[News] Criminalizing Solidarity: Sami Al-Arian and the War of Terror

[Anti-Imperialist News]

While this is a lengthy article, it is crucial reading especially as 
it is clear that the origins of this wave of repression and 
anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian attacks by the US government have their 
origins under the Clinton regime and are not merely a "Bush" phenomenon.

"...the Clinton Administration that has played a major role in the 
criminalization of resistance internationally, and the 
criminalization of solidarity within the United States -- the 1996 
Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. This law, targeting 
international movements of resistance to U.S. imperialism, formalized 
two previous Executive Orders by President Clinton, creating a list 
of "Foreign Terrorist Organizations," to be designated by the U.S. 
State Department, to which "material support" was forbidden and could 
be criminally prosecuted."
So much for the lesser of two evils approach to this "electoral" process.

cm


Criminalizing Solidarity: Sami Al-Arian and the War of Terror
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6767.shtml

Charlotte Kates, The Electronic Intifada, 4 April 2007

Dr. Sami Al-Arian, Palestinian political prisoner, is being held in a 
prison hospital, after a debilitating 60-day hunger strike seeking to 
draw the attention of the nation and the world to the injustice 
visited upon him, jailed for his commitment to justice and dignity 
for his homeland. This is not a scene from an Israeli jail, however, 
but from a U.S. prison in North Carolina. Al-Arian's hunger strike 
ended at the pleas of his family -- yet without justice for Al-Arian, 
whose imprisonment is part and parcel of a U.S. government policy of 
targeting Palestinian activists, as well as the broader Arab, Muslim 
and South Asian communities, in an internal "war of terror" whose 
policies run parallel to that being waged abroad.

The case of Sami Al-Arian is a story of persecution, perseverance, 
and, ultimately, the determination of those in power to criminalize 
resistance and punish Palestinian activism, subverting not only the 
principles of justice but also their own criminal justice system in 
order to do so. Sami Al-Arian, 49, is a Palestinian refugee who has 
lived in the United States for over thirty years and has, for the 
last decade, alongside his prominent role as an activist and leader 
in the Palestinian, Arab and Muslim communities in the Tampa Bay, 
Florida area and nationally, his work as a professor of computer 
science at the University of South Florida, and his personal life as 
a husband and father to five children, waged a prominent battle to 
protect fundamental rights within the U.S. from an assault through 
secret evidence, racist detention policies, and an all-out assault on 
community organizing and solidarity work within targeted communities. 
Al-Arian has lived with over a dozen years of surveillance, and eight 
years of FBI agents shadowing his movements. Today, he is imprisoned, 
despite the fact that he was convicted of nothing by a jury, despite 
a parade of witnesses and years of harassment.

Dr. Mazen Al-Najjar, Al-Arian's brother-in-law and a fellow professor 
at USF, was arrested in 1997, presumably for a minor visa violation, 
which, at the time, should have been a simple problem to correct. 
However, as a stateless Palestinian refugee, al-Najjar was instead 
imprisoned for three and one-half years on the basis of secret 
evidence to which Al-Najjar was never given access. Al-Najjar's case 
became a primary target of the then-Clinton Administration's demand 
to be able to hold and deport people on the basis of secret evidence, 
a case that is haunting today in its relevance to the thousands of 
men held around the world -- and the nearly 400 held at Guantanamo 
Bay currently -- imprisoned by the U.S. government with evidence they 
cannot confront and with no legal process to ensure any sort of real 
hearing. In the late 1990s, however, secret evidence had not yet 
assumed its terrifying and major place in the government's 
extra-legal arsenal of imprisonment and detention. Sami Al-Arian 
played a leading role in the campaign to defend his brother-in-law 
and obtain his freedom -- a fight in which, it seemed, they were 
victorious, as, in late 2000, Immigration Judge Kevin McHugh, 
describing the government's case -- based on secret evidence -- as 
"devoid of any direct or indirect evidence" to support Al-Najjar's 
detention, ordered his release. By mid-2001, a bill to restrict the 
use of secret evidence was progressing through Congress, all but one 
of the non-citizens held on secret evidence had been freed, and even 
George W. Bush had expressed, during his campaign, disapproval for 
the practice. (Bush's statement against secret evidence, in a twist 
that now seems bitterly ironic, helped to secure the support of many 
in the Muslim and Arab communities; in Florida, Al-Arian himself was 
key in mobilizing those communities to support Bush's campaign.)

Both Al-Arian and Al-Najjar were prominent activists in the Muslim 
community, deeply involved with the Islamic Community Center of Tampa 
Bay and the Florida Islamic Academy, as well as dedicated advocates 
for the Palestinian cause. The organizations Al-Arian co-founded at 
the University of South Florida, the World and Islam Studies 
Enterprise (WISE) and the Islamic Concern Project (ICP), produced 
volumes of educational materials and held numerous events and 
conferences, helping to link their Islamic work with the struggle to 
free Palestine from occupation and oppression, as well as providing 
educational perspectives often silenced or unheard within U.S. 
discourse around Palestine. Al-Arian was an exemplary founder and 
leader of community institutions that provided immense support to the 
strengthening of the Muslim community in Florida, as well as the 
national and international trend of Islamic work for justice in 
Palestine. Amidst the defense of his brother-in-law, he was also 
president of the National Committee to Protect Political Freedom.

For this work, Sami Al-Arian was targeted for spying, harassment and 
intimidation -- none of which silenced nor stopped his dedicated 
activism. Following the events of September 11, the repressive 
mechanisms of the state swung into action; Mazen Al-Najjar was 
re-arrested, on the same immigration charges, and later deported. 
Al-Arian, prominent as a spokesperson and leader in the Muslim 
community, was invited to appear on notorious right-wing TV talk show 
host Bill O'Reilly's program. While Al-Arian was informed that he was 
to speak about the response of the Arab and Muslim communities in 
South Florida to September 11, instead, he was confronted with an 
ambush by O'Reilly based on his commitment to the Palestinian cause, 
a commitment that O'Reilly, working from a campaign based on the work 
of die-hard Islamophobes like Joe Kaufman and Steven Emerson -- who 
sought to blame the Oklahoma City bombing on Muslims -- aimed to 
criminalize, attacking Al-Arian on the air, and declaring that if he 
were the FBI, he would be watching Al-Arian. The response to the 
O'Reilly show on the part of the University of South Florida 
administration was swift, and in line with the repressive 
post-September 11 environment that saw thousands of Arab, Muslim and 
South Asian men rounded up, detained for little or no reason, and 
deported, as well as the passage of repressive legislation like the 
USA PATRIOT Act: Al-Arian was placed on leave from USF, which claimed 
that it could not ensure his security.

While al-Arian had campaigned for his brother-in-law's civil 
liberties for years, his were now under attack. Faculty unions 
supported him in his campaign to preserve his ability to teach and 
work. Nevertheless, the worst was still to come. On 20 February 2003, 
Al-Arian was an arrested on the basis of an indictment that charged 
him, as well as three co-defendants, fellow community activists 
Sameeh Hammoudeh, Hatem Fariz and Ghassan Ballut, with various 
charges centered around the allegation that they provided "material 
support" to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a Palestinian resistance 
organization designated by the U.S. State Department as a so-called 
"Foreign Terrorist Organization."

Like the persecution of Mazen Al-Najjar, this prosecution had its 
roots not solely in the post-September 11 repression of the Bush 
Administration, nor in the infamous PATRIOT Act, but rather in 
legislation passed during the Clinton Administration that has played 
a major role in the criminalization of resistance internationally, 
and the criminalization of solidarity within the United States -- the 
1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. This law, 
targeting international movements of resistance to U.S. imperialism, 
formalized two previous Executive Orders by President Clinton, 
creating a list of "Foreign Terrorist Organizations," to be 
designated by the U.S. State Department, to which "material support" 
was forbidden and could be criminally prosecuted. This list of 
so-called "Foreign Terrorist Organizations" was not restricted to 
Palestinian (or even Arab or Islamic) organizations and political 
movements -- indeed, it has come to include such diverse examples of 
resistance to imperialism as the Communist Party of the Philippines 
and its associated New People's Army and the Revolutionary Armed 
Forces of Colombia. However, its genesis was as part of the U.S. 
effort to enforce the Oslo process upon the Palestinian people.

The U.S. was deeply involved in the early to mid-1990s effort to 
destabilize the Palestinian movement and create a willing Palestinian 
security force for the benefit of their Israeli occupiers, a process 
deceptively titled a "peace process" that, nevertheless, brought 
little to no peace for Palestinians, no real autonomy, a deeper and 
wider network of Israeli control of the West Bank and Gaza, and no 
justice whatsoever for the millions of Palestinian refugees and 
exiles, who, after sixty years, continue to be denied their right to 
return home to their original homes, lands and properties, from which 
they were forced in the Zionist military campaign to conquer 
Palestine and ethnically cleanse it of indigenous Palestinians in 
1948. Despite decades of valiant struggle by the Palestinian people 
within and without Palestine, as well as the vast weight of 
international support -- outside that of U.S. imperialism, which 
heavily funded and armed Israel, as a Western settler colony within 
the heart of the Arab world -- the post-Gulf War and post-Soviet 
international political environment, combined with an illusory 
promise of some relief for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, 
and accentuated by the political weakness of important sectors of the 
Palestinian leadership within the Palestine Liberation Organization 
at the time in their belief that making concessions to the occupying 
power would in some way help to obtain meaningful independence, or at 
very least, some form of Palestinian state, led to the ratification 
of the "Oslo Accords." The following decade brought nothing but more 
misery to Palestinians, as the assassinations of Palestinian 
political leaders, the military occupation, the tripling of exclusive 
Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, the introduction 
of closure and economic isolation of the West Bank and Gaza, and a 
vast network of checkpoints and roadblocks failed to materialize 
anything like independence or a state, while Palestinian citizens of 
Israel continued to live under an apartheid regime as second-class 
citizens at best and Palestinian refugees continued to be denied 
their rights. It is not surprising, therefore, that many Palestinians 
and Palestinian political organizations rejected the Oslo accords as 
improper and destructive to the process of national liberation, 
instead creating a "Palestinian Authority" with no real power except 
for its authority to serve as a security force for the occupier and 
oppressor, in its assigned role to root out and suppress Palestinian 
resistance to occupation. The Islamic organizations in Palestine, 
Hamas (the Islamic Resistance Movement) and Islamic Jihad, rejected 
Oslo, as did the Palestinian left, including the Popular Front for 
the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Democratic Front for the 
Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). In time, the brutal realities of Oslo 
led to the Al-Aqsa Intifada, often termed the "Second Intifada;" 
however, this Intifada was far from only the second Palestinian 
uprising for national rights, but rather the latest in a long history 
of uninterrupted struggle for national liberation that had been 
proceeding since before the Zionist occupation of Palestine, from the 
time of British colonialism in Palestine in the early twentieth century.

In 1995, however, President Clinton sought to shore up an unjust 
process built on an attempt to make the national movement of the 
oppressed collaborate with its oppressor by issuing an Executive 
Order that declared a "national emergency" to deal with the "threat 
posed to the Middle East peace process" by Palestinian resistance -- 
as well as Hezbollah, for continuing Lebanese resistance to the 
occupation of Southern Lebanon, and froze all transactions with 
twelve named groups, including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the PFLP, the 
DFLP, and Hezbollah. This Executive Order was soon followed by the 
push for the 1996 law, which went beyond freezing transactions to 
creating a criminal offense of "material support" to these 
organizations. This served an important objective in attempting to 
isolate Palestinian resistance and ensure Palestinian submission to 
Israeli rule. As a nation largely in exile, the Palestinian and Arab 
community in the United States -- and around the world -- was deeply 
involved in political and charitable activity to support its brothers 
and sisters inside the occupied land and living in refugee camps in 
the Arab world. In addition, the larger Muslim community was also 
actively involved in supporting Islamic peoples and movements against 
occupation in Palestine and elsewhere. The resistance organizations 
criminalized through this repressive legislation were not merely 
organizations engaged in armed struggle. On the contrary, they were 
-- and are -- engaged with all facets of Palestinian life. They are 
the political organizations of Palestine, and their activists are 
involved in social programs, community programs, unions, women's 
organizations, student organizing and all aspects of social and 
community life -- and the U.S. government has been quick to deem 
large numbers of such organizations to be "front groups" for 
resistance organizations, which, if honest, completely ignores the 
way in which a national liberation movement functions. Such movements 
are grounded in the people -- in grassroots organizing, social 
programs and community involvement. The resistance belongs to the 
people, and cannot be uprooted merely by a law prohibiting financial 
support. However, if observed through the lens of the U.S. 
government's political interest in aiding Zionist colonialism and 
repressing the Palestinian movement for liberation, it is clear that 
these laws targeted not "terrorism," but instead, the entire national 
liberation movement of the Palestinian people, criminalizing its 
institutions and its movements. (After all, if the U.S. was 
interested in securing peace and ending "terror," clearly the 
swiftest mechanism it would have for doing so would be to immediately 
end its billions of dollars in annual support -- including its 
provision of the latest U.S. military machinery, from Apache 
helicopters to M-16 rifles -- to the Israeli regime and to impose 
sanctions upon that regime for its conduct of terror against the 
Palestinian and Lebanese people.)

The criminalization of resistance should be seen within the context 
of the history of international solidarity inside the United States 
for national liberation movements, most of which are readily branded 
as "terrorists" by the imperialist forces opposing them. Take, for 
example, the movements in support of the people of Nicaragua and El 
Salvador in the 1980s, or the movement against South African 
apartheid. Both the Sandinista movement and the Farabundo Marti 
National Liberation Front (FMLN) were denounced as "terrorists," as 
was the African National Congress -- an organization with offices in 
major U.S. cities whose presence was able to lend vast coordination 
and strength to the anti-apartheid solidarity movement. In light of 
this repressive legislation and the U.S. government campaigns against 
these organizations in decades past, it is difficult to imagine that 
they would not be on the "Foreign Terrorist Organization" list of 
their day -- leading to devastating and dramatic consequences for the 
solidarity movements that proudly supported those popular national 
liberation movements and their resistance. The El Salvador and 
Nicaragua fundraisers of the 1980s branded illegal, would legislation 
to ban funding to the contras or the Salvadoran dictatorship ever 
have been passed? The ANC branded an "FTO," would, within the U.S., 
the anti-apartheid movement today be such a singular example of a 
successful solidarity movement? In the early part of the twenty-first 
century, when it is popular to declare that one opposed apartheid in 
South Africa all along, it is often forgotten that the U.S. 
government and its mainstream spokespeople for decades supported 
South African apartheid in all of its brutal settler-colonial horror, 
as today it supports Israeli apartheid in its own settler-colonial 
horror, and designated the African national liberation movement as 
"terrorists."

A vast array of charitable institutions and social organizations 
within Palestine has been branded fronts for the resistance 
organizations, and it has never been clear which organization will be 
so described next. In the post-September 11 atmosphere of repression, 
charities within the U.S., such as the Holy Land Foundation, were 
shut down and their assets frozen. Yet, even before September 11, the 
mechanism for the suppression of Palestinian community organizing in 
the U.S. was activated by the 1996 law and its executive order 
predecessor. The Oslo process itself was devastating to many 
Palestinian community institutions, as many fell victim to post-Oslo 
hopes for the end of the struggle and others sought to reestablish 
themselves despite the transformation of much of the PLO's national 
liberation structure to the new realm of the PA, limited in focus to 
the West Bank and Gaza, and with a newly circumscribed mandate that 
fell far short of national liberation. However, these laws were also 
laying the groundwork for repression of the community and creating 
fear of action and fear of supporting even purely charitable 
initiatives for their brothers and sisters in Palestine. Cases like 
those of Mazen Al-Najjar, combined with the existing 
immigration-based prosecution of Palestinian activists in Los 
Angeles, known as the Los Angeles 8, for their entirely legal 
activities in promoting the Palestinian cause, were part of creating 
fear in the community. Islamic institutions, which, outside the PLO, 
faced different post-Oslo challenges than their leftist and secular 
nationalist fellow organizations in the national liberation movement, 
yet had maintained a basic continuity of organization in the pre and 
post-Oslo era.

With the rise of the Al-Aqsa Intifada in Palestine, within the United 
States, Palestinian community as well as solidarity organizing 
rebounded in parallel to the upsurge in the movement in Palestine. 
New organizations were founded and existing organizations were 
inundated with support and volunteers. Despite repressive 
legislation, the obvious need of the Palestinian people suffering 
from the daily brutality of occupation combined with the 
inspirational example of their resistance inspired activism in the 
community around the world. Repression, however, fell harshly on 
these organizations and institutions. Charities that had received 
funds from thousands, if not millions, were shut down and attacked as 
"fronts for terror," while prominent community leaders faced 
insinuations and, at times, direct prosecution. While initially 
hailed as "terrorism" cases, in reality, these often revolved around 
minor immigration matters or financial matters with no relation to 
alleged "terrorism." The enactment and enforcement of this repressive 
legislation led to the defunding of Palestinian institutions, both 
religious and secular, as funding of the social and community 
institutions of Palestinian life, as well as for the financial 
welfare of Palestinian families, were directly impacted by both the 
freezing of funds and the repressive political climate that created a 
well-founded fear of persecution for any fundraising that would end 
up benefiting people outside the borders of the United States.

That so many organizations and institutions have continued to survive 
and in fact grow is a testament more to the creativity and commitment 
of the Palestinian, Arab and Muslim communities -- as well as that of 
solidarity activists -- than it is to the limitations of repressive 
legislation. Many organizations have focused on educating the public 
in the U.S. about the Palestinian cause, to win their support, while 
others have found non-governmental organizations and individual 
families to which funds can be safely distributed without fear of 
persecution. (It is also to be noted that the U.S., the European 
Union and others were instrumental in the Oslo era of promoting the 
rise of an NGO class in Palestine in an attempt to supplant the 
resistance organizations and the national liberation movement within 
the Palestinian social fabric, and that this repressive legislation 
can also be seen as a means of directing funding to approved 
institutions and attempting to undermine or separate the resistance 
from the people through this mechanism. However, such NGOs have not 
supplanted the resistance movements, and those NGOs, while 
independent of political affiliations with any organization, are 
often loyal to the Palestinian cause, rather than to the initiatives 
of the U.S. administration, and it is those NGOs that Palestinian and 
solidarity organizations in the U.S. have been able to safely 
support.) Just as the Oslo accords themselves had sought to segment 
out the Palestinian community -- separating Palestinians in the West 
Bank and Gaza from those within the borders of the Israeli regime and 
the largest Palestinian community, those in exile in the Arab world 
and internationally, the repressive legislation as well as the 
post-September 11 assault on the community sought to reinforce that 
division and ensure separation between Palestinians here and 
Palestinians there.

On 21 March, the New York Times noted that UN officials were 
observing that Palestinians were "becoming increasingly dependent on 
humanitarian handouts." Given the amount of energy expended by the 
United States and Israel over more than a decade to defund, isolate 
and undermine Palestinian institutions rooted in the people, this can 
hardly be seen as surprising. Nevertheless, the United States has 
opted to continue its war on Palestine, side by side with the war of 
the direct occupier upon the Palestinian people, and alongside its 
own direct war on the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, and its threats 
upon Iran. It has done so not merely by imprisoning its own 
Palestinian political prisoners, alongside the 10,000 held in Israeli 
jails, including 41 members of the Palestinian Legislative Committee, 
among them Aziz Dweik, the elected Speaker of the PLC from Hamas, and 
Ahmad Sa'adat, the General Secretary of the Popular Front for the 
Liberation of Palestine, kidnapped with four of his comrades in March 
2006 when Israeli military forces stormed the PA prison in Jericho 
where they were being held at the behest of the Israeli regime. The 
United States -- and indirectly, every U.S. taxpayer -- funds the 
provision of military supplies to the occupier and other direct aid 
to the tune of over $10 million daily. Meanwhile, the U.S., in 
collaboration with the EU, has imposed a devastating economic 
blockade against the West Bank and Gaza, in a new attempt to punish 
Palestinians for democratically electing a government committed to 
resistance and national liberation while demanding that government 
accept the "right" of the occupier state -- built on stolen 
Palestinian land and created as an ethnically and religiously 
exclusive settler-colonial entity based on the denial of Palestinian 
rights -- to exist as such a state and that the people of Palestine 
renounce their own right to resist against the occupation that has 
devastated their lives.

Despite the blockade, Palestinians have not acceded to these 
conditions, based, as they are, not on any concept of justice or 
legitimacy, but rather on the perpetuation of occupation without 
costs. In response, the U.S. administration, as it once attempted to 
criminalize resistance and demand Palestinians jail and imprison 
other Palestinians for the benefit of the occupier, has attempted to 
foment a civil war among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, 
seeking out willing collaborators for funding and military training. 
Nevertheless, the commitment of the Palestinian people in their 
entirety to resisting this attempt has carried the day, despite the 
best efforts of U.S. envoys. The U.S. government's war on Palestine, 
however, has not been limited to the massive support of the oppressor 
while attempting to isolate the oppressed -- it has centered efforts 
on the Arab League summit in Riyadh taking place this week, 
attempting to pressure the Arab regimes taking part in the summit -- 
many of whom maintain their power despite despotism and corruption 
through the support of the U.S. -- to relinquish their support for 
the most basic of Palestinian rights: the right of Palestinian 
refugees expelled from their land to return to their original 
properties, homes and lands. The return of six million Palestinian 
refugees, of course, disrupts the Zionist project to create an 
ethnically exclusive settler-colonial state on Palestinian land, and 
thus, generations of Palestinian refugees have been forced to pay the 
prices of Israeli apartheid, racism and colonialism, kept from their 
stolen land at the behest of an occupying power, an apartheid state 
ruling by the gun. The United States government, seeing maintenance 
of the Zionist regime in Palestine as a primary goal, has devoted 
itself, through envoys such as Condoleeza Rice, to seek an Arab 
negation of this fundamental right. However, as much as many of the 
Arab regimes may be dependent upon U.S. support, they also have 
legitimacy to retain among their own people, and it is clear that the 
Arab people do not support the attempts to undermine Palestinian 
rights sponsored by the U.S., in an attempt to bring about Arab 
normalization with Zionism.

In the meanwhile, Sami Al-Arian remains imprisoned. When his case, 
and those of his fellow activists, was brought to trial, despite a 
parade of witnesses including numerous Israelis, through the court, 
he was convicted of nothing, acquitted on eight charges, while the 
jury deadlocked 10-2 on nine others. This was the result of over a 
decade of FBI surveillance, under repressive legislation, in the 
post-September 11 political climate. It is no accident, however, that 
Sami Al-Arian was not convicted by a jury; in fact, it was so clear 
to his defense team that, rather than present their own defense, 
Al-Arian's attorney, William Moffitt presented only four words: "I 
rest my case," for Al-Arian's defense, after the close of the 
prosecution case, and ten of the twelve jurors wanted to convict 
al-Arian of precisely nothing.

Al-Arian's case is not an anomaly in this regard. 
<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6493.shtml>Mohammad Salah 
and Abdelhaleem al-Ashqar, two Palestinian community activists who 
were tried in Chicago on "racketeering" charges revolving around 
alleged "material support" to Hamas, were acquitted of all 
"terrorism"-related charges in February 2007. As William Moffitt, 
attorney for both Ashqar and Al-Arian, told the New York Times, "the 
Bush administration cannot win this war by trying to make criminals 
out of people who are fighting for their freedom ... and two American 
juries have said that." The Al-Arian and Salah/Ashqar juries made a 
very clear statement that the people of the United States are not 
interested in convicting Palestinian, Arab and Muslim community 
leaders of "terrorism" for aiding their community and supporting 
their people under occupation, which, despite the stand of the U.S. 
government, is not surprising.

While U.S. imperialism wages war on the Arab world, invades and 
occupies Afghanistan, continues an occupation in Iraq that has 
brought about the deaths of over 650,000 Iraqis as well as several 
thousand U.S. soldiers, funds a war on Palestine, funds and arms 
Israel's war on Lebanon, threatens Iran, and attempts to criminalize 
all resistance to its rule as it imprisons thousands around the 
world, kidnaps and "renders" people to countries where they will be 
interrogated under torture, and holds hundreds of men at Guantanamo 
Bay in an international symbol of the apparent impunity of U.S. 
imperialism and its brutality, the vast majority of people within the 
United States have seen only misery from these policies. The minimum 
wage -- on which many are forced to subsist -- is barely adequate for 
survival. Millions of people in the United States have no health 
care, and costs of education have been skyrocketing increasingly out 
of reach for many. Youth of color in U.S. cities are put on a fast 
track to criminalization, targeted by often-brutal police and 
introduced at a young age to the world's largest prison system. 
Women's rights are increasingly under attack, while women -- and men 
-- immigrants, who form a major component of the U.S. working class, 
have been targeted for severe repression. Within the U.S., around 
solely domestic issues, the right to dissent is under attack, as the 
administration seeks ever-increasing authority to spy on citizens, 
tracking everything from library books borrowed to wiretapping 
millions of telephone calls. Meanwhile, the power of major 
multinational corporations appears to grow, virtually unchecked. And 
yet, the administration attempts to sell its bankrupt policies to the 
people of the United States through scare tactics, racist 
manipulation, and repression. It deems resistance organizations 
"terrorist" and attempts to link the resistance of a people against 
occupation and oppression and for liberation to hatred of Jews -- a 
deceptive attempt to obscure the reality that Zionism, a political 
ideology based on racism and colonialism, and the regime it has 
created, is neither representative nor equivalent to Jewish people or 
Judaism as a religion -- while waging a bitterly racist "war on 
terror" that has been, in reality, a "war of terror" for its victims 
around the world, including those in the United States.

Despite the resounding defeat for the government in Al-Arian's case, 
it expressed its determination to re-prosecute Al-Arian. In this 
environment, with the stress of years of persecution wearing on his 
family, Sami Al-Arian agreed to a plea bargain in which he would 
plead guilty to one count of "providing services" to "people 
associated with" Palestinian Islamic Jihad -- the enumerated 
innocuous activities including hiring an attorney for his 
brother-in-law, Al-Najjar, and filling out immigration forms for a 
visiting Palestinian scholar -- and swiftly be deported. Despite his 
over thirty years in the U.S., and the U.S. citizenship of his entire 
family, he was willing to accept this in order to finally win some 
peace for his family. However, despite the request made by the 
prosecution at the entering of the plea that Al-Arian be sentenced 
lightly, and primarily to time served, the judge on Al-Arian's case, 
Judge James Moody -- who had shown immense bias during the 
proceedings of the case, allowing numerous Israeli witnesses to 
testify about the costs of Palestinian resistance to Israel while 
allowing no testimony about the suffering of Palestinians, or 
Palestinian rights -- sentenced him to an additional sentence while 
lecturing Al-Arian about his "guilt" in a manner that was, in fact, 
completely rejected by the jury in the case. Al-Arian and his 
co-defendants, like Salah and Ashqar, were not convicted, or even 
charged, with anything even related in the most remote degree to an 
attempt to harm anyone within the United States, or even the 
government or military of the United States -- every charge against 
them pertained only to the Palestinian struggle for national 
liberation against Zionist occupation. Al-Arian was scheduled to be 
deported following his sentence, in April 2007. As part of his plea, 
Al-Arian secured a promise that he would not be called upon to 
cooperate in any additional government prosecutions. Nonetheless, 
Gordon Kromberg, a Virginia prosecutor who has assailed "the 
Islamization of America," targeted Al-Arian as part of his fishing 
expedition in Virginia targeting Muslim organizations there through a 
wide-ranging grand jury. Despite Al-Arian's plea, Kromberg has 
demanded Al-Arian testify before his grand jury -- attempting both to 
lay Al-Arian open for charges of perjury and force him to serve as a 
witness against fellow community leaders and activists as part of a 
government witch-hunt.

Al-Arian's hunger strike came in protest to his sentence, extended 
yet again, for "contempt" for his refusal to testify, holding to the 
terms of his plea agreement. The use of grand juries as fishing 
expeditions in political cases is neither new, nor restricted to this 
case -- however, the attempt to force Al-Arian's testimony in direct 
contradiction of his agreement illustrates once more what little 
regard the U.S. government has for its own principles of criminal 
justice, in pursuit of a goal of political repression. Of course, 
Sami Al-Arian is far from the only political prisoner in U.S. 
prisons. From the many prisoners of the Black Liberation Movement, to 
Puerto Rican political prisoners, to Leonard Peltier, targeted for 
his work with the indigenous national liberation movement, to the new 
charges against Black liberation movement activists from the 1970s, 
the criminal justice system in the U.S. has always held political 
prisoners in its wars against oppressed communities and oppressed 
nations within the United States. The Al-Arian case is representative 
of an internationalization of political imprisonment in U.S. jails, 
alongside the impunity of Guantanamo Bay and its "military 
commissions" and U.S. secret detention around the world.

However, Al-Arian's case is not only an urgent call for support for 
his case, which is in urgent need of public pressure to make it clear 
that people in the U.S. will not stand for this persecution in our 
name (and with our money -- the prosecution of Al-Arian is estimated 
to have cost the government $50 million of our tax dollars). 
Al-Arian, like his fellow political prisoners in U.S. jails, and his 
fellow Palestinian and Arab political prisoners in Zionist jails, is 
an inspiration to all of those who struggle for justice. Despite 
repression and despite the targeting of him and his family, Sami 
Al-Arian never ceased his work with the Palestinian, Arab and Muslim 
communities. While he was under investigation, being shadowed by the 
FBI and attacked in the press, he traveled coast to coast, continuing 
to speak out for justice in Palestine and in support of the 
liberation movement of his people. He is an example of the courage, 
dignity and bravery of those who resist. Resistance takes many forms 
-- including, for many, like Al-Arian and the others who have been so 
targeted in these prosecutions -- speaking, writing, educating the 
public and building community-based institutions capable of 
mobilizing many for justice in Palestine, and it is that example that 
stands as a reminder of the tasks that are incumbent upon all of us 
that are also committed to that cause.

The U.S. administration engaged these prosecutions not simply to 
target a few prominent activists and leaders. Rather, a major goal of 
repressive legislation and prosecution has always been to silence the 
community of support for the targeted cause, to quiet activism, to 
press people to withdraw from their political work for fear of also 
becoming examples. However, the only successful response to 
repression has always been struggle and defiance in the face of 
repression and not allowing our legal and legitimate work to fall 
silent in the face of repression. The greater the level of activity, 
the stronger the institutions of the community, the louder and more 
visible the movement of solidarity, the stronger we are as a movement 
-- and the more repressive forces are pushed back. Indeed, Sami 
Al-Arian's case is a striking example of repression, of the targeting 
of a community leader and -- despite it all, his continued resistance 
and dignity in the face of attempts to force him to join the 
witch-hunt. With every event for Palestine, every act of solidarity 
and support for the Palestinian people, every Palestinian Arab 
community institution that is rebuilt, supported or encouraged, the 
criminalization of solidarity and the criminalization of resistance 
is pushed back. If that activism were not so crucial, vital and 
important, its leaders and activists would not have been targeted as 
part of the campaign against the national liberation movement. In 
much the same way, if the right to return were not the core and 
crucial issue in Palestine -- the achievable, indeed, realistic, core 
issue in Palestine, it would not be under sustained and direct attack 
from the U.S. and its Zionist allies.

Therefore, in the face of repression, attempted isolation, and the 
war on Palestine, there is only one real choice and one real hope for 
those who seek justice in Palestine, and those who wish to build 
solidarity with Palestine within the United States -- holding to the 
principles to which these political prisoners, those in U.S. and 
Zionist jails, have shown such deep and vigorous commitment: the 
right to return, the liberation of the land, the right to resist, the 
end of apartheid, the undoing of occupation, the freedom for the 
prisoners -- and popularizing them as broadly, as clearly, and as 
visibly as possible, within all areas of society, while supporting 
the mobilization and organization of the Palestinian and Arab 
communities, as well as the organization of the Muslim community, 
wherever and whenever we can. In the face of such sacrifices, it is 
the least we can do, and a critical task not only for Palestine, but 
for all forces of liberation who stand in the crosshairs of 
imperialism, in order to achieve the decriminalization of solidarity 
and the empowerment of community organizing for national liberation.

Charlotte Kates is an organizer and activist with 
<http://www.newjerseysolidarity.org/>NJ Solidarity - Activists for 
the Liberation of Palestine and Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to 
Return Coalition. She is a 2006 graduate of Rutgers School of Law, 
and is admitted to practice law in New York and New Jersey.




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