An American Muslim man prays at a New York City mosque.

Police Spying on American Muslims Is a Pointless National Shame 

Sharia law ban and Muslim wives

(AlJazeera English)

When Kansas State Senator Susan Wagle voted for Senate Bill 79 that would ban Sharia law in Kansas, she said that a vote in favour of the legislation was “a vote to protect women”. “In this great country of ours, and in the state of Kansas,” Wagle said, “women have equal rights.”

Her words echoed the sentiments of many of the 33 Senators in Kansas, in March 2012, who voted in support of the law. The Bill passed and was signed into law by the Governor of Kansas. On July 1, 2012, the application of foreign or Sharia law was effectively banned in the State of Kansas.

A mere month later, in August 2012, a court in Johnson City, Kansas, faced the consequences of the ban whose intent was to “preclude[s] the courts from applying foreign law, legal codes or systems that violate the public policy of our state or federal constitutions”. It has been widely viewed as precluding courts from applying Sharia law.

Before the Johnson City District Court came the Soleimanis, both from Iran and now divorcing in Kansas. The wife, Elham Soleimani asked the court to enforce their Islamic marriage contract which stipulated a payment of $677,000 from the husband to the wife in case of divorce.

The facts of the case were a saga of love, betrayal and abuse. Faramarz Soleimani had left Iran decades ago, fleeing from the draconian changes brought on by the Islamic Revolution. With him, was his wife Zohra Bamani.

The two arrived in Kansas and opened a restaurant, obtaining amnesty in their new country so that they would not have to return to a much changed Iran. They stayed for 30 years, until Soleimani, now nearly 60 years old, got on the internet and found love again.

His new flame was Elham Moghadem, 24 years younger, living in Iran. Rapt in passion, Soleimani divorced Zohra Bamani and arrived in Iran to marry again. His second marriage took place on July 19, 2009, two years before the Sharia ban and long before either the new husband or the new wife could predict just how bad things would become between them.

In the first heady months of romance, the newly married Elham and Faramarz Soleimani revelled in wedded bliss. To prove the eternity of his devotion to his new partner, Soleimani had her name tattooed on his chest. To prove she was a loving wife, Elham tried her best to get used to Kansas.

The divorce case of the Soleimanis

Based on the story told by court records, the end came hard and fast and with an avalanche of court proceedings. On June 1, 2011, less than two years after her marriage to Soleimani – the man she had found on the internet and followed across the world – Elham filed for divorce in the courthouse in Johnson City, Kansas.

Surrounding the divorce petition were allegations and pleadings of domestic violence, assault and battery, rape and even a marital tort case for spousal abuse.

By the time she filed for divorce, Elham, the once beloved bride, was alone, destitute, living in a domestic abuse shelter and looking to American courts to help her after her marriage became a harrowing ordeal.

Her account was one of betrayal, of having been wheedled into marriage by a man who boasted about his great wealth and promised her a fairy tale life in luxurious America. What she had found instead, like so many immigrant women arriving with little known and hardly seen husbands, was a domineering and abusive old man who wished to keep her in servitude.

So, betrayed Elham relied and asked for relief from the Johnson City court on the one thing she felt was in her favour: the Islamic marriage contract (mahr) signed between the parties during their wedding in Iran.

Based on its stipulations, Elham Soleimani, the wife, could demand the payment of 1,354 gold coins (valued at $677,000) from her estranged husband in the event of divorce. With no other recourse and little prospect of help under the rules of marital property division under Kansas law, she asked the court to enforce the agreement and make her husband pay up.

She was about to be disappointed again. On August 28, 2012, nearly two months after Kansas’ much touted Sharia ban went into effect, the District Court in Johnson County refused to enforce the agreement between the parties and grant Elham Soleimani the money she believed was due from her husband under the terms of Islamic marriage contract.

One of the most significant reasons offered by the court for its refusal to do so was the religious nature of the agreement, the precise sort they felt the Kansas Legislature had wanted to ban.

Enforcing the agreement, the court concluded, would “abdicate the judiciary’s role to protect such fundamental rights, a concern that was articulated in Senate Bill No 79″. If they enforced the mahr agreement and force Soleimani to pay it, the court felt, they would be violating the ban on Sharia law in Kansas.

Here is where the court in Johnson City, Kansas, went wrong. While it is indeed true that separation of Church and State provisions under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the United States prevents US Courts from interpreting religious texts, the court in Kansas disregarded longstanding precedent that insists that when the stipulations of a contract are clear, its religious origins do not preclude enforcement by a US Court.

One determinative case in this regard was Avitzur v Avitzur (1983), decided in the Second District of New York, where a Jewish woman petitioned the court to force her ex-husband to obtain a religious divorce decree as they had agreed in a contract prior to their marriage.

In Avitzur, the Supreme Court of New York decided that forcing the husband, Boaz Avitzur to obtain a Jewish divorce as per the agreement between the parties was not a violation of the separation of Church and State, and that the court could enforce the agreement despite its religious origins and content.

Foreign law not banned in New York 

Unlike Kansas, the State of New York has not banned Sharia or foreign law and so it can safely be concluded that the same case decided in that state would have yielded a markedly different result.

That is indeed exactly what happened in SB v WA - decided in New York in August 2012 – after the decision was issued by the court in Johnson City, Kansas. In that case, a Muslim-American woman married to an Egyptian immigrant, who subsequently divorced in the United Arab Emirates, was able to get a mahr payment of $250,000 enforced by the court.

The court decided in favour of the wife even though the agreement, an Islamic marriage contract, was entered in a foreign country and had just as much of a theological origin as the case in Kansas.

The issue at hand in both cases, fresh after the onslaught of Sharia ban that roared through the US, is not the issue of separation of Church and State – which has a long history of American jurisprudence attached to it – but rather the issue of the status of women, specifically Muslim women under Sharia law and the role of American courts in relation to it.

The case in Kansas reveals that imposing a blanket ban that refuses to allow for the consideration of the specifics of a case or the particularities of the position of an individual Muslim female litigant like Elham Soleimani, does more harm than good.

Where no ban would have resulted in an immigrant woman being able to avail of the resources that would allow her to begin a new life in the US and rehabilitate herself from an abusive relationship, a Sharia ban enabled the opposite, leaving her with nothing and allowing her more established husband to discard her with few consequences.

While all of these facts were argued in the feverish seasons in which the Kansas Legislature along with those in Oklahoma, Tennessee, Louisiana and others debated Sharia bans, the case of the Soleimanis lays in actual terms and actual lives the reduction of their effect and the dubiousness of their purpose.

If protection of women was indeed the issue before the Kansas court, or if the facts of the case were such that the same marriage contract would provide the wife with less than what would be available to her under the marital property division statutes of American law, then it would have made perfect feminist and jurisprudential sense to strike down the agreement under the Equal Protection Clause that provides for just such situations.

This was however, not the case. Under the provisions of stipulated mahr under her Islamic marriage contract, Elham Soleimani was entitled to more than she would have received under American laws of property division that would be governed the length of the marriage and the property acquired during the two years.

But in Kansas, with its Sharia ban in effect, Elham Soleimani lost out, not because she was a woman, but because the basis on which she argued her case for a future and for empowerment was Islamic.

Rafia Zakaria is on the board of directors of Amnesty International. She is a lawyer and a Political Science PhD candidate at Indiana University.

Follow her on Twitter: @RafiaZakaria

by Belen Fernandez (AlJazeera English)

Joseph Goldstein’s New York Times article of February 3 outlines a request from US civil rights lawyers to federal judge Charles S Haight Jr for an independent evaluation of the New York Police Department’s counterterrorism techniques.

Writes Goldstein: “The lawyers said the police’s tactics have placed Muslim communities under surveillance in violation of longstanding federal court guidelines.” Among these guidelines is a prohibition on the retention of information collected during surveillance operations unless it pertains “to potential unlawful or terrorist activity”.

As the Associated Press revealed in 2011, Muslim populations in the New York area had been targeted by a pervasive spying apparatus known as the Demographic Unit, the fruit of collaboration between the NYPD and the CIA.

The network, which has since been promoted to the more politically correct title “Zone Assessment Unit”, relies on undercover officers and informants to perform critical national security tasks such as – the AP notes – “gather[ing] intelligence on cab drivers and food cart vendors, jobs often done by Muslims”.

According to Goldstein, the civil rights lawyers who filed the motion with Haight based their allegations on over 1,200 pages of reports on Zone Assessment Unit monitoring activities at Muslim establishments, including shops and cafes, where invasive demographic details were allegedly compiled and retained despite the lack of “potential unlawful or terrorist activity”:

“The NYPD is continuing a massive, all-encompassing dragnet for intelligence concerning anything connected with Muslim activity through intrusive infiltration and record-keeping about all aspects of life, politics and worship”, the court filing stated. “The NYPD operates on a theory that conservative Muslim beliefs and participation in Muslim organisations are themselves bases for investigation”.

How to grow terror at home

Of course, the absence of apparent “terrorist activity” is not always an obstacle for well-funded NYPD informants. The Egyptian informant Osama Eldawoody, for example, actively encouraged young Pakistani-American Shawahar Matin Siraj to undertake the bombing of a New York subway station – a plot for which Siraj was convicted despite his stipulation, recorded on tape, that he was against killing and that he would need to acquire his “mother’s permission” before signing on to the project.

These sorts of machinations lend a secondary, ironic layer of meaning to the so-called “homegrown threat” of Muslims “radicalised” in the West rather than abroad, a topic meriting especial hysteria from the NYPD.

In a lengthy 2007 police department report [PDF] complete with a colourful chart depicting “Trajectories of Radicalisation Inside the United States”, we learn about homegrown Syed Hashmi, a Brooklyn College alumnus who “travelled to the UK and joined-up [sic] with elements of al-Qaeda”. Hashmi is said to have become involved in “terrorist activities overseas” and then charged with “aiding the al-Qaeda plot to attack targets in London and… delivering military equipment and funds to radical Islamists in Pakistan and Afghanistan”.

A glance at other sources confirms the true heinousness of Hashmi’s mission. Particularly incriminating is a 2010 Huffington Post column entitled “Kidnapped by the State“, in which acclaimed author and professor Amitava Kumar explains:

[W]hen Hashmi was extradited to the US [from Britain], the FBI revealed that a man who had stayed at the detainee’s apartment in London had supplied “military gear” to al-Qaeda members in Pakistan. Then, Hashmi’s lawyer found out that the items being labelled as “military gear” were socks and rainproof ponchos. The rest of the details of the indictment remain shrouded in mystery.

Kumar also notes that, as a Brooklyn College student, Hashmi had been “articulate and very critical of the ways in which the civil rights of American citizens, especially Muslims, had been curtailed by the Bush administration”, while a part of his thesis had concerned “the government’s surveillance and harassment of four or five Muslim groups in the US”.

No hope for urban hip-hop gangsters

It’s worth noting that neither Bush nor his successor – two homegrown characters who have blatantly pursued “terrorist activities overseas” including continuous drone strikes on civilians - has been subjected to the “special administrative measures” applied to Hashmi, who was placed in solitary confinement for over three years prior to being convicted.

Efforts to provide the US Executive with a carte blanche to assassinate US citizens abroad might be viewed as constituting another kind of “homegrown threat”. The delivery of billions of dollars a year and items far more militarily destructive than socks and rain ponchos to a state that subsists on terror meanwhile further underscores US hypocrisy.

Incidentally, in its 2011 report on the NYPD’s “human mapping” of Muslim communities, the AP cited a former police official who described the programme as being modelled partly on Israeli operations in the West Bank. Moustafa Bayoumi, Brooklyn College professor and author of How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America, commented in an email to me on common denominators between security regimes in New York and occupied Palestine: “Both seek to become systems of total surveillance [and] both are invested in the idea of essentially dangerous Muslims.”

Total surveillance would indeed appear to be a prominent NYPD aspiration given the comprehensiveness of its list of common “radicalisation incubators” for germinating terrorists: cafes, student associations, non-governmental organisations, butcher shops, book stores, and so on.

According to the official “Homegrown Threat” manual [PDF], “[g]iving up cigarettes, drinking, gambling and urban hip-hop gangster clothes” may indicate a Muslim’s “progression along the radicalisation continuum” toward “Jihadisation”. The report fails to advise persons who continue to sport hip-hop gangster attire on how to go about avoiding disproportionate subjection to other violations of civil rights in the form of the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk campaign.

Discriminatory mapping of Muslims clearly does nothing to resolve such homegrown threats as were on display during the December 2012 massacre in Connecticut, though it presumably contributes to the surge in anti-Muslim violence in the US – a natural byproduct of the selective elimination of human rights in favour of a narrative of fear.

As the current legal motion by US civil rights lawyers reminds us once again, the only unviolated Muslim right in this country is the right to oppressive surveillance.

Belen Fernandez is the author of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, released by Verso in 2011. She is a member of the Jacobin Magazine editorial board, and her articles have appeared in the London Review of Books blog, The Baffler, Al Akhbar English and many other publications.

Hussein Rashid is a native New Yorker and Proud Muslim. Currently an instructor at the Center for Spiritual Inquiry at Park Avenue Christian Church and based at Hofstra University, he is deeply committed to interfaith work and is passionate about teaching. He believes we need to start talking more intelligently about Islam specifically, and religion generally.

Islamophobia is Real, Mr. Mayor—A New York City Muslim Explains

Post by HUSSEIN RASHID

My colleague, Haroon Moghul, wrote a masterful piece here called “What’s Islamophobia, and Do I Have It?” In it, he expounds on the myths that serve as the bases for Islamophobia. His voice is one of a growing chorus that shows that Islamophobia exists and has a persistent logic of its own, often grounded in anti-Semitic tropes.

In fact, one of the amazing elements of Islamophobia is the denial of its own existence—as Nathan Lean explains. In his article, Lean also offers several examples of the impact Islamophobia has had on the lives of Americans; Wajahat Ali has written about the fear and death that an Islamophobic environment sanctions; Erik Love gives us sociological background on the impact of Islamophobia. I want to offer a reflection of what a New York Muslim sees and hears as Islamophobia becomes so normalized that it becomes an institution.

Let’s begin with the double-standard tango. We hear about about an Alabama teen who is reported to have a near-operational plot to attack his school. He is allowed to go back home. A couple in New York, where one partner is a serial offender, is found with explosives in their apartment, ready to blow things up. In both cases, there is no ongoing coverage of these attempted terrorist plots. They are released on bail and told to behave themselves. Yet, any Muslim who meets another Muslim is tarred by six degrees of separation as being a potential terrorist, deserving of NYPD surveillance.

The situation of the NYPD is one of the great travesties of Muslim life in the city. The extensive program has, admittedly, resulted in no leads. We at RD have covered the betrayalof trust that Mayor Bloomberg’s policies represent. This betrayal is further compounded by the fact that members of the NYPD call it the “most corrupt police department,” and try to harass people for exercising their freedom of expression. Yet, by giving them unsupervised, unchallenged power, Mayor Bloomberg makes it easy for them start with the assumption that Muslims are guilty until proven innocent. And again, much like the Islamophobia Industry denying Islamophobia in the presence of a preponderance of evidence, no NYPD policy changes, despite the overwhelming evidence that the surveillance is misplaced.

This type of Islamophobia is becoming so ingrained into the mayor’s administration, that when Sunando Sen was slaughtered on the altar of Islamophobia, the mayor urged us to remember that while it was sad, it was okay because the real story was how cool the NYPD was. This statement was a day after he talked about the unappreciated deaths of the 34 people killed everyday by gun violence. Clearly, some causes of violence and some victims of violence are to be appreciated more than others.

If the words of Fox News can lead to an arson attack against a mosque, and general Islamophobia results in knifings in pizzerias, then the words and actions of the Mayor of New York have a much more profound impact.

Muslims in the city are bombarded by media coverage that paints us as suspect. The city’s police department paints us as suspect. Advertising in the veins of the city paints us as suspect. The mayor made a rousing speech during the Park51 controversy, but he has not internalized or exemplified those words. We are a community besieged by Islamophobia. Instead of building strong, resilient communities, we are left with “Be safe,” as our most potent protection. We cannot trust the police, we cannot trust people on the subway, and the mayor fiddles.

Islamophobia is real. People die because of it. Communities are weakened, and the only people profiting from it are the police state and the Islamophobia Industry. As a New York Muslim, I hope Mayor Bloomberg leaves us a better legacy than bike lanes and broken communities.

Most of the anti-Muslim attacks have been dismissed as “the work of mentally ill individuals” [Getty Images]

Halting anti-Muslim violence

Many of the recent attacks have taken place shortly after well-publicised anti-Muslim hate speeches, argues author.

There has been a sudden uptick in the number of violent hate crimes where the victims are thought to be Muslim or “Middle Eastern”. Sunando Sen, a Hindu man originally from India, was shoved in front of an oncoming subway train in New York City, where he died. Cameron Mohammed, a Catholic American man whose parents are from Trinidad, was shot in the face next to a Walmart near Tampa, Florida. The suspect in Florida was apparently offended by seeing Mohammed walking with a white woman. He asked his victim whether he was “from the Middle East”, and then fired a pellet gun. He later told police that he didn’t care that his victim wasn’t Muslim, saying, “They are all the same”.

The New York and Florida attacks took place just days apart. They follow a shocking string of similar attacks in recent months: several Middle Eastern shopkeepers were murdered in New York City; a Muslim man was stabbed in the back in Queens; another man in Queens was brutally beaten after his assailants asked if he was “Hindu or Muslim”; there was a shooting at a mosque in Chicago and an acid bomb attack at a different Chicago-area mosque; two arson attacks destroyed a mosque in Joplin, Missouri; and there was the tragic mass shooting at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin that killed six worshippers.

Most of these attacks have been dismissed as the work of mentally ill individuals, rather than symptoms of larger social problems. The lack of equal access to health care in the United States, especially mental health care, could very well be part of the explanation for the increase in hate attacks. But there is all-too-clear evidence that people who “look Muslim” are under deliberate attack in the US. Hate speech and racial/ethnic profiling must be understood as contributing factors in explaining the persistence of violent hate attacks.

Discriminatory policies

It’s too easy to dismiss any one hate crime as the work of a “crazy” individual. Racism is often disregarded as the work of a “few bad apples”, even though sociological research has shown time and again that racism exists within the structures of American society. While it’s true that some of the perpetrators in hate attacks suffer from mental illness, by itself that cannot explain the pattern of hate attacks.

Official FBI statistics on hate crimes published last month found that the number of hate attacks on Muslims remained high after a spike in 2010 that correlated with nationally prominent fear-mongering over the construction of a mosque in Manhattan. Many of the recent attacks have taken place shortly after well-publicised anti-Muslim hate speeches, sometimes coming directly from public officials.

Congresswoman Michelle Bachman (R-MN) even demanded a McCarthy-esque investigation of Muslim “infiltration” in the federal government, and she doubled-down on her comments after Republican leaders like Arizona Senator John McCain repudiated her.

Former Congressman Joe Walsh (R-IL) whipped up Islamophobic fear when he said that “Muslims are here trying to kill Americans every day” and warned without evidence of an impending attack in Chicago that would “make 9/11 look like child’s play”. Shortly after these statements, two mosques in the Chicago area experienced violent hate attacks.

Hate speech and discriminatory policies targeting Muslim Americans remain common in the US. A well-funded hate campaign is currently placing anti-Muslim billboard advertisements in prominent locations around the country, including in the New York City and Washington, DC, subway systems. Another sophisticated operation has promoted anti-Sharia hysteria all around the US, resulting in nearly half of the state legislatures taking up unnecessary “bans” on Sharia law.

The New York Police Department engaged in clandestine profiling of Muslim Americans in restaurants, mosques and college campuses all across the northeastern US. The Transportation Security Administration was accused by one of its own agents of engaging in “rampant” racial profiling at Boston’s Logan Airport, and despite promising to investigate there have been no changes.

The connection between this hateful rhetoric, discriminatory policies and the increasing number of violent hate crimes is easy to see. It is perhaps less easy to see the impact of long-term cutbacks in the mental health infrastructure. In 2011, the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) found massive budget cutbacks for public mental health services: over $1.6bn since 2009 alone. This is on top of continuous budget cuts over the past 10 years in most states. NAMI predicted that these cuts put “tens of thousands of citizens at great risk”.

Mental health infrastructure

The Kaiser Family Foundation found a huge shift away from inpatient care and a massive shift toward prescription drugs from 1985 to 2005. The roots of this shift actually begin with a 1963 law that sought to move treatment away from state-run facilities and toward private settings, but instead the “sickest patients have begun turning up in jails and homeless shelters with a frequency that mirrors that of the late 1800s” according to a recent analysis in the New York Times.

The good news is that the Obamacare programme places additional mental health requirements on health insurance providers, but much more work is needed to reverse the damage done to America’s mental health infrastructure. In looking for ways to prevent hate attacks, expanding access to mental health would be a tremendous step forward.

In addition, more work is urgently needed to shore up civil rights protection in the US. It’s difficult to even know the extent of hate crimes targeting Arab, Muslim, Sikh and South Asian Americans, in large part due to inconsistent and outdated practices by the FBI. The law governing the FBI’s collection of hate crimes data has not been updated since 1990.

One of the symptoms of the inadequate data is a lack of a category for hate crimes targeting Sikhs - so attacks like the shooting in Wisconsin are classified as “anti-other group” or perhaps even “anti-Muslim”. Federal hate crime statutes have been updated only twice since 1968, and the increased penalties for hate crimes apply only to federal cases. Additional protections and improved funding for educational and outreach efforts to prevent hate crimes should be urgently approved.

Finally, perhaps the most promising avenue for change comes through holding elected officials and other public figures accountable for their hate speech and support of discriminatory policies. Several prominent anti-Muslim members of Congress lost their seats in the 2012 election, although Congresswoman Bachmann managed to win re-election by a slim margin.

Efforts by civil rights advocates to “name and shame” hatemongers have stepped up in recent months, and the Council on American Islamic Relations in Chicago has begun a campaign to reclaim the word “jihad”. Muslim American political activists in Chicago have successfully run for public office in recent years. Building on successes like these should help to curtail hate speech, discriminatory policies and hate crimes.

Erik Love studies civil rights advocacy in the United States. He is a professor of sociology at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania.

Follow him on Twitter: @ErikLove

Glenn Greenwald on the meaninglessness and menace of the term “terrorism” as well as the two-tiered system of justice in the United States. (h/t: Razainc.)

Greenwald importantly highlights,

It is hard to overstate the centrality of the term “terrorism” when it comes to state power, policy and law. It is the term that launches wars and sustains the US posture of endless war, justifies unprecedented state secrecy, serves as the pretext for due-process-free imprisonment and assassinations, and sends countless of our fellow (Muslim) citizens to prison for decades for the most trivial, and often constitutionally protected, acts. Those Muslims convicted under separate rules of justice don’t just get sent to normal prisons, but to their own special prison units now as oppressive as Guantanamo. And, as this case and so many others illustrate, these tactics are rapidly expanding beyond their original application - the persecution of Muslims – into a wide variety of expansions of government power.

New York’s top court highlights the meaninglessness and menace of the term ‘terrorism’

Valuable revelations are often found in unlikely places. Such is the case with a fascinating ruling released last week by the New York Court of Appeals, that state’s highest court, in the criminal case of People v. Edgar Morales. The facts of the case are quite simple, but the implications of the ruling are profound.

The defendant, Morales, was a member of a Bronx street gang known as the “St. James Boys” (SJB). In August, 2002, Morales and fellow gang members went to a party, saw someone from a rival gang which they believed responsible for a friend’s death, and told him to leave. When he refused, they planned to attack him after the party. When the party ended, Morales shot at the rival gang member and his cohorts, severely wounding one of them but also accidentally shooting and killing a 10-year-old girl who was a bystander.

Prosecutors were not content to charge Morales with murder and related crimes. Instead, they charged him with crimes of “terrorism” under an anti-terrorism law that was enacted in New York in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack. When enacting the law, the legislature stated that it is designed to ensure that terrorists “are prosecuted and punished in state courts with appropriate severity”. Under the law, this newly created “terrorism” crime is committed whenever one acts with the “intent to intimidate or coerce a civilian population”, but the law contains no definition of that term.

At trial, Morales vehemently argued that what he was accused of doing could not possibly be “terrorism”, but the prosecutors insisted – and the trial court agreed – that his violence “furthered the [gang]‘s objective to intimidate or coerce other Mexican-American gangs in the Bronx and, as a result of those activities, the [gang] intended to intimidate and coerce the entire Mexican-American community.” The jury found him guilty on all counts, including the “terrorism” charges, and the Court of Appeals set out to determine whether the terrorism charges were validly applied to this violence.

What’s initially so striking about the decision is the court’s obvious inability to state what “terrorism” even means. The court ultimately concludes, unanimously, that “terrorism” charges are inappropriate for Morales because acts of gang violence “do not match our collective understanding of what constitutes a terrorist act”, whatever this “collective understanding” might be. This reasoning is essentially the same as what US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart infamously offered when applying laws criminalizing obscenity, which, he said, entails “the task of trying to define what may be indefinable”. Opining that “obscenity” means “hard-core pornography”, he explained: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.”

Here, the court in Morales is similarly incapable of defining terrorism. It cannot state what it actually means. All it can do is insist, with no basis, that we have a “collective understanding of what constitutes a terrorist act” and “the Legislature did not intend for the crime of terrorism to cover the illegal acts of a gang member committed for the purpose of coercing or intimidating adversaries.” To illustrate our supposed “collective understanding”, the court lists the seven examples of “terrorism” referenced by the findings that led to the law – six of which involve acts of violence committed by Arabs and/or Muslims against westerners, including the 1994 Brooklyn Bridge shooting by a Lebanese cab driver of a van carrying Hasidic Jewish students (the sole exception being the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing).

That – violence committed by Arabs or Muslims against the west – is the real operational definition of “terrorism”, and the court thus concludes: “The offenses committed by defendant and his associates after the christening party obviously are not comparable to these instances of terroristic acts.” “Obviously”.

But here’s the most amazing and significant part of the court’s decision. Once it concluded that the “terrorism” charges against Morales were inapplicable, it could have simply dismissed those counts and upheld the conviction on all the other standard counts of murder. That’s what the intermediate appellate court did after it, too, found the terrorism statute inapplicable to Moraels: it threw out the “terrorism” charges, reduced his sentence, and let stand the conviction on the murder counts.

But the Court of Appeals went much further. It reversed the conviction on all of the counts – including the non-terrorism counts – and ordered a new trial. That was necessary, said the court, because there are special rules that govern a trial whenever a defendant is charged with “terrorism”, and these rules are so permissive, so designed to ensure conviction, that it is inherently unfair to convict someone under these rules who is not charged with terrorism. Here’s what the court said about that [emphasis added]:

“By proceeding on the terrorism theory, the People were able to introduce evidence about numerous alleged criminal acts committed by members of the SJB gang over the course of three years. Without the aura of terrorism looming over the case, the activities of defendant’s associates in other contexts would have been largely, if not entirely, inadmissible.

“Based on the record, it is apparent that the volume of proof regarding unrelated assaults, murders and other offenses created a reasonable possibility that the jury’s findings were prejudicially influenced. Hence, the spillover effect requires reversal and a new trial on the underlying offenses.”

What the court is admitting here is amazing. It is saying that when someone is accused of terrorism, the rules governing trials and law completely change. All sorts of things that the state is normally barred from doing on the grounds that it is unjust suddenly become permissible when someone faces terrorism charges. Indeed, so “prejudicial” are these special rules of “justice” for terrorism cases that anyone convicted under these rules is, by definition, treated unfairly if terrorism is inapplicable.

But if these special rules for terrorism cases are prejudicial and unfair when applied to murder defenders, then they are unfair for everyone. It means these rules are inherently unfair. But that’s what has happened in the post-9/11 era: a whole new system of “justice”, with all new rules designed to ensure convictions and long prison terms, have been invented exclusively for those facing “terrorism” charges. And since the term “terrorism” has no discernible meaning other than “acts of violence committed by Arabs and/or Muslims against westerners”, this illustrates why New York Times editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal was exactly right when, under the headline “Liberty and Justice for non-Muslims”, he wrote:

[I]t’s rarely acknowledged that the [9/11] attacks have also led to what’s essentially a separate justice system for Muslims. In this system, the principle of due process is twisted and selectively applied, if it is applied at all.”

It’s a separate system of justice so intrinsically unjust and unfair – designed to ensure that Muslims accused of “terrorism” have basically no chance of acquittal – that any trial that proceeds under its warped rules for non-terrorist defendants must be thrown out in its entirety, said the New York Court of Appeals. That’s extraordinary.

This case was brought to my attention by New York City lawyer Nirav Shah, who made four key observations about this ruling, and did so with such clarity and concision that, with his permission, I’m reprinting them here:

(1) The case shows how broadly and pervasively prosecutors have tried to apply terrorism statutes to curtail rights of defendants. That the NY high court has taken a stand against that trend is very good news, and hopefully starts a national trend. But the decision also highlights the underlying defects of most anti-terrorism laws, yet fails to overturn the statute.

(2) In that vein, the Court flails uncomfortably at the definition of “terrorism.” Without making the point explicitly, its analysis underscores the extent to which that term has become a proxy for “Muslim crime,” both socially and legally. For example, the Court exempts undefined “street crime” from the definition of terrorism, saying that the legislative history’s cited examples of terrorism indicate that the statute applies only to more “serious offenses” (the cited examples in the legislative history are Oklahoma City and six instances of Muslim violence, including the Brooklyn Bridge shooting, which left exactly as many individuals dead as the case at bar).

The Court offers no principled affirmative description of what terrorism is or how serious a crime it needs to be to meet the definition (because such description would be impossible), yet they continue to treat the concept as something with discrete meaning. By the time the justices are done with it, “terrorism” is a less precise term than Potter Stewart’s “pornography.”

(3) Without irony, the Court finds that “the concept of terrorism has a unique meaning and its implications risk being trivialized if the terminology is applied loosely in situations that do not match our collective understanding of what constitutes a terrorist act.” There is no acknowledgment that the collective understanding itself (Muslim violence = terrorism) is itself trivializing. Particularly ironic is the phrase “terrorism has a unique meaning” in the context of an opinion that fails to provide any definition at all.

(4) Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the Court rules that the Defendant’s entire conviction (not just the terrorism counts) has to be overturned because the invocation of “terrorism” so unduly prejudiced his trial. All sorts of evidence about gang activities became admissible as part of the terrorist conspiracy that never would have come in on an ordinary murder trial.

It is hard to overstate the centrality of the term “terrorism” when it comes to state power, policy and law. It is the term that launches wars and sustains the US posture of endless war, justifies unprecedented state secrecy, serves as the pretext for due-process-free imprisonment and assassinations, and sends countless of our fellow (Muslim) citizens to prison for decades for the most trivial, and often constitutionally protected, acts. Those Muslims convicted under separate rules of justice don’t just get sent to normal prisons, but to their own special prison units now as oppressive as Guantanamo. And, as this case and so many others illustrate, these tactics are rapidly expanding beyond their original application - the persecution of Muslims – into a wide variety of expansions of government power.

Yet this term, arguably in the abstract and certainly as applied, has no fixed meaning. It’s just a manipulative slogan legitimizing all forms of American violence against Muslims and delegitimizing any acts meaningfully impeding US will. Worse, it’s the overarching foundation for a completely separate system of justice for Muslims that is in exactly the same category as the most shameful episodes of US history. As always, it’s the term that means nothing and justifies everything. It’s truly valuable to watch New York state’s highest court unwittingly affirm all of those truths.

UPDATE

For those commenters shocked and horrified by the notion that “terrorism” has no fixed or real meaning, see the second-to-last section of this piece I wrote a few months ago elaborating on that point with ample documentation and citations – with examples such as this and this- as well as this interview I conducted (also here) with Remi Brulin, the NYU and Sorbonne scholar who has extensively studied the discourse of terrorism.

When Terry Jones tried to exploit the tragedy of 9/11 to bash Islam and Muslims, New Yorkers countered by singing the Beatles song “All You Need is Love.” (h/t: AliyaPlatif)

Proud of New Yorkers!:

This made me want to share the original Beatles song in its entirety:

Yup, Fox is really trying to dredge this “issue” up again.

Fox News Reignites Islamophobic Campaign Against The ‘Ground Zero Mosque’

By Hamed Aleaziz on Dec 10, 2012, ThinkProgress

Fox News is again trying to drum up “controversy” around the Park51 Islamic community center in Manhattan. On Sunday, Fox Nation re-published a New York Post article claiming that “community programs” no longer exist at Park51, just Muslims praying. From there, Fox and Friends discussed the latest “development” on Park51. “It’s all pray and no play,” host Gretchen Carlson said and complained that the center isn’t hosting community programs and is instead attracting Muslims for prayer. Noted Islamophobe Donald Trump cited the oft-repeated far-right claim that Muslims built the community center to celebrate victory on 9/11:

GRETCHEN CARLSON: It’s all pray and no play. The controversial Ground Zero Mosque was supposed to be a cultural center, but it turns out it’s now an empty space with no community programs. Dozens of worshipers gather at the site for prayer services, but that’s pretty much the only activity in the building aside from a small martial arts class.

BRIAN KILMEADE: … Donald, do you want to finance the mosque downtown?

STEVE DOOCY: The Mosque-erade

DONALD TRUMP: No, I don’t think so, I’d certainly buy the site. But I don’t think it’s an appropriate use of the site. A lot of people don’t. You know, in the Arab world, when they have victory, they like to build a Mosque at that site. It’s very strongly out there. I think this is a terrible idea. It shouldn’t be done and let’s see what happens…

Watch it:

Fox is recycling rhetoric from more than two years ago when anti-Islam activists like Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer led an all-out war in their attempt to prevent the cultural center from opening. At the time, Fox News became a major broadcaster of their Islamophobicagenda. Back then, Fox gave anti-Islam activists a platform to make their virulent attacks against the proposed Park51 community center.

Multiple news organizations, like the Washington Post, debunked the fearmongering, pointing out that the “stated point of the project is creating a world where Jews, Christians and Muslims connect again in a way that builds mutual understanding and respect. This is precisely the opposite goal of the 9/11 terrorists.” Conservatives like Orrin Hatch supported Park51. And New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg spoke up in favor of the center as well, saying that freedom of religion should be tolerated.

As far as Fox’s new angle goes, it’s hardly a new development that the center serves as a place of worship; it was always slated to provide a home for Muslim worshipers in Manhattan. And the lack of cultural events likely has more to do with the center’s perceived financial issues than with a sinister plot: last year, a rental dispute between the center and its landlord went to court.

But unlike two years ago, the center faces no legal hurdles from the city to continue operating in the site. New York City’s Landmark Preservation Commission approved the center in 2010 and Mayor Bloomberg agreed. Park51 opened up last year without protests and little to no fanfare.

Pamela Geller is using and abusing the symbolism of the Twin Towers and coupling it with verses from the Quran again, she says,

“I refuse to abridge my free speech so as to appease savages.”

Of course for the racist Geller, anyone, especially a Muslim who criticizes her and exposes her loonieness is a savage. She just goes out of her way to display hate. I’m thinking this campaign will be another dud with various interfaith organizations and representatives of mainstream religious groups condemning her and the wider populace ignoring her crazy rantings.

Geller’s new anti-Islam ad to debut in New York – with disclaimer

Pamela Geller is at it again.

The outspoken blogger and Executive Director of the American Freedom Defense Initiative has just purchased a slew of advertising space in several subway stations and on numerous Metro-North platforms in order to display her newest anti-Islam message.

Her latest ads, shared exclusively with The Observer, will feature a panorama of the sky the moment the World Trade Center burst into flames in 2001, accompanied by a quote from the Quran that reads “Soon shall We cast terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers.”

However, an MTA disclaimer taking up 25% of the ad space will be presented in conjunction with Ms. Geller’s message for the first time. “This is a paid advertisement sponsored by American Freedom Defense Initiative. The display of this advertisement does not imply MTA’s endorsement of any views expressed,” it reads.

The MTA’s new disclaimer policy came in September of this year following an incident in which protestor Mona Eltahawy, 45, was filmed spray-painting another AFDI advertisement, which equated Muslims with savages.

Following the September incident, Ms. Geller has been busy crafting new advertisements for her campaign beginning December 17. The new ads will be plastered across at least 50 different locations, the MTA confirmed, the result of an ad buy worth more than $10,000.

“I refuse to abridge my free speech so as to appease savages,” Ms. Geller told The Observer.

New York Observer, 7 December 2012

Queens, New York has been the scene of two gruesome separate attacks on Muslim men of South Asian descent in apparent hate motivated attacks.

We reported the stabbing attack on Bashir Ahmad (57) that occurred on November 19 which police are investigating as a “hate crime.”

Police are investigating a stabbing and biting of a man outside a mosque in Queens early Sunday morning as possible hate crime.

Authorities say the attack took place at the Masjid Al-Saaliheen Mosque on Kissena Boulevard in Flushing around 5:00 a.m.

Bashir Ahmad, 57, was walking up the steps to open the front door for morning prayers when he was approached from behind.

He was stabbed several times in the back as he opened the door.

Ahmad says the attacker yelled anti-Muslim slurs and then bit him in the nose.

On November 24 an elderly man by the name of Ali Akmal (72) was brutally beaten and also “bitten on the nose.” He is in critical condition and the police are investigating it as a hate crime. (h/t: Aliya Platif)

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) – A brutal beating left a beloved grandfather in the hospital Friday night and police want to know if it was an act of hate.

The whole incident apparently started with a simple question and answer, but it ended with the victim bloody and bruised from head to toe. It happened just before 5:30 a.m. on Nov. 24 in Queens.

Ali Akmal laid in his hospital bed in critical condition with wounds and bruises covering most of his body.  The 72-year-old was savagely beaten after he went out for his early morning walk on 46 Avenue in Corona last Saturday.

“They pretty much tried to kill him, with their hands, their own bare hands and maybe a bat, too. But they pretty much had the mentality that ‘Yeah we have to kill this person,’” the victim’s granddaughter told CBS 2′s Dick Brennan.

Akmal’s granddaughter did not want to show her face on camera because the attackers are still out there. Police said the suspects on seen on surveillance video running from the crime scene.

Akmal’s tongue was so badly swollen that he couldn’t talk for two days. When he finally could, he told police that when he first encountered the two men, they asked him, “are you Muslim or Hindu?”

He responded “I’m Muslim,” and that’s when they attacked.

The beating was so savage and personal, Akmal was even bitten on the nose.

“Just because we’re Muslim, just because we’re another religion or culture I don’t see why you have to beat that person up. They didn’t do anything to you, they didn’t hurt you,” the victim’s granddaughter said.

The crime has been assigned to detectives with the NYPD’s Hate Crimes Task Force.

Akmal was out of intensive care Friday, but not out of the woods. He cannot walk, can barely speak and is not always coherent, but his son-in-law said he’s lucky to be alive.

“He’d been beaten, head, back, knees, they tortured him. In every single joint they hit him,” the son-in-law said.

Police said the suspects are both in their late teens or early 20s.