Guest Editorial: Now That They've Come for the Muslims
Terror, successfully executed, requires two somewhat contradictory threats. First, nobody is exempt: You, yes, you are a target! Second, the idea that some people deserve what they get: Your race, religion, beliefs and, maybe even your actions, make you a deserving target. So it is that the new American Moment is defined by an unremitting war waged by state, church, citizens, soldiers, citizen-soldiers, and vigilantes alike. This is the War on Muslims. The latest threat to burn the Koran was a curious maneuver with both proponents and opponents agreeing that Muslims are dangerous people. Similarly, be it in Roxbury or Manhattan, mosques are dangerous places in the minds of the latter day Crusaders.
To be sure a robust response from progressives and various communities of faith is challenging the anti-Muslim bigotry. Some people have used First Amendment grounds and others the positive attributes of Islam itself for their rebuttals. Unfortunately, none of this makes for a sufficient response. The problem is that over the last decade the war against state terror has already been lost in the courts and the nation’s leading cultural institutions. Elite opposition to the War on Muslims has scapegoated the allegedly ignorant and unsophisticated. But anti-Islamic vitriol is fueled not only by parochial pastors and their "know-nothing" followers. It is also sanctioned by this nation’s legal establishment and by places like Harvard University.
How so? A concept and a person: pre-emptive prosecution and Martin Peretz.
Terror properly executed requires everyone to be a possible target. From Albany to Afghanistan, the sprawling War on Terror has globalized a totalitarian logic: the One-Percent Doctrine. Attorney Steve Downs (of Albany, New York) summarizes Dick Cheney’s lasting contribution as follows: “if there is even a 1% chance of some terrorist act occurring, the government must act to preempt it as though it was a certainty.” In practice, this means that it is okay if 99 innocent people are sacrificed in order to catch or pre-empt 1 actual terrorist. Of course, this is an inversion of what most Americans believe to be the practice of their justice system. "Better that 10 guilty persons escape than that 1 innocent suffer," in the words of William Blackstone, an 18th Century English judge whose articles on common law influenced the framers of the US constitution.
Attorney Downs has documented the impact of Cheney’s 10-fold inversion of the Blackstone ratio. It stems from Down’s first-hand experience representing a cleric sentenced to 15 years in jail for allegedly witnessing a loan. No evidence was presented that the cleric knew that the loan may have come from an illegal source. No opportunity was opened for the defense to discover the evidence and its context. No illegal wiretaps surfaced because the defense had to first prove that the wiretaps existed in order to discover these. Yes, judges had access to the illegal wiretaps but they required that the defense prove its existence before they could access them.
If the reader notices the shift from passive to active voice it is because the persecutors of the Albany imam are both anonymous institutions and real, live people. But if you’re the target or an ally, you do not know from whom the challenge originates… Was it your neighbor? Or just something they said out-of-context? Or an overzealous agent of Homeland Security? Or a paid informant? Or just something they said out-of-context? But, in the end, real, live judges, trained at the finest legal institutions take responsibility for the process.
Steve Downs believes that there is some kind of hidden consensus at work. Otherwise decent people have decided to look the other way. Perhaps believing that their society is under threat, they are prepared to give the prosecutors a pass. In so doing, however, they undermine the protections most of us believe that we have… And, in the case of Lynne Stewart, a lawyer discovers that attorney-client privilege does not apply to her client and not to her! Other lawyers, presumably, take notice. Properly applied, terror spreads beyond its initial victims.
State terror has accomplices. Human Rights First!, an ostensibly liberal group, is prepared to subordinate justice to the ends of the War on Terror: introducing a study recently, they write, “our conclusion from In Pursuit of Justice is that the criminal justice system has been and should continue to be an important tool in confronting terrorism.” Justice as a tool?!
Now that they’ve come for the Muslims, they’re coming for the rest of us. In recent days this is startlingly obvious as a bulleted survey of establishment media headlines reveals.
- 9/20 “Bill Would Give Justice Department Power to Shutter Piracy Sites Worldwide” Wired News
- 9/25 “Obama invokes 'state secrets' claim to dismiss suit against targeting of U.S. citizen al-Aulaqi” Washington Post
- 9/25 “To Protect State Secrets, Pentagon Buys and Destroys Book” ABC News
- 9/26 “Attorney: Feds trying to quiet anti-war activists” Associated Press
- 9/27 "US Authorities Want Power to Wiretap Online Communication” Fox News
Lest any of these seem reasonable in the context of the War on Terror, it should be more widely known that the government sought its extreme surveillance powers well before 9/11 as Wired reported back in 2007. Still, for the threat to everyone to seem real, it has to be applied selectively. And this means stigmatizing people and isolating them. Which brings us to Marty Peretz, editor of The New Republic.
Terror properly executed requires you to be undeserving of constitutional rights. Earlier this month, writing in his blog, Peretz wondered, “whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment, which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.” But he makes this case with yet another outrageous proposition, “frankly, Muslim life is cheap, especially to Muslims.”
On September 13, 2010, he retracted part of his statement. “I wrote that, but I do not believe that. I do not think that any group or class of persons in the United States should be denied the protections of the First Amendment, not now, not ever. When I insist upon a sober recognition of the threats to our security, domestic threats included, I do not mean to suggest that the Constitution and its order of rights should in any way be abrogated. I would abhor such a prospect. I do not wish upon Muslim Americans the sorts of calumnies that were endured by Italian Americans in connection with Sacco and Vanzetti and Jewish Americans in connection with communism… So I apologize for my sentence, not least because it misrepresents me.” Notice that the retraction is about his embarrassment and not the pain his remarks caused. But then he reasserts his Muslim-life-is-cheap claim. His evidence is that some Muslims are treated badly by some other Muslims. By this standard, Catholic life must be seen as cheap because, say, Colombian death squads murder other Colombians, both sides, Catholic. But Peretz has no need for consistency.
Such bigotry from a major national periodical is bad enough, worse still is the endorsement of Peretzprovided by Harvard University in naming a scholarship after him. If a group of students wanted to name anything after Peretz, that is their right, no matter their poor judgement. But Harvard has chosen to endorse their choice and that is a problem for a major university that routinely feeds at the trough of the public largesse through research funds and tax-free endowments.
Harvard’s endorsement of Peretz helps us understand why jurists can turn a blind eye to the prosecutorial abuses involved in targeting Muslims, their advocates and allies. Fortunately, Harvard students have not been silent; later today, the Boston May Day Committee, United for Justice with Peace and the International Action Center will be challenging FBI raids on the anti-war activists. In these actions may be the beginnings of a serious movement.
Resistance, properly conceived, stands on two complementary awarenesses: first, knowing that they will come for everybody; second, knowing that the objective of state terror is to isolate and separate the targeted from the rest of society. This means that we have to fight the temptation to either recoil in fear or become insular in our organizing.
Suren Moodliar is embarrassed that a website he built shares the Drupal CMS theme, Marinelli, with the Dove World Outreach Center.
Open Media Boston Editor/Publisher Jason Pramas has been out of town at a journalism conference for the last few days, and commissioned this guest editorial from Suren Moodliar in place of his regular weekly editorial.
