NOVANEWS
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Protesters interrupted Passacaglia w/ Beethoven (more on Israel Philharmonic protest in London)
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Protest disrupts London performance of Israel Philharmonic Orchestra
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UN report on flotilla raid: Israel shot em the wrong way but everything else it did was fine
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The Palmer/Uribe Report: Another attempt by Israel to whitewash murder
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J14 and the Calamity of Hope: a response to critics
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Normalcy, hope and the Israeli tent protesters
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Happy Dershday
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WTF– ‘Tea Party’-held district in FL is forking over $87 million for weapons to Israel
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As the Holy Land Five return to court, US policy goes on trial
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Attack dogs of the West Bank
Protesters interrupted Passacaglia w/ Beethoven (more on Israel Philharmonic protest in London)
Sep 02, 2011
Eleanor Kilroy
“We will picket the Proms” promised Palestine solidarity activists who had responded to a Palestinian call for a boycott of the BBC Proms concert by the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra (IPO) in London. When the concert went ahead this evening, more than 40 protesters gathered outside while a determined group inside the Royal Albert Hall disrupted both the first and second half of the performance, forcing the BBC to take the Radio 3 live broadcast off air. In anticipation of disturbances, security had been greatly increased, including airport-style bag searches.
As the orchestra played Passacaglia, Op. 1 by Webern, the group calling themselves ‘Beethovians for Boycotting Israel’ positioned themselves in the choir stalls so they could be seen by the audience. To the tune of Ode to Joy by Beethoven they sang:
Israel, end your occupation:
There’s no peace on stolen land.
We’ll sing out for liberation
’till you hear and understand.
Ethnic cleansing and apartheid
Should belong to history.
Human rights cannot be silenced:
Palestine will soon be free.
Should belong to history.
Human rights cannot be silenced:
Palestine will soon be free.
Before 13 of the group were escorted out, they held up individual letters spelling, ‘Free Palestine’ – many of which were snatched off them by angry audience members. At the very beginning of the next item, Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, four remaining activists stood up and chanted slogans such as “Settlements are out of tune with international law!” After the interval, and during Albéniz’s Iberia, a number of groups intervened with further slogans. Even after many in the audience had responded with their own chants of “Out, out, out!” and cheered the removal of some of the activists, the words, ‘Free Palestine’ still rang out clearly across the vast hall. The BBC refers to ‘some people in the audience’ who began booing and shouting. You can listen to the BBC audio of the action here.
A request by a few members of the orchestra and the audience for the Israeli national anthem,Hatikva, to be played at the end was ignored by the conductor Zubin Mehta. The Jerusalem Post reports that Minister for Culture Ed Vaizey, who was in the audience tweeted, “Demonstrators seem to have turned the entire audience pro-Israel.”’ Another tweet by @JonathanPos compared the disruption to the Night of Broken Glass, or Kristallnacht – the pogroms against Jews in Nazi Germany (in 1938): “Closed my eyes and suddenly imagined I was at the Berlin Philharmonie circa 1936. Breaking glass would have added a bit of colour”.
In an open letter, Out of Tune with Human Rights, Palestinian cultural institutions, including the leading musical organizations, had urged the BBC to cancel the concert, due to IPO’s complicity in whitewashing Israel’s persistent violations of international law and human rights. A letter in Tuesday’s Independent newspaper signed by over twenty musicians explained that when the Director of the Proms, Roger Wright, was asked to cancel the concert in accordance with the call from the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott (PACBI), he rejected this call, saying that the invitation is “purely musical”. The British Committee for the Universities of Palestine BRICUP wrote its own letter to Roger Wright on 31st July: “By inviting the IPO, a pillar of the Israeli state system and of its cultural propaganda campaign, you provide the Israeli government, perpetrator of the Cast Lead invasion of Gaza and of so many other violations of international law and of human rights, with the support that they crave. Cancel the concert!”
An inside source reported overhearing orchestra members referring to a cancelled concert tour in Scandinavia in response to the boycott call.
Protest disrupts London performance of Israel Philharmonic Orchestra
Sep 02, 2011
Henry Norr
The BBC reports that protesters disrupted a Thursday evening performance of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall in London. The BBC, which was broadcasting the concert live, took it off the air, brought it back, and then took it off again an hour later when the protest resumed, according to the report. The BBC’s “Proms Team” tweeted an apology, blaming “sustained audience disturbance.”
The orchestra’s About Us page boasts that it gives “special concerts for IDF soldiers at their outposts.” The foundation that supports it calls it “Israel’s musical ambassador,” and the American Friends of the IPO observe that “the IPO is Israel’s finest cultural emissary” and that “[t]he goodwill created by [its] tours, which have included historic visits to Japan, Argentina, Poland, Hungary, Russia, China and India, is of enormous value to the State of Israel.”
UN report on flotilla raid: Israel shot em the wrong way but everything else it did was fine
Sep 01, 2011
Philip Weiss
Update: Here is a PDF of the leaked copy of the UN report posted on the New York Times website.
The New York Times has broken the story of the UN report on the Gaza flotilla of May 31, 2010, and it’s shocking. Israel’s blockade of Gaza is legitimate; the Turks who were on the boat the Mavi Marmara, boarded by gun-wielding commandos in international waters, were violent; the flotilla organizers screwed up, etc. Israel is overjoyed, reading between the lines of the Times report, the Turks are incensed…
The report is hard on the flotilla, asserting that it “acted recklessly in attempting to breach the naval blockade.” It said that while the majority of the hundreds of people aboard the six vessels had no violent intention, that could not be said of IHH, the Turkish aid group that primarily organized the flotilla…
The report assailed Israel for the way in which the nine were killed and others injured. “Forensic evidence showing that most of the deceased were shot multiple times, including in the back, or at close range has not been adequately accounted for in the material presented by Israel,” it says….
the Palmer committee said while it had concerns about that policy and urged that it be loosened further, it saw the naval blockade as a purely security-oriented tool that had been imposed to stop weapons arriving to Gaza by sea.
The Palmer/Uribe Report: Another attempt by Israel to whitewash murder
Sep 01, 2011
The Free Gaza Movement
On May 31, 2010, Israeli commandos brutally attacked Freedom Flotilla 1, killing eight Turkish and one American passenger on board the Mavi Marmara, most having been killed at close range, execution style.. They injured more than 50 other passengers, both on the Mavi Marmara and on the other four boats sailing to the embattled territory of Gaza to bring the attention of the world to Israel’s illegal blockade of 1.6 million Palestinians. Not only were our passengers murdered and maimed, but the Israeli government has refused to return over $1 million in money and equipment, including cameras and videos which are of evidential value.
In the 15 months since Israel’s unwarranted attack on five boats carrying human rights watchers, Israel has been trying to spin the story that their well-armed soldiers were the victims and we were the aggressors. Several reports have already been written, most squarely blaming Israel for its attack on unarmed civilians.
The UN Human Rights Council Fact-Finding Mission took evidence from 112 eyewitnesses, reviewed forensic evidence, including autopsy reports and inspected the Mavi. It found that, because a humanitarian crisis exists in Gaza, Israel’s blockade is ulawful and ‘cannot be sustained in law…regardless of the grounds” used as justification. Israel’s blockade is collective punishment and in violation of article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, inflicting civilian damage disproportionate to any military advantage. Therefore, since Freedom Flotilla 1 neither presented an imminent threat to Israel nor was designed to contribute to any war effort against Israel, intercepting the flotilla was ‘clearly unlawful’ andcould not be justified as self-defense.
Israel refused to cooperate with this UN panel even though the United Nations and governments all around the world called for just such an independent investigation of the events.
Instead, the Israeli government set up its own investigatory panel, The Turkel Commission, led by Israeli retired Supreme Court Judge Jacob Turkel and three other Israelis issued a report on January 23, 2011 exonerating the commandos, then saying the blockade was legal. The commission did not interview a single passenger or crew member from any of the boats but only received testimony from the Israeli military.
On January 28, 2011, Amnesty International condemned the Turkel findings as no more than a whitewash. “Despite being nearly 300 pages long, the report crucially fails to explain how the activists died and what conclusions the Commission reached regarding the IDF’s specific actions in each case.”
Free Gaza shares Amnesty International’s analysis that the conflict between the Israeli armed forces and unarmed civilians was NOT armed conflict, making international humanitarian law (IHL) the wrong framework; international human rights law and law enforcement norms should have been applied, which would have made the use of force – and especially lethal force –an act of last resort.
Now there is the Palmer/Uribe report due to be released tomorrow, which apparently adopts the same faulty IHL framework. According to Audrey Bomse, Board member and Legal Adviser to Free Gaza: “If the leaks we’ve heard from Israeli officials are correct, the holes in this report are big enough to sail a flotilla of ships through. There are serious problems with the Panel’s composition, mandate and legal analysis. But most disturbing of all is the fact that the Secretary General’s Panel apparently condones Israel’s gross violations of the human and national rights of the Palestinian people and the rights of those in solidarity with them.”
The Panel has 4 members, one from Israel and one from Turkey, plus Geoffrey Palmer, former prime minister of New Zealand and ex-president of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe. The choice of Uribe as vice-chairman is suspect, given his intimate association with the military and paramilitary practice of murdering civilians in Colombia. The Panel, was only tasked to review the reports of the national investigations by Turkey and Israel (the Turkel Committee), not to conduct an in-depth objective investigation. Its ultimate goal, was to “positively affect the relationship between Turkey and Israel.”
International humanitarian law (IHL, the law of armed conflict) is the wrong legal framework to be used as the basis for judging the lawfulness of the actions taken by Israel both against the civilian population of Gaza (the blockade) and against those resisting the boarding of the MM. The conflict between the Israeli navy and unarmed civilians on the Mavi Marmara was not armed conflict. International human rights law and law enforcement norms should have been applied, which would have made the use of force – and especially lethal force –an act of last resort. Nor should the legality of the blockade of occupied Gaza be analyzed in the framework of the law of armed conflict.
If indeed the Uribe Rport has concluded that the Israeli naval blockade on Gaza – a serious measure of war – is legal and in accordance with international law, then this Report will contradict numerous other UN reports and resolutions, most recently that of the Human Rights Council Fact-Finding Mission, on the issue of the legality of the Gaza siege.
As the Human Rights Council Fact‐Finding Mission observed, “public confidence in any investigative process … is not enhanced when the subject of the investigation either investigates himself or plays a pivotal role in the process.”
J14 and the Calamity of Hope: a response to critics
Sep 01, 2011
Max Blumenthal
On August 26, Joseph Dana and I published an article, “Israel’s Exclusive Revolution,”bringing extensive reporting together with an analysis of Israel’s separation principle to describe the July 14 protest movement’s (J14) cognitive dissonance regarding the occupation. So far, no one — not one single person I know of — has responded to our article about the ongoing July 14 protests with facts of their own or anything resembling a reality-based analysis. Instead, our critics have replied with a mixture of personal attacks and emotion-laden, dreamy visions of the way things could be.
Noam Sheizaf wrote in a piece criticizing our article, “The important issue is not where the movement starts but where it leads, and in my view, this is still an open question… So there could, potentially, be mass change. This is the reason for the relative hope I see in this protest.” As with Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, which has left most of his formerly love-struck liberal supporters feeling angry and abandoned, hope was all you needed.
It is true that there could be mass change (I presume Noam was referring to a mass Israeli movement to end the occupation of Palestine and official discrimination against Palestinian citizens and non-Jewish residents of Israel), but Dana and I did not find very much evidence that it was on the way. So we reported what we learned based on our coverage of events and interviews with key players in the J14 movement, including Palestinians. We aimed to portray J14 — and by extension, Israeli society — as it was and not as it could be.
Sheizaf, who is not only a friend but one of the better journalists covering Israeli politics, responded to me and Dana’s article by accusing us of “cherry-picking.” He did not produce any reporting or factual analysis to set us straight, however. Most disappointingly, Sheizaf felt compelled to distort our conclusions, claiming that we said “J14 was some sort of right-wing movement.” I challenge Sheizaf to produce any evidence that we wrote or even suggested that. If he can not, he should immediately retract his false claim.
On August 31, the normally insightful Gabriel Ash published a piece that read like a mimeograph of the criticisms that had already been leveled against Dana and I. After completely concurring with the substance of our analysis, writing, “Everything [Blumenthal and Dana] say about the limitations of the protest movement, I agree [with],” Ash lambasted us for not focusing on the supposed “process” of “changing Israeli consciousness.” He pointed to nothing factual to support his claim that such a process was underway and did not attempt to explain what the process was. He did no reporting and offered very little reality-based analysis. In the end, the thrust of his criticism was that we did too much reporting, and not enough dreaming about the way things could be.
When Ash attacked our reporting, he did not do so by engaging with the substance of what our sources told us, but by complaining that we talked to the wrong sources. Never mind that we interviewed some of J14’s original organizers, or that the mainstream of the protest is based on Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard. And never mind what anyone actually told us. According to Ash, the people we interviewed were not valid sources because some of them were middle class Ashkenazim. Like other critics, Ash didn’t like what we found, so he attacked us for not looking somewhere else. Then, after proclaiming his distaste for “pop psychology,” Ash accused us without any factual basis of seeking to interview only “people who are like [ourselves].” This was a comical statement considering that we featured long quotes by Palestinian citizens of Israel and based our overarching analysis on countless conversations we had with Palestinians. So was Ash saying that Dana and I are Ashkenazi Palestinians? Or was he just refusing to acknowledge the substance of what our Palestinian sources told us about J14?
For those living in a region consumed with conflict and war, the tendency to cling to irrational hopes and evanescent solutions is completely understandable. But it is also dangerous, especially when utopian aspirations are projected onto a mass movement with deliberately vague politics and clear limitations. Not all social justice movements lead the way to progressive change. In fact, some ultimately produce the reverse effect. Saul Alinsky’s Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council, which transformed into a base of support for the segregationist George Wallace’s 1968 presidential campaign, is but one example of a dramatic social movement that turned reactionary. And after just a month and half of demonstrations, some of J14’s liberal-left activists have revealed an ugly, parochial mentality that has brought the movement’s latent ethno-nationalism closer to the surface.
Just weeks after the Israeli government detained scores of international Palestine solidarity activists at Ben Gurion International Airport for declaring their intention to volunteer in the occupied West Bank, the left-wing Israeli writer Yossi Gurvitz authored an uncharacteristically incoherent screed in which he declared that the “the ad hoc alliance” with “international left-wing activists…should end.” Addressing his rant to me, Dana and Ali Abunimah (though he didn’t mention us, we were the only J14 critics he linked to), Gurvitz claimed that “we’re not dealing with leftist [sic], but Palestinian right-winger. [sic]” Gurvitz’s broadside was an extension of his outbursts on Twitter, where he has attacked Abunimah, a Palestinian whose family was expelled from Lifta in 1948, as a “foreigner inciting natives,” bizarrely comparing him to Avigdor Lieberman. When I informed Gurvitz that Abunimah’s family was ethnically cleansed and that he is not allowed to return to their home, Gurvitz gloated, “If you ask Palestinians to reject moderate positions, you should be ready to pay the consequences.” Then, stepping into the role of the New Jew who had demonstrated his authenticity by “redeeming” the land, Gurvitz tweeted at me that my criticisms were not valid because I was a “tourist.” He thus appropriated the condescending talking point that has become a hallmark of Israeli hasbara: “You have to understand, it’s very, very complicated.”
While several other left-wing Israeli activists revealed ignorant, borderline racist views in Twitter exchanges with diaspora Palestinians, Gurvitz’s outbursts were in a class of their own. Gurvitz has covered the conflict for years, garnering a sizable following of readers who enjoyed his trenchant critiques of Israeli politics and military affairs. He seemed enlightened, informed about the history of the conflict and fully aware of the oppression Israel meted out against Palestinians on a daily basis. But once the “process” of J14 began, another side of Gurvitz emerged. As soon as Abunimah and others reminded Gurvitz that a movement that officially ignored Palestinians living under occupation or in refugee camps could not expect their solidarity, Gurvitz lashed out at them with visceral, almost inexplicable loathing. How long had Gurvitz harbored so much resentment for Palestinians? No one besides him really knows. But what is clear — and utterly tragic — is that his feelings were always there, lurking just beneath the surface. And now the mask is off.
While the “process” J14 initiated may have generated positive results in some areas, it has clearly been painful for Israelis like Gurvitz. Through their interaction with activists from the outside world, Gurvitz and others have been reminded that they are not citizens of a normal society, but players in a system that dominates and oppresses millions of people. They can sense through these exchanges that the discriminatory ideology of the state of Israel is a stain on their identity, and it hurts them. But instead of casting it off and redoubling their efforts against it, they hold on to the ideology and deploy it as a weapon against those “foreign” Palestinians and “tourists” who have denied them the sense of normality they yearn for. They want the occupation to go away for a little while so they can wage their “internal” struggle in the city Gabriel Ash once labeled “Colonial Tel Aviv.” But when Rothschild Boulevard empties out and the tents disappear, it will still be there. And then, they are going to have a whole lot of explaining to do.
Normalcy, hope and the Israeli tent protesters
Sep 01, 2011
Joseph Dana
Hope, one of the most powerful and fickle of human emotions, was a philosophical obsession of Baruch Spinoza, the 17th century Jewish philosopher. Spinoza paid a high social price in dedicating his life to the creation of philosophic system which valued rationalism above all else, especially hope and fear. The Israeli tent protests, which have rocked the country and this site over the last six weeks, have thrived on a momentum of hope in the absence of concrete language and goals. Similar to the historic presidential campaign of Barak Obama, the tent protests have been heavy on feelings but light on specific measures with which to carry them out.
Last week, Max Blumenthal and I published an article, based on extensive reporting, which described the core problems that we see in the tent protest movement. We argue that the separation principle and the form of cognitive dissonance which upholds it in Israeli society has been left untouched by the tent protests in an attempt to garner massive public support. Ultimately we claim that the tent protests are an example of the successful implementation of the separation principle in so far as they officially ignore the rights of all under Israeli rule.
More than two years ago, a social movement arose in Israel which has steadily grown despite incredible pressures from various forces. The Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity Movement, ostensibly embracing and acting for social justice through direct action, began in East Jerusalem as Israeli activists started to demonstrate in solidarity with Palestinians evicted from their homes by Israel in an attempt to solidify control over the conflicted city.
SJ Solidarity began as a reformulation of the Israeli left but its steadily rising numbers of Israeli participants over the years, many unfamiliar with political activism let alone Palestinian solidarity, have pushed it closer to the mainstream in Israel.
Many have been critical of SJ Solidarity, myself included, but there is little doubt that the movement is here to stay. Instead of harassing hope for a shared future with Palestinians through the deployment of flowery language of vague togetherness, Sheikh Jarrah has focused on action. It has been clear about its intentions, political positions and goals. After six weeks of unprecedented protests, it is time for the tent protesters to follow a similar program and define their political positions and, more importantly, their goals.
In the absence of concrete goals and positions, rifts have emerged between traditional partners over the tent protests. For the most part, Palestinians have been clear that a social justice movement that maintains official silence on the occupation is virtually impossible for them to support.
The occupation aside, some of the rifts created by the tent protests between Israelis and internationals, center on an important issue, Israeli normalcy. As seen in the emotional comments of my colleague Noam Shiezaf, the ability of Israelis to live as a normal people and exercise their right to hold political demonstrations about issues of their choosing is an important part of how the tent protests have been internalized in Israel. The tent protests are an example of this right in action. Therefore, the perceived rejection of this right is akin to a personal attack and even as a rejection of Israeli identity in total. This is, perhaps, the most profound demonstration of the cognitive dissonance which Blumenthal and I address in our piece.
The demonstrators in SJ Solidarity, however implicitly, do not argue that Israel is a normal society. They argue for change, understanding that the actions of the Israeli government in occupied East Jerusalem are a symptom of a society anything but normal. Far from denying the Israeli right to normalcy; SJ Solidarity has, in practice, rejected the type of hopeful language employed by the tent protests in order to work on changing the issues which cause Israel’s normalcy problem.
A movement willing to suspend criticism and embrace forms of cognitive dissonance should and must be criticized using the existing social and political structures of the society. Papering over Israel’s dysfunctions with vague notions of social justice while lashing out at critics is not a recipe for a lasting revolution. The sooner that Israelis recognize this, the greater the prospects for a true revolution of consciousnesses inside Israeli society. Hope left unfulfilled can result in tragic outcomes.
Happy Dershday
Sep 01, 2011
Adam Horowitz
In honor of Alan Dershowitz’s 73rd birthday we’ve decided to post of some on his online alter ego’s greatest hits. To receive more of the Dersh’s wisdom be sure to follow @TheDersh on Twitter:
WTF– ‘Tea Party’-held district in FL is forking over $87 million for weapons to Israel
Sep 01, 2011
Philip Weiss
Josh Ruebner of the US Campaign to End the Occupation hammers Rep. Allen West for his Israel junket in the Palm Beach Post and does the numbers:
It is questionable whether Rep. West’s participation in this junket was even legal, according to congressional travel guidelines prohibiting lobbying organizations from paying for trips. The trip is nominally sponsored by the American Israel Education Foundation, a “charitable affiliate” of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the most influential of the myriad pro-Israel lobbying groups. However, AIPAC pays the staff salaries at its sister organization, making this a seeming violation of post-Abramoff ethics rules.
Making matters worse, Rep. West was lobbied to increase the debt by sending more weapons to a country that has been engaged in a 44-year military occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip that denies Palestinians freedom and self-determination. Surely the deficit-reducing tea party favorite would be hard-pressed not to agree that ending military aid to Israel as a sanction for it misusing U.S. weapons to commit systematic human rights abuses against Palestinians is the right thing to do .
If we are going to tame government spending, Rep. West should reconsider the $30 billion in weapons pledged to Israel from 2009 to 2018. Based on our calculations, using IRS data, his constituents are on the hook for $87 million of this earmark. Israel is not a sacred cow, and our bankrolling of its human rights abuses of Palestinians comes at a price we can no longer afford.
As the Holy Land Five return to court, US policy goes on trial
Sep 01, 2011
Joe Catron
My friend Noor Elashi, the daughter of imprisoned Holy Land Foundation for Human Relief and Development (HLF) chairman Ghassan Elashi (also my friend), just arrived in New Orleans. She’s there to watch the long-awaited appeals of her father and the rest of the Holy Land Five, Palestinian-American men convicted of providing charity to Palestinians. Federal prosecutors specifically alleged that the HLF funded Palestinian zakat committees – local Muslim charitable organizations – somehow connected with Hamas, a US-designated foreign terrorist organization and now the elected governing party of the 1967-occupied Palestinian territories. But the same federal government funded many of those same committees through the US Agency for International Development (USAID), even after the HLF indictments were issued. Whether foreign relations or criminal law, US policy concerning the occupation of Palestine has a way of making everything surreal, transforming the most straightforward questions – who is a legal recipient of private charity? – into Kafkaesque riddles.
Noor’s determination to achieve justice for her father, the rest of the Holy Land Five and their families, and Palestine shines through in two articles published over the past day. Her essay in CounterPunch outlines the legal rationale behind her father’s conviction:
In 2001, President Bush signs the Patriot Act, which strengthens the Material Support Statue. The law’s language is so vague that it gives prosecutors the authority to argue that humanitarian aid to designated terrorist organizations could be indirect, and therefore, a crime.
In my father’s case, he is charged with conspiring to give Material Support in the form of humanitarian aid to Palestinian distribution centers called zakat committees. Prosecutors admit the zakat committees on the indictment were not designated terrorist groups, but according to the indictment released in 2004, these zakat committees are “controlled by” or act “on behalf of” Hamas, which was designated in 1995. Their theory is that by providing charity to zakat committees, the HLF helped Hamas win the “hearts and minds” of the Palestinian people.
The HLF case was tried in 2007, lasting three months, and after 19 days of deliberations, the jury deadlocked on most counts. The judge declared a mistrial and the case was tried the following year.
In 2008, after essentially the same arguments, the retrial ended with the jury returning all guilty verdicts, and in 2009, my father was sentenced to 65 years in prison, for essentially giving humanitarian aid to Palestinians.
She also describes the irregularities necessary for the government to finally win its case:
According to the appellate brief, there’s a major fact that undermines the prosecution’s claim that Hamas controlled the zakat committees: “The United States Agency for International Development—which had strict instructions not to deal with Hamas—provided funds over many years to zakat committees named in the indictment, including the Jenin, Nablus, and Qalqilia committees,” writes my father’s attorney, John Cline. He continues stating that in 2004, upon the release of the HLF indictment, “USAID provided $47,000 to the Qalqilia zakat committee.”
Furthermore, defense attorneys will argue that the district court:
Violated the right to due process by allowing a key witness to testify without providing his real name, thereby abusing my father’s right to confront his witness. They are referring to an Israeli intelligence officer who became the first person in U.S. history permitted to testify as an expert witness using a pseudonym.
Abused its discretion by allowing “inflammatory evidence of little or no probative value,” which included multiple scenes of suicide bombings.
Deviated from the sentencing guidelines when they sentenced my father to 65 years.
Nora Barrows-Friedman’s post on The Electronic Intifada cites a Muslim Legal Fund of America (MLFA) press release, which notes “[t]he fact that the court denied the defense access to evidence the prosecution had access to. Instead, prosecutors were allowed to cherry-pick what evidence the defense could review.”
Analyzing “a massive covert programme to monitor the Muslim communities” in New York’s metropolitan region, Mark LeVine recently wrote in Al Jazeera English: “Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the intelligence unit’s activities is who and what it is modeling itself after: the activities of the Israeli occupation forces in the West Bank.” As American standards of both policing and jurisprudence descend to those of the IDF and its military courts, increasing numbers of Americans may find themselves wondering what their government’s unflinching support for Zionism has wrought.
Nora’s post also includes a good interview with Noor, in which she both offers further analysis of the case and describes its practical effects on her family:
We saw him behind a plexiglass wall, which is part of the cruel nature of this CMU system. My five siblings and I, our mother and our grandmother, had to cram ourselves in this 5-foot by 7-foot visitation room, which meant that we had to sit on each others’ laps. We had four hours on the first day and four hours on the second day, and that’s all we had for the entire month. It was a 12-hour drive back and forth each way. There were so many things that we wanted to talk about as a family; things that you could typically iron out in months or years, but we only had those few hours where we could speak face to face. And during those moments, that physical contact is so important — to be able to wrap my arms around my father was so important during this last visit, but of course I was not allowed to do so.
He’s been telling me that during Ramadan, he feels that he’s amongst the community — most of the inmates with him are fasting. They get up in the morning before sunrise to eat together, and eat together again at night. They’re rarely allowed to congregate, but they’ve been allowed to pray together a few times a day. But it still doesn’t change the fact that we only get to hear from him just once every couple of weeks, and he’s still sentenced to 65 years in prison.