The American Bear

› Clashes erupt as settlers storm al-Aqsa | Al Akhbar

Israeli settlers, guarded by soldiers, stormed Al-Aqsa Mosque in the Old City of Jerusalem Tuesday, injuring several people and arresting at least three, local media reported.

A group of over 40 settlers, accompanied by members of the far-right Likud party, broke into the mosque interrupting student study sessions as Israeli forces stood guard outside the entrance to bar Palestinians from entering.

Soldiers also fired tear gas at Palestinians protesting the takeover.

Settlers entered the mosque through the Moroccan Gate, denying all Muslims under 50 access to the mosque.

Female students were also denied access to the mosque, resulting in clashes between the women and Israeli forces.

Forces injured a woman attempting to enter. She was later taken to a nearby hospital in Jerusalem for treatment.

Palestinian woman injured by Israeli attack on worshipers in Al Aqsa Mosque few hours ago, evacuated by medics. twitter.com/AlqassamBrigad…

— Alqassam Brigades (@AlqassamBrigade) May 7, 2013

Settlers toured the mosque in commemoration of what Israelis call “Jerusalem Day” marking their military takeover of the Old City in 1967.

In a separate incident Sunday night over 1,000 settlers escorted by soldiers forced their way to the site of Joseph’s Tomb near Balata refugee camp east of Nablus.

Clashes broke out between the forces and Palestinians near the site resulting in three teenagers being treated for tear gas inhalation.

Al-Aqsa is a site of frequent violence between Palestinians and Israeli forces.

In other West Bank news:

Netanyahu quietly curbs settlement expansion: reports
and: Report: Netanyahu promised Kerry to put ‘hold’ on settlement construction

› Anti-Immigrant Zealots Capitalize on Boston Bombings | Dispatches from the Underclass

Muslims, Arabs and more recently Chechens aren’t the only ones bearing the brunt of collective blame following the Boston Marathon bombing last week.

Since learning that bombing suspects Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev immigrated to the United States as children, anti-immigrant zealots have capitilized on the moment to argue against immigration reform.

Right-wing talk radio host and frequent Fox News contributer Laura Ingraham insisted that the US block Muslim immigrants from entering the country, particularly from the ex-Soviet region of the world where the bombing suspects were born.

“I would submit that people shouldn’t be coming here as tourists from Chechnya after 9/11,” Ingraham said. “Dagistan, Checnya, Kergystan, uh-uh. As George Bush would say, ‘None of them stans.’”

You might be thinking: Who cares what Ingraham says? She’s nothing more than an inflammatory radio host with no power over actual public policy. But Ingraham isn’t alone.

For example, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tx.) has demanded that the US government investigate and deport all Chechen immigrants with violent leanings.

Because the Boston Marathon attack came as the Senate began debating an immigration reform bill, certain politicians wasted no time in using the tragedy to pile on additional fear and hatred of immigrants.

Today, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) joined in the hatefest in a letter he wrote to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) calling for the bill to be delayed in light of the Boston bombings.

“Why did the current system allow two individuals to immigrate to the United States from the Chechen Republic in Russia, an area known as a hotbed of Islamic extremism, who then committed acts of terrorism?”, wrote Paul, who is now apparently an expert on Chechnya and ex-Soviet Muslims.

But the notion that stricter immigration policies could have prevented the Boston bombings is ridiculous given that Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsaraev were 15 and 8 when they came to this country with their parents as asylum-seekers. As The Atlantic‘s Elseph Reeve explains, “The two individuals were allowed to immigrate because we don’t expect children to become terrorists just because people of their ethnicity live in a violent place.”

Nevertheless, Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) used the bombings to denounce the immigration bill as well, expressing disgust to MSNBC host Martin Bashir that the bill bans law enforcement from racial profiling. In a creative mix of Islamophobia and anti-immigrant rhetoric, Walsh said the following:

“We’re at war, and this country got a stark reminder last week again that we’re at war,” Walsh said to host Martin Bashir during an appearance on MSNBC. “And not only should we take a pause, Martin, when it comes to immigration, we need to begin profiling who our enemy is in this war: young muslim men,”

“The fact is, Martin, neither you or I or Jonathan knows of the 11 million, and it’s more than 11 million, how many are bad characters,” Walsh continued, addressing Bashir and fellow guest, columnist Jonathan Alter. “And what we’re going to do is replicate what we did in ’86, provide amnesty to all of them, which in essence is providing legal status to a lot of bad characters. You know, Martin, there’s also a piece of this legislation that bans our law enforcement officials of profiling. We need to profile even when it comes to our immigration policy.”

I wonder if these hate-mongerers know that Carlos Arredondo, the man in the cowboy hat being hailed as a hero for providing life-saving services immediately after the Boston bombings, was once an undocumented immigrant. Probably not. Facts don’t seem to be their forte.

› The Saudi Marathon Man | Amy Davidson

A twenty-year-old man who had been watching the Boston Marathon had his body torn into by the force of a bomb. He wasn’t alone; a hundred and seventy-six people were injured and three were killed. But he was the only one who, while in the hospital being treated for his wounds, had his apartment searched in “a startling show of force,” as his fellow-tenants described it to the Boston Herald, with a “phalanx” of officers and agents and two K9 units. He was the one whose belongings were carried out in paper bags as his neighbors watched; whose roommate, also a student, was questioned for five hours (“I was scared”) before coming out to say that he didn’t think his friend was someone who’d plant a bomb—that he was a nice guy who liked sports. “Let me go to school, dude,” the roommate said later in the day, covering his face with his hands and almost crying, as a Fox News producer followed him and asked him, again and again, if he was sure he hadn’t been living with a killer.

Why the search, the interrogation, the dogs, the bomb squad, and the injured man’s name tweeted out, attached to the word “suspect”? After the bombs went off, people were running in every direction—so was the young man. Many, like him, were hurt badly; many of them were saved by the unflinching kindness of strangers, who carried them or stopped the bleeding with their own hands and improvised tourniquets. “Exhausted runners who kept running to the nearest hospital to give blood,” President Obama said. “They helped one another, consoled one another,” Carmen Ortiz, the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, said. In the midst of that, according to a CBS News report, a bystander saw the young man running, badly hurt, rushed to him, and then “tackled” him, bringing him down. People thought he looked suspicious.

What made them suspect him? He was running—so was everyone. The police reportedly thought he smelled like explosives; his wounds might have suggested why. He said something about thinking there would be a second bomb—as there was, and often is, to target responders. If that was the reason he gave for running, it was a sensible one. He asked if anyone was dead—a question people were screaming. And he was from Saudi Arabia, which is around where the logic stops. Was it just the way he looked, or did he, in the chaos, maybe call for God with a name that someone found strange? [continue]

› Every 28 Hours an African American is Extrajudicially Executed in the U.S. | Dispatches from the Underclass

Every 28 hours a black woman, man or child in the United States is executed by a person employed or protected by the US government according to a year-long investigation by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM), which has thus far been virtually ignored by the news media, progressive outlets included.

Following the murder of Trayvon Martin, the MXGM embarked on a year-long study to determine the prevalence of extrajudicial killings of black Americans. The organization initially recorded around 120 killings in the first half of 2012, which came out to one black person murdered every 36 hours. That number climbed to 313 by the end of last year, forcing the MXGM to update its findings to every 28 hours in their latest report, titled “Operation Ghetto Storm“. That’s almost one black American killed every day by law enforcement, security guards and/or vigilantes, which the MXGM believes is more accurate since their numbers reflect only those killings that are reported by police departments and the news media. As the organization points out in the report, there exists no national tracking of police-involved shootings, so it’s impossible to know the full extent of the crisis.

The largest portion of those killed in 2012 (40 percent) were between the ages of 22 to 31, followed by 18 to 21 year olds at 18 percent. Children made up 8 percent of extrajudicially executed black Americans.

Furthermore, 44 percent of those killed were unarmed while 27 percent were “allegedly” armed, meaning police claimed the victim was armed but no corroborating evidence existed to prove this was the case. Only 13 percent of those killed were said to have “fired a weapon either before or during the officer’s arrival”, according to the MXGM.

One of the report’s most damning findings is the sheer lack of accountability for these killings. Thus far, less than 9 percent of those responsible for the deaths have faced charges, almost all of whom are security guards or vigilantees and all of which have yet to be determined. Despite the fact that an overwhelming number of the victims were definitively unarmed, only 3 percent of officers officers responsible for the deaths have been charged: “3 for vehicular crimes stemming from their crashes, 5 for manslaughter—the killers of Remarley Graham, Wendell Allen, Dane Garrett Scott Jr, Christopher Brown, and Bobby Moore Jr.”

And the justifications are almost always the same: “I felt threatened”, “he reached for his waistband to get what I thought was a gun”, “he was acting suspiciously”, etc. All are based on personal perceptions that are no doubt influenced by racial stereotypes, given that every American is surrounded by a culture that conditions them to fear the “criminal black man”.

This isn’t speculation. Study after study has confirmed the lethal consequences of the black-as-criminal stereotype. [must read]

› NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly 'wanted to instil fear' in black and Latino men At stop-and-frisk trial, New York state senator and former police captain Eric Adams testifies about 2010 conversation with Kelly

kenyabenyagurl:

State senator Eric Adams, who retired from the NYPD after rising to the rank of captain during a 22-year career, said commissioner Ray Kelly described his views on stop and frisk during a July 2010 meeting in the office of then-governor David Patterson.

Adams had traveled to Albany for a meeting on 10 July 2010 with the governor to give his support for a bill that would prohibit the NYPD from maintaining a database that would include the personal information of individuals stopped by the police but released without a charge or summons. In discussing the bill, which ultimately passed, Adams said he raised the issue of police stops disproportionately targeting young African American and Latino men.

“[Kelly] stated that he targeted and focused on that group because he wanted to instil fear in them that every time that they left their homes they could be targeted by police,” Adams testified.

“How else would we get rid of guns,” Adams said Kelly asked him.

Adams told the court he was stunned by the commissioner’s claim and immediately expressed his concerns. “I was amazed,” Adams testified. “I told him that was illegal.”

The words, they won’t come. Where I want words to be there is only anger and frustration.

(Source: latinosexuality, via absurdlakefront)

› Spying on Muslims: A Q&A on the lasting damage of NYPD's surveillance | NJ.com

“The long-term damage has yet to be seen. There are reasons surveillance tactics aren’t tolerated in free societies. You have an entire segment of the population withdrawing its voice from public conversations. That’s something that is in some ways immeasurable.” — Diala Shamas

Across the Hudson, the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk tactics are on trial, accused of systematically violating the rights of young men — mostly minorities — who were detained and searched with little or no cause.

Meanwhile, the NYPD’s insidious surveillance of Muslim communities — in New York, but also in Newark, Paterson and on college campuses — continues as it has since shortly after 9/11.

The mapping, photographing and infiltration of Muslims in New York and New Jersey was a secret program until the Associated Press unearthed documents proving its existence. In all that time, it has never produced a single terror-related lead.

Earlier this month, a coalition of Muslim watchdog groups released “Mapping Muslims: NYPD Spying and Its Impact on American Muslims,” a 56-page report that catalogs the damage caused by the department’s spy ops.

Star-Ledger editorial writer Jim Namiotka spoke last week with Diala Shamas, a Liman Fellow at CUNY’s law school and one of the report’s co-authors. An edited transcript appears below.

Read on →

› The racism that fuels the 'war on terror' | Glenn Greenwald

[Written in response to the disconnect between this poll and this poll]

[…] Many Americans can (a) say that they oppose the targeted killings of Americans on foreign soil while simultaneously (b) supporting the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen because, for them, the term “Americans” doesn’t include people like Anwar al-Awlaki. “Americans” means their aunts and uncles, their nice neighbors down the street, and anyone else who looks like them, who looks and seems “American”. They don’t think those people- Americans - should be killed without charges by the US government if they travel on vacation to Paris or go to study for a semester in London. But the concept of “Americans” most definitely does not include people with foreign and Muslim-ish names like “Anwar al-Awlaki” who wear the white robes of a Muslim imam and spend time in a place like Yemen.

Legally - which is the only way that matters for this question - the New-Mexico-born Awlaki was every bit as much of an American citizen as the nice couple down the street. His citizenship was never legally revoked. He never formally renounced it. He was never charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime that could lead to the revocation of citizenship. No court ever considered revoking his citizenship, let alone did so. From a legal and constitutional perspective, there was not a single person “more American” than he. That’s because those gradations of citizenship do not exist. One is either an American citizen or one is not. There is no such thing as “more American” or “less American”, nor can one’s citizenship be revoked by presidential decree. This does not exist.

But the effort to depict Muslims as something other than “real Americans” has long been a centerpiece of the US political climate in the era of the War on Terror. When it was first revealed in 2005 that the Bush administration was spying on the communications of Americans without the warrants required by the criminal law, a Bush White House spokesman sought to assure everyone that this wasn’t targeting Real Americans, but only those Bad Ones that should be surveilled (meaning Muslims the Bush administration decided, without due process, were guilty):

“This is a limited program. This is not about monitoring phone calls designed to arrange Little League practice or what to bring to a potluck dinner. These are designed to monitor calls from very bad people to very bad people who have a history of blowing up commuter trains, weddings and churches.”

Identically, when the Israelis attacked the Mavi Marmara flotilla in 2010 and killed 9 people including the US-born teenager Furkan Dogan, some conservatives insisted that he was not a Real American because his parents were Turkish and he grew up in Turkey (“it is silly to call him an ‘American of Turkish descent’. He, like the other members of his family, was a Turk”). The stark contrast in reactions between the sustained fury of the Turkish government over the killing of their citizens by the Israelis versus the support for those killings given by the US government was accounted for in part by the blind US support for whatever Israel does (including killing Americans), but also by the belief that Dogan wasn’t really an American, not the Real Kind you get upset about.

This decade-long Othering of Muslims - a process necessary to sustain public support for their continuous killing, imprisonment, and various forms of rights abridgments - has taken its toll. I’m most certainly not suggesting that anyone who supports Awlaki’s killing is driven by racism or anti-Muslim bigotry. I am suggesting that the belief that Muslims are somehow less American, or even less human, is widespread, and is a substantial factor in explaining the discrepancy I began by identifying.

Does anyone doubt that if Obama’s bombs were killing nice white British teeangers or smiling blond Swiss infants - rather than unnamed Yemenis, Pakistanis, Afghans and Somalis - that the reaction to this sustained killing would be drastically different? Does anyone doubt that if his overhead buzzing drones were terrorizing Western European nations rather than predominantly Muslim ones, the horror of them would be much easier to grasp?

Does it really take any debate to know that if the 16-year-old American suspiciously killed by the US government two weeks after killing his father had been Jimmy Martin in Sweden rather than Abdulrahman al-Awlaki in Yemen, the media interest and public outcry would be far more substantial, and Robert Gibbs would have been widely scorned if he had offered this vile blame-the-victim justification for killing Jimmy rather than Abdulrahman? It is indisputably true that - just as conservatives argued that Furkan Dogan was not a Real American - large numbers of Americans believe the same about the Denver-born teenager named Abdulrahman. This ugly mindset is not the only factor that leads the US public to support more than a decade of US killing and rights abridgments aimed primarily at Muslims, including their fellow citizens, but it is certainly a significant one.

Amazingly, some Democratic partisans, in order to belittle these injustices, like to claim that only those who enjoy the luxury of racial and socioeconomic privilege would care so much about these issues. That claim is supremely ironic. It reverses reality. That type of privilege is not what leads one to care about and work against these injustices. To the contrary, it’s exactly that privilege that causes one to dismiss concerns over these injustices and mock and scorn those who work against them. The people who insist that these abuses are insignificant and get too much attention are not the ones affected by them, because they’re not Muslim, and thus do not care.

The perception that the state violence, rights abridgments and expansions of government power ushered in by the War on Terror affect only Muslims long ago stopped being true. But ensuring that people continue to believe that is the key reason why it has been permitted to continue for so long.

› New York’s finest Islamophobes | Falguni Sheth

Imagine living in a small American community, innocently minding your own business, while constantly worrying that your government is monitoring how you meet with others in your community, speak about your faith, express political views, and dress — for hints that you are a terrorist. As seen by a report released today, such harassment and violations of civil liberties are constant facts of life for American Muslims today.

The new report, Mapping Muslims, analyzes the effects of the New York Police Department (NYPD)’s infiltration into every facet of Muslim communities, from mosques, local shops, college organizations and more. The report — released by the Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition (MACLU), the Creating Law Enforcement and Accountability Project (CLEAR) and the Asian American Legal Defense Fund (AALDEF) – interviewed 57 Muslims, mostly living in New York City. The interviewees included high school and college students, community organizers, lawyers, teachers, shopkeepers and others.

Mapping Muslims indicates that the NYPD’s surveillance program infused Muslim communities in New York City with widespread psychic harm. Interviewees reported worries about “appearing Muslim,” whether that was defined as appearing pious, wearing the niqab or hijab, growing beards, or speaking critically about political issues pertaining to Muslims. The report illustrates a widespread fear of congregating with other Muslims, speaking or befriending others at mosque services, speaking freely about their faith, even by young students, and of the constant defenses against entrapment or solicitation by the FBI. Judging from interviewees’ answers, this report indicates civil liberties violations have been wrought upon the Muslim community in New York —and most likely wherever similar programs have been implemented.

The surveillance program was first reported on at length in 2011 by the Associated Press. It published a devastating series of articles that chronicled the NYPD’s vast spying program, put in place to track the movements and interactions of Muslims in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The extent of financial and ideological support for the programs was remarkable. While today’s report does not address this aspect, I have written about this elsewhere. Generally, one would imagine that a local (albeit one of the largest and most powerful) police department in the U.S. would not be able to extend the scope of its surveillance beyond the confines of the city itself, and certainly not beyond the confines of New York State.

Yet, under the auspices of the NYPD’s International Liaison Program (a counterterrorism initiative established by NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly, which falls under a non-profit discretionary fund) created by Mayor Bloomberg for unforeseen contingencies, such as natural disasters, from hurricanes to counterterrorism, the NYPD was essentially freed from funding or jurisdictional constraints. This enabled selected NYPD officers to travel as far as needed for activities such as the interrogation of spying suspects in London and Madrid or for other counterterrorism policing activities in “Tel Aviv…Amman, Singapore, Santo Domingo, Toronto, Montreal, Paris, Lyons” and elsewhere. Indeed, American Airlines proudly announced its partnership with the NYPC in 2007, whereby it would provide travel vouchers for several participants in the program. The federal government cooperated extensively with the NYPD, giving it $1.6 billion dollars to finance its spying program. Indeed, collaboration between the NYPD and the federal government was extensive. As the Huffington Post reported in 2011:

“A veteran CIA officer, while still on the agency’s payroll, was the architect of the NYPD’s intelligence programs. The CIA trained a police detective at the Farm, the agency’s spy school in Virginia, then returned him to New York, where he put his new espionage skills to work inside the United States. And [in July 2011], the CIA sent a senior officer to work as a clandestine operative inside police headquarters.”

Oversight came from New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who approved and subsequently defended the NYPD program. To a lesser extent, Newark’s Mayor Cory Booker also approved it, though he claimed not to know the scope of the spying program. Moreover, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has never clarified the extent of his knowledge of the NYPD’s surveillance program. Neither have the Attorneys General of NJ, NY, PA, or CT, in whose states the NYPD ventured to continue its surveillance.

What the report makes clear is the extent to which the NYPD’s relentless surveillance program has decimated trust and bonds within various Muslim communities. Of course, for Islamophobes and general supporters of the War on Terror waged at the Federal level, these findings will be welcome—since at an important cultural level, that is the purpose of waging war on Muslims in the United States. That must be the primary purpose, since it has been established by various sources—including the FBI (even prior to 2005; scroll to the bottom)–that Muslim Americans are among the least likely terrorists. [continue]

› 'Palestinian-only' buses torched in West Bank | Al Akhbar English

Unknown attackers set fire late Monday to two buses operating on the newly launched segregated bus lines in the occupied West Bank, an Israeli news site reported.

Ynet said that the buses, owned by the company Afikim, were found burning in the village of Kafr Qassem.

Nobody was injured. Police surveyed the scene to check for evidence of arson, the report added.

The attack took place on the first day the company began operating two controversial bus lines reserved for Palestinians. The incident may have have been in protest against the discriminatory policy that has drawn fire from rights groups.

“Creating separate bus lines for Israeli Jews and Palestinians is a revolting plan,” Jessica Montell, director of the B’Tselem rights group, said on Army Radio, as cited by Reuters.

“This is simply racism. Such a plan cannot be justified with claims of security needs or overcrowding,” she added.

Following the incident, drivers were asked to remove all the buses from the city, fearing that attackers will strike again.

The new bus lines restrict Palestinians to only a few bus stops in the West Bank, forcing many to commute to remote locations.

Previously, Palestinians with Israeli work permits shared buses with settlers commuting to Tel Aviv, but the new system severely restricts their options. [++]

› A Little More From The Chambers | Charles Pierce

It’s become clear that Antonin (Short Time) Scalia’s “racial entitlement” is going to be the primary noise-bite out of the Supreme Court today. It doesn’t matter that whatever point Scalia was making was completely incoherent. By what possible standard is Section V of the Voting Rights Act a “racial entitlement”? Who, precisely, is being entitled? And to what? The Voting Rights Act does not confer a government benefit to any one race or another. It merely makes sure that the rights guaranteed under the 15th Amendment are not finagled with out in certain parts of the country that have proven, through history, as being deft at said finagling. The reason that African Americans have been the primary beneficiaries of this law is the simple fact that they were its primary victims. The Voting Rights Act doesn’t privilege their votes over any others. It just guarantees that they can be cast, and that they will be counted. But Scalia doesn’t care at this point whether he makes sense. He’s just interested in throwing whatever rocks through whatever windows he can find. He called it a “racial entitlement” because putting those two words together in any context is bound to cause a reaction. He’s one step away from calling Rush from behind the bench.

Also, too: it has become plain that, for the Roberts court, and for the Chief Justice from whom it bears its name, Citizens United is going to be the hill on which they die. It is central to its judicial legacy. It defines Roberts’s tenure as chief justice. (When the Court declined to hear the so-called “Citizens Unitedon steroids” case this week, it can be argued, it did so in order to protect the Citizens United ruling itself as a “moderate” decision in the field of campaign finance.) It cements into place principles — corporate personhood, money as speech — that prevailed during the previous Gilded Age, which also happened to be the period of history in which racial discrimination in the law, and especially at the ballot box, through Plessy v. Ferguson and its progeny. Plessy was decided by a Court that was pretending that it didn’t know what it was doing, and that was completely heedless of the inevitable effect of its ruling. That was plain to Justice John Harlan Marshall, who wrote a howling dissent:

Everyone knows that the statute in question had its origin in the purpose, not so much to exclude white persons from railroad cars occupied by blacks as to exclude colored people from coaches occupied by or assigned to white persons. Railroad corporations of Louisiana did not make discrimination among whites in the matter of accommodation for travelers. The thing to accomplish was, under the guise of giving equal accommodation for whites and blacks, to compel the latter to keep to themselves while traveling in railroad passenger coaches. No one would be so wanting in candor as to assert the contrary.

If the Roberts Court declares Section V of the Voting Rights Act to be unconstitutional, as seems sadly likely, it will complete a historically resonant parlay through which corporate influence over elections is enhanced while minority participation is made more difficult.