any city, or actually, we only want it done in New York. It does seem weird, right? If it’s good practice, if this is good law enforcement, it should be replicated and put everywhere. And if it’s not good law enforcement, then we certainly don’t want it done in the city that is the biggest focus of the biggest focus of international terrorism.

IMAM TALIB ABDUR-RASHID: Just a few weeks ago, you did a program here on Democracy Now! in which you were highlighting the continued militarization of the police force in New York City and other major cities. This is another example. A few years ago under Mayor David Dinkins, he implemented a policy and approach that was called “Community Policing.” Of course, under the Giuliani administration, they moved away from community policing, and now here we are in the past decade under Mayor Bloomberg and Ray Kelly. Ray Kelly has moved the NYPD completely away from community policing. They are in fact running the NYPD like it’s the private army of Mayor Bloomberg.

JUAN GONZALEZ: You’re having a protest today, Imam Rashid, down at Foley Square here in New York city, and you’re calling for the resignation of the Police Commissioner?

IMAM TALIB ABDUR-RASHID: Absolutely. The Police Commissioner and his spokesman Paul Browne. They have continuously misled and lied to New Yorkers, generally, and Muslim New Yorkers in particular. They’ve been caught in their lies and the taxpayers of New York are not paying them to lie to us about what they’re doing, so we’re calling for the resignation.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you very much for being with us, Matt Apuzzo in Washington, D.C., reporter for The Associated Press, co-author of a new AP report called, “Document Shows NYPD Eyed Shiites Based on Religion.” And Imam Talib Abdur-Rashid of the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood and President of the Islamic Leadership Council of New York. He’ll be at Foley Square today at three o’clock in New York City, that’s the court’s area of New York, leading the protesting. This is Democracy Now!, Democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. The Super Bowl is coming up and some are saying Occupy the Super bowl. Stay with us.

by: Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez, Democracy NOW!   .

From time to time, I read about condemnations of religion coming from non-religious groups, especially concerning the all-too-common violence perpetrated in the name of religious gods. Indeed there is plenty to condemn.

Altogether too many religions sects of both major and minor religions, despite verbally professing a desire for peace and justice in the world, are actually pro-war, pro-homicide and pro-violence in practice (or they may be silent on the subject, which is, according to moral theology, the same as being pro-violence).

Obvious examples include those portions of the three major war-justifying religions of the world: fundamentalist Islam, fundamentalist Judaism and fundamentalist Christianity.

I use the term fundamentalist in the sense that the religious person, who ascribes to a fundamentalist point of view, believes, among other dogmatic belief, that their scriptures are inerrant and thus they can find passages in their holy books that justify homicidal violence against their perceived or fingered enemies, while simultaneously ignoring the numerous contradictory passages that forbid violence and homicide and instead prescribe love, hospitality, mercy, forgiveness and reconciliation.

Behind the scenes, of course, there are hidden elites — amoral, politically and financially motivated operatives who are embedded in these religious organizations — who, through the strength of their political power, can easily manipulate the followers into clamoring for war, not against their enemies, but rather against the enemies of the ruling elites: the politicians, the financiers and the other exploiters of natural resources.

And so nonviolent portions of the various religions – and they are there, albeit often hidden and censored – can be erroneously painted with the same brush that justifiably condemns the hypocrisy and the violence.

It is certainly true that the Catholic Church endorsed and/or orchestrated the genocide of the Crusades, the Inquisition and many wars of colonization and exploitation — with the origins of these atrocities in fundamentalist interpretations of “holy” scripture.

But I do have to take exception to the blanket condemnation of the entirety of the religion by pointing out one reality — that the original form of Christianity, the church of the first generation after Jesus and even most of the first three centuries was a religion of pacifists, oppressed women, orphans, those forced into prostitution, despised people of all stripes and others of those called “the least.”

Though this history has long since been forgotten or ignored, the earliest followers of Jesus rejected violence, tried to return good for evil, fed the hungry, did acts of mercy and unconditional love and tried to make friends out of their enemies (by caring for them, feeding them, praying for them and certainly refusing to kill them or pay for somebody else to kill them).

Practicality of Nonviolence

It was a hugely successful ethical stance to take. It could be described as an act of divine genius. And it made tremendous practical sense. One bit of evidence of the practicality of gospel nonviolence is the fact that in the first couple of centuries, no early Christian male ever acquired combat-induced PTSD or the soul-destruction that always accompanies that reality.

And no early Christian ever felt depressed, ashamed, guilty or suicidal about killing, plundering or raping innocent unarmed women and children in wartime. The earliest Christians took seriously Jesus’s clear command to love and befriend their enemies, and – despite brutal Roman persecutions – the religion survived; indeed, it thrived.

In fact, by 300 CE, it had grown into one of the largest religions in the empire, at which point the emperor Constantine (who was a worshipper of the Sun god until his deathbed baptism into the “faith”) co-opted the church by stopping the persecutions and granting it power, property and prestige, thus seducing it into becoming the obedient and increasingly dependent state church whose master was the brutal, often satanic Roman Empire and its army generals.

Eventually – and logically – church leaders who were now dependent on the largesse and protection of the empire felt obliged to support it and its troops, pay homage to the emperor and send its young Christian men to violently defend the empire’s borders against the fingered enemy. Or homicidally enlarge the empire if it was profitable for Rome or the Papal State to do so.

Just War Theory

St. Augustine wrote the first Christian Just War Theory (CJWT) in the late Fourth Century, making legitimate, in certain rare circumstances, killing by Christians in wartime, which had been long forbidden to the followers of Jesus.

Soon thereafter, Christianity became a religion of justified violence, contrary to the teachings and modeling of Jesus, and it remains that way until this very hour. However, it is generally agreed among Just War scholars that no war in the past 1,700 years has been conducted according to the principles of the Christian Just War Theory; that if the actual principles were applied to an impending war, they would lead Christians back to its original pacifist stance. And so the principles of the CJWT are not taught to the vast majority of Christians.

So, the blanket condemnation of homicidal religions, especially Christianity, is justified up to the point of acknowledging that the bulk of the Christian church, over the past 17 centuries, has ignored – or become apathetic to – the nonviolent teachings of Jesus (forgiveness 70 X 7, unending mercy, ministering to “the least of these” and the unconditional love of friend and enemy).

Among the realities that keep the churches silent, of course, are the fear of losing the largesse of state-granted tax-exempt status and the threat that their pro-war, dues-paying members might object or leave if church leaders were to speak out prophetically about the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount and the incompatibility of nationalistic militarism with the life and teachings of Jesus.

But the Christianity of the first few centuries, when Christians refused to take up the sword, should not be condemned. Rather, critics of Christianity should start challenging the churches to go back to their roots where evil was not allowed to run rampant, but rather was aggressively and courageously resisted using the nonviolent methods of Jesus and his inspired disciples like Tolstoy, Gandhi, Dorothy Day, A. J. Muste, Martin Luther King, the Berrigan brothers, John Dear, Kathy Kelly and a multitude of other courageous prophetic voices.

The major motivation for the legendary civil disobedience of those modern-day prophets was their commitment to Jesus and the way he lived his life as pacifist (not passive) active resistor to evil.

The followers of that very real Jesus should be courageously “going to the streets” and saying “NO” wherever and whenever fear and hatred raise their ugly heads and try to provoke violence — no matter if it is coming from the US Congress or the Parliament in London, the Oval Office or # 10 Downing Street, in the Knesset or in the headquarters of Hamas, whether in Tehran or in Baghdad or in the Vatican or in Colorado Springs or in the bowels of the 700 Club – or from within the local parish.

Jesus, a Nonviolent Leftist

Jesus of the Gospels was an outspoken, nonviolent leftist who tried to reform his authoritarian conservative, dogmatic church but also refused to shut up with his call for justice for the down-trodden — even when his superiors threatened him with serious consequences if he didn’t.

The economic model of Jesus’s early church was socialist, where the resources of the group were shared with the widow and orphans and others who didn’t have enough. He would have stood, like the prophet he was, in solidarity with pacifists, socialists, antiwar activists and feminists and surely would have marched in nonviolent antiwar rallies.

Jesus was definitely NOT a punitive, pro-death penalty, pro-militarism conservative. His power came not from the sword but from the power of love.

Jesus would surely have condemned his church’s complicity in the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans, the enslavement of black Africans and the segregationist, apartheid policies that were designed by various ruling elites to destroy ethnic or religious minorities.

And if the leadership of his church had been found guilty of or just complicit with such acts, especially genocide, Jesus would surely have insisted on the formation of an independent truth and reconciliation commission to respectfully hear the testimony of the victims, the survivors and the families of the survivors and allow those victims to face their victimizers. And then Jesus would have insisted upon his church repenting of the sins, whether committed by them or their forefathers.

The power that Jesus utilized was epitomized by the willingness to do the right thing in the crisis situations even if it involved risks to life or liberty. Fear had no power over him or the martyrs of the early church. His power came out of the holy spirit of love, goodness, mercy and forgiveness and his certainty that, by refusing to do acts of violence, he was doing the will of God.

The practicality of that radical stance resulted in the healing power that Jesus’ disciples and apostles exhibited when they started implementing what Jesus had taught and modeled for them.

War and violence emanates from an entirely different spirit than the spirit shown by the early church. That spirit is the spirit of the unholy, the spirit of the satanic, the spirit of Cain. The willingness to kill was the spirit that was strongly present in such historic figures as Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, Eichmann, Stalin, Mussolini (all baptized into pro-war, Constantinian Christian churches).

That evil spirit was also present in many saber-rattling militarists throughout history – the most ruthless presidents, Secretaries of Defense, generals, dictators, legislators, gun-running businessmen and trained assassins that have ever lived – from the ancient low-tech, PTSD-afflicted Achilles, who killed up close and personal, looking into the eyes of his victims, to the ultra-modern, high-tech Air Force, Navy, Army and Marines that orchestrate, usually from safe distances, such atrocities as were perpetrated by Christian soldiers against innocent unarmed civilians at Nagasaki, Dresden, My Lai, Baghdad and Fallujah, to name just a few.

A Challenge to the Church

It seems to me that the Christian church must start teaching what Jesus taught about violence – that it is forbidden for those who wish to follow him – or our so-called “Christian” nation won’t be able to stop the deadly suicidal/homicidal cycle of war that has been bankrupting America, both financially and morally, for decades.

Jesus was absolutely right about the satanic nature of killing. The Golden Rule and his warning about the consequences of living by the sword speaks profound truth. According to just those two teachings, we can say that theologically and spiritually, the high-profile pro-war “Christians” that dominate the news are dead wrong.

That brand of Christianity definitely deserves condemnation. What has been criticized by Christianity’s detractors as the norm for Christianity is not the Sermon-on-the-Mount Christianity of Jesus but rather the aberrant “Constantinian Christianity,” a religion that espouses an anti-Christic, punitive theology that justifies killing fellow children of God in the name of the one who forbade it 2,000 years ago.

Church leaders need to repent of their support for (or their silence about) their nation’s state-sponsored terrorism and start acting ethically, as if the Sermon on the Mount mattered.

The Christian church in America MUST take the lead in this or it is doomed — as doomed as was Germany’s dominant Constantinian Christianity of the first half of the 20th century, whose pro-military, nationalist, racist, xenophobic, domination theology permitted torture, genocide and two brutal world wars that ultimately resulted in the suicide of German Christianity, not to mention the complete destruction of the nation by its provoked enemies.

One wonders what would have happened if every German and Russian and American church had been a real peace church, as the founder envisioned? The real question is, will we learn the lessons of history, or is it already too late?

by :  Gary G. Kohls, Consortium News  .

This month, in a New Republic article titled “The End of the Christian Right,” historian Michael Kazin confidently asserts that “the Christian Right is a fading force in American life, one which has little chance of achieving its cherished goals.”

I have lost count of how many times the Religious Right has been declared dead as a political force by someone in the mainstream media. Maybe Kazin’s piece seemed absurd to me because I read it the day after watching every Republican presidential candidate take time from their South Carolina debate preparation to stop by Ralph Reed’s “Faith and Freedom Coalition” event and pledge devotion to the Religious Right’s agenda.

Kazin acknowledges this dynamic, but says, “whatever their influence on the Republican primary, the Christian Right is fighting a losing battle with the rest of the country – above all, when it comes to abortion and same-sex marriage, the issues they care most about.”

Really? The Washington Post reports that with GOP now in control of both houses of the Virginia legislature, the state’s “most conservative Republicans aren’t holding back” and are pushing legislation that, among other things, will “roll back gay rights” and “beef up gun rights, property rights, parental rights and fetal rights.”

Here are five reasons why we shouldn’t declare the end of the Christian Right.

1. Redefining Religious Liberty 

Kazin does not address church-state separation or efforts by the Religious Right and its allies, particularly the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, to redefine religious liberty. In the name of “religious liberty,” they demand religious exemptions from generally applicable laws, but only for their religious beliefs; take government funding for religiously based programs but cry discrimination when a government grant program has anti-discrimination policies incompatible with their religious beliefs; portray those who oppose government funding of religion as anti-religious bigots and and claim oppression when government officials are made to comply with the separation of church and state.

Under President George W. Bush, Religious Right leaders’ political support was rewarded with weakened legal protections against tax dollars being used to fund religious discrimination and proselytizing, troubling changes that have yet to be fully reversed by the Obama administration. A phalanx of conservative Christian legal organizations fights daily to weaken the legal separation of church and state, and to reverse restrictions on overt electoral activity by tax-exempt churches.

2. Lack of Big Names ≠ Lack of Big Influence  

Kazin cites “the absence of effective, well-known leaders” as a reason for the Religious Right’s decline. It’s true that there’s a shortage of household names among the Religious Right’s leadership, and that the endorsement of Rick Santorum by a group of evangelical leaders didn’t give him the boost they had hoped. But that fact reflects at least in part the decentralization and mainstreaming of the movement. Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and James Dobson were like Dan Rather, Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw back when the networks were the only game in town. Now the Religious Right influences culture and politics through a massive and diffuse infrastructure of religious ministries, educational institutions, think tanks, political organizations, radio and television empires, and online media – not to mention the elected officials they have put into power in Congress and all across the country.

Newt Gingrich has spent years cultivating support among Religious Right activists by attacking “secular elites” and insisting in books like Rediscovering God in America that our country’s greatness is tied to the notion of a divinely inspired American exceptionalism. His fans weren’t going to abandon him on the say-so of a group of self-appointed leaders.

3. The Leadership Pipeline 

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, Rep. Michele Bachmann, and other conservative leaders are products of the Religious Right’s educational and leadership pipeline, which is training thousands of college and law school students how to bring their “biblical worldview” to bear on government, the courts and society in general. Journalist Sarah Posner has reported on law school students being taught to advise clients to follow God’s law rather than man’s law at Liberty University, the Falwell-founded school where Romney’s new debate coach built a powerhouse debating team.

Virginia Gov. McDonnell got an MA and JD from Pat Robertson’s Regent University; Rep. Michele Bachmann got her law degree from the law school at Oral Roberts University, which was later taken over by Regent. Right-wing foundations pour millions each year into conservative college newspapers, leadership training programs, and fellowships at “think tanks” that allow people like Dinesh D’Souza to claim the title of “scholar” while turning out dreck like his book portraying Kenyan anti-colonialism as the roots of Obama’s “rage.”

The Religious Right and its conservative allies have put a lot of like-minded federal judges on the courts in the past two decades, and they’ve done quite well with the John Roberts-led conservative majority on the Supreme Court. Religious Right leaders are pulling out all the stops to make sure a Republican president and Senate are in place; the American Center for Law & Justice’s Jay Sekulow told a Faith and Freedom gathering in South Carolina just before the primary there that if “President Romney” were to name two more justices, Sekulow wouldn’t have to worry any more about counting to five when he had a case before the court.

Newt Gingrich, who swamped Romney in South Carolina, staked out a more radical approach to the judiciary were he to be elected president. Gingrich says he would ignore rulings he disagrees with and abolish courts that rule in ways that displease him; he frequently cites church-state issues when complaining about the courts.

4. The Assault on Choice and Family Planning  

The 2010 wave of right-wing electoral victories at the state level has brought an accelerated attack on women’s healthcare. According to NARAL Pro-Choice America, 69 anti-choice measures became law in 25 states last year; some of these laws ban pre-viability abortions without meaningful exceptions for women’s health and are clearly designed to challenge Roe v. Wade. Some are designed to force clinics to close and simply make abortion inaccessible for even more women. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 87 percent of U.S. counties already have no abortion providers. A consistent Religious Right rallying cry in recent years has been to “defund Planned Parenthood,” with no apparent regard for the impact on women who count on the organization for basic medical care. Last year, seven states restricted or barred family planning funds from going to Planned Parenthood or any health center that provides abortion care.

Kazin believes it is “exceedingly unlikely” that a President Romney would sign a draconian anti-abortion bill. Why is that? Romney has said repeatedly that he believes life begins “at conception” and would back efforts to enshrine that in law or even in the Constitution. It’s true, as Kazin notes, that Mississippi voters recently rejected a “personhood” amendment. But just this week every GOP candidate except Romney took part in an event organized by PersonhoodUSA  — at which it wasn’t sufficient for candidates to repeat the “at conception” dogma. They had to agree that legal rights begin at the sperm-meets-egg moment. That this extreme and hugely problematic principle is embraced by presidential contenders is a clear sign of the Religious Right’s continuing influence.

Romney, who named Robert Bork to head his legal advisory team, would almost certainly nominate Supreme Court justices who would continue to chip away at a woman’s right to a legal abortion if not overturn Roe v. Wade altogether — another of Romney’s stated goals. That would throw the question of legal access to abortion to the states, where a number of laws criminalizing abortion have already been passed contingent on Roe falling. Does Kazin really believe that if the 2012 elections bring us a Republican president and Republican congressional majorities, the Republican base will not demand — and get — further restrictions on women’s access to abortion and family planning?

5. Massive Resistance to LGBT Equality  

Kazin is correct that the Religious Right is losing the public opinion battle when it comes to support for equality for LGBT Americans, where progress has been extraordinary. The hard-fought end to the ban on military service is a sign that laws are beginning to catch up with public opinion.

But just because the Religious Right is a minority does not make it a powerless one. They and their allies in Congress have managed to prevent passage of federal anti-discrimination protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity in spite of overwhelming public support for such measures. And they have managed to pass dozens of state-level constitutional amendments denying same-sex couples the right to marry – many of those provisions also preventing even the most basic legal recognition and protection for gay couples and their families. In 2010, Maine voters overturned an equality law after opponents forced it onto the ballot. New Yorkers won marriage equality last year (barely), but residents in Maryland and New Jersey did not. There will be several tests in legislatures and the ballot box, both pro and con, in 2012; we may see additional victories, but they are far from assured.

It is good news that support for equality is high among younger Americans, so time seems to be on our side when it comes to LGBT equality, but to cite an economic aphorism, “in the long run we’re all dead.”  Many individuals and families have been harmed and will continue to be harmed by anti-equality campaigns waged by the Religious Right and its allies in the Catholic and Mormon hierarchies.

Progress is not linear or irreversible. Reconstruction gave way to Jim Crow. Kazin looks at statistics about young people’s attitudes, and at the growing group of Americans who claim no religious affiliation, and declares “the end of the Christian Right.” But the increasing number of secular-minded Americans does not prevent the well-organized forces of the Religious Right from continuing to impact public policy, especially in areas of the country where they are strongest. This political and cultural movement will not be sinking beneath the horizon anytime soon.

by : Peter Montgomery, AlterNet .

As Arab countries and especially Egypt continue to struggle their way into a new and hopefully more democratic political order, a persistent theme in commentary in the United States about this story has been suspicion of any political actor identified with political Islam. Some such actors warrant such suspicion. There is, for example, Abdel Hakim Belhadj, head of the Tripoli military council in Libya. Belhadj is also a founding member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which the United States still officially lists as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. Belhadj stresses his focus on overthrowing Muammar Qaddafi’s regime, but his career as an international jihadist has involved violent activities elsewhere, especially South Asia. Someone like Belhadj deserves suspicion—not because he is Islamist but because of his history.

Now consider the history of the political Islamist actor that probably is receiving more attention than any other these days: the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. That history is one of decades of remarkable forbearance and endurance in the face of different degrees of repression by different Egyptian regimes. The Brotherhood has a long record of commitment to nonviolence—a record that has made it the target of vehement denunciation by the likes of al-Qaeda. What is there about the Brotherhood, beyond its Islamist coloration, that should make it any more the object of suspicion than other parties, movements and groups vying for influence in a new Egypt? How else should it have behaved to make us less suspicious?

Ask also why parties such as the Brotherhood (or more properly, the Freedom and Justice Party, which is the Brotherhood’s political arm) that have an Islamic identity should be viewed differently from parties with some other religious identity. Christian democratic parties have been an accepted part of the political mainstream in many European countries. How are Christian democratic parties different from Muslim democratic ones? It is easy to think of religiously identified political parties that have caused problems—for stability, for sound policy and for democracy itself—but they are not just Islamist ones. In important respects, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party in India, for example, has not been good news for peaceful communal relations in that country, just as some religiously identified Jewish parties in Israel have not been good news for any hope of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

David Pollock of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy had an opinion piece in the Washington Post on Friday that exemplifies the automatic suspicion that gets directed at a group such as Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which is the subject of his article. Pollock wants to warn us about falling for what he describes as “new signs of moderation” by the Brotherhood, which is a misleading formulation by Pollock given that what is new is not the direction of the Brotherhood but instead the political environment in which it is now operating. The main substance of the piece involves comparing what the Brotherhood says on Arabic and English language versions of its websites. Some subjects that get significant attention on one version do not on the other. There are not inconsistencies, just differences in attention and emphasis. Pollock concedes that “some might note that all political parties, to at least an extent, engage in mixed messaging.” Well, that’s for sure. In fact, the Brotherhood’s mixed messaging that he describes seems pretty mild compared to, say, Republican candidates’ English and Spanish language advertising in Florida.

Pollock takes other whacks at the Brotherhood for things that really reflect larger political realities in present-day Egypt. He mentions the organization’s position on the issue of “supraconstitutional” guarantees of individual freedoms, which is really part of the overall balance that all Egyptian political players need to struggle with in trying to combine the liberal and democratic parts of liberal democracy. In fact, the Brotherhood’s position could be said to be the most uncompromising prodemocracy position. Pollock also portrays an escalating set of Brotherhood ambitions about what offices it hopes to occupy as if this were some kind of hidden plan, whereas it is best described as a logical response to the organization’s popularity and conformity with the beliefs of other Egyptians. That conformity is what is involved in Pollock’s inaccurate reference to “the Brotherhood’s hostility toward U.S. policies and interests.” He cites as support for that phrase a section in the Freedom and Justice Party’s platform that rejects the Mubarak regime’s approach of “supporting occupiers and colonizers, through its presence in the so-called axis of moderation, which is sponsored by the United States.” This doesn’t reflect any peculiar position on the part of the Brotherhood. It reflects views held by most of the Egyptian people, who still give the United States favorable ratings of only about 20 percent . The problem is not that an Egyptian party reflects those views; the problem is with the occupiers and colonizers, and with the groundless idea that support for occupation and colonization could be the basis for some kind of moderate axis in the Middle East.

Arguments such as Pollock’s partly reflect attitudes of the Israeli government, which (contrary to Israel’s own long-term interests) fears Arab democracy , especially in Egypt, more than it welcomes it. More democracy means more outspoken opposition to Israeli policies, more attention to the absence of popular sovereignty for Palestinians and less claim by Israel to getting extraordinary treatment by the United States because it is the “only democracy” in the region. Beyond this influence, it is hard to imagine such arguments based on anything other than Islamophobia. As a test of that proposition, consider what the arguments would sound like if the organization in question (i.e., the Brotherhood) were associated with any religion other than Islam.

These attitudes and arguments matter as an encouragement to possible U.S. policies that would be damaging to U.S. interests. Ostracism or rejection of movements that have remained peaceful, have played by democratic rules when they have had the opportunity to play by them and have garnered substantial popular support would be a mistake, especially insofar as the rejection was for no other reason than the Islamist coloration of the groups. It would be a mistake partly because it would be antidemocratic. It would be an encouragement to abandon democratic methods. It would hinder important U.S. relationships with important countries such as Egypt. And it would put the United States on the wrong side of what is going on in the Middle East.

By : Paul R. Pillar,The National Interest.

What’s so scary about sharia? According to a recent federal appeals court decision, not much.

A 10th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruling this month effectively blocks implementation of Oklahoma’s “Save Our State” constitutional amendment. Passed by 70 percent of the state’s voters in 2010, the measure “forbids courts from considering or using sharia” – Islamic legal principles – as well as “international law.” Similar laws have been enacted in Tennessee and Louisiana, and legislation is pending in at least 20 states.

The 10th Circuit affirmed a ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Vicki Miles-LaGrange in favor of Muneer Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Oklahoma, who had sued claiming the law violated his constitutional rights. The three-judge panel that issued the ruling agreed that the law expressly condemns only one religion, Islam, thus violating the First Amendment’s establishment clause, which forbids the government from favoring any religion.

The appellate judges also suggested that the law is pointless: Its supporters admitted “they did not know of even a single instance where an Oklahoma court had applied sharia law.”

The issue’s salience in the United States is more symbolic than legal. Sharia sounds scary to lots of Americans. The irony is that many who think they are opposed to sharia would likely support many of its general precepts. They may be the same people, for instance, who want American judges and lawyers to pay more attention to the Ten Commandments – a kind of reasoning that is encouraged by sharia.

In his book The “Higher Law” Background of American Constitutional Law, Princeton professor Edward S. Corwin argues that American constitutional law was founded not only on the philosophical notions of the Enlightenment, but also on theological affirmations. In fact, he suggested, American jurisprudence rests on a deep ethic that is quite congenial to transcendent, “higher” reasoning.

At root, sharia asserts the same thing. This was what Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams was trying to say when he provoked a firestorm by telling the BBC that “there are perfectly proper ways the law of the land pays respect to custom and community.”

As our Jewish brothers and sisters celebrate Hanukkah and Christians prepare for Christmas

, Muslims must contend with the fact that their own elected officials have capitulated to the hysteria of Islamophobia and are contemplating an anti-sharia bill.

On Wednesday, December 14, CAIR-Philadelphia and interfaith leaders held a press conference to challenge House Bill 2029.  House Bill 2029 is the latest in a series of bills introduced in state legislators across the country, many of which have passed.  They are written by anti-Muslim, white supremacist David Yerushalmi.  Although the bill itself does not mention sharia, the legislative intent is clear by its sponsors.  Blatant government action against sharia, and by extension all Muslims, will not be tolerated and CAIR-Philadelphia will take a stand.

So what is sharia? In simplest terms, it is primarily a set of principles and guidelines observant Muslims follow. It also includes methodologies of jurisprudence for producing religious opinions on matters involving Muslim life. Sharia does not mean totalitarianism, and it is not a set of barbaric punishments or penal codes. In fact, sharia has become a part of Philadelphia culture. Have you ever enjoyed a gyro or platter from a food cart or restaurant in Philadelphia? Chances are the meat was halal – the sharia-compliant method of slaughtering and preparing meat. Philadelphians of all faiths consume sharia compliant food every day here in Philadelphia. Indeed, sharia has contributed to the cultural and culinary richness of Philadelphia in a way many of us take for granted, and that is but one example.

Yes, in some parts of the Muslim majority world, sharia has been interpreted, twisted and applied in extreme ways. In other instances, criminal behavior among some Muslims has been wrongfully conflated with sharia. CAIR unequivocally condemns these extremists among the Muslim community and will be the first to stand against them. But let’s understand that there is already a criminal justice system in place to prosecute such individuals. We do not need a vague bill that claims to protect women in children; we have law enforcement, department of child and family services and a multitude of other agencies for that. Furthermore, the courts have made clear that religious beliefs cannot overrule civic laws.

What has arrived in Pennsylvania is the second or third version of much more explicitly anti-Muslim legislation that swept through Oklahoma and Tennessee last year. For example, what was proposed under Tennessee’s anti-sharia bill was that the state’s attorney general can freeze the assets of any organization that is “promoting sharia” and the government can label any group of Muslims as a “sharia organization.” In other words, the sponsors of the Tennessee bill tried to make it illegal to be a Muslim.

So where does this blatant, in-your-face bigotry come from? It is the work of David Yerushalmi. In 2007, he pushed for legislation that would make adherence to sharia (in other words, the practice of Islam) a felony punishable by 20 years in prison. He urged the U.S. government to declare a war on Islam and all Muslims. But he doesn’t stop there. He believes liberal Jews “destroy their host nations like parasites” and has suggested that whites are genetically superior to blacks. Let me be clear: he is the author of Pennsylvania House Bill 2029. We know this because entire sections of the bill are identical to those authored by him for other states. Yes, sharia is not mentioned in the bill, but that is only because previous versions in other states which did mention sharia are facing tough legal battles as their discriminatory intent is quite clear. Thus, Representative RoseMarie Swanger (R-Lebanon) might be the sponsor of the bill, but she is not the author despite her claims, which is refreshing I might add.

I do not think Representative Swanger or any of the co-sponsors are anti-Muslim bigots. Rather, what is offensive is their sheer lack of due diligence and the level to which they are misinformed. As taxpayers, we send our money to Harrisburg expecting our elected officials to do their homework and to at least know who is writing their bills. I hope that upon learning more about the inspiration of her bill, Rep. Swanger will be appalled and will seek to distance herself from this mistake. Furthermore, if she is truly concerned about the welfare of women and children as she states, then she should author a bill regarding women and children. Indeed, we would support her in that effort.

Another troubling aspect of this legislation is the profound ignorance of the U.S. constitution and legal system exhibited by some of our state representatives and members of the public. It is by design impossible to have a foreign system of law or religious laws supersede the Constitution. Both Muslim sharia law and Jewish halakha law are considered by judges on a regular basis, and that is what this bill threatens, the consideration of foreign or religious laws. For example, what if a restaurant claiming to serve halal (sharia-compliant) meat is found to not serve halal meat? If there were a lawsuit brought forth against it, a judge would have to look at the sharia standards for halal meat. Simple and straightforward; it boggles my mind how that is threatening to anyone.

House Bill 2029 is a threat to the religious liberty of all Pennsylvanians, not just Muslims. And if one believes it not to be a threat, then it is redundant and has no true application. At its worst, it may just serve as a repository for anti-Muslim paranoia and fear mongering. Ultimately, this bill is a farce. America has been interacting with foreign countries, foreign systems of government and various religions since its founding and without detriment to the Constitution. It’s comical to think that a bill titled “American Laws for American Courts” would need to be introduced in 2011, over 200 years after the Constitution was written. CAIR-Philadelphia is calling the bluff, the ignorance and the bigotry behind this bill.

If this does get anywhere, we are fully prepared to defeat it on First Amendment grounds.

Not only are we not seeking to overturn the Constitution, it is our last line of defense in the struggle against Islamophobia and ignorance.

by : Moein Khawaja, CAIR-Philadelphia.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg had a message to New York City’s Muslim community: don’t worry that the New York PoliceDepartment showed an anti-Muslim film to around 1,500 officers, because top cop Ray Kelly “probably visits more mosques” than many Muslims in New York.

Speaking at a press conference in Queens, Bloomberg continued his defense of Kelly: “He has reached out to this community as he has reached out to lots of other communities. We have things regularly at 1 Police Plaza for clergy people of each religion, including Islam. And we’ll continue to do that.”

But Muslim community leaders and activists, backed by a diverse coalition of allies, are having none of that. They want Kelly fired. And they say this latest incident shows how anti-Muslim sentiment has become institutionalized in the NYPD.

A rejoinder to Kelly’s defense was already on display at around the same time Bloomberg spoke, at a January 26 press conference on the steps of City Hall. Protesters held signs labeling Kelly a racist. Anger was in the air, and Muslim activists and allies repeatedly called for Kelly’s resignation; for “corrective training” for the officers who viewed the film; and for independent oversight of the NYPD. As chants of “Kelly must go” rang through the air, some activists demanded state or federal oversight of New York City police.

“This outrage is a violation of the honor of our city and those who protect it,” said Cyrus McGoldrick, the civil rights manager for the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ New York chapter.

The battle is centered around an Islamophobic film titled The Third Jihad, which was shown to police officers on a continuous loop during “the sign-in, medical and administrative orientation process,” according to police documents obtained by the Brennan Center for Justice. The film, which is filled with violent imagery and posits that mainstream Muslim groups are in fact secretly plotting to take over the U.S., was financed by the Clarion Fund, a right-wing organization with links to Israeli settlers. Compounding the NYPD and Bloomberg administration’s problems is the fact that Kelly willingly agreed to sit down for a 90-minute interview for the film and that NYPD spokesman Paul Browne lied about Kelly’s involvement and how many officers saw the film.

This is hardly the first time NYPD’s problematic relationship with the city’s Muslims has come to light. But what makes the episode significant is the media firestorm it has created over the spokesperson’s lies at a time of increasing awareness of police abuse due to Occupy Wall Street-related arrests and brutality. Muslim activists are looking to capitalize on that energy as they confront the NYPD in the weeks ahead.

Since the September 11, 2001 attacks, the NYPD has had a fraught relationship with the city’s 800,000-member Muslim community, one of the fastest growing religious communities in the city. Billions of dollars have been spent to make NYPD one of the most powerful forces in the fight against terrorism. But the NYPD has been routinely accused of harassing and entrapping Muslims in terrorism-related cases. The final straw for many Muslims came when an Associated Press investigative series published last summer exposed an arbitrary spying program, implemented with CIA help, that targeted virtually all of New York’s Muslims. A “demographics unit” established at the NYPD has “monitored daily life in bookstores, bars, cafes and nightclubs” in Muslim communities, as well as mosques, the AP reported. It was also revealed that the NYPD spied on Muslim student associations on college campuses.

Revelations of the spying program dealt blows to a Bloomberg administration whose relations with the Muslim community were at a relative high note when the mayor defended the Park 51 mosque project near Ground Zero in lower Manhattan.

“These practices paint a dangerous picture of the ways in which law enforcement engages with Muslim communities under the banner of national security,” reads an August 25, 2011 statement from the Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition. “These McCarthyite spying techniques threaten the civil rights of all Americans, and deepen the long-existing rifts between communities of color and police in the United States.”

Then came the most recent revelation about the showing of The Third Jihad. Although the Village Voice first reported on the story last January, a Jan. 23, 2012 New York Times report, based on police documents obtained by the Brennan Center, has received a lot more attention due to the AP expose on the NYPD’s spying program.

“Seeing that propaganda like this is being used in training is almost logical in light of Associated Press reports on the NYPD’s comprehensive and warrantless surveillance of Muslim New Yorkers,” said CAIR-NY’s McGoldrick.

After the most recent revelations broke, Browne’s lies about the NYPD film screening became a hot media topic. The AP ran a January 30, 2012 article titled “New York Police Spokesman Comes Under Fire.” The two free daily papers in New York led with the story after it broke, and some city council members have called for more oversight of the NYPD as a result of the incident. Protests calling for Kelly’s resignation have kept the story in the news, and an editorial, an opinion piece and a column in the New York Times were published in recent days criticizing the NYPD.

A burgeoning alliance between black and Latino activists working against “stop-and-frisk” police tactics, Muslim activists and Occupy Wall Street could keep the momentum going. Jumaane Williams, a black city council member and OWS supporter whose own run-in with NYPD has turned him into an outspoken advocate against police abuse, spoke at the rally and denounced the NYPD’s “corrosive culture.”

The coming together of long-time anti-police brutality activists and OWS was chronicled in The Awl in a report by Michael Tracey. Titled “A Fresh Movement Against the NYPD’s Culture of Misconduct,” the article detailed how OWS has reinvigorated New York’s anti-police brutality movement. As Tracey shows, the alliance is natural given OWS’ experience with police brutality—something communities of color have had to combat for decades. And OWS’ attention to police brutality has also been a boon to Muslim activists.

On October 21, 2011, a CAIR-NY-organized day of prayer was held in Zuccotti Park. Although it attracted little attention outside the anti-Muslim blogosphere, it was a sign of an alliance to come.

“CAIR-NY’s endorsement of Friday Prayer at Occupy Wall Street stems from a conviction that many of the issues brought into the international spotlight by Occupy Wall Street affect Muslim communities disproportionately,” read a statement announcing the action. “Especially in light of the recently exposed NYPD surveillance in Muslim Student Organizations, we need to unite in our repudiation of government corruption and our rejection of the political effort to marginalize our voice.”

A month of organizing followed the prayer action, and a much larger rally at Foley Square against the NYPD spying program was held in November with hundreds of people, including a contingent from OWS. Muslim youth broke into chants of “We are the 99 percent” as they marched to NYPD headquarters to make their discontent known.

“It’s really critical we create this broad-based movement,” said Faiza Ali, a community activist and organizer who attended the November rally. “On the whole there’s a general distaste for the police department and the way they’ve been operating, especially recently given the police brutality issues being raised at Occupy Wall Street…All of these issues are connected, and [we have] the support of Occupy Wall Street on this issue.”

Muslim activists like Imam Talib ‘Abdur-Rashid, the spiritual leader of the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood in Harlem, say the public pressure on Kelly and the NYPD won’t stop until corrective action is taken. Speaking at the January 26 press conference, Abdur-Rashid promised more public protests on these issues in the coming weeks and laid out the stakes.

“We are facing the specter of a 21st-century COINTELPRO,” he told reporters. And activists say the fight is just beginning.

“This is part of a long-term strategy,” Linda Sarsour, a prominent Palestinian-American activist in the NYC Muslim community, recently wrote. “We are not just reacting anymore.”

By:  Alex Kane, Alter.Net .

It’s interesting to observe what qualifies as beyond the pale in American politics. For bigoted newsletters written two decades ago, Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, is deemed by many to be disqualified from the presidency. I don’t fault anyone for criticizing those newsletters. I’ve done so myself.They’re terrible. So is the way he has handled the controversy. But isn’t it interesting that Paul has been more discredited by years-old, ghostwritten remarks than has Newt Gingrich for bigotry that he’s uttered himself, on camera, during the current campaign? It has gone largely ignored both in the mainstream press and the movement-conservative organs that were most vocal condemning Paul.

That’s because Muslims are the target. And despite the fact that George W. Bush was admirably careful to avoid demonizing a whole religious faith for the actions of a small minority of its adherents–despite the fact that President Obama too has been beyond reproach in this respect–anti-Muslim bigotry in the United States is treated differently than every other kind, often by the very same people who allege without irony that there is a war in this country against Christians.

In the clip at the top of this post, Gingrich says, “Now, I think we need to have a government that respects our religions. I’m a little bit tired about respecting every religion on the planet. I’d like them to respect our religion.” Of course, the U.S. government is compelled by the Constitution to afford protection to religion generally, and “our” religion includes Islam, a faith many Americans practice. That’s just the beginning of what Gingrich has said about this minority group. In this clip, he likens Muslim Americans seeking to build a mosque in Lower Manhattan to Nazis building next to the Holocaust Museum. He once suggested that the right of Muslims to build mosques should be infringed upon by the U.S. government until Christians are permitted to build churches in Saudi Arabia, a straightforward suggestion that we violate the Constitution in order to mimic authoritarians. He favors a federal law that would preempt sharia–although not the religious law of any other faith–from being used in American courts, which would be the solution to a total nonproblem.

And no surprise, for he regularly engages in the most absurd kind of fear-mongering. To cite one example:

I think that we have to really–from my perspective, you don’t have an issue of religious tolerance; you have an elite which favors radical Islam over Christianity and Judaism. You have constant pressure by secular judges and by religious bigots to drive Christianity out of public life and to establish a secular state except when it comes to radical Islam, where all of the sudden they start making excuses for sharia, they start making excuses that we really shouldn’t use certain language. Remember, the Organization of Islamic Countries is dedicated to preventing anyone, anywhere in the world from commenting negatively about Islam, so they would literally eliminate our free speech, and there were clearly conversations held that implied that the U.S. Justice Department would begin to enforce censorship against American citizens to protect radical Islam; I think that’s just an amazing concept frankly.

If Gingrich believed all of this it would be damning. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether it is more or less damning that his tone, and much of his substance, is in fact a calculated pander. Justin Elliott at Salon demonstrated as much when he delved into how Gingrich used to talk about these issues:

Gingrich’s recent rhetoric represents a little-noticed shift from an earlier period in his career when he had a strikingly warm relationship with the American Muslim community. As speaker of the House in the 1990s, for example, Gingrich played a key role in setting aside space on Capitol Hill for Muslim congressional staffers to pray each Friday; he was involved with a Republican Islamic group that promoted sharia-compliant finance, which critics –including Gingrich–now deride as a freedom-destroying abomination; and he maintained close ties with another Muslim conservative group that even urged Gingrich to run for president in 2007.

anuary 25 marked the one-year anniversary of the inception of Egypt’s revolution against the dictatorship of the Mubarak regime, eleven days after the success of the Tunisian revolution, when its former president Ben Ali fled the country. Within weeks of the brisk success of these two revolutions (28 days for Tunisia and 18 days in the case of Egypt), the Arab peoples across the region launched their own simultaneous revolts to rid themselves of their decades-long dictatorships, especially in Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain.
So what is the current status of the Arab Spring? And what are the likely scenarios?
In late October, nearly ninety percent of Tunisians cast their votes in historic democratic elections. With an impressive victory, the Islamist Ennahdha party received the largest share of votes (42 per cent). It not only displayed the discipline of a political party with sophisticated machinery, but it also demonstrated sensitivity to the concerns of the public, as half of its elected officials were women, thus shattering the myth of being an anti-women party by virtue of its religious affiliation.
Furthermore, it was able to form a coalition with the leftist-leaning and nationalist-liberal parties. The three blocs claimed the top three positions in government, with the General Secretary of Ennahdha, Hamadi Jebali becoming the head of government or Prime Minister, while the other two junior partners occupying the seats of head of state and speaker of parliament, respectively.
The biggest losers of the elections were the secularist, anti-religion parties as well as the remnants of the Ben Ali regime. It was clear that the public voted for an alliance between parties that preserved the Arab and Muslim identity of society, and respected the principles of democratic governance, political pluralism and civil and human rights. The major task of this elected body was to write a new, modern, and democratic constitution for Tunisia and then call for new elections within a year. But the government immediately devoted most of its energy and resources to the pressing economic problems such as unemployment and the deteriorating infrastructure, rebuilding the security apparatus, and reforming the judicial branch to become truly independent.
Many of the critics, including former Prime Minister Al-Baji Qaid Al-Sibsi criticized the elected assembly and government for not speeding up the process of writing the new constitution and holding new elections. The government, on the other hand, insisted that it could not ignore the pressing needs of the people while embarking on writing the new constitution.
The likely scenario for the Tunisian revolution is that a new constitution will be written and offered as a referendum in the fall, followed by new parliamentary elections at the end of the year. If the current government is able to lessen the economic hardships on the poor and the middle class, reform the security agencies and the judiciary as promised, then Ennahdha may not only repeat its victory but is likely to further consolidate its gains.
Likewise, the triumph of the Egyptian revolution was not only historic but also swift and stunning. Once Mubarak was deposed, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) took over and promised sweeping reforms. But throughout the year, the revolutionary youth learned that their objectives were achieved only by taking their demands to the streets. For instance, the trial of Mubarak, his sons, and the corrupt elite of the former regime did not take place until millions of Egyptians returned to Tahrir Square. Even then, the corrupt figures of the old regime were tried on minor criminal charges (taking bribes or technical misuse of authority) rather than the gross political corruption and constitutional violations they committed with impunity for decades.
The unity displayed during the eighteen revolutionary days in Tahrir and across the country had quickly dissipated because of ideological differences, Islamic on one hand and liberal-secular on the other. Throughout last summer and fall, the debate was centered on the future nature of the state in the new constitution. Although everyone agreed that the state would be civil, the dispute focused on the role of Islam in the state. In contrast to the others, Islamic parties called for Islamic law to be the main frame of reference in all legislative matters.
Ultimately, this debate was settled with the new elections for the Peoples’ Assembly. Held over three stages over a period of nine weeks (between the end of November and mid-January), an unprecedented 62 percent of eligible Egyptian voters, or over 27 million people, went to the polls. The Islamic parties won big, with almost 73 per cent of the seats by the end of the vote. Out of 508 seats, the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP is the political wing of the pragmatist Muslim Brotherhood Movement) won 235 seats (including 22 seats to its junior partners in the Democratic Alliance), the Salafist-literalist party, Al-Noor, and its Islamic Alliance won 123 seats, and 10 seats went to Al-Wasat, a more moderate Islamic party. Meanwhile the liberal and secular parties received 99 seats (liberal parties Al-Wafd, and the Egyptian bloc received 42 and 33 respectively, while other leftist or centrist parties got 14), former regime remnants received 13, and independents won 28 seats.
Predictably, the Egyptian electorate voted overwhelmingly for the Islamist parties. But, surprisingly, they elected not just moderate and pragmatist elements, but the more conservative groups gained almost 25 percent of the seats. As in Tunisia, the biggest losers were the remnants of the former regime and the hard-line secular parties. Quickly the FJP formed a tactical alliance with Al-Noor and the liberal Al-Wafd (together, they hold 400 out of  the 508 seats) electing as speaker of parliament FJP General Secretary Mohammad Saad Katatni, as well as two deputies, one from each of the other partners in the alliance.
The first act of parliament was to promise to launch full investigations into the former regime’s crackdown on the revolution in its early days, during which more than 800 people were killed. It also promised full accountability of the current government appointed and controlled by SCAF. Meanwhile, the revolutionary youth took back to the streets demanding the end of military rule. Although the youth received only nine seats in the elections under the party name “The Revolution Continues,” many of the revolution’s objectives would not have been achieved without the sacrifices of the revolutionary youth and their persistence throughout the year to challenge SCAF’s authority, even if other more disciplined and organized political parties reaped the benefits.
After the elections the FJP announced that it will not contest the authority of SCAF and would not demand to immediately form the government. Rather, the party said it would stick to the timetable determined by SCAF, to hold the presidential elections in June. FJP also vowed to keep its promise of not offering a presidential candidate or even supporting an Islamist candidate in the election, which supposedly would mark the end of military rule. Many liberals, secularists and leftists fear that FJP and the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), could make a deal with SCAF at the expense of the prime objective of the revolution, namely establishing a democratic, civilian, and transparent government. In short, they are fearful that the entrenched military presence in the economy (over 40 per cent control) and its political (behind the scenes) interference in state affairs will be preserved in return for the military granting permission to the FJP to rule.
During his visit to Egypt during the elections, former President Jimmy Carter expressed these sentiments, saying that he doubted that SCAF would transfer power to a civilian rule. Meanwhile, FJP denies that there are any secret deals with the military. Rather it vowed that it would demand to form the next government after the presidential elections, and that it would seek the widest possible national unity government.
But perhaps the main battle will be in the formation of the committee of 100 that will write the future constitution of Egypt. According to a previous constitutional declaration, the elected members of parliament are supposed to select this committee. However, secularist forces are fearful that with an overwhelming majority of elected Islamists in parliament, they would be effectively shut out. Meanwhile, the MB/FJP continue to give assurances that no group will be excluded.
It is clear from the elections results in Tunisia and Egypt that the public wanted a complete break from the previous dictatorial regimes, and placed its confidence in established Islamic parties (which for decades were the major rivals of the deposed regimes). Nevertheless, there are stark differences between both experiments.
In the case of Tunisia (at 11 million people, it is less than one seventh of the Egyptian population of 82 million), a comfortable alliance has taken shape between the moderate Islamic movement and the liberal-leftist-religious-friendly parties. On the other hand, in the Egyptian scene, the Islamists (moderate and conservative) received a much bigger piece of the pie, and the liberal and secular forces are nervous and skeptical. In Tunisia, the military has withdrawn from political life for the most part, while in Egypt the military is still in control and demands to have a large, if not dominant role, behind the scenes going forward.
Further, Tunisian society, which is 99 percent Muslim, is more homogeneous and women were elected to over 40 percent of parliament. In Egypt, Christians comprise 8-10 percent of society, feel discriminated against and very apprehensive about the role of religion in public and political life. Meanwhile, Egyptian women, although very prominent during the revolution, were elected to only 2 percent of parliament. In Tunisia, the Islamic movement claims to have developed its philosophical doctrine to be completely in harmony with democratic principles and governance. In Egypt, the Islamic parties struggle to harmonize their understanding of what democracy means and promise to develop their own model that will be compatible with their ideology and understanding of Islam on the one hand and democracy with its grandiose promise of personal freedoms on the other.
Tunisia is considered a minor country in the Arab-Israeli conflict or the ensuing Iranian-Western confrontation, with minimal demands asked of it from international powers led by the United States. On the other hand, Egypt is a major country in the region with respect to both conflicts, and has maintained a peace treaty (although very cold) with Israel. It has also been historically applying tremendous pressure on the Palestinians (both the Palestinian Authority and the resistance movements) succumbing to American and Israeli pressures. The behavior of the future government of Egypt towards these international conflicts will determine not only its relationship with major powers in the world as well as international financial institutions, but also its future relationships with regional pro-Western countries such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates, which it desperately needs for investments and economic development.
In short, Tunisia promises a much smoother transition to a more stable society and democratically functioning system than Egypt. But with the cautious moves of the FJP and other Islamic parties, Egypt’s future also appears to be heading towards steady though slow progress, and following a promising yet challenging path. However, it’s important to keep in mind that all these significant changes in both countries are taking place while severe economic problems and hardships are mounting, and as they struggle against enormous foreign interference and external pressures.

by :  ESAM AL-AMIN