By Greg Moses
Special to The Rag Blog
I don’t know much about death. I’ve seen very little of it up close, and I’d like to see less of it on TV. But I have this idea that the less death we cause each other, the better.
However, the death penalty seems to be based on another kind of idea. The world will be better, says the death penalty, if we all get together and make one death more.
See the rest of the article at The Rag Blog
An email from Rita Zawaideh of the Arab American Community Coalition of Washington State (theaacc.org) brings word of two Dallas media success stories. The story of the Ibrahim family abduction is seeing the big sky of day in Texas.
Brett Shipp of WFAA-TV Dallas begins a report with the words “inhumanity” and “atrocity.”
Speaking of Shipp, Jay Johson-Castro sends word that “Shipp says one cannot imagine the amount of ‘hate mail’ he has received today. Please let your support of this story be known to him at www.wfaa.com/bshipp as well as to your friends, business associates, etc. who believe in our country and the ideals it portrayed when our ‘immigrant’ ancestors arrived.” We have sent word to Mr. Shipp that we appreciate his reporting. Have you?
As for believing how much hate mail Mr. Shipp gets, of course we can. That hate mail is evidence of the political appetite that the Ibrahim arrest was supposed to satisfy in the first place, the weekend before the November election.
At the Dallas Morning News, Paul Meyer and Frank Trejo, along with Dianne Solis, quote New York immigration attorney Theodore Cox, who is filing habeas corpus pleas in Dallas and Austin today. Meyer and Trejo credit Cox’s involvement to Zawaideh and Dallas real-estate developer Ralph Isenberg.
The DMN story ends with a paragraph describing the mail that Ahmad Ibrahim gets on behalf of his jailed relatives, including 15-year-old Hamzeh:
Another letter arrived recently, this one from the Richardson school district. The letter was to inform Salaheddin that his son Hamzeh had been absent from or tardy for classes at Berkner High School for 35 days since Aug. 14. The absences, the letter said, could make the parents guilty of a Class C misdemeanor, “contributing to truancy.”
This major-market coverage breaks an important threshold in public awareness. Well done, Rita!
The Ibrahim story also breaks into the Austin media market thanks to a story by Diana Welch of the Austin Chronicle, with a picture featuring the Kopit family at Vigil III. These corporate media outlets get their phone calls returned from immigration spokespeople, if only to be told that nothing can be said: “due to – you guessed it – ‘reasons of homeland security.’ ”
–gm
Note: mission accomplished. Attorney Bardavid reports that habeas corpus motions for the Ibrahims were filed today and the Dallas court has already issued its order for immigration authorities to show cause next week, with a court hearing for Feb. 9. A similar order out of Austin is expected this Friday. “Keep shining the light,” he said via cell phone. Will do.–gm
By Greg Moses
New York attorney Joshua E. Bardavid will file motions in two federal courts today for immediate release of the Ibrahim family. The first, for Salaheddin Ibrahim, who is being held at Haskell, Texas will be filed in Dallas. The second, for Hanan and her four children, who are being held at the T. Don Hutto prison in Taylor, will be filed later today in Austin. Bardavid will be accompanied by his mentor, Theodore Cox.
In the writ of Habeas Corpus, Bardavid and Cox rehearse the general facts of the “stateless” Palestinian family who came to the USA in 2001 on Jordanian travel papers that have since expired, who were denied asylum in 2004, and who maintained open residency at an address on file with immigration authorities.
Without the procedural exercise of a “bag and baggage letter” that would have ordered the family to leave on its own expense, immigration authorities “went to Petitioners’ home without notice” and detained them all, sending the father to Haskell, the mother and four children to Taylor, and the 2-year-old daughter to her uncle’s home.
Attorneys Bardavid and Cox have recently applied on the family’s behalf for travel to Palestine and Israel. The attorneys argue that it is unlikely that the stateless family will be granted rights to return to Palestine; meanwhile, it is unlawful to hold them in prison.
Meanwhile 15-year-old Hamzah is jailed in a cell by himself, while his sisters Rodain and Maryam (14 and 8 years old) bunk together. Mother Hanan, who is pregnant, shares her cell with 5-year-old Faten.
“Upon information and belief, all Petitioners’ have been yelled at and verbally threatened by the guards at T. Don Hutto,” says the writ. “For example, on several occasions, five-year-old Petitioner FATEN was yelled at and threatened with ‘punishment’ for her failure to ‘stand still’ during the population ‘count,’ which is taken four-times per day.”
The two youngest children, Faten and Maryam “sob uncontrollably on a near-daily basis, complain of nightmares, and exhibit symptoms of psychological traumatization.” Yet, “none of the Petitioners have been given access to psychological counseling while incarcerated.”
Some of the more chilling sections of the writ concern the treatment of Hanan:
6.Upon information and belief, Petitioner HANAN has not received the medical treatment appropriate for a woman in her fifth month of pregnancy.
7.Upon information and belief, Petitioner HANAN has been forced to remain standing on numerous occasions, despite complaints that she was tired or in pain.
8.Upon information and belief, on at least one-occasion, Petitioner HANAN was threatened with solitary confinement (and thus, separation with five-year-old Petitioner FATEN) because she complained that she was too tired to participate in the daily 5:30 a.m. showers.
9.Upon information and belief, Petitioner HANAN was not given prenatal vitamins, despite repeated requests, until approximately January 18, 2007.
10.Upon information and belief, there is no obstetrician/gynecologist staffed at T. Don Hutto prison, and thus Petitioner HANAN must be drive approximately two hours away to be examined by a qualified doctor.
11.Upon information and belief, Petitioner HANAN is placed in arm and leg shackles for the duration of her OB/GYN visits.
12.Upon information and belief, the total time for a OB/GYN examination, including travel time is eight hours.
13. Upon information and belief Petitioners HAMZEH, RODAINA, MARYAM, and FATEN have great difficulty during the eight hours they are separated from Petitioner HANAN, and are deeply traumatized by this experience.
14.Upon information and belief, Petitioner HANAN has declined to receive treatment by the OB/GYN due to concerns regarding the impact her absence causes to her minor children.
15.Upon information and belief, Petitioners are not provided with culturally appropriate food (“halal”).
16.Upon information and belief, Petitioners are prohibited by their religion from eating pork, yet some of the meals that are served to them contain pork. As a result, upon information and belief, Petitioners have skipped meals.
Following issues recently pursued by the Texas Civil Rights Project’s demand for seven hours of schooling at Hutto, Bardavid and Cox note that education at the prison is inadequate, and they dismiss corollary claims that the so-called family detention center may be considered something other than prison, quoting a passage from the US Supreme Court 1967 Gault ruling.
The boy is committed to an institution where he may be restrained of liberty for years. It is of no constitutional consequence — and of limited practical meaning — that the institution to which he is committed is called an Industrial School. The fact of the matter is that, however euphemistic the title, a ‘receiving home’ or an ‘industrial school’ for juveniles is an institution of confinement in which the child is incarcerated for a greater or lesser time. His world becomes a building with whitewashed walls, regimented routine and institutional hours. Instead of mother and father and sisters and brothers and friends and classmates, his world is peopled by guards, custodians, [and] state employees….
The section of legal arguments in today’s writ is quite similar to a “request for release” submitted Jan. 24 to the Department of Homeland security. Cox and Bardavid argue that the family’s detention is “arbitrary and capricious,” unconstitutional, and in violation of detention policies that immigration authorities have themselves adopted.
Therefore, argue Cox and Bardavid, the detention of the Ibrahims should be declared “unlawful”and the family should be released “immediately.”
Last week we posted Yanar Mohammed’s appeal for international solidarity with women in Basra, Iraq who have been suffering a crime wave of rape and murder.
This week we find supporting analysis from MADRE. The women’s rights group based in New York joins issue with Mohammed’s appeal to discount Islam as the base causal culprit.
It makes much more sense to examine gender’s system of power relations whose number one enforcement mechanism is recourse to violence against women. There is nothing “Muslim” about that system, except that its Muslim proponents, like their Jewish, Christian, and Hindu counterparts, use culture and religion to rationalize women’s subjugation.
In fact, shifting the focus from culture to gender reveals a system of power that is nearly universal. Yanar Mohammed, the founder of OWFI, describes this year’s killings of women in Basra as a campaign “to restrain women into the domestic domain and end all female participation in the social and political scene.” Compare her comment to Amnesty International’s conclusion about the ongoing mass killings of women in Guatemala. According to Amnesty, that wave of violence, “carries with it a perverse message: women should abandon the public space they have won at much personal and social effort and shut themselves back up in the private world, abandoning their essential role in national development.” This certainly captures the intent of Iraq’s Islamists, who have little in common with the killers of women in Guatemala, other than a rigid adherence to a gendered system of power.
Instead of lamenting the “brutality” of Islam, the US media should start connecting the dots between the US occupation and the empowerment of people who use violence against women as a strategy to pursue their political agenda. We can start with the fact that the Pentagon has trained, armed, and funded the very militias that are killing the women of Basra.
Applying these lessons to home turf, let us not forget the “feminization of poverty” in the USA nor the murder epidemics among women in Nuevo Laredo and Ciudad Juarez.
As the MADRE analysis suggests, war is predominately a man’s world, and the more war we make, the more women will suffer in vastly disproportionate ways.
In our attention to the suffering of the women of Basra we should not go around pretending that patriarchy’s violence has no causal reflection in our own mirrors at home.
–gm
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