http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Opinion/Commentary/Sep/14/Defend-the-Palestinian-cause-against-its-most-unreasonable-supporters.ashx

The conflict that has developed between Fatah and Hamas poses new and unprecedented challenges for supporters of the Palestinian cause. A rational response to this crisis should focus on reformulating a viable strategy for ending the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. The only serious prospect for ending the conflict and gaining independence for the Palestinian people is a negotiated solution to the occupation and the creation of a Palestinian state.

To work effectively toward that aim, there is no need for supporters of Palestine to become partisans of Fatah. However, important choices need to be made and there are serious consequences to words and deeds.

In the United States a small but vocal group of left-wing commentators has reacted by defending Hamas and heaping vitriol on Fatah. However well-intentioned, their rhetoric, or more significantly what it advocates, might significantly undermine efforts to help to end the occupation.

Such support for the Muslim far right is symptomatic of a broad trend in Arab leftist circles. Some in the Arab left have, in effect, abandoned many of the left’s traditional values, including class analysis and a materialist program for social change, secularism and iconoclasm, feminism and the cause of women’s rights, and internationalism. What remains intact is Arab nationalism, suspicion of the West, and hatred of Israel.

There are still many honorable pockets of bona fide leftist thinking in the Arab world. However, some Arab leftists now find themselves reading politics mainly through the lens of ethnic nationalism, an orientation now dominated by Islamist organizations. Thus, Islamist groups can seem appealing to those on the left. What gets lost or ignored in the process is the far right’s reactionary, repressive and theocratic agenda.

In the United States, the most strident of these voices are Columbia University professor Joseph Massad, Asaad AbuKhalil of California State University, Stanislaus, and Ali Abunimah and others writing on the Electronic Intifada Web site.

Massad has drawn an extended analogy comparing Hamas to the deposed and murdered Chilean leftist President Salvador Allende, and Fatah to the fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet. When someone on the left starts looking at Khaled Meshaal and seeing Salvador Allende, their moral and political compass may be so badly broken that there is little hope for them to ever find their way back. Similarly, Abunimah has repeatedly compared Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization to the Nicaraguan Contras, arguing: “These are Palestinian Contras.”

Rather than seeing the obvious shortcomings on both sides, these writers insist that the fault line is between a gang of traitors on the one hand and the defenders of Palestine on the other.

Massad has passionately defended Hamas’ extremely violent takeover of the Gaza Strip, for example, claiming that Fatah had “pushed it into a corner in the hope of slaughtering all its leadership in Gaza” and that, therefore, Hamas “could not but defend itself against their final onslaught.” In May 2006, AbuKhalil urged Hamas to “to pre-empt their enemies if they want to rule,” anticipating the bloody scenes in Gaza over a year later. And Abunimah has gone so far as to accuse Fatah of waging a “war against the Palestinian people.”

Massad takes every opportunity to suggest that Hamas and democracy are organically linked, declaring that “the supporters of Hamas, whether believers or atheists or secularists or Islamists, are the supporters of the real Palestinian democracy because Hamas’ struggle is a struggle against dictatorial traitors (under the legal definition of treason).” However, when it was obvious that Mahmoud Abbas was about to be elected Palestinian president in January 2005, Abunimah’s Web site published several articles questioning the possibility of democracy under occupation and arguing that “the elections are a liability for the Palestinians.”

Electronic Intifada then published “The False Promise of Western Democracy,” which claimed that the election of Abbas “added to a growing worldwide skepticism about Western notions of democracy (i.e. institutionalized suffrage, parliamentary procedures, etc.).” The article affirmed that “the value of Western democracy is questionable for the Palestinian people” and condemned the international community for “an invasive imposition of democratic practices” on the Palestinians.

There were no articles to this effect following the Hamas parliamentary victory.

The rationalization many of these commentators offer to explain Palestinian support for Fatah and opposition to Hamas is that it is the fruit of willful wickedness and greed. Singled out for special condemnation has been the beloved Palestinian

poet Mahmoud Darwish, who Massad frankly accuses of being an intellectual prostitute: “Perhaps Mahmoud Darwish’s recent poem in support of the coup published on the front page of the Saudi newspaper Al-Hayat, can be explained by the monthly checks he receives from the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority, and he is not alone.”

AbuKhalil claims that Darwish supports Fatah only because the “Oslo regime gave him a nice house in Ramallah.” He added that, “I expect [Darwish] to declare [Israeli Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert the ‘knight of Zionism’ any day now,” and that Darwish’s recent poetry reading in Haifa was properly translated as: “I want Nobel. Please give me Nobel. I really want Nobel. Please give it to me NOW. If you give me Nobel, I will keep repeating that Arabs are in love with Israeli nuclear weapons.”

These hyperbolic and hyper-personalized attacks on Darwish typify the approach to Palestinian politics that has been developed by some leftist and secular defenders of Hamas. These accusations can border on incitement to violence. What is to be done to those condemned, as Massad put it, “under the legal definition of treason?”

The Palestinian public, in contrast, has had the good sense to blame both sides – Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. Majorities urge reconciliation and continue to support an end to the conflict based on a negotiated agreement leading to the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Public opinion also continues to give an edge to Fatah over Hamas to an increasing degree, based on the most recent polls that showed 48 percent support for Fatah and 31 percent backing for Hamas.

Abunimah has suggested, “We know what Hamas is against, but no one is clear what it is for.” In fact, Hamas has been very clear and consistent that its aim is to establish an Islamic state, according to the model of the Muslim Brotherhood, in all of Mandatory Palestine. It also seeks to “Islamize” Palestinian society along ultraconservative Salafist lines.

After its election victory, Hamas was urged to renounce deliberate attacks against civilians, abide by the treaty obligations undertaken by its predecessors, and express a willingness to negotiate an end to the Israeli occupation based on mutual recognition with Israel in accordance with international law. Hamas adamantly refused to take any such steps, preferring to stick with its already well-established positions.

Those presently inclined to be sympathetic to Hamas need to step back and ask themselves: Are we really laboring to support the creation of another theocracy in the Middle East? Would we want to live in such a society? Is that what liberation looks like?

The suicide bombing campaigns have done more than anything else to harm the Palestinian cause in the eyes of the world, unify Israelis, and give them a false sense that the occupation is some kind of self-defense necessity. That is a gift that no occupier should ever be granted. Nor are we even mentioning the corrosive effect that the ideology and rhetoric of “martyrdom” has had on Palestinian society. There are limitations on what is acceptable in the pursuit of freedom.

Fatah also has serious problems, not only with corruption and cronyism but also with incompetence, disunity and a history of poor management of Palestinian diplomacy. It is obviously no model of democracy either.

Abbas has demonstrated an unshakable dedication to the goal of establishing a viable and independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, a principled position that has required both personal and political courage. However, he has proven an uninspiring leader, lacks charisma and has been systematically undermined by Israel.

Nonetheless, Fatah’s approach at least offers the possibility of a negotiated agreement with Israel and the development of a secular state. In order to achieve an end to the occupation, Palestinians must come to an agreement with the Israelis, just as in order to have peace and security Israel must make a deal with the Palestinians.

The real alternative is not some utopian reconciliation and post-nationalist bliss, but rather unending conflict and untold suffering. Friends of Palestine in the US must be clear about the principles that inform their activism. If people are genuinely in sympathy with the aims and methods of Hamas, then that is one thing; but those of us who seek first to end the occupation and then support the development of a democratic and pluralistic Palestinian state have to hold firm to those commitments. Dismissing those who maintain these important values and goals as “diplomatic fronts” or “Washington lobbies” for narrow Palestinian political factions, or most preposterously as “neoconservatives,” is beneath contempt.

An approach that simply condemns Israel and the US, now lamentably extended to include, and even focus on, other Palestinians and Arabs, is trapped in the limitations of its own negativity. By offering nothing of positive value, this method functions as a terribly weak argument for ending the occupation. Any successful approach to pro-Palestinian advocacy in the United States should therefore emphasize the benefits to the United States, and indeed to Israel, of freedom for the Palestinian people. The Palestinians cannot achieve their aims without international backing that applies pressure on Israel and that provides the context and support that a workable agreement and a fledgling state would obviously require. This is why Hamas’ policies that reject international law outright are so damaging to the Palestinian cause.

Therefore, building international support to end the occupation must be the principal aim above all in the US. The single greatest tool for this that Palestinian- and Arab-Americans have is their citizenship. Their primary task is to engage the political system nationally and the policy conversation as it is taking place in Washington. A politically receivable message is urgently required. This could emphasize the benefits to American policy goals in the region generally, reducing the appeal of anti-American extremism in the region, enhancing the US role as a responsible world leader, the promotion of American values such as independence and citizenship, and economic benefits to the region and to the US.

Friends of Palestine must also help build up a serious coalition to end the Israeli occupation. The motivations for such support are irrelevant, as are differences on other issues.

Jewish-and Arab-Americans who are serious about peace also need to develop functional working relationships. I do not mean here simply groups friendly to Israel that nevertheless oppose the occupation on moral grounds, but also those that wish to end it simply for practical purposes. Israel has every reason, in pursuit of its own manifest self-interest, to come to reasonable terms with the Palestinians; and its American supporters have every reason to encourage it to do so, even though not everyone has fully comprehended this yet.

If we say we want the same thing, we should at least try to call each other’s bluff and test the waters, rather than conclude from the outset that it is inconceivable that self-interest might actually bring friends of Palestine and Israel to the same place at the same time, with the real potential for mutual benefit.

Palestinian-Americans have to recognize that their traditional approaches have failed and see the poverty and pointlessness of a purely negative agenda of condemnation without positive content. The keys to success are to take much better advantage of our status as Americans, develop new and effective forms of advocacy, and forge the alliances that can actually achieve results.

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Opinion/Commentary/May/19/Is-Arab-American-irrelevance-our-goal.ashx#axzz2axJWowPa

What was amazing in the response to the much-publicized recent paper written by Steven Walt and John Mearsheimer on the influence of the pro- Israel lobby on American foreign policy was not the chorus of condemnations from Israel’s supporters, but similar criticism from some on the Arab-American left.

The paper, a set of fairly obvious observations about the workings of one of the most influential centers of power in Washington, combined with a few debatable claims and a couple of minor errors, should have produced little comment. But given the atmosphere of intimidation in political and academic circles regarding Israel, its publication created a firestorm.

The response from the pro-Israel right was predictable. “[T]here is no Israel lobby” one noted pundit thundered. Another called it “worse than the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion.'”

The preposterous argument offered by some pro-Israel commentators is that hundreds of millions of dollars, innumerable man-hours and relentless organizing at every level of society, over many decades, has had no significant role in producing the staunchly Israel-centric American policies of recent years – allegedly no more than natural expressions of Americans’ love of Israel. An insult to one’s intelligence, this proposition holds that the intended effect was not produced by its putative cause.

If this were true, then the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is not a great political force but a remarkable fraud and confidence trick: millions of unsuspecting Jewish Americans and their friends have been bilked by unscrupulous grifters continuously begging for money on the false pretense that it is needed to consolidate the U.S.-Israel relationship. Call the cops!

But surely no serious person would believe that. Would they?

Enter some Arab-American commentators, stage left. Joseph Massad of Columbia University and Asaad Abu Khalil of Californian State University, Stanislaus, have dismissed the Walt-Mearsheimer paper and agree that the pro-Israel lobby is basically irrelevant.

In a widely-circulated article in Al-Ahram Weekly, Massad agued that the real problem was the “imperial policies” of the United States, which exist independently of the influence of the pro-Israel lobby. There are surely American imperial interests that have been pursued in very damaging ways in the Arab and post-colonial worlds. But Massad does not attempt to explain how, why, or by whom these interests are defined, except that he is sure the lobby has virtually no role in it.

Such arguments are deterministic, a-historical, and profoundly disempowering. This thinking has led the Arab-American community to largely exclude itself from the political system, ensuring its own irrelevance in shaping political behavior, while also granting the pro-Israel lobby an open field without any substantial opposition.

One finds here a profound ignorance of, or more precisely complete disinterest in, the process of American policy-making as it actually takes place. There is no sense that the U.S. government is the sum of its constituent parts that vie for influence in a system designed precisely to be lobbied if any faction seeks to effect policy and law.

In place of these mundane realities are the amorphous “imperial policies” described by Massad in the language of a divine absolute, floating above a Kabuki-show political fray. His is a simplistic version of American politics in which power is exercised in an automatic and irresistible manner by an imperial hidden hand – a caricature of the old Marxist idea of a social superstructure.

This argument cannot account for the development of American policy toward Israel, unless one accepts that American interests in the Middle East have independently evolved in almost perfect concert with the growing size, competency, and entrenched power of the pro-Israel lobby.

Take Israel’s forced withdrawal from Suez in 1956, followed by its French-supported victory in the 1967 war, the development of a military technology-transfer regime with the Nixon administration, the closer embrace under President Ronald Reagan, and the almost complete convergence of U.S. and Israeli policies under President Bill Clinton and his successor George W. Bush; is the movement toward the later developments better accounted for by changes in the international climate than by the gradual and painstaking development of political influence thanks to the efforts of a highly focused ethnic lobby and its allies? Did the removal of a number of key legislators in the late 1970s and early 1980s and the defeat of President George H.W. Bush, who confronted Israel over settlements, (all major scalps claimed by AIPAC) mean nothing? Is the adoption in recent years of Israel as the main issue for a well-organized fundamentalist Christian right irrelevant?

As the Walt-Mearsheimer paper points out, Arab-Americans have, for the most part, sat on the sidelines rather than engage the political system, unlike the pro-Israel lobby. After all, why would any politician care what a group that doesn’t seriously participate, or contribute its time or money in a substantial or coordinated way, have to say?

If Walt and Mearsheimer are right, then Arab-Americans have been a big part of the problem by opting out of the give and take of politics and refusing to challenge their opponents or provide cover for and support their friends. If, on the other hand, Massad and Abu Khalil are right and American policies are not the products of the social forces brought to bear on political institutions, but instead follow the dictates of an ineluctable and ineffable imperial imperative, then what’s the point?

And here, surely, lies the appeal of this analysis beyond the confines of the ultra-left: it lets both Arabs and Jews off the hook, frees them from their rivalry, and places “the blame,” as Massad puts it, on “the United States,” an entity that bears no resemblance to the sum of its parts. It’s very convenient as an argument, but also completely wrong.

We Arab-Americans have failed ourselves and our Arab brethren through self-imposed alienation from American politics. While substantial efforts are required and obstacles must be overcome, there is nothing preventing Arab-Americans from serious political engagement, or from having a major impact on U.S. foreign policy, except a tradition of ignoring our own interests and being seduced by beguiling pseudo-revolutionary excuses.

The late Edward Said warned against “sitting back blaming ‘the Arabs’ since, after all, we are the Arabs,” and we all play a role in defining our social and political condition. It is high time for Arab-Americans to embrace the fact that we are also, in exactly the same sense, “the Americans.”

Far from blaming “the United States,” we need to roll up our sleeves, assert the full spectrum of our rights as citizens within our political system, and take responsibility for helping to shape our government’s policies.

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Opinion/Commentary/Aug/15/Lets-not-spite-our-face-with-profiling.ashx

If anyone ever wondered what demons lurking in American culture might have possessed the singer Michael Jackson to bleach his skin and destroy his once-noble African features through a series of bizarre plastic surgeries – to literally cut off his nose to spite his face – all they need to do is cast their attention on the debate that has ensued in recent weeks in the United States about “racial profiling.”

Racial profiling is a long-discredited American law-enforcement technique whereby police identify individuals as suspects based on their apparent race, ethnicity, age, and other simple identity criteria. This was a central feature of abuse against African-American and Latino populations throughout the country, but is now illegal and has few defenders. Except where Arabs and Muslims are concerned.

Following the attacks on the London mass transport system, the New York City subway instituted random searches of passengers, as a reassurance to the public and a deterrent to terrorists. Many American commentators have condemned this policy, as well as the U.S. government’s entire counterterrorism strategy, for not engaging in racial profiling against Arab and Muslim Americans.

Many Americans are used to thinking in simplistic terms about race and ethnicity, of living in a world divided between black and white in which identity is obvious from pigmentation and can be discerned at a glance. Proponents of profiling have proven amazingly resistant to understanding that identifying Arab and Muslim Americans based on appearance is simply impossible.

Leaving aside the fact that over half of the Arabs in the United States are Christians, Arabs can resemble almost any group of southern Europeans, Latin Americans, Central and South Asians, or Africans.

Even more preposterous would be any attempt to identify Muslims by appearance, since Muslims come from almost every part of the world, and constitute a fifth of humanity. And, since about a third of American Muslims are African-Americans, any futile attempt at profiling of Muslims, especially in urban areas such as New York City, would immediately degenerate into yet another way of profiling black people.

Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer wants racial profiling but would “immediately exempt Hispanics, Scandinavians and East Asians,” as if Hispanics were readily distinguishable from Arabs and South Asians. And, as his Washington Post colleague Colby King pointed out, “by eliminating Scandinavians from his list of obvious terror suspects, Krauthammer would have authorities give a pass to all white people.”

Supporters of racial profiling cling to the idea that you can tell who is an Arab, and even a Muslim, just by looking at them. I was on a CNN debate recently with a profiling supporter who, when confronted with the facts, resorted to holding up the photos of the 19 hijackers of September 11, 2001, and insisting: “They all look alike.”

The tragic shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in the London subway could have been based in part on his dress and behavior, as British authorities maintain. But almost certainly Menezes would not been shot eight times in the head had he not been a young, brown-skinned man. British police looked at a Brazilian electrician and saw a Pakistani suicide-bomber.

Not that all the London bombers were of Pakistani origin – a fourth man was Jamaican. The failed bombers in the second group were all East Africans. And then you have Richard Reid, John Walker Lindh and Jose Padilla, to mention but a few. But it’s okay, “they all look alike.”

Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind has also demanded that New York police use ethnic profiling in the subway searches, maintaining that “the London suicide bombers on July 7 and July 21 fit a very precise intelligence profile.” He also found that “[T]hey all look a certain way.” The police replied “racial profiling is illegal, of doubtful effectiveness, and against department policy.”

Demagogues who call for profiling against American Muslims need to drop the pretence that this could be based on appearances or names. It would require Americans to carry identity documents confirming their official religious designation. And even if it were possible to profile Arabs or Muslims by sight, or Muslims were forced to carry religious identification to be produced on demand, the effect would still be to cast an impossibly wide pool of suspects and distract attention from behavioral and other contingent factors that may actually point to a potential threat.

Race, ethnicity and religious affiliation, even when accurately identified, are widely recognized by law enforcement and counter-terrorism officials as false leads, which in themselves say nothing relevant about whether or not an individual may be about to commit a crime.

Only two approaches in dealing with mass groups of people make sense: comprehensiveness, as at airports; or randomness, as in subways – anything in between serves less as a deterrent to terrorists and more as a tipping of the authorities’ hand and a helpful hint for how not to get caught.

When U.S. airport security was based on a supposedly neutral, secret computer profiling system, dating from 1996 and leading up to September 11, 2001, the evidence strongly suggested that it resulted in widespread discrimination against Arab and Muslim travelers. However, it did not prevent the September 11 attacks.

The intensified post-September 11 airport security regime has been both more thorough and more equitable, despite the ongoing bureaucratic nightmare of “no-fly” lists. There was more evidence of intentional discrimination against Arabs and Muslims in domestic air travel before September 11 than after, precisely because the U.S. government has had to accept that serious security threats require policies that do not boil down to crude stereotypes or rely on subjective judgments about ethnicity.

Toward the end of his tenure as the first secretary of homeland security, Tom Ridge, explained to Americans: “There was a legitimate concern right after 9/11 that the face of international terrorism was basically from the Middle East. We know differently. We don’t have the luxury of kidding ourselves that there is an ethnic or racial or country profile.”

Most Americans understand that fighting terrorism with racism is repugnant to their values and won’t work. And most people have enough sense not to cut off their nose to spite their face. But not everyone.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0507310401jul31,1,6884546.story

The attacks on the London mass-transport system and the random
searches now in place on the New York City subways have again raised
the issue of racial profiling against Arab-Americans and Muslims.

The New York Police Department insists that the searches will be just
that–random–and one should presume that its officers will hold to
that standard.

Those who urge the government to ask officers enforcing security
policies like New York’s random searches to engage in profiling of
Arab-Americans and Muslims based on appearance are not only advocating
something degrading and pointless–they are asking for the impossible.

Leaving aside the fact that more than half of the Arabs in the United
States are Christians, Arabs simply do not possess to any set of
physical characteristics that either plainly bind them together or set
them apart from many other American communities.

Arabs are a very diverse ethnic group who can resemble almost any
group of southern Europeans, Latin Americans, Central and South Asians
or Africans.

Even more preposterous would be any attempt to identify Muslims by
appearance, as Muslims come from almost every part of the world, and
constitute one-fifth of humanity. And, because about one-third of
American Muslims are African-Americans, any futile attempt at
profiling of Muslims, especially in urban areas such as New York City,
will immediately degenerate into yet another way of profiling black
people.

The tragic shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes by British police may
well have been based in part on his dress and behavior, as United
Kingdom authorities maintain. But almost certainly Menezes would not
have been shot eight times in the head if he had not been a young,
brown-skinned man.

British anti-terrorism cops were capable of looking at a Brazilian
electrician and seeing a Pakistani suicide-bomber, and a terrible
injustice was the direct result.

Not that all the London bombers were of Pakistani origins–the fourth
was Jamaican.

As former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge explained, “There
was a legitimate concern right after 9/11 that the face of
international terrorism was basically from the Middle East. We know
differently. We don’t have the luxury of kidding ourselves that there
is an ethnic or racial or country profile.”

Remember the likes of Richard Reid, John Walker Lindh and Jose Padilla?

Demagogues who call for profiling, and even across-the-board
discrimination, against American Muslims should acknowledge that in
practice this could not be based on appearances or names.

It would probably require Americans to be categorized by, or register
their faith with, the government, and carry identity documents
confirming their official religious designation.

How else to distinguish Arab Muslims and Christians, Hindu and Muslim
South Asians, Muslims and Christians of African origin and so forth?

Even if it were possible to profile Arabs or Muslims by sight, or if
they were forced to carry something equivalent to a yellow star to be
produced on demand, the effect would still be to create an impossibly
wide pool of suspects and distract attention from behavioral and other
contingent factors that may point to a potential threat.

Worse than useless, such approaches would drain resources from serious
intelligence and law-enforcement tactics, and alert terrorists to
exactly what appearances to avoid.

Only two approaches in dealing with mass groups of people make sense:
comprehensiveness as at airports, or randomness as in subways.

Anything in between serves less as a deterrent to terrorists and more
as a tipping of the government’s hand and a helpful hint for how not
to get caught.

When airport security was based on a supposedly neutral, secret
computer profiling system, from 1996 to Sept. 11, 2001, the evidence
strongly suggested that it resulted in widespread discrimination
against Arab and Muslim travelers, but it did not prevent the Sept. 11
attacks.

The intensified post-Sept. 11 airport security regime has been both
more thorough and more equitable. There was more evidence of
discrimination against Arabs and Muslims in domestic air travel before
Sept. 11 than after, precisely because the government became committed
to providing effective security.

The government seems to be learning that serious security threats
require policies that do not boil down to crude stereotypes or rely on
subjective judgments about ethnicity.

Race, ethnicity and religious affiliation, even when accurately
identified, are widely recognized by law enforcement and
counterterrorism officials as false leads, which in themselves say
nothing relevant about whether an individual may be about to commit a
crime.

Institutionalized racism is repugnant to our values, but more to the
point, it cannot be the basis of serious, workable policies that
provide real security.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2004/09/26/media-he-can-t-pay-for-a-cab.html

Sept. 27 issue – There should be a New York Press award hanging on the wall of Hussein Ibish’s office, but the 41-year-old Lebanese-American and Washington correspondent for the Arab world’s most prominent English-language paper, the Daily Star, hasn’t had time to put it up. He picks up the plaque off his cluttered desk and reads it aloud: “best tv spokesman for the arab cause. It’s really flattering,” he says, “but it’s a bit like being named the tallest skyscraper in San Clemente.”

As the former communications director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Ibish has pioneered a new type of Middle Eastern advocacy and become a hero among civil libertarians and Arab-Americans alike. When the Rev. Jerry Falwell referred to Muhammad the Prophet as a “demon-possessed pedophile” on CNN’s “Crossfire” after the 9/11 attacks, Ibish decided all logical argument was out the window. “I called him an idiot, plain and simple,” says Ibish. He received a standing ovation from the studio audience.

On Alan Keyes’s show, New York Post columnist Daniel Pipes asserted that it was far too dangerous for Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories. Ibish carefully deconstructed the argument until Pipes’s only defense was to yell, “Shut up! Shut up!” And then there was the recent phone call from a political columnist the day after Ibish had appeared on MSNBC with him. By the end of the call the columnist had dropped his dogged assertions that the Saudi government was a terrorist organization and instead asked, “Hussein, why don’t you like me?” “When the other party comes unglued, flails around or loses their cool, you know you’ve won,” says Ibish, who’s now writing a book about the Arab-American experience. “When people get really mad, you know you’ve done a good job. And if you’ve done an excellent job, you’ll receive death threats.”

But the love Ibish receives from those he’s defending, he says, makes it all worth it. “I was in a New York cab and the driver said, ‘You can’t pay. I know who you are. I know what you’re doing for me and my children.’ On the way back the same exact thing happened. It helps to be appreciated. But in the end I volunteered to mud-wrestle in the sewer with half-wits and villains. Somebody has to do it-why not me?”

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Opinion/Commentary/Sep/18/An-idealist-haunted-by-reality.ashx

Edward Said’s last book, “From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map,” published posthumously following his death last year, highlights the dangers of shaping a book out of otherwise unedited newspaper columns: what is perfectly palatable in small doses becomes far less appealing when consumed in large quantities.

“From Oslo to Iraq” is useful mainly because of its first chapter, “Palestinians Under Siege,” Said’s masterful explication, along with the requisite maps, of the topography of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. These physical alterations to the Palestinian landscape, now most dramatically illustrated by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s Great Wall currently snaking its way across the West Bank, constitute what Israeli sociologist Jeff Halper has aptly dubbed a “matrix of control” over the Palestinian people.

Said’s essay, and his maps, expose the absurdity of many of the arguments routinely presented in defense of Israeli actions, such as Alan Dershowitz’s ridiculous formulation that he is opposed to the “occupation of people,” but not to “occupation of the land.” They also demonstrate how deeply entrenched the occupation has become and how complex it would be to dismantle its infrastructure.

The rest of Said’s book consists mainly of his columns from Al-Hayat and the English-language Al-Ahram Weekly, which were certainly not among his finest works. Said returns time and again to themes which were already fully developed in his earlier writings: the suffering of the Palestinians and the nobility of their resistance; the atrocious leadership of Yasser Arafat; and the culpability of the Americans, the Europeans and the Arabs.

There is little to argue with, but almost nothing new either. Long sections of the book are mind-numbingly repetitive, in a way in which the original columns, because they came out periodically in newspapers, were not. The effect is like pouring endless teaspoons of syrup into a large beaker and then expecting people to drink it as they would a glass of beer. One can only assume that, had he lived, Said would have ensured that this effect, which is not to be found in any of his other books, would have been attenuated.

In spite of the extraordinary elegance of much of his prose, like many polemical writers Said was capable of creating a hectoring effect, making even the most sympathetic reader feel oppressed by righteous indignation. His penchant for hyperbole makes repeated appearances, as in his characterization of U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as Bush’s “psychopathic henchman.” Almost any other pejorative would have better described him, and many would have been accurate.

However, two of the columns in “From Oslo to Iraq” do reflect Said at his finest, and it is surely no coincidence that they were both written, back-to-back, in October 2001 in response to the terrorist attacks in the United States and their aftermath. One of the pieces, “Adrift in Similarity,” demolishes in a few short sentences entire discourses in both the Western and Islamic worlds where “hugely complicated matters like an identity and culture exist in a cartoon-like world where Popeye and Bluto bash each other mercilessly.” And can there be any doubt that Said’s plea for the development of “a new secular Arab politics … without for a moment condoning or supporting the militancy (it is madness) of people willing to kill indiscriminately” is as urgent today as when it was written three years ago?

“From Oslo to Iraq” chronicles the final stage in one of the most interesting aspects of Said’s career and intellectual development: his relationship with Palestinian nationalism. He was among the first to call for a two-state solution in the late 1970’s, and then among the first to turn his back on it in the mid-1990’s. Indeed, in most of his writing over the past decade, he has argued that partition of Israel-Palestine under existing circumstances is unworkable, both politically and because of the changing geography he described in “Palestinians Under Siege.”

Instead, Said advocated a binational state for Jews and Arabs that could transform rivals into partners and allow each to express their national identity without excluding or oppressing the other. Said had the intellectual integrity to admit that this was not, as others have disingenuously suggested, a return to previous Palestinian nationalist positions that envisioned a “secular, democratic state” which was also somehow “Palestinian and Arab” at the same time.

Instead, Said spoke in terms of Israelis and Palestinians transcending their ethno-nationalist identities. Unfortunately, neither he nor any other of the small group of thinkers on both sides of the divide who embrace this frankly utopian vision have been able to give us the slightest idea of how such an arrangement might work in practice – let alone how to get from here to there. As it stands today, binationalism exists only as an exceptionally ambitious project to change the way millions of different people think about their societies and the world around them.

Among the most fascinating passages in “From Oslo to Iraq” are the moments where one sees the visionary and the idealist reverting to the rhetoric of partition: “The only negotiations worth anything now must be about the terms of an Israeli withdrawal from all the territories occupied in 1967.” In another column from October 2001, Said demands a return to negotiations, and writes that “the great failing of Oslo must be remedied now at the start: a clearly articulated end to occupation, the establishment of a viable, genuinely independent Palestinian state, and the existence of peace through mutual recognition … have to be stated as the objective of negotiations, a beacon a shining at the end of the tunnel.”

American neoconservatives call this effect “being mugged by reality.” One can read in Said’s essays the ongoing tension between a desire to advocate an essentially undefined political agenda of binationalism and the lure of existing political structures Said understandably despised for being dysfunctional, but which, at least, are real. In the end, his break with the idea of partition and the end of the occupation as the primary goal of the Palestinian national movement was not as absolute as it sometimes seemed.

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Opinion/Commentary/Sep/07/The-political-suicide-of-John-Kerry.ashx

The campaign of Senator John F. Kerry appears to have imploded. With almost two months left before the presidential election on Nov. 2, U.S. President George W. Bush is poised to win an election in which, given his extraordinary record of domestic and international failure, he should certainly have been defeated.

Contrary to conventional wisdom in the American media, Kerry stands on the brink of failure not because of the Republican attacks against him, but because of his own incomprehensible strategic blunders.

This is not to say that the spectacularly dishonest television campaign falsely impugning Kerry’s Vietnam War record – spurred by a thinly veiled Bush campaign front group preposterously named “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” – has had no effect. Such negative campaigning, particularly when the lie being told is so massive that the public cannot imagine anyone being brazen enough to invent it out of whole cloth, has a proven record in American politics. But Democrats can, and indeed have, fought back effectively against these charges, and most voters are not particularly interested in 35-year-old Vietnam-related issues.

The brilliantly staged but vicious Republican National Convention was certainly much more impressive than the Democratic convention a few weeks earlier. It played well to the party base, but the thundering of the self-hating Democrat Senator Zell Miller, the keynote speaker, was not the stuff that turns elections.

Compared to Kerry’s own strategic miscalculations, the Republicans have been a minor problem for the Democratic candidate. What really occurred during August that decisively shifted the momentum in favor of the president was Kerry’s own unfathomable decision to cede to Bush the major issue on which this campaign, and the incumbent’s record, will be judged: the war in Iraq.

Before August, Bush was incredibly vulnerable on Iraq. A majority of Americans considers the war to have been a mistake, resistance to the occupation is intensifying, and virtually everybody concedes that the two reasons the administration gave for the invasion – Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction and the supposed alliance between the regime of Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda – were based entirely on deception, or were illusory.

Hammering Bush on this ill-advised adventure must lie at the heart of any successful challenge of his record. The difficulty is that Kerry voted for the Senate resolution giving the administration the authority to use force in Iraq.

However, Kerry could have used his own vote to emphasize the degree to which the administration manipulated, exaggerated and falsified existing intelligence to misrepresent Iraq as a threat to the United States. He could have taken the issue of his vote for a war he now criticizes and, instead of allowing it to be used by Republicans as evidence of his fickleness and inconsistency, made it the centerpiece of an attack on the administration’s deceptiveness or incompetence.

Kerry should have spent August repeating: “Mr. Bush, I voted for that resolution on the basis of what you and your subordinates were telling the Congress and the country. We now know that the information you gave us was false. Mr. Bush, if you knew it was false, you deliberately deceived us all. If you did not know, then you and your team are incompetent in the extreme, and you must go before you blunder your way into further disastrous and unnecessary conflicts. Mr. Bush, you are either a liar or a fool, and thousands of people have died as a consequence.”

Kerry, instead of mounting this kind of vigorous offensive on the blundering in Iraq, made the fateful error of, in effect, conceding the issue entirely. On numerous occasions in August, the Democratic candidate confessed that if he knew then what he knows now, he would still have voted for the war authorization resolution. However, the coup de grace was delivered by Kerry’s unqualified foreign policy spokesman James Rubin, who told the press that the candidate would have “in all probability” invaded Iraq himself. Rubin later clarified that he “never should have said the phrase ‘in all probability.'”

The Kerry team has become completely entangled in its gnarled inconsistencies on Iraq, like a bull trapped in razor wire – every effort to extricate itself has only trapped it more tightly while opening fresh wounds. Unable to successfully engage Bush on the major issue of the campaign, Kerry is now going to try to shift the debate away from national security issues to a domestic agenda under the rubric: “A stronger America begins at home.”

Relying on those opinion polls showing Americans are most concerned about economic issues, the Democrats have decided not to put up a serious fight over Iraq, but to try to make the election about jobs. This is cowardly, unprincipled and an almost certain recipe for defeat.

Since there will be at least two major televised debates before the November voting, Kerry will have some opportunity to climb out of the formidable hole which he has dug for himself. But given the familiar divisions between Democrats and Republicans on economic policy, and the extraordinary incoherence and contradictions of Kerry’s foreign policy pronouncements, even as poor a debater as Bush ought to be able, at the very least, to hold his own.

There was a disturbing whiff of demagoguery about the Republican National Convention, but the mocking chant of “flip-flop, flip-flop, flip-flop” perfectly characterized Kerry’s political self-immolation at the alter of Iraq.

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-East/Sep/01/Proposed-UN-resolution-shows-deterioration-of-US-Syrian-ties.ashx

A new initiative by the United States and France to seek a UN Security Council resolution condemning Syria for engineering an unconstitutional second-term for Lebanese President Emile Lahoud comes in the context of a long spiral of deteriorating relations between Washington and Damascus. The resolution is expected to pass if introduced, possibly later this week, in spite of pleas from the Lebanese government and others that it would be unhelpful.

“By pressing for such a resolution, the French and Americans will themselves by intervening in Lebanese politics, and thereby defeating their own stated purposed,” Murhaf Jouejati, an adjunct professor at George Washington University and a specialist on US-Syrian relations, told The Daily Star.

Joshua Landis, a Syria specialist at the University of Oklahoma, said: “I don’t think anything is going to stop the deterioration right now; Syria has dug in its heels and the US has set terms that the Syrians can’t possibly meet.”

Landis said that Syria was creating serious problems for itself, because the Lahoud issue would “force many fence-sitters in Lebanon to choose between Lebanese nationalism and some sort of Arab identification.”

“I think Syria is going to lose from this,” he said. “Syria has nothing to gain from driving this fight internationally and in Lebanon.

“On the other hand, the regime has never been stronger domestically and has been able to make peace with a large array of domestic opponents,” Landis added.

The Lahoud affair could be raised bilaterally when US Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs William Burns and a delegation of other senior officials visit Damascus as part of a planned Sept. 8-16 trip that is also set to include Cairo, Jerusalem and London. The trip was planned before the issue of the Lebanese presidency became a diplomatic controversy.

Syria’s role in Lebanon adds another charge in the bill of particulars against Syria being pressed by neoconservatives and supporters of Israel. These already include the charge that Syria harbors Palestinian terrorist groups, that it allows foreign fighters to pass across the border with Iraq, that it has a chemical weapons program, and even – according to the most ardent critics of Syria – that the former Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein may have transferred weapons of mass destruction to Syria prior to the US invasion of Iraq.

“This is yet another hook against Syria, and this administration has been moving from hook to hook, so much so that this is truly a downward spiral in the relationship between the US and Syria,” Jouejati said.

In the year following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, Syria and the US enjoyed an unprecedented spell of cooperation against Al-Qaeda extremists, so much so that the Syrian government was publicly credited by senior US officials, including Secretary of State Colin Powell, as having provided information that saved American lives.

This relationship was described in greatest detail by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker magazine. Hersh wrote, “Syria’s efforts to help seemed to confound the Bush Administration, which was fixated on Iraq. … the Administration was ill prepared to take advantage of the situation and unwilling to reassess its relationship with Assad’s government.” According to Hersh, the administration “chose confrontation with Syria over day-to-day help against Al-Qaeda.”

Since then the accusations against Syria in Washington have only gained momentum, and the man reputed to be the most enthusiastic proponent of cooperation between the US and Syria, former CIA Director George Tenet, has resigned.

“The CIA has been neutralized – the last time it intervened in these matters was when they succeed in altering the language of US Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton’s testimony before Congress about Syria’s weapons of mass destruction and exposed his language as highly exaggerated and containing a political agenda,” Jouejati said. “But since then Tenet is gone, Congress and the Defense Department have got the upper hand, and the only thing that can stop the downward spiral at this point is the Burns delegation and the talks that will occur on Sept. 9.”

According to Landis, “Washington right now is very divided – there are many people who don’t want to repeat what we did in Iraq in Syria, and who want to deal with Bashar, who has many promising qualities and who is trying to take Syria from being an autocratic state to being a liberal dictatorship, like America’s best friends in the Middle East – many realists are ready to embrace this under their traditional mantra of stability.”

“However, the neocons have got Syria clearly in their crosshairs and want to take down the regime,” Landis said. “They established the line early on that Bashar Assad and the Baathist regime are irrational and cannot be dealt with.” Landis said he thinks this is “the worst possible policy” for the US to follow.

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-East/Aug/28/Bush-supporters-face-tough-sell-with-Arab-Muslim-Americans.ashx#axzz2axJWowPa

With the Republican National Convention set to kick-off Sunday, and with US President George W. Bush running in a statistical dead-heat against the Democratic challenger Senator John Kerry, a small but influential group is set to press the president’s case to a deeply skeptical Arab-American community in coming weeks.

Polls suggest that less than a quarter of Arab-Americans are considering voting for the Bush in the November election.

Bush’s Arab-American supporters, including veteran Republican activists like Washington attorney and former Reagan administration official George Salem, admit that they are facing a difficult task in asking the community to support a record defined by the war in Iraq, unflinching support for Israeli Premier Ariel Sharon and the controversial law enforcement policies of Attorney-General John Ashcroft. Yet they insist that a deeper look at the president’s record could change minds.

In particular, they say that Bush has appointed more Arab-Americans and Muslims to senior positions than any other president. These include Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, presidential personnel aide Dina Powell, former head of the Office of Management and Budget Mitch Daniels, General Counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services Alex Azar, Ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad and the head of the National Institutes of Health Elias Zerhouni.

In addition to this list of appointees, Bush’s supporters essentially make the case that Arab-Americans have the same concerns as most other American constituencies. Since they believe that Bush has performed well over-all, they feel Arab-Americans can be convinced to either overlook specific concerns or rethink their generally critical assessments of his policies.

Randa Fahmy Hudome, a Washington consultant involved in forming a committee in support of the president, told The Daily Star: “I think there is a perception of negativity out there in our community and that when presented with the facts they will see this is just not the case.”

Salem told The Daily Star: “The Arab-American community is a sophisticated, mature ethnic constituency that needs to factor in everything, including economic and tax policies, education polices, and others, as well as foreign policy. In other words, many of us can continue to support Bush in spite of our concerns about civil liberties and foreign policy. Our community is not monolithic and it’s not single-issue.”

“I think both Bush and Kerry are tough sells in our community, and I don’t think that there are any distinguishable differences between them on issues of particular concern to us,” Salem said.

Talking-points for Arab-American supporters issued last week by the Bush-Cheney campaign, raised at least two arguments which could be effective. They cite Bush’s repeated condemnations of post-Sept. 11, 2001, hate crimes, saying: “The president demonstrated his true character when he immediately spoke out in defense of Arab-Americans and asked the rest of America not to harm the Arab-American community.” They also underline that Bush “is the first president to call for an independent and democratic Palestine while in office.”

Salem said: “In my view, a second-term president who has called for a Palestinian state is preferable to someone with a 100-percent pro-Israel voting record. There is the historic precedent that all major progress on the Palestinian issue has been in second terms of presidencies.”

The points also say that “because the United States and our coalition helped to end the violent regime of Saddam Hussein, and because the United States is helping to raise a peaceful democracy in its place, 25 million Iraqis are free and America is safer,” a claim unlikely to meet sympathy outside some sections of the Iraqi-American community.

Four years ago, it was all so different. Then, as now, the relatively small Arab-American and Muslim vote was widely seen as disproportionately important due to its concentration in key battle ground states such as Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida.

At that time Arab-Americans had grave misgivings about the presidential ticket of former Vice-President Al Gore and his vocally pro-Israeli running-mate, Senator Joe Lieberman.

In this context, Bush’s unprecedented efforts at outreach to the Arab-American and Muslim communities proved highly effective. In particular, his slightly garbled condemnation of racial profiling against Arab-Americans and secret evidence in the second television debate with Gore seemed to deeply impress its intended audience.

Every sentence in these crucial debates is part of a carefully-crafted strategy, and Bush’s comments were the first by any major presidential candidate that specifically referred to Arab-American concerns. It was justifiably seen as something of a break-through for a constituency still cutting its electoral teeth.

In response to these overtures, in October 2000, the American Muslim Political Coordinating Council, a coalition of the four largest American Muslim political groups, endorsed Bush. Although Bush lost Michigan to Gore, he held Ohio, which proved key to his election victory. Some well-informed observers credited Muslim support for Bush’s narrow victory in 2000, including the noted Republican activist Grover Norquist, who wrote in the ultra-conservative American Spectator magazine, “Bush was elected president of the United States of America because of the Muslim vote.”

Norquist had led the effort in the late 1990s to bring American Muslims into the Republican Party on the grounds that they are “socially and economically conservative in their attitudes,” and that “American Muslims look like members of the Christian Coalition or religiously active Catholics.”

However, over the three years since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, the reputation of the Bush administration with both Arab and Muslim Americans has suffered severely.

Concerns about the use of secret evidence in a handful of high-profile deportation cases in the 1990s have given way to almost universal alarm among Arab and Muslim Americans regarding the USA Patriot Act and other legal changes over the past three years.

Bush is also badly hurt by his seemingly limitless support of Sharon, including an exchange of diplomatic letters which, for the first time, formally committed the United States to supporting Israel’s right to retain some territories occupied in 1967, and opposing the right of return.

In spite of this uphill battle, Bush is persisting in efforts, clearly more focused than those of Senator Kerry, to win back as much Arab-American and Muslim support as possible. The campaign has recently hired two new Muslim staffers to speak at community events. One of Bush’s prominent American Muslim supporters, Malik Hasan, the former chief executive of Foundation Health Systems of Denver, has not only given large donations to the campaign, he and his family have established a “Muslims for Bush” website.

Salam al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, one of the groups endorsing Bush in 2000, told The Daily Star: “There are a lot of people who feel we made a mistake back then, but we were looking for specific things from the Bush campaign, which we got.”

“This year the Bush camp is still trying to reach out,” he said. “But my instinct is that they won’t have a lot of success. They’re going to keep trying to say they have a good record, but I don’t think that’s ever going to match with our perceptions.”

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-East/Aug/26/US-charity-arrests-raise-questions-regarding-war-on-terror.ashx#axzz2axJWowPa

In a case with profound implications regarding the nature and focus of the US “war on terror,” on July 27 US authorities arrested the leadership of one of the largest Muslim charities in the United States, the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development.

Three additional indictments handed down on Aug. 20 were said by US authorities to also be part of efforts to stop the flow of money from the United States to the Palestinian militant group Hamas. A Hamas senior official who was indicted on Aug. 20, Moussa Abu Marzook, told the Associated Press in Syria: “Hamas did not take a penny from the Holy Land Foundation. Hamas has its own means of funding and that is not connected to any institution in the West.”

The 42-count indictment accuses the senior officers and fundraisers of Holy Land of using the charity to “provide financial and material support” in excess of $12.4 million to “Hamas-controlled organizations in the West Bank and Gaza, as well as for direct payment to individuals whom (Holy Land) supported on behalf of Hamas, including family members of martyrs and prisoners.” The case appears to rely heavily on information provided by Israeli intelligence,

with federal authorities citing “critical assistance from our foreign allies and partners.”

Among the accused arrested on July 27 were Holy Land’s founder, Shukri Abu Baker, its executive director Ghassan Elashi, Mohammed al-Mezain, Mufid Abdel-Qader and Abdel-Raham Odeh. Also indicted were Haitham Maghawri and Akram Mishal, both said to be outside the United States. A former fundraiser, Abdel-Jabbar Hamdan, was also detained, and is presumed to be a material witness in the case.

Indicted along with Abu Marzook in the second case, and arrested on Aug. 20, were Mohammed Salah, whose Chicago-based Koranic Literacy Institute was the subject of a controversial civil asset forfeiture in the late 1990s, and Abdel-Haleem Ashqar, who has previously been held on contempt of court charges for refusing to testify in other cases. Neither man has been connected to the charity.

John Boyd, a lawyer for Holy Land, told The New York Times: “This is completely unfounded, and if the Holy Land Foundation is given an opportunity to defend itself, it will be able to rebut every charge made in this indictment.”

The American Muslim community was shocked when the federal government in December 2001, froze the assets of Holy Land, along with two lesser known charities. With outstanding assets estimated to be in excess of $7 million, and having been listed as a suggested charity on the State Department’s website, Holy Land was among with most respected American Muslim institutions.

But for years it had been the subject of accusations, mainly from journalist Steven Emerson and his one-time associate, the self-described “terrorist hunter” Rita Katz, that it was a “front” or fundraising arm of Hamas-related social service organizations. These charges were not taken seriously by many people, because of the long history of false accusations from Emerson and his associates against Arab and Muslim Americans.

Holy Land challenged the seizure of its assets, filing a suit in federal court against the government in March 2002. In response, the government declared its intention to re-designate Holy Land as a “terrorist organization” itself, rather than merely treating it as a supporter or fundraiser. Lawyers for the charity say they were given two weeks to challenge the accusations in a voluminous memo from the Justice Department. They say they declined to try to meet what they call an impossible deadline. In May 2002, the government officially re-classified the group a “specially designated terrorist.”

Holy Land’s lawsuit proved a complete failure, as neither the federal district court judge nor the appellate court would allow the charity to introduce evidence challenging the government’s claims. Though these rulings created a minor uproar among legal scholars, the Supreme Court refused to hear Holy Land’s appeal and the rulings stood.

Civil liberties groups insisted that since Holy Land had never been allowed to defend itself, the government should either bring criminal indictments against its leaders, or unfreeze the assets. On July 27, the indictments came.

The accusations against Holy Land and the other charities have created a conundrum for American Muslims regarding how to perform their religious obligation of zakat – charitable giving – when some of the best known charities, implicitly endorsed by the State Department and enjoying federally-approved tax-free status, are now accused of being criminals.

Arab-American and Muslim groups have repeatedly suggested that the government provide some mechanism to assure Muslim donors that the groups to which they contribute are not suspected of any crimes, but to no avail. Additionally, the effort, spearheaded by Salam al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, to get the remaining Holy Land funds, estimated to be about $5 million, released to a mutually acceptable third party charity has met with little success.

Central to the Holy Land case are key civil liberties and foreign policy issues defining development of the US war on terror.

Free speech and freedom of conscience in the United States could be compromised if giving money to humanitarian operations overseas run by people with the wrong opinions becomes a serious crime. Few Americans are aware of the vast social-service network run by Hamas in the Gaza Strip, and – like the Israeli government but unlike many others – US authorities seem to recognize no difference between the humanitarian, political and para-military branches of the movement.

The indictments against Holy Land suggest the money in question was allegedly passed to “charitable fronts” for Hamas, and in part provided as aid for the families of its activists who were jailed or killed. “In this manner, defendants effectively rewarded past, and encouraged future, suicide bombings and terrorist activities on behalf of Hamas,” the government says.

If the case proves to be based solely on support for humanitarian groups run by people with the wrong opinions or the wrong associations, or aid to people who have the wrong relatives, then otherwise lawful activity will be a crime more because of the opinions being implicitly expressed than any violent acts. Since “material support” laws were enacted, civil liberties scholars have warned that they could develop into a form of “thought crime” in the US.

In July, the US government was rebuffed by a jury in Idaho that acquitted a Saudi student of “supporting terrorism” by setting up websites that allegedly praised terrorism in Chechnya and Israel. He was charged under a provision of the US Patriot Act makes that makes it illegal to provide “expert advice or assistance” to terrorists.

The recent arrests suggest that just as US foreign policy has become difficult to distinguish from Israeli attitudes, US law enforcement increasingly sees little difference between nationalist groups fighting Israeli occupation and Al-Qaeda’s worldwide terrorist network.

Opponents of Israel are thus increasingly treated as opponents of the US by American law enforcement, while the same standard is not applied to other nationalist groups such as Irish, Basque, Tamil, Iranian, Colombian that engage in terrorism.