Category: Uncategorized

By Greg Moses

CounterPunch / Z-Net / GlobalResistanceNetwork

Since this is the season for intensive pre-election-year planning, we have to be worried about the public relations victory achieved by the Minuteman Project in Arizona. In five weeks time, they have gone from “vigilante” to “brave and caring.” And in the process they have staged a powerful wedge issue for 2006.

The public relations success of the Minuteman Project shows up in a poll from Arizona that reports 57 percent approval for the border action, but please note first of all how nicely the question is asked: “The Minuteman Project is a group of citizen volunteers who have been patrolling the Arizona-Mexico border to watch for people coming into the United States illegally and reporting them to the U.S. Border Patrol. Do you support or oppose the Minuteman Project?”

The first line of challenge to the public relations victory of the Minuteman Project is to ask how the organization is best described: as a group of “citizen volunteers” or a group of “armed vigilantes”?

Standing next to the President of Mexico on March 23 — one week before the Arizona border action began — USA President George W Bush was asked about “those people who are hunting migrant people along the border” and he answered: “I’m against vigilantes in the United States of America. I’m for enforcing law in a rational way. That’s why you got a Border Patrol, and they ought to be in charge of enforcing the border.”

Never mind for the moment how Bush’s appeal to the principle of “rational law” along the USA border is a blatant contradiction to his dismissal of “rational law” everywhere else. Does the President this time have good reason to make his claim? Is the Minutemen Project a threat to “rational law”?

One way to determine if a person is acting as vigilante or volunteer is to see if the person is coordinating his or her law enforcement activities with relevant law enforcement agencies. Neighborhood Watch Committees for example operate under supervision of local police. Is this the same relationship we find between the Minuteman Project and the USA Border Patrol?

“The Border Patrol administration chose to have no contact with our project other than quickly responding when we reported an illegal crossing,” said one Minuteman vigilante in an interview with Sher Zieve.

“To be 100% straight up with you and your readers,” said another Minuteman vigilante in an interview with La Shawn Barber, “some of our folks are going to be armed. This is something that is really hard to understand if you have not worked near the border. Having a weapon is not only legal, it’s stupid not to have one. Most of the ranchers don’t go out without a pistol on their belt.”

So we have it from the horse’s mouth: the Minutemen (unlike your average neighborhood watch committee) were not operating under supervision or control of the relevant law enforcement agency, yet they were carrying weapons in an organized effort to enforce criminal law. Now what part of vigilante do we not understand?

To be sure, the Minutemen have so far operated a very disciplined vigilante activity, confining themselves strictly to observation and reporting. But they are armed vigilantes nevertheless, not simply “citizen volunteers” as characterized in the Arizona poll.

It is strange to google news reports about Minutemen and find so many headlines that reinforce their well-crafted “volunteer” image. It is doubly strange to wonder why the media behave this way in clear dismissal of the President’s preferred “vigilante” language.

If we consider the media’s widespread disregard for the President’s framework when he discourages vigilantism along the USA border yet recall their nearly unanimous adoption of his language when he called upon vigilantism in global arms inspection, we get a brand new theory for media bias. It was never the President himself that the media favored all those years, it was simply the vigilante attitude. When it comes to selling news, media love lawlessness best.

Indeed, if world audiences did not respond well to images of rogue tough guys taking law into their own hands, we would not have the current Governor of California to consider, who made a movie career playing to vigilante appeal and who now hopes he can achieve the same star power as an elected powerhouse. On that score alone, how could we argue that he is wrong?

Yet when Hollywood celebrates a vigilante for movie entertainment, they usually make sure that the hero is an underdog type who is beset by forces more powerful, well connected, and deadly. Therefore, in order for Schwarzenegger to trade on his image as vigilante hero along the Mexican border, dramatic formula requires him to adopt the Minuteman characterization of Mexican immigration as deadly foe. And this is where the moral structure of Minuteman vigilantism collapses into racist pandering, exploiting fearful images of collective evil on the move. In Hollywood terms, Schwarzenegger the politician is no Terminator. Instead he now offers a reprise of Birth of a Nation, the movie where the Klan rides in to save the USA from Negro rule.

When the Arizona poll asked what people thought about the Army reservist who held seven illegal immigrants at gunpoint at a highway rest stop, the results returned a significant wedge with 44 percent approving, 41 percent disapproving. Again, the phrasing of the question raises difficulties. When a person is described as an Army reservist, was he on duty or off? If he was off duty, what relevance is his status as a reservist? But if he was on duty why was HE arrested for aggravated assault? So we wonder why the question must describe the alleged perp as an “Army reservist”?

Both questions in the Arizona poll are phrased in ways that tend to pre-legitimize vigilante actors as either “citizen volunteers” or “Army reservists.” Yet responses to the question about the obviously criminal activity of the rest stop vigilante demonstrate that armed confrontation with illegal immigrants in America is capable of producing a significant wedge. So we must attend to this incubator of ugly politics before something more terrible grows.

An April 29 report from the Associated Press signals that Minuteman politics is being tested for Texas. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, who is widely rumored to be considering a run for Governor says of the Minuteman Project that, “these people have shown a commitment and a caring that should be acknowledged here in the United States Senate.”

As Damu Smith counseled a gathering of Texas peace activists in February, these wedge issues work against progressives only when we lose our grip on the larger agendas. If progressives fail to meet people with comprehensive responses to the experience of common life, then the wedge issues begin to look like they are causes of political weakness, although they are only symptoms. Crime and security are palpable issues, but they need not generate politics of criminalization, suspicion, or crackdown.

Do progressives have inclusive answers when it comes to policies that will help workers and citizens feel better about their chances in the world? Do Texas progressives have something more significant to offer than the retirement of Republican hammer Tom DeLay?

Finally, it will be interesting to see if political passions for vigilante actions persist now tha
t th
e Minutemen have announced plans to go after employers who hire illegal immigrants. What this means, I fear, is not some transformative confrontation with corporate power, but busloads of workers heading South.

“Our federal government is not doing their job,” Schwarzenegger said. “It’s a shame that the private citizen has to go in there and start patrolling our borders.”

vig·i·lan·te n.

One who takes or advocates the taking of law enforcement into one’s own hands.

A member of a vigilance committee.

By Greg Moses

“Your article is insulting and incredibly naive,” writes a correspondent from Alaska in response to “Gringo Vigilantes.” Since I am an insult to all law abiding Americans, she suggests that I should move to Mexico City.

Well first of all, I think we can come down off that high horse about law abiding Americans. I know very few. Most folks I know try to get away with something that’s illegal. It could be as simple as speeding. Or a preference for cash transactions in order to avoid taxes. Maybe they have stories about how they engaged in underage drinking, faking a drivers license. Or maybe on a Saturday night they dabble in some illicit kind of high life. In fact, if law abiding Americans never broke laws, there would be no market for illegal immigrants in the first place. So I imagine that if I’m an offense to law abiding Americans, I don’t need to worry too much about the percentages.

“The Minutemen are there to stop ILLEGAL immigration,” says my Alaska reader. “What part of ILLEGAL do you not understand?” She reminds me that there are legal methods to seek immigration through visas and work permits. What’s wrong with asking people to immigrate legally so that we can know “who they are and where they are.”

On this point, I admit I have little to say. We do offer legal avenues for immigration and they should be preferred. I have not argued in favor of dismantling the border patrol or the federal immigration bureaucracy. There is a lot about the status quo that I have accepted. And this is a predictable feature of the civil rights framework. There is a lot about the status quo that it tends to accept.

“You used the term ‘VIGILANTE’ in a negative way, as if it is a bad thing,” but were I to consult the Spanish definition of vigilante, she suggests I would discover it simply means to be watchful, and that’s all that the Minutemen are doing, being watchful. They have not been accused of any violence whatsoever. “I am glad those VOLUNTEERS are there and if I could, I would be right there with them. YOU, and ALL Americans owe them a big ‘THANK YOU’ for doing freely, what our paid government employees have not been doing.”

Thank goodness the Minutemen have indeed conducted a disciplined vigilante action. They have been only watching, with no reports of any “hands on” activity whether violent or not. But as my correspondent makes clear, the kind of watching being done in this case is the kind of watching that government employees are paid to do, because watching for people who are breaking immigration laws is what border patrols are paid for. The MinuteMan Project is not a group of volunteers, despite what every copy desk in America may say.

The Minutemen count as vigilantes because they have deputized themselves to assist in the enforcement of criminal law without working under authority of paid law enforcement personnel. And I do mean to say that is a bad thing when people who are not duly authorized to enforce the law begin to deputize themselves to take law enforcement into their own hands. Compare Gov. Schwarzenegger’s description of the Minutemen to a dictionary definition of vigilante. Are they not taking law enforcement into their own hands by Schwarzenegger’s own admission?

I could remind my Alaska correspondent that there are also legal ways to apply for work as a federal immigration enforcer. There are ways to seek employment as a border patrol agent or as an immigration bureaucrat. For American citizens, there are ways to engage the political process on matters of immigration policies and border patrol budgets.

When borderland residents say that Minuteman presence has cut down on the sound of helicopters in the neighborhood, their testimony suggests that the vigilantes have displaced usual law enforcement practices. So these are some considerations that go into the mix as we debate the MinuteMan Project: it steps into criminal law enforcement without going through any process of authorization.

But there is another dimension to the question that rarely keeps a distance from the Minuteman talk about law. When vigilantes stake themselves along the Mexico border, are they really not enforcing a color line? From a civil rights perspective, vigilantes have a preference for the color line, and there is almost nothing about the MinuteMen Project that would lead one to believe they are any different.

In keeping with the tradition of vigilantes along the color line, my Alaska correspondent offers an argument that includes anti-Mexican sentiment:

You may want America to look like Mexico in the near future, but I do not want that for my posterity. In the past, immigrants have tried to assimilate into OUR culture. Not these interlopers. They want to retain their language, their lifestyle and their morals, and force US to accommodate them at the expense of our own language, lifestyle and morals.

Language, lifestyle, and morals. How in the world does one untangle these passionate motives from the vigilante talk about legality? In the end it is difficult to imagine that if language, lifestyle, and morals were not the real issues here that the question of legality would rise to the top in the first place. It is not the breaking of law per se that motivates these “sovereign citizens of the United States” but a more specific kind of threat: the threat of a future swallowed up into Mexican identity.

On the question of Mexican identity, I wish I could report that MinuteMan sympathizers expressed some wonderment and appreciation for the cultural and economic contributions made by Mexicans to the USA. It would be quite another constellation if we were hearing from vigilantes who acknowledged and appreciated Mexican heritage. But we don’t. So as my correspondent accuses me of “picking and choosing” which laws to obey, I can see that vigilantes have chosen laws that help them patrol the color line.

Will the vigilantes take their binoculars to the picking fields at harvest time and watch for labor law infringements upon migrant workers? Will they assist in enforcement of minimum wage? The list of laws about which the vigilantes are not being watchful suggests that they have made a choice. And their choice is not so much about a kind of law as it is about a kind of people.

But how well do the MinuteMen and their sympathizers know the Mexican people. It is a perfect question to ask this week. So we conclude this installment of replies to Gringo letters by providing the following link to reasons why Mexicans celebrate Cinco de Mayo and why Gringos might want to join them.

Hasta luego.

By Greg Moses

DissidentVoice / CounterPunch

The thing about courthouse reporting is the stories come packaged for delivery. For a thirty-dollar check and a five-minute wait, the clerk at the federal courthouse will hand you a document whose news value comes pre-certified by affiants with impeccable credentials, signed off by a U.S. Magistrate Judge.

“That’s sixty pages,” she says, not meaning to remind you of the audio thud that television producers delivered yesterday when they dropped this report in front of the camera from two feet above the desk.

Walking back out the silent stone building, past the metal detector, wishing the courteous guardian a nice afternoon, I wonder that times have changed so many of these heavyweight buildings into inner sanctums. Thank goodness that I could explain myself briefly.

Standing later in the May shade across from the Texas capitol, sipping a short cup of coffee, I am nothing but depressed, having stopped off at the pizza joint for a stuffed slice and preview of the thudding federal litany that served in late February to warrant the search of the South Austin home of Riad Hamad. It is a summary of the last chapter of his life.

“We had a very unpleasant visit from the FBI and IRS agents yesterday morning and they walked out with more than 40 boxes of tax returns, forms, documents, books, flags, cds etc.,” wrote Riad Hamad in a Feb. 29 email that was quickly forwarded across the internet. “The special agent said that they have a probable cause for money laundering, wire fraud, bank fraud..etc and I think that all of it stems from more than 35 years of watching me.”

Indeed, the 60-page package, unsealed last week by the federal court in Austin, contains an affidavit which swears that Riad Hamad’s home had been under surveillance enough to be able to report license plate numbers from his car and those driven by his closest companions in life.

There is a fourteen page inventory of the stuff that was taken from Riad Hamad’s house on Feb. 27. Miscellaneous bills seized from the dashboard of a BMW. Notepad with notes seized from a briefcase in a Ford Explorer. Tax return info found in a canvas bag. Deposit slips. Paycheck stubs. Spreadsheets of addresses, names, phone numbers. Articles of Incorporation for the Arab-American Cultural Society. Miscellaneous medical records.

From the top stereo shelf of the kitchen the feds seized CD Roms. From the second shelf they took cassette and camcorder tapes. From the dresser in the master bedroom they grabbed various letters. From the kitchen table some W-2 forms. From luggage in the master bedroom they removed the airline luggage tags.

They took the Dell Optiplex, the HP Pavillion, the Gateway laptop, and both Compaq Presarios, along with two generic thumb drives, one Kingston 2GB media card, and two floppy disks.

From master closet (hers) they took passports. From master closet (his) they took 80 video tapes. From the master bedroom nightstand they took a sheet of paper with handwriting. And from the family room they took something called “Volkswagon of America.”

From the master bedroom desk they took medical bills (’98 forward) and house purchase documents. From the trash can outside the house they pulled a postal service package sent from Stone Ridge, NY to Riad Hamad.

And David Rovics, if you’re out there listening, they took your CD, too, from a file cabinet in the office. That’s some of the stuff listed up to page 8 of 14, but that’s enough, don’t you think, to get the picture. They came to Riad Hamad’s house, and they cleaned him out.

Well, maybe we should also mention (from page 11 of 14) that on the piano they found a book entitled, “War on Freedom.”

They don’t say what they found in the safety deposit box when that was searched, too.

The federal agent who asked for the search warrant works for the Joint Terrorism Task Force, and he sets forth a case of probable cause involving “an illegal fraud scheme through the use of non-profit organizations, false documents submitted via U.S. Postal Service, false documents transmitted via wire communications, the failure to file federal income tax returns for the years 1999 through 2003 and 2005, and tax evasion for the years 1999 through 2006.”

There is absolutely no probable cause that Riad Hamad had anything to do with terrorism. Some sizable cash payments were allegedly delivered via ATM to the Occupied Palestinian Territories. But according to Google, the man named in the affidavit as the one who received those payments appears to be a well-known nonviolent activist. In fact, the affidavit says very little about where Riad Hamad spent his money.

“Hamad sends large amounts of money to the Middle East and/or to charities that forwarded these funds to the Middle East. The disposition of these funds is unknown at this time.”

At the website for the Palestine Children’s Welfare Fund, is a list that has not been referenced in the affidavit or by any press reports about the affidavit. There Riad Hamad offers some accounting of his donations and spending. According to my calculations, based upon the materials that he posted online, Riad Hamad publicly declared donations in the amount of $491,751.05 and expenses in the amount of $331,897.00 for the period starting Jan. 1, 2002 and ending Jan. 31, 2008.

Beginning in 2005, however, there are large gaps in the online numbers, some of them apparently due to inadvertent sloppiness. For example, Riad Hamad posted a document that purports to show donations from 2005, but actually shows donations from 2006. Therefore, he posted the 2006 numbers twice, probably without realizing that he had overwritten his previous file.

“Most small nonprofits have terrible record-keeping,” writes an Austin attorney who helped Riad Hamad find a lawyer after the Feb. 27 raid. On that count, Riad Hamad appears guilty as the rest.

Federal agents hinted that Riad Hamad may have been a tax protester, too.

“Hamad also filed a document titled ‘Redirect TAX Money AWAY from Israel’ with the IRS,” says the affidavit. “Your affiant believes that this form is used by ‘anti-tax’ groups as a way for them to justify not filing federal income tax returns or not paying income tax to the IRS.” Riad Hamad sent in the form twice, during 2002 and 2007. He also declared zero withholding from his paychecks. And when he filed for an extension in 2005, “Hamad listed his tax liability, Total 2005 payments, Balance due, and Amount you are paying as being $0.00 for all of the line items.”

So far, we have a story of a big-hearted man with a temper for justice who worked fast but loose in the cause of Palestinian children’s welfare. This is the man that everyone says they know well. It is the man that I talked to once by telephone when he was helping the incarcerated Palestinian families at the T. Don Hutto prison in Texas.

As a boy growing up in Beirut, Riad Hamad would look from his widow over tented communities. This is how he remembered it for me:

“What are those tents, Daddy?”

“Those are the Palestinians, Riad. They are waiting to return home.”

Could that boy grow up to be capable of drowning himself at the age of 55 in despair over what things had come to? Could he put duct tape over his own eyes, bind his own feet and hands, and shuffle himself down into Austin’s Lady Bird Lake?

“He didn’t seem suicidal,” says one Austin attorney who met with Riad Hamad after the raid. And in an email to me on March 1, Riad Hamad dashed off the phrase, “will fight like hell.”

But when Riad Hamad called his friend Paul Larudee via cell phone on the evening of April 14, he spoke in a hushed voice. And when Larudee shared news that a donation

had arrived at the new California address of the PCWF, Riad Hamad said, “Well, it doesn’t matter.” He would be dead by April 15. Was it the ultimate tax protest?

Beyond this point the affidavit veers into pathetic allegations about the background details of Riad Hamad’s home finances. Checks written via credit card accounts. Student loans from several colleges. Stock accounts. I can understand why Riad Hamad would not want to face these public humiliations.

By chance on the bus home I am reading Derrida’s discussion about the role that pity plays in Rousseau’s account of human morality. Isn’t pity a good word for what young Riad Hamad must have felt as he peered out his window upon the Palestinian refugee camps of the 1950s? Isn’t pity a good word for what motivates so many people, as Paul Larudee explains, who actually travel to Palestine and experience the pain of dispossession up close? And isn’t pity what I right now feel for the kind of pain that must have consumed the last days of Riad Hamad’s life?

Riad Hamad never could reconcile himself to a world where so many people could know so much about the Palestinian children, and care less.

Salamat, Riad Hamad. They are selling your suicide note down at the federal courthouse today.

Salamat, Riad Hamad. Would you have us buy it?

On the evening of April 14, about the time that Riad Hamad went missing, he placed a call to Paul Larudee in California via cell phone. The Texas Civil Rights Review has archived Mr. Larudee’s recollection of that phone call under our selected death notices. During the call, Mr. Larudee reported to Mr. Hamad that a donation had been mailed to the new California address for the Palestine Childrens Welfare Fund. “Well, it doesn’t matter,” said Mr. Hamad.

“I wish I had told him that the person who sent the check had also written a letter thanking him for the gifts of handmade Palestinian crafts and other items that Riad had sent as a thankyou for a previous donation,” writes Mr. Larudee. “He had also included handmade thankyou cards from his two young daughters. The older daughter, age 11 had written, ‘Live in peace on the world. Everybody should LOVE! I am sad because people should be nice to you, but they are not.’ The younger, age 8, had written, ‘I hope you start to live in peace.’ “

Mr. Hamad would never see those notes from children, encouraging him to continue his charity work. On April 16, his body was pulled from Lady Bird Lake.

As part of our effort to undestand the last months of Mr. Hamad’s life, TCRR asked Mr. Larudee a few questions about his work with Mr. Hamad:

TCRR: Would it be correct to say that you were instrumental in getting PCWF designated as a nonprofit? Did you have any information about donations or expenses as part of that work?

Paul Larudee: As you may know, in the past, PCWF has had fiscal sponsors like MECA and Kinder USA. In February, Riad asked the International Solidarity Movement – Northern California, which gained 501(c)(3) nonprofit status last September, to do the same. Our way of doing that was to create an account for that purpose under the PCWF name but under our complete control. We (presumably including Riad) originally thought it would be used for very limited purposes, such as company matching grants for their employees. However, it has assumed a much larger role since the investigation and Riad’s death. Nevertheless, it continues the charitable work that Riad started, to the extent that it receives the funds to do so.

TCRR: Also, would you be willing to say a few things about your relationship with Riad? When you met, how you came to assume the responsibility of the PCF address for donations, and how you worked with Riad during the past few months, especially after the FBI raid in late February?

Larudee: As far as my relationship with Riad is concerned, it was until last year the same as he had with many other supporters and purchasers of the goods that he brought from Palestine. At that time he became part of the Free Gaza Movement, as a procurement volunteer, making arrangements for purchases. PCWF also initially collected funds for this project, until Free Gaza got its own nonprofit account through ISM in October, in much the same way PCWF did five months later.

From the time of the investigation until Riad’s death, we were in close contact, trying to interpret events and the best way to respond to them, and especially with regard to legal questions. He very clearly felt that he and his family were being persecuted, but I told him that I thought that he really shouldn’t worry unless he was indicted, because they might find that they don’t have enough evidence for an indictment. I guess he didn’t want to wait for that and especially didn’t want to be arrested. He thought that if the evidence didn’t exist, it would be created.

TCRR: Finally, it would also be interesting to hear a few things regarding your own motivations for working on the cause of Palestinian rights.

Larudee: My own motivations in working for Palestinian rights are not different from those of most persons who discover a gross disparity between the way the Palestinian condition is viewed in the U.S. media and the reality that they experience first hand by visiting the region. The film Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land is a good documentation of the disparity, but no film replaces direct experience. For me, that experience began in 1965, and my activism became more intense after Ariel Sharon’s accession to power in 2001. I’m attaching my bio for further info.

Bio: Dr. Paul Larudee is a San Francisco Bay Area activist on the issue of justice in the region known as Palestine, which includes Israel, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Jerusalem. He was born to an Iranian Presbyterian minister and his American missionary spouse in 1946 and grew up in the American Midwest. He has a Ph.D. in linguistics from Georgetown University and spent 14 years in Arab countries as a contracted U.S. government advisor, Fulbright-Hays exchange lecturer, teacher, training administrator and graduate student.

Paul has visited the Palestinian region ten times since 1965, including four times with the International Solidarity Movement, a Palestinian-led movement that applies nonviolent principles to resist the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. Paul was among seven ISM volunteers wounded by Israeli gunfire in April, 2002 in an otherwise nonviolent attempt to help Palestinian families. In 2006, he was held in Israeli detention for two weeks while appealing a decision to deny him entry, then expelled from the country. He was in Lebanon during the 2006 Israeli invasion. He is one of the founders of the Free Gaza Movement, which seeks to break the siege of Gaza through seaborne nonviolent action. His publications can be found by searching on his name and at his weblog, www.hurriyya.blogspot.com.

Paul is a compelling storyteller of personal experiences and speaks of justice and equitable solutions for all persons who consider their home to be in Palestine, without discrimination on the basis of race, religion or ethnicity. He offers new perspectives and provides insight into the way the parties themselves view the conflict. He challenges established viewpoints and misunderstandings, and offers innovative ideas for making progress toward resolution. For further information, contact 510-236-4250 or larudee-at-norcalism.org