How we messed up
Since 9/11 hundreds if not thousands of Muslims have faced so-called "preemptive prosecution." Officially, a preemptive prosecution is defined as a case in which Muslims who are deemed "dangerous" are prosecuted before they commit a crime. Attorney Stephen Downs explains:
"In the Bush Administration, which insisted that the FBI and the Justice Department follow a new paradigm of preventing terrorist attacks before they occurred, any Muslim who was 'suspicious' needed to be targeted and incarcerated." [1]
Albany, New York's Imam Yassin Aref notes that his own preemptive prosecution is "a form of selective prosecution which targets certain individuals for prosecution for crimes not yet committed, based on their adherence to the Muslim religion, and that such unequal protection of the laws is prohibited under the Constitution" [2]
"Predatory prosecution" is probably a better term to use for these political cases because the situation more closely resembles a community of gazelles munching on grass, who are then suddenly pounced upon and ripped apart by vicious tigers. Muslims seem to have retreated more and more profoundly into the "gazelle" role, for they live with the fear that wherever they go, everything they do is being watched by the tigers hiding in the bushes and waiting for their next attack. Nowadays Muslims seem to find it normal to live in a state of nervous tension.
Gazelles are programmed to be gazelles. They have only one way of reacting to danger. The tigers chase them; they run away. The tigers chase them; they run away. The tigers chase them again; they run away again. After thousands of years, you will still find the gazelles running away from the tigers. You never see the gazelles band together to implement a more creative strategy to defeat the tigers.
In contrast, humans are programmed to be flexible. While there is an appropriate time to run away from a tiger (if you can), humans have also learned how to call a village meeting to form a plan for getting rid of the tiger that is causing danger. Humans over time became so good at hunting tigers that they made the tiger into an endangered species. Then humans felt ashamed that they had gone too far and realized they should protect God's creatures in their natural habitat. So now, the humans are trying to save the tigers. Humans are not perfect, but they can change strategies when the situation calls for it.
The enlightened human being is neither a predator nor a victim. A Godly person strives to perfect himself. Humans do not have to be stuck in one role doing the same thing over and over for millions of years like the mosquito.
Not only did God give us minds with which to view the entire landscape, take into account both the details or what's on the horizon, to remember the past, and to make theories about the future, but we can even learn to navigate by the stars. When humans can't see the sky, we can use an airplane to go above the clouds or even use a satellite to look at the moon, just to determine what day it is. Has Ramadan started? Is a storm coming? The human being has been created for nobility. [3]
Those humans that act like tigers are not really tigers just as we are not really gazelles. They are acting like tigers to cover their weaknesses. In fact, they even manage to convince people that they are the innocent gazelles and that you are the tigers. In the preemptive prosecutions of Muslims, there are so many holes in the government's theories that the case is nothing but a list of unsubstantiated accusations. Then when the defense asks, "Where is your evidence?" the prosecution says, "The evidence is "classified." They argue that to give evidence of the outrageous statements they are making against this person would be a threat to national security! [4]
We have to expect that they will do this, just as we expect a toddler to point to his brother and say, "He did it!" when their mother asks who spilled cereal all over the floor. Naturally the brother is going to come up with a defensive strategy. He might say, "I did not!" or he might say, "He bumped me." While that works fine for children up to a point, from the mother's point of view, does she really care who spilled the cereal? Not really. Her job is to make sure the mess gets cleaned up and to teach the children to be careful and perhaps most importantly, not to blame others for their mistakes. She can see how they are acting, and she knows why they are acting that way. They don't want to get in trouble. The adult human being should be able to see beyond the "he said she said" game and try to solve the problem. She has to have the intelligence to know what is a mistake and what is deliberate trouble making. She has to gear her reaction accordingly in order to get the best outcome.
The American Muslim community needs to develop an "adult" response to Islamophobic politics and prosecutions in the USA. It is time for us to realize that the way we have been approaching this problem has not been working. We need to analyze the entire picture, develop new strategies, and try some new approaches.
The defensive strategy has not worked because American Muslims face a situation more serious than that of two kids that accidentally spilled cereal on the floor, and yet we are acting as if this is the case. We even seem to believe on some level that there is a Mommy who is going to fix it all for us if we could just convince her that we are innocent. Your Mommy already knows you are innocent. The problem we are facing is not spilled cereal but a crime more on the level of Cain and Abel. There are people out there that don't like to see you happy. When they see God smiling upon you, it makes them angry. When they see your children, they don't think to themselves, "Oh how adorable." They think to themselves, "If I get rid of the father, still there are four more to replace him." Sometimes they even say this out loud. They want to wreck your life. They want you out of the way. It's as simple as that. And it's not even personal. They will wreck your life just to score a political point – even when the point they are making is totally unrelated to the reality of your life. We have to face the facts if we want to solve our problems.
The goals of the bad guys
Animalistic people think in terms of winners and losers. They think if they want to win, then you have to lose. So they dedicated this life to cheating, stealing, dominating, controlling, murdering and then lying about it, on purpose, because they have decided that they are going to destroy you. Even though we act in good faith in our dealings with others, we should not assume that everybody acts in good faith with respect to us. As soon as we realize that we are not being treated in good faith, then we will stop limiting our response to pleading our innocence. We have to realize that nobody cares that we are innocent. You are guilty of existing. The blame game is simply a game to keep us living in terror so we don't realize what's going on while they concentrate on consolidating their power, walling us in, and depriving us of our human rights.
Some Muslims have taken another strategy, which has also not worked. This is the dawah approach. They say, "Maybe we can convince them to be our friends. Maybe we can convince them that a win-win solution is preferable." Unfortunately, this strategy again is based on the false hope that we are going to be treated in good faith if we treat others in good faith. Because of our naivety our enemies say, "Sure, I'll be your friend," in order to get close to us and gain information about us that will help them destroy us. They will say, "Sure, let's cooperate," in order to distract us from the goal of protecting our communities. They will keep us busy with talking while they continue to do what they were doing all along. Even the Prophet Mohammed (pbuh)'s companions made this mistake out of the goodness of their heart, until Allah reminded him: "You love them, but they do not love you" (Quran 3:118-119).
Professional Islamophobe Daniel Pipes is so open and shameless in his overwhelming absence of good faith toward Muslims that he often publicly expresses his true goal, to dismantle America's Constitution-based legal system. In his mind, an accusation against a Muslim or organization is proof enough in itself because it "points to the urgent need that the FBI, White House, Congress, State Department, Pentagon, and Homeland Security – as well as other institutions, public and private, throughout the West – not continue guilelessly to assume that smooth-talking Islamists are free of criminal, extremist, or terrorist ties… Individual Islamists may appear law-abiding and reasonable, but they are part of a totalitarian movement, and as such, all must be considered potential killers." [5]
Shortly after the release of her book entitled Mecca and Main Street, Lebanese American reporter Genevieve Abdo provided critical background information related to Islamophobic prosecutions. She explained that American Muslims are like and unlike other immigrant groups to the USA. American Catholic immigrants often faced similar prejudices in the past, but American Muslims confront well-organized extremely wealthy or well-funded and politically powerful American Jewish Zionists willing to do practically anything to prevent the participation of Muslim citizens in American politics, academics, and economics. [6]
As Arabs and Muslims become a larger part of the American population, Israel lobbying and advocacy groups have engaged in many conspiracies against rights both to prevent American Muslims from freely assembling to practice their religion and also to stop Arab and Muslim Americans from engaging in international charity and other activities that could enhance their political and social stature. [7], [8], [9]
When American Muslims practice their religion, they are contributing to the strength of the United States. By defending the Muslim right to practice the traditional form of Islam, Muslims defend the American principle of freedom of religion. Those who imprison Muslims for practicing their religion are deliberately contributing to the downfall of the United States as a Constitutional Republic. They are the true enemies of all Americans.
While numbers in a democracy are normally supposed to correlate with influence, pro-Israel activists fear what they see as a "Muslim-liberal coalition," for "if this coalition can be organized to act with any degree of coherence, it could indeed end up, through sheer numbers alone, wielding a disproportionate influence on American politics, to the clear detriment of the interests of American Jews." [10]
The standard modus operandi of the anti-Constitution conspirators has involved scare mongering and defamation. [11] The phony political prosecutions are likewise part of a deliberate strategy to bolster the subversive agenda of those whose ultimate goal is to dismantle the United States. Consequently, the normal defensive legal strategy has not worked to clear Muslims of false charges.
Of all the anti-Muslim anti-Arab political prosecutions orchestrated by the Neocons of the Bush administration, that of Imam Yassin Aref may be one of the most outrageous. Since his conviction in 2007, Aref has been filing appeals on technical legal grounds. Unfortunately technical arguments have never overturned a political conviction in the USA while the ideology remains dominant that drove the prosecution. Sadly, Aref will rot in jail until his defenders are willing to battle the Zionist ideology and politics, on which the prosecutions of Arabs and Muslims have been based.
In 2004, the FBI had targeted Aref in a sting operation, which was so farcical that it could have been a comedy, except that the jury was swayed by government manipulations during the trial. Government bad faith included the secret classification of the very evidence that would prove Aref innocent. All he did was witness a loan transaction that took place between a member of his mosque and a paid FBI informant, who was apparently trying to avoid prosecution for his own criminal acts by setting up and framing Aref and pizzeria owner Mohammed Hossain in a fictional crime. As a result of the sting operation, Aref was charged with Conspiracy, Money Laundering, Material Support for a Foreign Terrorist Organization, and Lying to the FBI.
Aref was sentenced in 2007 to 15 years of incarceration. His appeal was denied in 2008 while his petition to the Supreme Court was denied in 2009.
In March 2010 he filed a court motion to win a retrial of his case because he believes he was denied his Constitutional right to a fair trial due to his nationality (Iraqi Kurd) and religion (Islam). Aref felt his court appointed lawyer Terence Kindlon was negligent and ineffective. Because Kindlon was overconfident that the government had no provable case against his client, he did not act aggressively to demonstrate the innocence of his client. In the present motion Aref requests a "Stevens Review" for misconduct. In part this is normal in any case and such motions are routinely denied, but given the unusual nature of Yassin's case a more detailed analysis is worthwhile.
Aref states in his deposition dated March 8, 2010: "The FBI claim that they decided to give me a "test"…The "test" was rigged in such a way that the FBI knew I would be unable to understand what was happening and so would appear to fail…I had no awareness that anything illegal was occurring."
He continues: "Essentially the government's theory was that while I was witnessing a series of apparently legal loan transactions, I heard comments from one of the parties indicating the money for the loan came from the sale of a missile to a terrorist group to be used to assassinate the Pakistani ambassador at the UN. I then decided to become part of the plot without ever reacting in any way to this startling inflammatory idea, and without ever asking a single question about the plot." Yet the government claims "it was not possible to verify what I was told about a 'missile attack in New York City' or whether I was told the meaning of the code word." He continues:
"I testified that I heard Malik make some kind of a comment about an attack in New York City, and I became angry at Malik for making jokes like that, especially in my house which I believed to be bugged by the FBI. I testified I was 100% sure that the comment was an attempt at a joke because nobody who was seriously planning an attack in New York City would broadcast this to complete strangers a week before the attack."
The prosecution relied heavily on some of Aref's old diary entries that were both selectively quoted and mistranslated. The defense never found a translator to contradict the government mistranslation. Aref offered an Arabic translator, Prof. May Saffar, to contradict the government's fake translations, but the defense did not use her. A correct translation of the complete diary would have proven Aref's non-involvement in terrorism.
The lawyer also failed to hire a Kurdish translator to examine the government's fake translations. Additionally, the defense ignored all of the character witnesses who offered to testify that Aref never encouraged terrorism to his mosque congregation. [12]
Under government pressure, Judge McAvoy told the jury that the government had good reason to target Aref. This seriously swayed the outcome of the verdict despite the lack of evidence so the defense's assumption that the government would have to prove its accusations was false. [13]
The government claimed that Aref made 14 calls to keep in touch with terrorists even though Aref was only keeping in touch with friends at the general office of IMK (Islamic Movement in Kurdistan), a non-terrorist political party for which Aref had worked in Syria. The government refused to hand over transcripts of these conversations that would have shown that there was nothing of alarm being discussed and claimed that this evidence was "classified." Aref's conviction was based on the government's assertion that Mullah Krekar, who was later accused of forming a terrorist organization, Ansar al-Islam, had also called that number in the past. [14]
Aref repeatedly asked his lawyer to bring an expert to trial, who specialized in Kurdish political movements, especially IMK, because the government's expert, Evan Kohlmann gave totally wrong misinformation about IMK to the jury. In the trial the government witness also mixed up the HSK (Kurdish Socialist Party) and PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party). Even though the mixed up information provided to the jury by the government "expert" was factually wrong, the defense provided no witness to contradict the government's claims.
In order to depict Aref as a terrorist because he was once employed by the Islamic Movement for Kurdistan (IMK), which the US government does not consider to be a terrorist organization, the "expert witness" Evan Kohlmann testified to an all but impossible collaborative connection between the IMK, the militant Kurdish Ansar al-Islam organization, al-Qaeda, and Saddam Hussein.
Zionist activists were involved in framing case against Aref
Did Zionists within the Bush administration officials actively look for an Iraqi Kurd resident in the USA for the FBI to target in order to prove the existence of a direct domestic threat to America from al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein? This seems clear from the evidence. The FBI informant was introduced to Aref by his co-defendant Hossain.
Aref's court motion reads: "However, it was not simply an introduction but was specifically orchestrated by the government. When the informant told Hossain that they needed a witness to the loan, Hossain responded by giving the informant a name of an individual. However, the informant said no to that individual. Again, Hossain gave another name, and again the informant said no. After the second name however, the informant stated, 'I don't want any Pakistani's, Yemeni's, Sudanese, or Bangladeshi's.' Hossain then asked, 'What about Imam Yassin?" and the informant became excited and proclaiming how great a man Petitioner [Yassin Aref] was, even referred to the Petitioner as "his man," implying that the informant had great respect for him, or even knew him. It is essential to understand that Petitioner is a Kurdish and when the informant excluded the two individuals initially proposed by Hossain, and went further to eliminate all Pakistani, Yemani, Sudanese and Bangladeshi's the informant almost certainly was left with only very few individuals that would have qualified to witness a business loan – in this case it was the Petitioner. As soon as the Petitioner was mentioned the informant did not have any more objections. This shows that the informant specifically eliminated everyone until Petitioner was mentioned. Why? The Petitioner and informant had never met, and there was no evidence whatsoever that the informant had ever even heard about the Petitioner.
"The government openly acknowledges it sought out Petitioner. The government contends that initially Petitioner came to their attention after Petitioner's phone number was found in certain areas in Iraq. However, even if the Petitioner's phone number was found that by itself does not mean that Petitioner was in violation of any law whether nationally or internationally. The government, however, began a 'sting operation.'" [15]
Tying Yassin Aref to Ansar al-Islam and the IMK (Islamic Movement for Kurdistan) was quite likely part of the Neocon propaganda effort to prove that Saddam was linked to al-Qaeda via the IMK and that the presence of alleged IMK agents in the USA showed that Saddam was a direct threat to the USA. Jewish Neocon Jonathan Schanzer started seriously promoting this absurd set of specious claims in 2003 at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) [16], described by Stephen Walt as "an influential organization in the Israel Lobby…pushing an agenda that is not in America's interest." [17] Then Treasury Department analyst Jonathan Schanzer seems to have been the main proponent and possibly the original fabricator of this fiction. Schanzer continued the dissemination of this false narrative to justify the Iraq war when he was contracting for the US government. [18]
Schanzer placed this Zionist propaganda into an April 3, 2003 Policy Review article:
"Ansar al-Islam, an al-Qaeda affiliate in northern Iraq, was rocked by U.S. missile and air strikes over the weekend, concluding an eight-day campaign against the organization. The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) stated that, with help from more than 100 U.S. Special Forces operatives, they have "completely overrun" Ansar's stronghold. The PUK reportedly killed twenty-four Ansar fighters on Monday alone. Yet, the group may not have been defeated completely. Although its enclave was literally flattened, Ansar al-Islam is threatening new attacks, and will likely live to fight another day."
In his conclusion Schanzer elaborated:
"U.S. intelligence and Kurdish authorities are now sifting through a treasure trove of data left behind in Ansar's bunkers and are testing for what they believe to be evidence of chemical and biological weapons. Information gleaned from seized computer hard drives and documents (some containing addresses and phone numbers) could help prevent future terror attacks. Moreover, if these materials offer further evidence that Ansar has ties to Saddam or al-Qaeda, they could serve as a boost to U.S. war efforts." [19]
This claim is noteworthy because the prosecution asserted that there was an address book containing Yassin Aref's name and address found in the pocket of a dead alleged terrorist. Even if true, this would not implicate Aref in terrorism. Still, this empty claim was heavily promoted in the media in a sensational manner.
After Schanzer became a key staffer of the U.S. Treasury Office of Intelligence and Analysis, where he closely worked with Jewish Zionist US government officials Matthew Levitt and Stuart Levey, he elaborated upon the Jewish Neocon narrative:
"The roots of Ansar al-Islam extend back to the mid-1990s. The group appears to be comprised of the various Islamist factions that splintered from the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan (IMK) in northern Iraq. As Iraq scholar Michael Rubin notes, they included groups called Hamas, Tawhid, and the Second Soran Unit, among others.
"On September 1, 2001, the Second Soran Unit and the Tawhid Islamic Front merged to form the Jund al-Islam. Jund al-Islam was soon renamed Ansar al-Islam. As the group grew, it bore the markings of other al-Qa'ida affiliates. Their cadres hailed from other Arab countries; some of them had experience in Afghanistan, and they based themselves in the part of Iraq under the weakest central authority: northern Iraq, also widely known as Iraqi Kurdistan." [20]
In order to make these types of outrageous claims seem convincing, and to justify the Iraq debacle, convicting Yassin Aref in a highly publicized trial that linked him with Ansar al-Islam, al-Qaeda, and Saddam Hussein was of supreme importance to Jewish Neocons.
Arch-Zionist David Remnik and Lawrence Wright at the New Yorker among others helped tremendously with the fabrication and incitement of "al-Qaeda consciousness" in the US media. Remnick provided Wright with the incomparable resources of the New Yorker to create the docudramatic and generally fantasy work entitled The Looming Tower. [21] This book ties a lot of disconnected information together to fabricate a compelling script defining a vast Islamic fundamentalist terrorist conspiracy, which Osama bin Laden is supposed to head but really does not exist and which can only be fought by stripping Americans of their Constitutional rights. Wright's fictions are sophisticated and quite similar in style to the misrepresentation in the Aref-Hossain trial. The deception depends on subtle mistranslation or ellipsis and calculated distortion. The entire mythology of the War on Terror -- like the political show trials – is filled with the same sort of deliberate misrepresentations.
Jewish Zionists Stuart Levey, Jonathan Schanzer, and Matthew Levitt, an FBI consultant and pro-Israel propagandist, all worked for the Office of Intelligence and Analysis of the Treasury Department as "counter-terrorism experts" in theory to stop terrorist cash flows but in reality to staunch the increasing political clout of wealthy Muslims and Muslim countries. While serving the government they have constructed a vast terrorist conspiracy out of paranoid Zionist fantasies. They coordinated the legal attack on international Arab and Muslim charities and financial institutions with the media campaign. [22] These Jewish Zionists were all heavily involved in cooking up the nonsense about Aref and Ansar al-Islam. Their jobs involved manufacturing off-the-wall yet dangerous-sounding international financial connections, which was also a theme in the Aref-Hossain trial. Stuart Levey has continued in the same role under the Obama administration.
According to Obama's Treasury secretary Tim Geithner, "Stuart [Levey] has been the chief architect of our strategy to impose growing financial costs on Iran for its continued defiance and he has played a major leadership role on this issue internationally."
Jonathan Schanzer is now vice president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracy think tank and pro-Israel lobby, whose original name was Endowment for Middle Eastern Truth (EMET), which calls itself a nongovernmental group that "tracks sanctions busters and terrorist financing" and reports to Levey. [23] In reality, the FDD never defends democracy but works only to protect and to extend Jewish privilege and special exemption from the laws of the United States.
As Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Levey is for all intents and purposes an American Jewish Committee employee lent to the US government to make sure that US foreign policy remains subordinate to Zionist goals. [24] Levey has a particularly important strategic role (with the assistance of Obama administration officials Lawrence Summers and Martin Feldstein) to make sure that wealthy Muslims and Muslim states remain impotent in the face of the power of Jewish wealth [25].
Jewish Zionist Evan Kohlmann, who served as a prosecution expert witness with no qualifications whatsoever during the Aref-Hossain trial and many other Islamophobic political prosecutions became acquainted with Matthew Levitt while they worked on FBI terrorism projects. After leaving the US government they have both been closely associated with the Counterterrorism Foundation. Kohlmann's connections to Levey and Levitt should have made it possible to address issues of ethnopolitical agenda in the Aref-Hossain trial. Clever cross examination of the expert witnesses could go a long way toward clearing Muslim detainees of the false charges used against them.
According to David Gersten, who is a Director at Homeland Security, the Department of Homeland Security has stopped working with the ADL because of its obvious Jewish Zionist political and ethnic agenda. [26] The FBI could be forced to make the same decision regarding its sources such as the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IP).
Kohlmann's career got its start at the Investigative Project, which is headed by the long discredited terrorism pseudo-expert, Steve Emerson. As a law student, Kohlmann interned at the IP and worked alongside the delusional terror fantasist Rita Katz while he wrote his first book about al-Qaeda. He now serves as their senior terrorism analyst. [27]
Emerson has a longtime association with Martin Peretz, the publisher of the racist propaganda magazine The New Republic. [28] Not only has the Department of Justice employed a tremendous number of Jewish Zionists in senior roles for the last several presidencies, but the George W. Bush Administration put a lot of Zionist intellectuals with personal relationships to Emerson or Katz into senior positions. As these Zionists infected the US government bureaucracy with Islamophobia, the IP and the Search for International Terrorist Entities (SITE) Institute headed by Katz gained influence within the middle and upper layers of the US government.
Even though no genuine terrorism scholar would ever take Emerson and his associates seriously, the FBI approached the IP to find a replacement for Rohan Gunaratna. Gunaratna, who holds the position of Honorary Fellow at Israel's International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism, was the first "expert witness" at Aref's trial but had to step down due to his lack of knowledge on the topics he was hired to discuss.
Kohlmann's deposition revealed that he also knew nothing about the subject. [29]
Kohlmann spoke none of the languages in Bangladesh, Pakistan, or Iraq and was completely clueless with regard to the politics. He simply regurgitated the fantastic theory that Schanzer and Levitt had put together to justify the attack on Iraq and that described a collaboration between the Islamic Movement for Kurdistan, Ansar al-Islam, al-Qaeda, and Saddam Hussain.
In 2005 the Islamic Society of Boston brought a complaint of defamation against Fox News, the Boston Herald, and the David Project (DP), which is an Israel advocacy organization. Discovery documents revealed that the DP came up with a list of names of Muslims they planned to accuse of terrorism as part of their media and legal campaign against the Roxbury Mosque project. The DP then hired the IP to fabricate evidence against the Islamic Society of Boston in an attempt to halt construction of the mosque. The discovery documents clearly showed that the people were targeted first, and then the evidence was manufactured. [30], [31]
The same casuistry was equally obvious in Yassin Aref's trial because the government, or more accurately, Zionist agents working within the government had been trying to come up with a way to frame Aref for years before his actual arrest.
There were a number of potential witnesses with very interesting stories that the defense never called to the stand. One was Abraham Youssef, who said the FBI had interviewed him before Aref's arrest. Youssef was facing some potential felony charges, which the FBI told him they could make "disappear" if he would give a statement against Imam Yassin, "that one week prior to the September 11, 2001 attack, Ibrahim had seen two of the nineteen hijackers sleeping over at my house." Youssef refused the offer.
Another man, Ali Yaghi, was approached by FBI agents in Jordan and asked to testify against Aref in exchange for legal residency in the US so he could be reunited with his estranged American wife and their children. Yaghi refused.
Aref stated: "the testimony of Youssef and Yaghi were critical in showing that the government was attempting to frame me and were willing to give valuable consideration in order to get false but incriminating testimony." [32]
Defending the unjustly accused
Careful jury selection could make a difference to the outcome of preemptive prosecution trials. In the Aref case, Judge McAvoy told the jury that the government had good reason to be suspicious of Aref. He implicitly recommended that the jurors should convict. The defense lawyer must use peremptory challenges to favor jury candidates, who would be likely to wonder whether there is a good reason to be suspicious of the government. Because of the post-9/11 atmosphere where terms like "Islamofascist" pervade political discourse, one tactic the defense lawyer could use to weed out Islamophobic or pro-Israel jurors would be to ask the prospective juror whether he believes Muslims could be fascists and whether he believes a Jew could be a Nazi.
An increasing number of Americans are becoming aware that US Middle East foreign policy has no connection to US national interest but is created in order to maximize political contributions from hyper-wealthy Jewish Zionist subversives like Haim Saban [33] or Sheldon Adelson. [34] As soon as possible after the trial starts, the defense team must attack the common American judicial inclination to defer to US government claims that it withholds evidence for foreign policy or national security reasons.
Aref was half-right when he told Kindlon to bring in an expert on Kurdish politics.
Such an expert could show how Kohlmann was lying. A Jewish studies expert could explain why Kohlmann was lying. This combination could rework the trial into a case against the FBI and the Department of Justice. More aggressive lawyering would include an expert witness on the Israel Lobby and Zionist political manipulation of US policy, in an effort to put the FBI and US governmental bureaucratic Islamophobia on trial.
When Judge McAvoy prevented Aref's and Hossain's attorneys from challenging Kohlmann's credentials, the defense should have aggressively concentrated on Kohlmann's political agenda.
Respinning the Story/Media Pressure
In Islamophobic show trials prosecutors and the US government are well-positioned to commit great wrongs and to undermine the constitutional legal system of the USA due to existing prejudices against Muslims. To win in such a situation, supporters must present themselves as the last line of defense for the American way of life. The legal defense team, Muslim and civil rights organizations, and supporting political activists must act as a highly coordinated special forces unit much in the way that prosecutors and both left wing and right wing Israel advocates coordinate their efforts.
Muslims need to create a rapid reaction strategy. When the FBI and the US Attorney move to arrest and to indict, instead of engaging in apologetics as if the accused were already tried and found guilty, Muslim defense organizations need to make as much noise as possible about yet another US violation of Muslim or Arab American civil and human rights. The key words should be fairness, equal protection, and reciprocity.
US laws should be enforced uniformly for Jews and non-Jews. Why do the FBI and the US attorneys only pursue alleged Muslim extremism and material support of terrorism when Jewish Zionist extremism and material support of terrorism are open and blatant?
Even though Friends of the IDF (FIDF) is prima facie a criminal organization that aids and abets terrorists, it has 501(c)(3) status. FIDF leadership and most if not all the membership should be serving long prison sentences under RICO and anti-terrorism statutes.
Irving Moskowitz, a far-right millionaire in New York and his Yashar Lachayal organization, which supplies goods directly to IDF soldiers, are possibly in even more direct violation of US law. [35] The FBI should long ago have shut down his group, seized its assets and arrested both Moskowitz and also his staff by the standards of the treatment of Muslim charities.
Yick Wo v. Hopkins is as important today as it was in 1886 when the Supreme Court's decision established that it was just as unfair to enforce laws unequally as it was to write racial inequality into laws.
Muslims should pressure media outlets that refuse to cover the issue of unequal enforcement of anti-terrorism laws. The right of rabidly Islamophobic channels like Boston FOX 25 to broadcast spectrum must be challenged. Just as Jewish Zionist groups try to prevent al-Jazeera's honest reports of the Middle East from being carried by the cable TV providers, Muslim groups should increase their pressure campaigns to drive racist anti-Muslim content-providers off of every cable network whenever possible.
In some situations defamatory actions of media organizations have given individual Muslims and Muslim organizations reason to sue. Muslim defense organizations and the larger Muslim community should give the plaintiffs all possible material support.
Changing the General Atmosphere
Jewish Zionists will respond to any explicit or implicit suggestion that Jews inside and outside of government are collaborating to achieve Zionist goals with accusations of anti-Semitism and conspiracy-mongering. Muslim defense organizations must neutralize such Zionist propaganda campaign by using press releases, demonstrations, and other publicity tactics to point out that the USA has lots of laws against conspiracy precisely because conspiracies are real. It is racist to believe that Jewish Zionists are less likely than other groups to engage in them. An extremely public debate over the government's refusal to address Jewish criminality and Jewish conspiracy as such can help foster the development of public consciousness of the fairness issue in order to delegitimize Zionist orchestrated show trials and political prosecutions.
Zionist subversion is a Gesamtkunstwerk (a totally synthesized combination of efforts into one unified vision). It permeates American society from elementary school through academia to the highest levels of government. Muslim defense organizations must conceptualize fighting Zionism as their own Gesamtkunstwerk that involves lots of little lawsuits, political mobilization, careful investment, and lots of PR. The composition will reach its climax when the first Zionist leaders are incarcerated, but much work will still remain. Any lesser goal means Muslims will probably lose because Zionists like Pipes are without doubt willing to do anything to put as many Muslims in jail as possible.
Addressing the political show trials of Muslims is only one battle in the struggle against the web of control that Zionists are trying to exert over all aspects of society.
Because Zionist organizations have targeted rising Muslim and Arab academics for denial of tenure and have tried to prevent any sort of rational education about Arabs and Islam, academics and educators targeted by Jewish Zionists such as Joe Massad, Hatem Bazian, Nadia Abu el-Haj, Debbi Almontaser and others probably have the best shot at a class action law suit if they are willing to band together to challenge those attempting to prevent them from working in their chosen profession.
Because Zionist machinations are hardly confined to the non-governmental sector, Muslim defense organizations must look carefully at the role of Jewish Zionist conspiracy within the federal government.
Jewish Zionists and their friends at the IRS have long misused their offices to attempt to deny the granting of 501(c)(3) tax-deductible contribution status to organizations critical of Zionism. For example, the Council for the National Interest, which lobbies for a balanced Middle East foreign policy, had tremendous difficulty in obtaining 501(c)(3) while the racist Investigative Project of Steven Emerson had no problems whatsoever.
Zionist machinations have enmeshed Harvard, Yale and many other universities in activities and programs that violate US government regulations. For example "[the] goal of the [Harvard] Wexner Israel Fellowship Program is to provide Israel's next generation of public leaders with advanced training in public management and leadership development, thus enhancing the quality of democracy and the institutional vitality of Israel's public sector." [36]
This educational opportunity provides rising middle level Israelis outside the private sector with connections to the upper levels of the US government through the Harvard Kennedy School. The fellowship discriminates against Israeli Palestinians and is unavailable to Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Recipients are expected to visit synagogues and take part in local Jewish activities, which creates a hostile environment for Arabs or Muslims and implies that non-Jews are unwelcome.
The program's discrimination against Israeli Palestinians and Palestinians in the Occupied Territories would lead to forfeiture of Harvard's 501(c)(3) tax deductible contribution status if the IRS applied same standards to anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism as it applied to anti-Black racism when it stripped Bob Jones University of this status. Yet the US government fails to enforce the law in the case of Jewish Zionist racism.
Not only is the IRS thoroughly penetrated, but the Security and Exchange Commission, the Treasury, the Department of Justice, the Federal Elections Commission (FEC), the Federal Communications Commissions (FCC), and associated US government agencies often make great efforts to undertake Zionist policies and to ignore Zionist infractions.
The most glaring recent example has been the effort of the US Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR) to thwart the effort to combat structural racism while at the same time it has made attacking campus anti-Zionist organizing a high priority. USCCR Vice-Chair Abigail Thernstrom is a long-time associate of Israel lobbyist Charles Jacobs.
Other agencies do similar things: the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which comes under the jurisdiction of the FCC, spends a lot of time in fighting criticism of Israel while the Treasury combats boycotts of Israel even as it attempts to sanction Iran.
Muslim defense organizations must use the whole range of available legal, regulatory or political challenges to undermine Zionist control within the US government.
Muslim defense organizations must file a notice of claim (SF95) to indicate intent to take legal action against any government agency, whose improper or unequal application of US law and regulations is harming Muslim American citizens and residents. Such notice should be accompanied by the identification of US government officials, who have engaged in the misuse or perversion of office on behalf Zionism in order to harm Muslims.
The Bevins precedent [37] was a major topic in the lawsuit of Canadian citizen Mahar Arar, who was dispatched by Canada to Syria to be tortured at the behest of the US government. Bevins addresses the question of compensating persons, who have suffered unjust deprivation of Constitutional rights. Because the implications of Bevins belong to the cutting edge of US legal theory, a lawyer using reasoning derived from the Bevins decision must be ready for close and difficult questioning from the judge. Yet the Bevins precedent in combination with equal protection arguments could provide a means to attack the belief that far too many judges and jurors have in the government's good faith and that has been used so successfully in producing unjust convictions like those of Aref and Hossain in Albany.
While the Supreme Court in theory does not adjust its decisions with political vicissitudes, it practice it does, and with more public discussion of Jewish Zionist subversion of the US legal process, an opening may be created for Muslim political prisoners to win appeals against unjust conviction. This outcome would become more likely if Muslim defense organizations can create international pressure and link the release of political prisoners to US strategic foreign policy goals and better relations with the Islamic world. Obviously no Muslim country should trust the US as long as the US wrongfully incarcerates decent patriotic Muslim American citizens. Muslim Americans will have to start reaching out to Muslim countries that are being pressured by the USA to take action against alleged terrorist organizations or to aid US strategic goals. Turkey for example should start asking why the US is not arresting Jewish Zionists that supported the IDF in killing US and Turkish citizens.
Developing a public consciousness of the issues is essential to prevailing in a political prosecution, because there are so many factors that can influence prison sentences.
According to Aref's lawyer Steve Downs, "I do not think the issue in sentencing is the ability of the lawyers but particular judges and the amount of community support that the defendants were receiving. (Most judges stick to the guidelines. Some judges as in Aref's case can be persuaded to deviate down, and some judges as in the Ft. Dix 5 are persuaded to deviate up)."
While 15 years is still a terribly harsh price for an innocent man to pay, Aref got half the time of the normal legal guidelines. Holy Land Foundation founder Ghassan Elashi got 65 years [38], while the Ft. Dix 5, who were falsely accused of conspiring to attack a military base, got life imprisonment. [39].
In addition to developing effective legal defense strategies to keep innocent individuals out of prison, there needs to be a wider-reaching offensive strategy, that will prevent future preemptive prosecutions and turn around the general attitude towards Muslims.
Witch Hunt
Not only must Muslims be willing to deconstruct the Zionist politics, ideology and mobilization, on which the Islamophobic prosecutions Americans have been based, but Muslim activists must have the ultimate goal of putting Jewish Zionist criminals into jail.
This would require hiring private detectives as well as a legal team. We'd need to find out who decided to target whom and why, which people exactly made the plans and carried out the plans. Who sent the press releases to the media claiming false claims to sway the jury against the defendants? Who funded the lawsuits and who coordinated the media to coincide with the lawsuits and who did the psychological analysis to decide what to do in court vs. what to say in the newspaper? In other words, who came up with the plan on how to exaggerate the actual legal battle and make it into something sensational? Who then went forward and used that fake story to back up their political agenda? Whose agenda?
We do know the names of many government officials, who are openly disloyal to the US in subverting the US government for the benefit of Israel, who published the fantasy framework documents in general, but who exactly are all the individuals who fed these authors the information, and who then advanced the plans to destabilize the US by using false intelligence to cover up their own crimes?
We actually have a fairly good idea because there are a limited number of players in the Zionist mafia. But we have to dig up the documents and that can only be done by initiating our own lawsuits and investigation as we evolve an aggressive strategy to find out who was feeding Rumsfeld and Ashcroft their twisted ideas. Whose game plan were they following? We know in general who did it, but you need exact names to accuse people of treason or seditious conspiracy.
The private detectives should also look among other things for financial and real estate improprieties unrelated to incitement of Islamophobia. Evidence of corruption could easily throw a monkey wrench into an anti-Muslim show trial.
What is necessary to uncover a conspiracy involving infiltration of the government is certainly more than a criminal defense lawyer's job description, however competent. It requires a full-scale investigation of Zionist organizations on the level of a "witch hunt." That's where Aref's witnesses would come in handy, as they were offered rewards by the government to falsely testify against him. It would be good to trace the line of command back to whose idea it was to incriminate Aref.
It is impossible to mount a defense that the prosecution was generated through improper influences without proof that this is so. Defense lawyers may feel that improper influences are behind a prosecution but the judge will not allow speculation about it. It requires proof, and given the nature of the challenge it would be very difficult and costly for an individual lawyer in an individual case to make any headway in obtaining such proof for an individual case. What is really needed is some money and effort to be spent uncovering all of the hidden influences that are working on our prosecution system right now, which could be used in all preemptive prosecution cases.
Zionist Terror Prosecutions: Stopping FBI Entrapment Operations
To be successful in preemptive prosecution cases you usually have to mount an aggressive defense, related primarily to the bad faith of the government. However, some lawyers believe that if you go after the government aggressively it can backfire on their client. The judge may get angry and increase the sentence. Some judges will retaliate against a defendant for an aggressive campaign against the government.
In order to change the government response on issues of terrorism and the question of who are America's enemies, it may help to differentiate between those in law enforcement who are truly interested in protecting US security from the Israeli agents who have infiltrated the US government on every level and in every branch. Because the FBI or Homeland Security are infiltrated by the very people committing the financial and political crimes against the US and pointing the finger at (and falsely framing) Muslims who never posed any threat to the US, these agencies have a vested interest in cleansing themselves of this corruption.
In some sense Muslims are fortunate that Zionist subversives overreached after 9/11 to manipulate Congress into enacting tough anti-terrorist legislation, for after the Flotilla Massacre this year, no one can rationally deny that Israel is a terrorist state and that American supporters of Zionism materially aid Zionist terrorism.
Instead of arguing legal technicalities, American Muslims can use US anti-terrorism laws as key elements of a comprehensive strategy to break the continuing sequence of show trials resulting from FBI entrapment tactics. If the FBI is running sting operations against innocent Muslims, it should certainly be running the same sort of operation Jewish Zionists, who are aiding and abetting Zionist terrorism.
Herein lies the key to stopping the entrapment operations and political show trials. If Muslim organizations can persuade foreign governments to pressure the US to prosecute Zionist terrorism supporters in the USA, the non-Jewish non-Zionist segment of the US foreign policy establishment may use what little remains of its political clout to work to stop FBI stings and the Islamophobic show trials. Once American Zionist leaders realize that they are vulnerable to terrorism prosecutions, they themselves will use the full extent of their power to stop these trials as antithetical to fundamental Constitutional principles, to which they will suddenly develop a profound attachment.
Conclusion
In the aftermath of 9/11 the US Department of Justice and especially the FBI have had a policy of rooting out a phantasmagorical world-wide anti-USA Islamic terrorist conspiracy by arresting and by prosecuting Muslim American leaders on ridiculous charges. Developing tactics and strategies to fight such US governmental abuses of human rights requires honest documentation, understanding and discussion of the actions, origins, tactics, and strategy of the Islamophobic conspiracy that has moved from the Israel Lobby and the organized Jewish community to the highest levels of the US government.
There is no magic bullet that will fix the US justice system. It will take thousands of lawsuits over both large and small issues, and lots of PR. I truly hope that someone could come up with the money and the will to deal with this problem. It's certainly less money than destroying and rebuilding country after country, although it is no small amount of money that would be needed.
We know this for sure. As long as a subversive like Stuart Levey holds his post in the Treasury despite prima facie violation of Federal Seditious Conspiracy law, which makes preventing enforcement of the US criminal code in time of war a crime almost equivalent to treason, legal persecution of Muslims will continue while Yassin Aref and many other good and decent Muslims suffer in prison.
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