NOVANEWS
- Settler leader endorses boycott of apartheid
- My grandfather sparked my interest in debate over Zionism
- Romney visits the Western Wall, July 29
- Israel’s lone soldiers: Come for the perks, stay for the war crimes
- Exile and the Prophetic: Romero rising
- Happy Eid, from Gaza with love
- Lawyer’s verdict on NYPD surveillance of Muslims: unconstitutional
- ‘Get ready to fight Iran,’ Washington Post warns in URL
Settler leader endorses boycott of apartheid
Aug 19, 2012
Matthew Taylor
Check out this gem from the New York Times’ fawning GQ-like profile of Israeli settler leader Dani Dayan:
[Dayan and his wife] built a showpiece home, where the sunken double-height living room is filled with a painting from Vietnam, a sculpture from Machu Picchu and a meditation bowl from Nepal. “This is from South Africa,” he said, pointing to a set of large wooden masks. “Post-apartheid South Africa. I refused to visit apartheid South Africa.”
Chickens. Home. Roost.
Bulletins to Jodi Rudoren: 1) Did you read the Falk book I recommended to you that documents your employer’s sordid history of mis-reporting the facts and the law? Apparently not, as your article completely elides international law, just like your predecessors’ work. 2) In light of Dayan’s comments above, how could you not mention the international anti-Israeli-apartheid campaign, and the two former Israeli Prime Ministers’ claims — Barak‘s and Olmert‘s — that the West Bank is a de facto apartheid regime? 3) Why no Palestinian voices? What do Palestinians think of what Dayan and his colleagues are doing, stealing Palestinian land and all?
P.S. Dena Shunra has kindly translated portions of a settler site’s Hebrew story referring to the same Times article. She writes:
In two words – they’re pleased.
More words: they’re pleased that he gets the prestigious “profile” spot
in the NYT. The quote they chose from the piece: “most effective,
pragmatic, man of the world.”
The piece mentions that he didn’t hide his opinions from the Rudoren
(using the rather reductive term for report “katevet”), quotes Dayan’s
cousin, Israeli journalist Ilana Dayan (using a more respectful word for
her position, “itona’it”) and ends with the end-point of the piece.
It also links to “sharp criticism on left-wing news sites in the U.S.”
(James North’s at Mondoweiss.net) and to the full original piece & a Hebrew translation therof.
My grandfather sparked my interest in debate over Zionism
Aug 19, 2012
Sheldon Richman
Blogger and commenter Sheldon Richman recently wrote about a young family member who moved to Israel to join the army. (See the comments section here.) In an 1989 article in The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Richman wrote about his anti-Zionist grandfather, an orthodox Jew from Lithuania. We reprint it here with permission. –Editor
I have vivid childhood memories of collecting money to plant trees in Israel. I recall as well the frequent accounts provided by Hebrew school teachers of Jewish heroism and devotion in the midst of a hostile sea of Arabs. And I’ll never forget the day my school mates and I were taken downtown in 1960 to see the eagerly awaited movie “Exodus.”
Mine was a childhood that in large part revolved around Israel. Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan, and Golda Meir were heroes. My parents, Conservative Jews, were not Zionists; moving to Israel, or seeing their children do so, was unthinkable. But they were loyal Israelists, committed to the Jewish state as necessary for the existence of Judaism and for the victims, present and future, of ubiquitous anti-Semitism.
I have another memory, which stands in sharp relief to these pro-Israel images. It is the memory of my paternal grandfather, Sam Richman, a joyous, tolerant Orthodox Jew and a shomos (sexton) at a little synagogue. Every Saturday afternoon, after Shabbat services, we’d visit Zadie and Bubby at their apartment. The conversation would often turn to the Middle East. I would sit quietly and listen. There, and only there, did I hear criticism of Israel. I think this became particularly pronounced after the six-day war in 1967.
“The Jews in Israel are causing all the trouble,” he would say repeatedly. “The Arabs want peace. ”
My father would counter: “How can you say that? Israel wants peace. It is one little slice of land. The Arabs have so much, but they won’t sit down and talk.” He would suggest that my grandfather visit Israel and see the situation for himself.
Zadie wouldn’t budge. “I will never go,” he’d say. Each year, as he led our Passover seder, when he was supposed to say “next year in Jerusalem,” he’d improvise with a smile, “next year in Philadelphia.” The family always regarded Zadie as the venerable patriarch. But on this issue he was treated as uninformed and stubborn. It was confusing. Little did I know then that he represented an important position in the original Jewish debate over Zionism. To him Zionism was counterfeit Judaism and the Zionists charlatans. His Orthodox belief held that the re-establishment of Israel was a matter of God in the messianic future. He would have agreed with Yehoshofat Harkabi, a former chief of Israeli military intelligence, who said “The Jews always considered that the land belonged to them, but in fact it belonged to the Arabs. I would go further: I would say the original source of this conflict lies with Israel.”
At the time of the six-day war I was 17 years old. Aside from this one dissenter, I never imagined there was another side to the Israeli-Arab dispute. As I understood it, the Jews had a Biblical and legal right to the land and were eager to live peacefully with the Arabs. But the Arabs hated the Jews because they were Jews. So there was no peace. I don’t think I’d heard the word Palestinian.
My parents and teachers sincerely believed what they taught me. They bore no ill will toward the Arabs. But like many of us, they were too busy with their lives to research the question themselves, so they relied on the people they trusted, namely, the Jewish and Israeli leaders, who were Zionists.
In the early 1970s I had stirrings of dissatisfaction with what I had been taught. I began to wonder how European Jews came to own land in Palestine when an indigenous population lived there. My teachers said the Jews bought the land. That satisfied me at first. Meanwhile, I made two trips to Israel, during the 1973 war and a year later. By this time I was a journalist looking for adventure. I put my reservations on hold.
Whose Land Was It?
In 1978 I began hearing the land question discussed and for the first time I came across the argument that most of the land bought by the Zionists was sold by absentee feudal landlords, whose “tenants” were then run off by the purchasers. In my view of property this was illegitimate. The real owners were the people actually working the land: the homesteaders, the Palestinians.
Since my libertarianism puts me on the side of the victims of the state, I began to understand that the Palestinians were the latest in a long line of groups oppressed by political power. Jews, of course, have been similarly oppressed in many places; now some Jews, the Zionists, were in the role of oppressor. My childhood view of Israel was unraveling.
I belatedly began investigating the real story of the founding of Israel. I read Elmer Berger’s Memoirs of an Anti-Zionist Jew and the writings of Alfred Lilienthal, Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, and others. I revised my views on the relationship of Judaism and Zionism, on the Arab-Israeli wars, and on the Zionist agenda for Eretz Yisroel. I “discovered” the Palestinians. I became satisfied that what my parents and teachers told me was mistaken and that what Zadie had said was right.
He died in 1974. I’m painfully sorry I didn’t know then what I know now. He was a wise man, a prophet unsung in his own land.
Romney visits the Western Wall, July 29
Aug 19, 2012
Philip Weiss
After Romney visited the Western Wall in Jerusalem last month and planted a prayer in a crevice, I promised to put up video of it. Well here it is at last. Him going to the wall.
At the beginning you’ll see Ann Romney get out of the SUV. At 1:15 or so you can see Dan Senor, Romney’s neocon aide, standing there like a proud father. At 3:50 and 4:00 or so I ask Romney whether Israel has a right to annex the West Bank. You can see the perfectly coiffed candidate ignoring me. (I asked him a third time on his way back, even closer; another video, maybe later). Near the end there’s a little dialogue offcamera between me and Senor about how many times Romney has been to Israel (I failed to say, Occupied East Jerusalem).
Israel’s lone soldiers: Come for the perks, stay for the war crimes
Aug 19, 2012
Nima Shirazi
In his 2011 book entitled Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam, author J.M Berger (purportedly in his own words) “uncovers the secret history of American jihadists.” Berger, who refers to himself as a “specialist on homegrown extremism,” tells us that these traitorous terrorists are “Muslims [who] have traveled abroad to fight in wars because of their religious beliefs.”
Please read that definition again. Ok, just one more time.
Now read this from Tuesday’s New York Times:
On Tuesday, with talk rampant about the possibility of an imminent Israeli attack on Iran, Mr. [Josh] Warhit became a citizen of Israel to enlist in its army.
“Our parents were freaking out,” Mr. Warhit, now 22, recalled of that first trip [to Israel] during the war against Hezbollah. “It only made us more thirsty. I love the Jewish people. Love involves commitment. Right now we need people to commit.
“Of course it’s scary,” he added, regarding Iran, “but if you feel a commitment, that’s the thing to do.”
Warhit explains his decision to leave the country of his birth in order to join the massivelyAmerican–subsidized military of a foreign state this way: “I love my family, I love my friends and I love the Jewish people. The Jewish people don’t need another Jew in suburban New York.”
Apparently, according to Warhit, what the “Jewish people” do need are more Israeli soldiers using American-bought weapons to maintain a brutal 45-year-old occupation and apartheid legal system, facilitate ethnic cleansing, impose collective punishment upon millions of civilians by way of walls, checkpoints, blockade and siege, bulldoze homes, orchards and olive groves, protect and enable colonists in violation of international law, oppress and dominate an already devastated and dehumanized indigenous population, conduct night raids, abduct, detain, and abuse children, usesonic booms to deliberately terrorize people, wage more aggressive wars and commit more crimes against humanity with total impunity.
If that’s not terrorism then nothing is.
The article, headlined “Enlisting From Afar for the Love of Israel”, states that “Warhit, who grew up in New Rochelle, N.Y., and graduated from the University of Rochester after spending several summers in Israel, was one of 127 soldiers-to-be who landed Tuesday morning at Ben-Gurion International Airport.” The enlistees, referred to as “lone soldiers,” were given “a hero’s welcome that included a live band, balloon hats and a speech by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,” who praised them for deciding “to defend the Jewish future.”
In Jihad Joe, Berger writes, “Since 1979, American citizens have repeatedly packed their bags, left their wives and children behind, and traveled to distant lands in the name of military jihad, the armed struggle of Islam.”
Compare that to what the Times report tells us of the young IDF cadets who “left behind parents, girlfriends, cars and stuffed animals to become infantrymen, intelligence officers, paratroopers and pilots in a formerly foreign land.”
“Their motivation is often way higher than the average Israeli,” Colonel Shuli Ayal, who oversees the lone-soldier program, told the Times. “They want to make their service as meaningful as possible.”
With such zealous fervor and passionate commitment to his co-religionists and the ethnocentric,exclusivist nationalism of Zionism, it is no wonder that Warhit desperately hopes to join the Givati Brigade, an IDF military unit which Rudoren innocuously writes “has been active around the Gaza Strip” over the past ten years. What she should have told her readership is that the commander of the Givati Brigade, Colonel Ilan Malka, was directly responsible for authorizing the airstrike that murdered 21 members of the Samouni family in Gaza on January 5, 2009 for which no one has been held accountable.
Soldiers in the Givati Brigade are also known to have custom t-shirts designed and printed for their units at end of training or field duty that bear such images as dead Palestinian babies, mothers weeping at their children’s graves, guns aimed at kids and destroyed mosques. These shirts glorify, celebrate, and mock the rape of Palestinian girls, the murder of Palestinian men, women (especially if they’re pregnant) and children.
An anonymous Givati soldier was recently sentenced to a mere 45 days in prison for “illegal use of a firearm,” a charge reduced from manslaughter through a plea bargain. He had willfully murdered 65 year old Ria Abu Hajaj and her 37 year old daughter Majda Hajaj, after they were ordered to evacuate their home in Juhr ad-Dik with their families during the Gaza massacre in early January 2009. They were waving white flags and moving slowly in an area in which there was no combat whatsoever when the Israeli soldier opened fire on the group of 28 Hajaj family members, which included at least 17 children. Apparently, the use of his firearm was illegal, not the execution of civilians.
Clearly, for Warhit, it’s all about the love.
The article continues, “[A]ccording to a military spokeswoman, Israel has enlisted 8,217 men and women from other countries since 2009, 1,661 of them from the United States, second only to Russia’s 1,685,” adding, “They receive a host of special benefits: three times the typical soldier’s salary, a personal day off each month, a free flight home and vouchers for holiday meals.”
How’s that for incentive? Come for the perks, stay for the war crimes.
A March 2012 article in the Jewish online journal Tablet chronicles “Aluf Stone, an organization for Diaspora-born soldiers who have served in the Israel Defense Forces” that was formed in 2008 and is affiliated with the American Veterans of Israel (which is something that apparently exists). The report quotes Aluf Stone co-founder Marc Leibowitz describing service in the Israeli military as “a specific and meaningful shared experience. Deeper than an alumni group or a fraternity, which people are fanatical about.”
Fanatical.
Leibowitz explained that most Jewish groups are wary of associating with Aluf Stone since “[n]o organization wants to be seen as if they are encouraging Americans to fight in a foreign army.” Still,Tablet reveals, in 2011 “the group was invited by the Friends of the IDF to speak at a synagogue in New York and share their stories with an audience composed of family members of IDF soldiers from the States.”
One member of Aluf Stone told Chandler that American-born former IDF soldiers “don’t belong in U.S. veterans’ groups and networks, as they didn’t [all] serve in the American military.” Consequently, “Aluf Stone occupies an interesting middle ground in the U.S.” More accurately, perhaps, the members of Aluf Stone were actually occupying Palestine.
While it’s clear that these Jewish foreigners who join the Israeli military do so out of some sort of fervent compulsion and perceived obligation to their own religious tribe, so much so that they leave their own nation to bear arms on behalf of another, it should be noted that numerous studies have found religious ideology not to be a prime motivating factor in most of the terrorist attacks credited to Muslims.
An unclassified study published by the Pentagon-appointed U.S. Defense Science Board on Sept. 23, 2004 determined that:
Muslims do not “hate our freedom,” but rather, they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, even increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf States.
Professor Richard Jackson of The National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies in New Zealandconcurs that “terrorism is most often caused by military intervention overseas, and not religion, radicalization, insanity, ideology, poverty or such like.”
Political Science professor at the University of Chicago and founder of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, Robert Pape, who has conducted some of the most comprehensive research and written the most respected analysis of terrorist motivation, concluded in a 2010 study that “suicide terrorism such as that of 9/11 is particularly sensitive to foreign military occupation, and not Islamic fundamentalism or any ideology independent of this crucial circumstance.” His data reveals that “[m]ore than 95 percent of all suicide attacks are in response to foreign occupation.”
That U.S. and Israeli policies of invasion and occupation rather than religious extremism are the guiding forces behind acts of terrorist violence is evidenced in a letter allegedly written by those responsible for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and published in The New York Times. It stated, “This action was done in response for the American political, economical, and military support to Israel, the state of terrorism, and to the rest of the dictator countries in the region.”
The letter adds, “The American people are responsible for the actions of their government” and “all of the crimes that their government is committing against other people.”
Tragically, those American lone soldiers, that zealous minority of homegrown ideologues who – in J.M. Berger’s words – “travel abroad to fight in wars because of their religious beliefs,” will now be personally responsible for the actions and crimes of the Israeli government and military as well.
(h/t Glenn Greenwald)
****
Exile and the Prophetic: Romero rising
Aug 19, 2012
Marc H. Ellis
This post is part of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page. This piece is set in Innsbruck.
Let’s face it, synagogues and Hebrew Schools are places where Jewish (re)education is the word on the street. (Re)Educating Jews to accept a violence we used to rail against when perpetrated against us.
Not to forget the South African parents I used to meet in Europe traveling to meet their Jewish children who left Apartheid South Africa because they couldn’t take the injustice anymore. Or because it became unsafe to raise white Jewish children in an unraveling political space. Today, Jewish Israeli parents travel to visit their children who have left Israel. Because they just couldn’t take the injustice anymore. Or because it is increasingly unsafe.
Jewish youth camps. What are they being taught there? I doubt rah-rah Israel is the theme anymore. Does a knowing silence on Israel help Jewish kids navigate their internal world in relation to others?
The miracle of 1967. The spoils of 1948. Palestinians on the run. Jewish parents on the planes visiting children who can’t take it anymore or don’t feel safe in the country they were born.
The places of refuge that weren’t open to Jews fleeing the Holocaust are now open. No problem there. A new (un)expected Jewish Diaspora with Jewish Israelis in increasing numbers is forming.
Yesterday we finished Rubenstein’s The Cunning of History, a difficult book, the Holocaust as a paradigm for the future. Not just mass death but the bundle of modernity, bureaucracy, social organization and advanced technology, which guides us into an “iron cage” future. No way out. For Rubenstein, no “not only.”
Grumblings about the book – what in the world does this have to do with peace and development studies? Not stated directly, just some acting out. Perhaps it’s touched some in places they didn’t want to go. Tomorrow we’re on to my Practicing Exile, a primer for me at least. That pesky combination of exile and the prophetic in which there’s no way out either. In the community that practices exile the “not only” remains, as a catalyst or foundational openness, as we continue on the journey. More about this later.
Here’s a clue. It isn’t about transcending modernity. Rubenstein is right, there isn’t a way out of modernity. It’s about how we move within and through modernity. The light isn’t at the end of modernity, like the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. The light is within the journey through modernity among the debris and the hope that surrounds us.
Like Israel/Palestine. There isn’t a way that transcends the reality or takes a U-turn to the past. The only way forward is through Israel/Palestine. Creating a way within so that transformation can be glimpsed in the here and now.
This doesn’t sound highly political. May even be defined as apolitical. Let the definitional chips fall where they may. Suggestions welcome but please spare me the outdated slogans and the theories.
So much acting out when the going gets tough. In the big group yesterday I had to admonish two students, somewhat like grade school. The anxiety was about liberation theology which I was lecturing on. The slides I added with the themes of liberation theology were dark gray, not the best color, so during the break a few students worked on them. They ended up blue, with a snow flake pattern. When I saw the new format I smiled. The discussion had become heavy, with some of the resistance because of my God-talk. Lighten it up, Marc, they were saying. How to describe liberation theology without God?
Yes, liberation theology, from the 1960s and 1970s, Rubenstein from the 1970s – dated? Bookends of my life I suppose. No way out of my own history. Possibility of movement, though. Rubenstein: Those defined by modernity and the state as superfluous are destined for death. Liberation theology: Those defined by modernity and the state are defended as important in and of themselves and to God. Modernity-Talk/God-Talk. A tangle. Who wins there?
Defending the poor, Gustavo Gutierrez’s On Job: God-talk and the Suffering of the Innocent. I showed slides of the conference I directed in the summer of 1988 honoring Gustavo and Liberation Theology at Maryknoll. It was a large gathering of everyone who was anyone in liberation theology circles. What a month, with publicity around the world. An attempted, though too late, Vatican intervention, was deflected by the Maryknoll hierarchy. A reminder that not all administrations are as corrupt as the one I just tangled with.
So much happened at the event honoring Gustavo. The memories are vivid. During the planning of the event, one day Gustavo came to my office with a smile on his face. His good news was that a publisher in Israel had agreed to translate his Job book into Hebrew. Through some contacts, I also managed to wrestle a congratulatory comment from Elie Wiesel. Though short, his comment was powerful. Wiesel referred to Job as a disturbing brother who accompanied suffering Jews in the Holocaust and those suffering in Latin America today. Gustavo himself made the link in his book. For Gustavo, the question was the Holocaust, then. Now the question is about those in Latin America and around the world thatare dying in the “corners of the dead.”
Among the speakers at the conference was Naim Ateek, whom I had met in Jerusalem the previous year and who handed me a dissertation he had written on a Palestinian Theology of Liberation. He asked me to read it, which I did. I brought it back to Maryknoll and since, through Orbis Books, Martyknoll was publishers of liberation theology, I told them they needed to publish Naim’s manuscript.
After Orbis decided to publish his book, we brought Naim to Maryknoll for six months or so to ready his manuscript for publication. I served as his editorial consultant. The discussions I had with Naim during his rewriting were amazing, enlightening and sometimes raw. He was learning more about himself as an “Arab-Israeli.” I was learning more about myself as a Jew in relation to Israel. Our dialogue was unchartered territory. Now his Palestinian theology of liberation and my Jewish theology of liberation, published a year earlier, are thought together. Without one, the other is impossible.
True, the birth of a Jewish and Palestinian liberation theology has done little to right the political situation in Israel/Palestine. Nonetheless, our work together represented a breakthrough that many others have witnessed in the years since. Our work contributed to other breakthroughs and, coupled with the movement of history, consciousness about the situation in Israel/Palestine has changed significantly.
Are these thoughts pie in the sky? Regardless, they are part of my response to Rubenstein. I had to keep moving though history.
This morning I am showing “Romero,” the movie. Such a beautiful, haunting film about the conservative Archbishop of El Salvador who, in the end, is martyred while saying Mass. Just months after, two Maryknoll Sisters and a lay missioner, who had been trained at Maryknoll, were brutally murdered there as well. I had just arrived to begin my teaching at Maryknoll’s headquarters in New York when the Sisters were killed. A difficult arrival.
I taught at Maryknoll for fifteen years and traveled all over the world with them. During that time, I visited Maryknoll’s mission sites in Latin America, Africa and Asia. While traveling, I experienced the burgeoning liberation theologies that emanated from the different countries and continents. It was a formative time for me. From this experience my Jewish theology of liberation was born.
I couldn’t witness the suffering and hope of the world without finding my voice on the Jewish home front. It took me some time for sure. Once I found my voice I never looked back.
Yes, much more about this part of the journey at another time. But what is crucial for me to remember – what might be helpful in this time of dead-end sensibilities in Israel/Palestine – and as a response to Richard Rubenstein – without denying the foundational truths of his analysis – is that personal change is constantly occurring and that personal change can be translated into larger frames.
During these years, I learned that Jews cannot be free until Palestinians are free. A huge lesson. What to do with that lesson has occupied since a Jewish theology of liberation was born.
Global transformation is hard to fathom. It is difficult to know what encounters – say with Gustavo Gutierrez and Naim Ateek – mean for Jews or for Latin Americans and Palestinians. I don’t know the answer to the larger question, but, on a personal level, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
Yes and the words of Oscar Romero, as I recall them in Austria, the former home of the Nazis ascendant. Interviewed shortly before he was assassinated, Romero spoke about resurrection as a historical phenomenon: in death, he would rise in the history of the Salvadoran people.
Rising in the history of our own people. Global rising. Among the peoples. An (un)pious resurrection. Quite Jewish.
May it be so.
Happy Eid, from Gaza with love
Aug 19, 2012
Rawan Yaghi
Boy with Eid candies, Gaza 2012 Photographer Sarah el-khoudary
In Gaza, people celebrate. Yes, Gaza celebrates. Piles of all kinds of candy are spread everywhere on sidewalks in markets. Different kinds of fresh fruit, toys, snacks, Eid cookies. In Gaza, like so many other places in the world, kids are eager to wear their new clothes at the very early hours of the first day of Eid. They wake up early in the morning of Eid to get dressed and to pray along with the rest of the neighborhood, after spending the last week preparing with their Moms, going through shopping lists, and going with them to the market to buy their precious outfits, cleaning the house and caring for little spots while cleaning the staircase, helping bake the incredibly irresistible cookies.
Eid cookies, Gaza 2012 Photographer Sarah el-khoudary
In Palestine, those same children miss their dads who are either locked behind bars, behind crossings and borders, or locked under gravestones. In Gaza, you feel a bit excited about tomorrow. Then electricity goes off. You remember you didn’t iron your clothes, but you haven’t decided what you’re going to wear anyway, so you don’t bother getting mad about it. In Gaza, you see pictures of weekly demonstrations in villages in the West Bank, and you wonder how THEIR Eid is going to be after all that gas they inhaled and after one more day of being silenced by an army, after one more Friday of challenge, arrests, resistance, Sumood. Friends of yours wish a Happy Eid for everyone. Then wish the next Eid would be in a free Palestine.
You laugh
Eid, Gaza 2012 Photographer Sarah el-khoudary
Lawyer’s verdict on NYPD surveillance of Muslims: unconstitutional
Aug 19, 2012
Alex Kane
Muslims and allies rally in New York’s Foley Sq. against NYPD spying on Muslims (Photo: CAIR-NY/Flickr)
An official verdict remains out on the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) widespread surveillance of Muslims in the Northeast. But one lawyer, writing in The National Law Journal, proclaims the program unconstitutional.
A judge will likely rule on the constitutionality of the surveillance program as a result of lawsuit filed in New Jersey earlier this year. That suit was filed in June by a California-based organization, Muslim Advocates, and focuses on the NYPD’s spying efforts in New Jersey. The plaintiffs allege that Muslims’ First and Fourteenth Amendment rights under the U.S. Constitution were systematically violated by the NYPD.
But Alan Levine, a New York civil rights lawyer, isn’t waiting for a judge to rule on the New Jersey case–a prudent decision, given that judges in the post-9/11 era have proved themselves willing toallow the government to run roughshod over the rights of Muslim-Americans.
Writing in The National Law Journal, Levine lays out what the NYPD must prove before a program that targets one ethnic group can be considered legal. Based on court precedent, the surveillance program has to serve a “compelling” interest, and prove that the methods it uses are “necessary” to accomplish that interest. Levine demonstrates that the NYPD has proven neither.
Here’s the crux of Levine’s argument:
While “compelling” and “necessary” are imprecise terms, they mean, minimally, that law enforcement may not target a religious group unless the goal is critically important and nothing else will work. The government must surmount both hurdles. As to the first, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the NYPD say that surveillance of the Muslim community has prevented serious criminal activity. “We have stopped 14 attacks since 9/11 fortunately without anybody dying,” the mayor said, referring to a list of “terrorist plots” that the NYPD claims to have foiled.
However, a recent investigation by ProPublica reporter Justin Elliott analyzing each of the alleged plots demonstrates that the claim of crime prevention is willfully overstated…
Elliott’s conclusions are consistent with an AP analysis that found that the NYPD list “includes plans that may never have existed as well as plots the NYPD had little or no hand in disrupting.” Even assuming legitimate disagreement about one or two of these plots, the NYPD’s list clearly fails to provide the compelling justification required by the Constitution for the use of a suspect classification as a basis for a surveillance operation.
Nor can the NYPD satisfy the second constitutional requirement of showing that its Muslim surveillance program was “necessary” to fight terror. How, for example, does investigating an elementary school, or placing informants on a college rafting trip or in a random house of worship, lead to the prevention of a criminal plot?
Here’s Levine’s conclusion:
More than 50 years after the Japanese internment, President Clinton issued an apology, conceding that “our nation’s actions were rooted in racial prejudice and wartime hysteria.” Prejudice and hysteria are at the root of the NYPD’s surveillance program as well. The Muslim community should not have to wait a day longer for city officials to abandon a practice that so flagrantly affronts principles of equal justice and religious freedom.
‘Get ready to fight Iran,’ Washington Post warns in URL
Aug 19, 2012
Philip Weiss
Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren, outside the King David hotel
The Washington Post URL (the internet address for the piece) gives this piece away: “Get ready to fight Iran.”