Israeli court sentences Palestinian MP Jarrar to 15 months in jail
Palestine Information Center – December 7, 2015
RAMALLAH – An Israeli military court on Sunday evening sentenced member of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) Khalida Jarrar to 15 months in prison.
Ofer military court gave Palestinian lawmaker Khalida Jarrar a 15-month prison sentence for purely political reasons, according to her husband, Ghassan Jarrar.
Jarrar was arrested by the Israeli occupation forces from her home in the West Bank town of al-Bireh, on 2 April 2015.
The Israeli government charged her on 12 accounts, and after 25 court hearings, the prosecution and the court settled on three main charges: Providing assistance to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), incitement against Israel, and membership in the PFLP.
Jarrar is a prominent and inspirational leader in Palestinian society. In addition to being a lawmaker, she is a women’s rights activist and a member of the board of directors for the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association.
Addameer reported in November that the Israeli military prosecution relied on alleged secret material to maintain leverage during the trial proceedings in Jarrar’s case.
Jarrar was placed under administrative detention based on “secret material” from the day she was arrested.
Addameer also said that Israel used “fabricated charges” against Jarrar obtained through “deceptive and flawed interrogation techniques” that were used to force confessions from Palestinian detainees.
The witnesses later denied the confessions, which they said were given under duress.
Jarrar’s husband told al-Araby website that the Israeli police had been exhausting his wife by transporting her from prison to court nearly 25 times in the past few months.
“It takes 22 hours to transfer her each time. She is usually prevented from using the toilet for nearly 8 hours and remains in cuffs all the time.”
Jarrar is detained in Hasharon prison where Palestinian women are mainly held. Her husband is not allowed to visit her on “security” grounds.
Jarrar had also been targeted by forced displacement to Jericho from Ramallah by an occupation military order, which she succeeded in defeating after a month-long sit-in at the PLC office and an international support campaign.
“The conviction of Khalida Jarrar comes as no surprise; Israeli military courts serve no function except as an instrument of repression and suppression directed against Palestinians. Khalida Jarrar is a Palestinian political leader and an internationally-renowned struggler for justice. She has dedicated her life to working for freedom for her people and her land, and especially for the freedom of Palestinian political prisoners,” said Charlotte Kates, coordinator of Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network.
“It is urgent that we build the movement internationally to demand freedom for Jarrar and for her nearly 7,000 sisters and brothers held as Palestinian political prisoners inside Israeli jails,” Charlotte Kates added.
Nisreen Azzeh continues to struggle after the death of her husband, Hashem Azzeh
International Solidarity Movement | December 6, 2015
Al-Khalil, Occupied Palestine – The 22nd of November, one month after the passing away of Palestinian activist and dear friend of the ISM, Hashem Azzeh, the team of al-Khalil (Hebron) visited his widow, Nisreen.
Nisreen with her late husband, Hashem Azzeh. Photo credit: Global Research
While sitting in her living room, Nisreen explained how, after her husband’s death, everyday life for her and her family has only gotten worse.
The Israeli army does not allow any visitors into the house. She also says that the army refers to them not by their actual names, but with numbers.
4 days before this conversation took place, Nisreen was coming back home to find the main access to the house closed. The Israeli soldiers had declared it a military closed zone. They asked her, “Why are you so nervous?” To which she replied, “Because the way is closed.”
The soldiers mockingly answered, “Call Mahmoud Abbas and tell him to stop the Intifada.” But Nisreen answered back to this cruel sarcasm, saying that this is H2 area, “which is ruled by Netanyahu.”
Since the main access to her home is now blocked, she is forced to use an alternative entrance where she must climb some very difficult rocks. Nisreen suffers from knee problems, and she can foresee that when the winter and the snow comes, this passageway will be very slippery, putting her in danger of falling.
Both Nisreen and her brother in law are afraid of their children going out alone on the street. They are especially afraid for Raghad, Nisreen’s oldest daughter who is 17, and her cousin, who is 19 years old. Because of their age, both of their parents are scared that the illegal Israeli settlers and Israeli army will shoot and kill them and place a knife next to their bodies, since this is what they have been doing, targeting youth of similar age, almost on a daily basis from the beginning of October. Read more about this here and here.
Therefore, Raghad is not going out of the house alone, and she had to stop walking her youngest sister to school. Now her mother has taken on that task.
Fear of settler violence is part of every day life for the inhabitants of Al-Khalil (Hebron). Nisreen will never forget how she suffered two miscarriages due to settlers’ attacks. During the first miscarriage, she was three months pregnant; the second time, she was four months pregnant.
After one of these miscarriages, which happened in 2003, she had decided to file a complaint to the Israeli Police. After waiting for 8 years, the case was finally brought to court in 2011. The settlers counted with three lawyers, whereas for her it was very hard to pay for all the necessary expenses.
She recalls how, during the first court hearing, the settlers did not show up saying they were sick. During the second court hearing, when the settlers came with three layers, she had presented a video showing how they had attacked her together with her son Younes, who was three years old at the time. The court even requested her to draw a map of the location where this took place. She did so, but the final decision of the court was that she was lying and she lost the case.
In the meantime, Nisreen continues her struggle to provide a life as normal as possible for her children.
For a deeper understanding of Al-Khalil’s daily life struggle, read an interview ISM made to late Hashem Azzeh in 2013 here.
Anti-Assimilation group protests Christmas tree event in Jerusalem
Benzi Gopstein holds a noose at a Lehava meeting shared on social media (Twitter/@ronnie_barkan)
IMEMC News | December 6, 2015
The right-wing Jewish group ‘Lehava’ held a protest outside of the YMCA in Jerusalem, shouting at Palestinian Christian children and families as they were entering and leaving the annual Christmas-tree decoration party.
Lehava is a group that calls for the expulsion of the indigenous Palestinian population from their homes in what is now Israel, in Jerusalem and in the West Bank. At a protest last year outside of a business that had some Palestinian employees, the group chanted “Stop hiring Arabs,” “stop dating our women” and “employing Arabs equals Assimilation.”
The group, whose name in Hebrew stands for the “Organization for the Prevention of Assimilation in the Holy Land”, has also disrupted weddings between Palestinians and Israeli Jews, and handed out fliers saying they are trying to “save the daughters of Israel” by preventing them from dating or marrying Arab men.
A 2011 investigation by the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz found that around half of the annual budget of the controversial Lehava organization was funded directly by the Israeli government.
The leader of the group, Benzi Gopstein, was reportedly present at the YMCA protest on Friday. Gopstein is on the record voicing support for Pinhas Aburamed, an Israeli man who murdered a Palestinian who he thought was trying to flirt with a Jewish girl. Gopstein said that Aburamed is a hero and should receive a medal.
The event that the right-wing Jewish Lehava group chose to protest was a family event described on the YMCA’s website as “A festive evening in the YMCA lobby decorating the Christmas tree, singing carols and enjoying holiday treats.”
The protesters shouted anti-Palestinian and anti-Christian slogans at the children who came to decorate the Christmas tree, including, “The Arabs won’t defeat us with knifes, and the Christians won’t buy us with presents,” and “Jews want a hanukkiah [menorah], not a fir tree”, according to Israel National News.
Around 1% of the population of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza is Christian. The percentage had been higher before the Israeli military occupation and theft of Palestinian land began. The emigration of Palestinian Christians to other countries increased significantly after the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993 and Israeli settlement expansion increased exponentially.
Many Palestinian Christians in Bethlehem, Jerusalem and Nazareth can trace their ancestry back to early Christians who have remained continuously on the land where Christians believe that Jesus was born, died and resurrected.
Why ‘Active Investigations’ Don’t Justify Keeping Police Video Secret
By Jay Stanley | ACLU | December 4, 2015
The Chicago police last week released video of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald being shot to death by a police officer. Release of the video showing the 16-shot barrage came only after a judge order its release, and after more than a year during which the police had refused to make it public. In Minneapolis, protesters have been clashing with police as the police similarly refuse to release video in the recent shooting death of another young Black man, 24-year-old Jamar Clark. In both cases the police have cited the need to keep video under wraps because there is an “ongoing investigation.”
The question of what police body camera video gets released to the public, and when, is an important one, and has become one of the central areas of dispute surrounding the technology. At issue are two sometimes conflicting values: privacy, and government transparency. Our position (as outlined in our body camera white paper and model policy) is that while most video footage should be kept private—held for a short period in case a complaint is filed, not analyzed or used for any other purpose, and then deleted within six months—some video footage is important for the public to see. We call for video of incidents to be releasable under state open records laws where there has been a use of force, a felony arrest, or a complaint against a police officer. Certainly in the case of a police shooting or other use of deadly force, the public’s interest in understanding how and why an officer took such an extreme measure is overwhelming.
Police departments, however, regularly refuse to release video citing their need not to release details of ongoing criminal investigations. Aside from the question of whether police should have exclusive control over videos in the first place, the question needs to be asked: does this general exception to public transparency make sense in the case of body camera or other video footage of police uses of force?
There are a limited and narrow range of purposes for which exemptions should legitimately be granted. Those purposes include:
- Protecting personal privacy
- Protecting confidential sources
- Not interfering with the investigation
- Protecting the right to a fair trial
Many state laws have active-investigation exceptions to their open-records laws, and these laws vary but generally include the above factors, as does the federal FOIA law (Exemption 7). The federal law also includes a broad catch-all exemption for circumstances where disclosure could “reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings,” as well as an exemption for when it could “reasonably be expected to endanger the life or physical safety of any individual.” And, it contains an exemption for law enforcement guidelines, techniques, and procedures where “such disclosure could reasonably be expected to risk circumvention of the law.”
But none of these exemptions justify the withholding of video footage of a shooting or other use of force by a police officer. Exemptions to open-records laws for “ongoing investigations” were simply not created with police video of police shootings in mind, and do not make sense applied to such recordings. Yet police departments around the country are using these rules to block or delay release of video not because it would harm investigations, but because it makes them look bad. This is not how things are supposed to work in a democracy.
Let’s look at each justification for “active investigation” exemptions and how they apply—or not—to body camera footage.
Privacy: One purpose of these exemptions is to protect people from the stigma of being under investigation before the police have even finished assessing whether there is evidence of their involvement in a crime. A police officer who has used deadly force against a citizen has typically already been identified, and has no right to privacy in such circumstances as they are an employee of the public whose actions, ostensibly to protect the interests of that public, merit the highest levels of community scrutiny.
A concrete example of this was given to me recently by Laura Schauer Ives, a civil rights attorney in New Mexico (and former legal director for the ACLU there) who litigates on police use-of-force issues, including the infamous James Boyd shooting. As she pointed out,
The public needs to know if there are problematic officers. That’s why in Albuquerque, we know which officers have shot people three, four times. We have officers who have repeatedly used excessive force against citizens, and that’s the only way to know it, by knowing their names. And that is their job. You’re a police officer doing your public job.
In Chicago, where police and city officials fought to keep civilian complaints secret, the resulting lack of sunshine has allowed problematic officers to stay on the job unpunished (as we now know only because of a decade-long legal battle to bring that information to light).
When it comes to the privacy interests of the subject or victim of a use of force (or his or her survivors), typically they do not object to release of the video on privacy grounds; in the vast majority of cases under contention they are the ones clamoring for release. I recently wrote about an exception, where a shooting victim’s family sought to block release—but even there the public’s interest in monitoring the police force overcomes the privacy rights of the subject of police use of force. Should a video show bystanders with a legitimate privacy interest, their identity can be obscured through redaction of the video.
Protecting confidential sources: If an officer shown in the video is an undercover officer, his or her identity can ordinarily be obscured through redaction. While a case involving an undercover officer is theoretically possible, I have not heard of one. Redaction should also be sufficient should bystanders or others in a video happen to be informants. (And of course unredacted bystander video posted online can render any of these protections moot.) But this exemption to transparency has been abused: Ives told me that in New Mexico “we see the Albuquerque Police Department making the argument that officers who are not undercover, are undercover. If you’re out in public in a police vest that says APD, sorry but you’re not undercover.”
Interfering with the investigation: Another purpose of secrecy can be to avoid alerting suspects that they are under investigation (potentially spurring them to destroy evidence) or revealing what the authorities know about them and their possible crimes. But if there has been a police shooting, then the situation is different from those in which the above concerns apply. In a shooting, or if there has been a complaint, the involved officers know full well that they will be the subject of an investigation. (It is important to temporarily withhold the video from viewing by those under investigation—witnesses, arrestees, and the involved officers—until after they have given initial statements on the incident, as we have explained, but that does not justify any significant delay in release of the video to the public.)
Furthermore, the reason that police don’t want to release the details of an investigation to the public is that they don’t want one member of the public in particular—the perpetrator—to see that evidence. But in a police shooting, once the involved officer has seen that video, withholding it from the public no longer serves the purpose of keeping it from the person under investigation—now it serves only to prevent the public from seeing it. That’s not a legitimate goal on its own.
The right to a fair trial: It is important insofar as possible to protect defendants in criminal trials—whether they are arrestees or police officers—against pre-judgment by the community. Exposure to video evidence can harm not just the defense, but also the prosecution; one former Justice Department official whose job had included prosecuting police officers made the point to me that letting potential jurors in the community view a video before trial will shape and prejudice their impressions of what took place.
This is a legitimate concern, but generally does not hold up against the public’s critical need to engage in oversight of how its police are using force. There are also several factors that diminish the force of this consideration. Bystander video has so far been much more common in police shootings than bodycam video, and nothing can stop bystanders from exercising their First Amendment right to post their videos of an incident for the whole community to see. The courts have dealt with public bystander videos and they can deal with public bodycam videos—through the jury selection process for example, or change-of-venue motions that can be filed if the concern is particularly significant. In addition, it’s not clear how differently a video will prejudice a juror who views it on YouTube before joining a jury, compared to how they’ll interpret it when viewed at trial. It is far more important to get untainted initial testimony from witnesses and participants in a use of force case, than shielding the community at large.
The right to a day in court: There’s another reason it’s not okay to delay release of video until investigations and other legal processes around an incident have run their course: it prevents individuals from seeking justice for police wrongdoing in court. “It’s actually imperative that these things be public because of federal pleading requirements,” Laura Ives told me, explaining:
It used to be when you go to federal court with a claim of abuse, you just needed to make enough of a claim to get past a motion to dismiss. Now the federal standard under a case called Iqbal is that your claim needs to be “plausible.” To demonstrate that, you have to have enough information—you have to have evidence, you have to have a fairly strong claim going into the litigation, and even then you’re going to go up and back within a circuit on the qualified immunity issue before you ever get discovery, before you ever get to see a video or get a deposition. So getting video as a public record, seeing what happened in a shooting for example, is very, very important if you don’t want your lawsuit dismissed before you ever get to see discovery.
Overall, in some circumstances there can be sufficient reason to delay the release of certain evidentiary materials due to an active investigation, but when it comes to police body camera videos, the public’s interest in immediate oversight of how police officers use force is overwhelming, and it is hard to imagine circumstances in which the reasons for withholding such videos are not inapplicable or fatally weak—and even in the scenarios I can come up with, redaction would be sufficient.
Indeed last week’s release of the Laquan McDonald video followed a ruling by a judge who found that the Chicago police had failed to prove that releasing the video would hurt any ongoing investigation. But where existing state open records laws and jurisprudence do not clearly provide for the immediate release of police body camera video, state legislatures should take action to make clear that ongoing-investigations exceptions to open records laws do not apply to police body camera footage. If unusual situations should arise that we have not unanticipated, in which the harms such laws are intended to prevent would be brought about with sufficient severity to overcome the compelling public interest in disclosure, then withholding should be allowed if the police can establish the likelihood of those harms to a judge under a very high standard—and establish that redaction cannot solve the problem. And the videos should be released at the earliest possible moment that those extraordinary conditions no longer apply.
Finally, it’s important to note the significant harm that withholding video of police shootings does to trust and confidence in police and their relations with the community. Such withholding increases the sense of disrespect, and often appears to communities to be another example of police abusing their authority—not without reason, as our analysis here suggests. Police having exclusive control over, and then refusing to release, video of killings, which are disproportionately of Black men, frays even further any semblance of dignity and trust, and brings into sharp relief the use of authority to attempt to avoid accountability.
CNN Goes on Defensive After Calling Man Killed by Police the ‘Son of an Illiterate Heroin Addict’
By John Vibes | The Free Thought Project | December 3, 2015
Baltimore, MD – When reporting on the case of police brutality victim Freddie Gray, the man that was killed by police in Baltimore earlier this year, a CNN writer described Gray as “the son of an illiterate heroin addict.” The article quickly drew backlash and CNN attempted to edit the article, but it was too late, screenshots of the article had already gone viral.
CNN president Jeff Zucker later said that it was simply a mistake and insisted that there was no intent to slander the dead victim Freddie Gray.
“This was a mistake, the digital team removed it last night and inserted an editor’s note to be completely transparent. The editorial intent as the digital team has laid it out to me was to make clear he had a difficult upbringing. But clearly it did not come across that way when it was written and published. We recognize that. It did not work and we removed it. And were transparent about that. That was a mistake,” Zucker said.
Zucker said that the comments were taken “out of context,” however, the context was clear, they were attempting to assassinate the character of a dead man with accusations that were not even relevant to the case. This type of smear campaign is typical for victims of police violence, which is one big part of the reason why people in America are so confused about the police. When the victim is demonized, it allows the police to maintain the moral high ground and it absolves them of their crimes in the eyes of the public.
According to police, Gray was first stopped and arrested by officers at 8:39 am on April 12, and was thrown in the back of a police van 15 minutes later. An entire hour later an ambulance was called to give him medical care, but he sadly fell into a coma died soon after. He suffered broken vertebra and an injured voice box, which required emergency spinal surgery that he never recovered from.
Many suspect that Gray was the victim of a “Nickel Ride”, a horrific police torture tactic where a suspect is handcuffed and placed in the back of a police van without restraints, and driven recklessly around town by police officers. This practice has also been called a “Rough Ride” or a “Cowboy Ride.”
Grays death resulted in the protests and riots that took place in Baltimore earlier this year. The police officers involved in his death are now standing trial for their crimes.
Increasing collective punishment in occupied al-Khalil (Hebron)
International Solidarity Movement | December 3, 2015
Hebron, Occupied Palestine – Israeli forces closed the al-Hareka neighbourhood putting up new roadblocks and completely closing off a whole neighbourhood in occupied al-Khalil (Hebron).
The neighbourhood’s access to the main street has been blocked off with an iron gate for a long time already. Recently, a group of about twenty soldiers arrived to the neighbourhood to further limit the freedom of movement of the Palestinian residents.
One resident, a journalist documenting the soldiers putting the new roadblocks that completely barr any access to about 200-300 people living there, was detained by the soldiers for over an hour. Soldiers attempted to stop him from filming this measure of collective punishment, a clear infringement of freedom of the press. In order to reach the main road or leave their houses, people living behind the wall are now forced to walk all the way around and will thus need at least ten minutes more to reach the military gate that is already blocking their entrance.
Additionally, soldiers have commanded the roof of a private family home for military purposes and have erected a small military base there. A group of six soldiers is permanently stationed on the family home and “they slept on the roof”, as a school-boy explained.
The al-Hareka neighbourhood is bordering the illegal settlement of Kiryat Arba, and thus is often the target of harassment and violence both from the Israeli forces as well as the settlers – often under the protection of the soldiers.
This is yet another measure to intensify the efforts to restrict – or completely stop – Palestinian freedom of movement. Such collective punishment measures have sky-rocketed in the recent weeks and months in occupied al-Khalil, and add to the increasing efforts to further exacerbate everyday life for Palestinians and eventually make them disappear completely.
Israel failed to try perpetrators of settler violence: UN
Press TV – December 2, 2015
A top UN official has voiced concerns over Israel’s failure to bring to justice the culprits of an arson attack in late July that claimed the lives of three members of a Palestinian family.
“Four months have passed since the arson attack against the Dawabsheh family,” Nickolay Mladenov, the UN special coordinator for the so-called Middle East peace process, said in a statement released on Wednesday while expressing worries about “the slow progress” in the case.
The lack of charges was troubling, Mladenov further noted, urging the Israeli authorities “to move swiftly in bringing the perpetrators of this terrible crime to justice.”
On July 31, a large fire broke out after extremist Israeli settlers threw firebombs and Molotov cocktails into two Palestinian houses in the West Bank town of Duma.
Ali Dawabsheh, an 18-month-old Palestinian baby boy, burned to death as a result of the assault. Ali’s parents, Riham and Sa’ad, later succumbed to their severe burn injuries sustained in the incident.
The arson attack sparked angry reactions from Palestinians, including political as well as resistance groups, and led to widespread condemnation across the globe. However, no individual has been charged for the killings so far.
Over the past few days, Israeli media suggested a breakthrough in the case, but a gag order seems to have prevented details from being published.
Israeli settlers have in recent years carried out various attacks including arson and graffiti on Palestinian property in the occupied West Bank and al-Quds (Jerusalem) under the “price tag” slogan. The raids have often turned deadly.
Israel’s failure to make arrests in connection with the Dawabsheh case is reportedly among the causes for two months of violence in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Tensions have dramatically escalated since the Israeli regime’s imposition of restrictions in August on the entry of Palestinian worshipers to the al-Aqsa Mosque compound in East al-Quds.
Palestinians say Tel Aviv seeks to change the status quo of al-Aqsa. They are also angry with Israeli extremists who, escorted by army forces, have stepped up their raids on the sensitive site, which is Islam’s third holiest site after Masjid al-Haram in Mecca and Masjid al-Nabawi in Medina.
More than 109 Palestinians and nearly 20 Israelis have been killed in the recent wave of clashes between Palestinians and Israelis since the start of October.
Israel: The Willing Executioner
By Barbara Erickson | TimesWarp | December 2, 2015
Rasha Oweissi, 23, was a good 30 feet back from a West Bank checkpoint when she was shot and killed, clutching a knife and a bag with a suicide note. Hadeel Awwad, 16, waved a pair of scissors at a Jerusalem security guard and was brought down in a hail of bullets. Ashrakat Qattanani, 16, was killed as she lunged at a woman near a military post.
Their names appear in a New York Times story today, which informs us that some 20 percent of alleged attackers in the past two months have been women, a new and surprising turn of events in the annals of resistance to the Israeli occupation. The article goes on to examine why so many young women in the current Palestinian uprising are “wanting to be killers.”
But the story avoids the obvious question here: How is it that some Palestinians are now courting martyrdom by showing up at checkpoints armed with kitchen knives?
Diaa Hadid and Rami Nazzal skirt this issue throughout the article. There are quotes from Ashrakat’s father who proudly states that his daughter chose to be a martyr, and there is talk of the “romantic” aura of dying for the cause of Palestinian freedom, but nothing is said of the Israeli role here: the summary executions carried out under the thinnest pretexts.
The practice is well known to Palestinians, however, and B’Tselem, the Israeli monitoring group, recently wrote an open letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanding an end to a “horrific string” of unlawful killings. The letter states, “There can only be one outcome in cases that combine an individual with Arab appearance and a knife: execution on the street.”
As a result, any troubled young person looking for martyrdom knows she has only to hold a knife in hand and walk toward a checkpoint to achieve her goal. Thus, Rasha Oweissi could write her suicide note, confident that the executioners would do their job.
The real story here, so carefully avoided in the Times, is the presence of willing executioners at the checkpoints. This angle, however, does not fit into the narrative of Israeli victimhood, so we find this print headline on the article today: “Palestinian Women Assert Role in Uprising,” as if we are celebrating their emancipation as they take up arms.
But there is little to celebrate. The story reports that most of the would-be female attackers have been killed in the two months since the recent spate of knife and vehicular assaults began and that those who survived have been taken into custody. At the same time, not a single Israeli has died at their hands.
Readers do not learn, however, that several of these women died under disputed circumstances. Hadeel Hashlamoun, 18, was the first victim of the trigger-happy forces in this recent surge in violence. She was shot in late September at a checkpoint in Hebron, and although Israeli officials reported that she had a knife, eyewitnesses dispute this. B’Tselem noted the discrepancies and called her death an extrajudicial execution.
The Times story today, however, asserts that Hadeel “pulled out a knife,” ignoring the controversy surrounding her killing.
Hadid and Nazzal note that B’Tselem called the deaths of Hadeel Awwad and Ashrakat Qattanani “public, summary street executions,” but the full import of the B’Tselem charges are not to be found in the Times.
In fact, the organization asserts that the highest levels of the Israeli government are responsible for the series of unlawful killings. “Your government permits—and encourages—the transformation of police officers, and even of armed civilians, into judges and executioners,” B’Tselem writes in its open letter to Netanyahu.
The letter notes that senior members of the government have incited this violence through “inflammatory statements,” and it continues, “A new pseudo-normative reality has effectively emerged in which a ‘shoot to kill’ approach must always be adopted, no matter the circumstances, even when the suspect no longer presents any danger whatsoever.”
Thus reports show that Ashrakat Qattanani was killed after she had been run over by a car and that Nourhan Awwad was shot at close range after being beaten to the ground by a man wielding a chair. Likewise, Hadeel Hashlamoun stood behind a barrier and several feet from heavily armed officers when a hail of bullets ended her life.
A careful reader of the Times story might have noticed that security forces indulged in overkill, emptying rounds of bullets into the bodies of young women after they were already immobilized and lying wounded on the street, but the article avoids any close look at the behavior of police and soldiers, not to mention the provocative comments of government officials.
Once again the Times averts its gaze from the reality on the ground in Palestine. Here we had an opportunity to look at the tragic intersection of youthful romanticism and Israeli brutality, but the newspaper can provide only one side of this equation: Israel gets a pass, as usual, even when the evidence for its crimes is in plain sight.
Follow @TimesWarp on Twitter.
‘New Turkey’: Toward an Authoritarian and Sectarian Police State
By Sinem Adar | Jadaliyya | December 2, 2015
Tahir Elçi, the president of the bar association in southeastern Diyarbakır province and a determined Kurdish human rights lawyer, was shot dead on Saturday, 28 November, during a press statement he had delivered in Diyarbakır. Photos of Elçi’s dead body lying on the ground quickly overwhelmed social media accounts, symbolizing the deadly difficulty of talking about and fighting for peace at this critical juncture that Turkey, and the region at large, are going through. Despite the fact that Turkey is known for its long history of unsolved political crimes and political violence, Elçi’s assassination is an alarming turning point in the final phase, after the electoral victory of the AKP (Justice and Development Party) in the 1 November elections, of consolidating an authoritarian and sectarian police state.
In this essay, I argue that the “new Turkey” the AKP government is forcefully imposing on its citizens goes beyond a mere ideological transformation. It includes a full reorganization of the state’s security apparatus to consolidate an authoritarian and sectarian police state, thoroughly controlled by the AKP government under the leadership of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The institutionalization of this police state is made possible through a physical war against Kurds that is legitimized by a war of discourse, the complete suppression of dissidence, and the manipulation of regional dynamics. In the rest of the essay, I will elaborate this argument by focusing on three disparate events that happened last week: the assassination of Tahir Elçi; the arrest of Can Dündar and Erdem Gül, two journalists at Cumhuriyet daily; and Turkey’s shooting down of a Russian military jet with the claim that it violated Turkish airspace. Although these events are independent of one another and thus there is seemingly no causal relationship among them, they come together as pieces of a rather discomforting, and even alarming, puzzle, indicating the deeper transformation toward building the “new Turkey.”
The Physical War against Kurds and the War of Discourse
The country is at war. It is a war of discourse through the constant and willful reproduction by state elites of the infamous friend-enemy binary. But also, it is an actual physical war brutally carried out through a state of emergency in the Kurdish southeastern and eastern Anatolia. The AKP government legitimizes this physical war against its Kurdish citizens through expansively launching a war of discourse against any form of dissidence. In other words, the AKP government has been strategically manipulating, since the 7 June elections, ethnic cleavages and societal fears, leading up to its electoral victory in the re-elections on 1 November.[1]
Following the suicide bombing in Suruç on 20 July that killed thirty-three and injured 104 people, and the killing of two policemen in Șanlıurfa (which was at first claimed by the PKK, although the group then denied responsibility for it), the ceasefire between the Turkish army and the PKK came to an abrupt end. Extensive and intensive securitization policies in what are defined as “special security zones” were quickly put to work in most of the cities and towns of the Kurdish southeast and east, directly targeting life itself. It is important to emphasize here that the state of emergency and curfews continue today.
The death toll increased rapidly during the period between 7 June and 1 November. A total of 229 civilians died and about 595 were injured in incidents not related to the armed struggle. Among these, 101 died and about four hundred were injured in the Ankara suicide bombing. A total of 150 soldiers, policemen, and village guards died and forty-two were injured during the armed struggle, while at the same time, 181 armed guerrilla members died and nineteen were injured. In addition, nine civilians died and 101 were injured as a result of the armed struggle.[2]
Despite the fact that state violence has been a common practice in Turkey since the establishment of the republic in 1923 (and even preceding the founding of the republic), this particular moment is distinctively different, mainly because of the changes made to the security apparatus of the state. Among these are the reorganization of the National Intelligence Organization (MIT) under the Council of Ministers and the expansion of the MIT’s access to personal and private information; the expansion of power given to government-appointed mayors over the deployment of security measures, particularly at the local level; and the reorganization of the police force. In other words, the governance of violence has been reorganized in ways toward institutionalizing a police state.
The war of discourse around the constant re-evocation of the friend-enemy binary that has brutally accompanied this physical war against Kurds since 7 June is only possible in this context of hyper-securitization. Such a war of discourse significantly confines the contours of any conversation about, and any political action for, peace, by effectively de-sanctifying any attempt to reason and mobilize. As such, the war of discourse has the ideological capacity to turn anything and everything that is considered a threat to the status quo of the party into an enemy of national unity and security, into a spy against the state. As loyalty to the party—and thus the state—has now become the overt doctrine of the AKP government in the name of assembling the nation together, the search for truth and justice is under severe attack.
Suppression of Dissidence
It is exactly in this context that Elçi became a prominent target, as someone who violated this desired and imagined state of loyalty of the citizen/subject to the party/state. In the aftermath of his remarks as part of a television discussion about the PKK not being a terrorist organization but rather an organization of Kurdish resistance, he became the target of a public verbal lynching and death threats. There was also a court order banning Elçi from international travel. As a symbol of “out-of-the-box” thinking who had the political ability to mediate between different positions through reason and a powerful language of peace, Elçi was systematically turned into a public enemy. His assassination therefore came as no surprise to many, as was painstakingly expressed by Selahattin Demirtaş, the co-leader of the HDP, at Elçi’s funeral.
A total of 5,713 people, the majority of whom are supporters of the Kurdish resistance movement, were taken into custody during the period between 7 June and 9 November. Of these, 1,004 were arrested. There were also attacks on party buildings of the HDP (People’s Democratic Party), as well as lynchings of HDP supporters and Kurdish citizens.[3] In other words, as the most vocal oppositional fraction and the most adamant supporter of freedoms in the Turkish public sphere today, the Kurdish movement and its supporters, Kurdish and Turkish alike, were at the center of this full-fledged attack on dissidence since the 7 June elections.
The arrest of Can Dündar, the editor-in-chief of Cumhuriyet daily, and Erdem Gül, the paper’s Ankara bureau chief, on 27 November came within this larger context of suppressing dissidence. The two journalists were charged with “spying” and “helping a terrorist organization without being active members of it” after alleging, through photos and video footage published at the newspaper, that Turkey’s intelligence agency sent arms to Islamist rebels in Syria. President Erdoğan personally filed charges against the newspaper, also threatening Dündar in an interview aired on the national television channel right before the November elections.
Regional Dynamics: Rojava and Re-Mapping the Borders
The charges filed against Dündar and Gül—that is, “spying” and “helping a terrorist organization”—demonstrate the highly expansive reach that the war of discourse has over dissidence in Turkey today. These terms have now become the legitimizing grounds for any (arbitrary) attack on freedom of expression. Turkey is ranked number 149 in press freedom out of 180 countries, according to Reporters Without Borders’ 2015 Press Freedom Index. The state of exception that was confined to the Kurdish southeastern and eastern Anatolia during the 1990s has now extended into the entire country.
Besides the actual physical war that the government has launched against its Kurdish citizens, the civil war taking place in Syria, which involves myriad international and regional actors with competing and conflicting interests, contributes to the government’s excessive suppression of dissidence. In fact, the government’s response to the allegations made by the daily Cumhuriyet was that the ammunition had been sent to Turkmens, instead of Islamist groups, fighting in Northern Syria.
There are two important factors that raise the AKP government’s stakes in the war in Syria. One is driven by the sectarian concern to establish a strong Sunni hand in the changing power order in Syria. The second is the government’s discomfort with the rising Kurdish power in Northern Syria, especially following the Rojava revolution. The Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) is one of the most prominent factions powerfully fighting on the ground against the Islamist rebels, and particularly ISIS. The shooting down of a Russian jet by the Turkish army on 24 November should be interpreted in this context. Although the dynamics and factors behind Turkey’s decision to shoot down the plane are likely to be much more complicated than what appears in public, there are two implications of the decision.
First, it is a declaration—a rather too ambitious one—meant to re-position Turkey in the politico-military field beside the West as an imperial/powerful actor along the Cold War nexus. Bashar Al-Assad still remains in power despite Turkey’s staunch criticism of him since the beginning of the uprising in Syria, and the support Turkey has been giving to the quite heterogeneous and ambiguous mix of Syrian opposition groups that includes Islamist rebels of all factions. Moreover, Russia’s actual military involvement in Syria since September 2015 came as a significant challenge to Turkey’s attempt to limit the rising Kurdish power in Northern Syria, on one hand, and its support to Islamist rebels, on the other. Therefore, Turkey’s decision to shoot down the Russian military jet was part of an attempt to regain power in Syria.[4]
Second, it is also a subtle declaration aimed to position Turkey in the politico-religious field as the legitimate hegemonic actor vis-à-vis the Islamist rebels fighting in Syria. Putin immediately said that the shooting down of the plane “represents a stab in the back by the terrorists,” implying Turkey’s relationship with ISIS. Since then, allegations of Turkey’s relations with ISIS have been at the center of the cat-fight between Turkey and Russia. It would be naïve to think that Turkey acted without knowing that this action would heat up such a discussion. The dangerous pragmatism of the West (the most recent example of which is the agreement between Turkey and the EU to control the migrant and refugee flow) and the rise of Salafi jihadism across the world provide the AKP government the opportunity to attempt to position itself as the legitimate Sunni actor in the politico-religious field.
What Is Our Political Imaginary for the Future?
We are living through dark times, not only in Turkey, but also across the world. In the particular case of Turkey, what makes this juncture critical is that it underlines a deeper transformation of the state, but also of the nation. The state is being consolidated as an authoritarian police state, while at the same time the nation is re-engineered based on a sectarian imagination.
At this critical juncture, we should all earnestly ask ourselves the following questions: What is our political imaginary for the future? What kind of a country do we want to live in? What do we need to do to build such a future? Debating and answering these questions is much more pressing than ever. It is a time that urgently calls for an honest self-reflection about our societal fears. This requires a confrontation with historical injustices.
If the state is significantly failing to protect its citizens’ right to have rights—and thus the right to have a life—as equals, we are left with the political and moral responsibility of demanding it begin to do so, in full solidarity with one another despite our differences. Politics is not a kind of magic that happens to us tomorrow by some visible hand or power. Politics happens today through our deliberate choices to act or not to. Through silence and dismissal, we contribute to every death, to every bit of suffering, and to every other catastrophe.
NOTES
I would like to thank the Turkey Page editors for their useful comments in revising this essay.
[1] For a discussion of political parties’ strategic deployment of ethnic, racial, and religious cleavages toward political articulation, see Cihan Tugal, Cedric de Leon, and Manali Desai, “Political Articulation: Parties and the Constitution of Cleavages in the United States, India, and Turkey,” Sociological Theory 27:3 (2009): 193-219.
[2] See this report by the Human Rights Association (IHD).
[3] See this report by the Human Rights Association (IHD).
[4] See this essay by Metin Gurcan for an analysis of the incident.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel Fires Police Chief Even Though Mayor Was Part of Police Shooting Coverup
By Carlos Miller | PNAC | December 1, 2015
In an obvious effort to detach himself from the growing scandal in the Windy City, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel fired the police department’s top cop today, saying it was the first step in restoring confidence in the Chicago Police Department.
But the coverup of the Laquan McDonald police shooting death extends way above Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy, up through the state attorney’s office and to the mayor’s office.
To truly restore confidence, both Emanuel and Cook County State Attorney Anita Alvarez need to lose their jobs.
And it needs to be done now.
After all, it is pretty obvious they tried their best to coverup the shooting to protect their political positions as was pointed out by university professor Bernard E. Harcourt in a New York Times opinion piece:
The Cook County prosecutor, Anita Alvarez, must have had probable cause to indict Officer Van Dyke for the Oct. 20, 2014, shooting death of Mr. McDonald the moment she viewed the police dash-cam video, after her office received it two weeks later. That video, in her own words, was “everything that it has been described to be by the news accounts. It is graphic. It is violent. It is chilling.”
Ms. Alvarez, and other city leaders, surely knew they would have to indict Mr. Van Dyke for murder as soon as the public saw that footage. “I have absolutely no doubt,” Ms. Alvarez finally said last week, “that this video will tear at the hearts of all Chicagoans.”
But the timing, in late 2014, was not good.
Then up for re-election, the mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, was looking ahead to a contested election on Feb. 24, 2015, which would ultimately result in a runoff election on April 7. In Ferguson, Mo., a grand jury was hearing testimony on the police shooting of Michael Brown. The video of Eric Garner being choked to death during an arrest in New York had gone viral. The Black Lives Matter movement was gaining momentum across the country.
The video of a police shooting like this in Chicago could have buried Mr. Emanuel’s chances for re-election. And it would likely have ended the career of the police superintendent, Garry F. McCarthy.
And so the wheels of justice virtually ground to a halt. Mayor Emanuel refused to make the dash-cam video public, going to court to prevent its release. The city argued that releasing the video would taint the investigation of the case, but even the attorney general of Illinois urged the city to make it available.
In other words it was Emanuel who had the final say in whether or not the video was released.
With the help of Alvarez, of course, who recently announced her reelection campaign, and who has spent the past two terms protecting dirty cops.
Firing McCarthy is the first step, who admitted today that the initial information about the shooting of McDonald was inaccurate.
Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy admitted Tuesday on NBC Chicago that the initial press release sent out after 17-year-old Laquan McDonald was fatally shot 16 times by an officer last year was wrong.
“The initial press release was mistaken, no two ways about it,” he said. “I guess that’s my fault.”
Police initially said an officer shot McDonald in the chest when the teen refused to drop a knife and continued to walk toward officers. Authorities also said the boy lunged at officers with the knife.
But dash-cam video of the shooting shows an officer shooting the teen several times as he appeared to walk away from police.
McCarthy added that he didn’t see dash-cam video of the shooting until the day after the press release went out.
So not only do we have a mayor who ordered the video not be released and a prosecutor who waited a year to file charges – and also found no wrongdoing in how police deleted surveillance video from a local Burger King – we have a police chief who claims he did not even see the video before describing what took place on the video.
And for that, he was making more than $400,000-a-year.
McCarthy is a liar, of course, as is Emanuel and Alvarez. They all saw the video and chose not to release it. Had it shown exactly what they described, they would have wasted no time in releasing the video.
Also part of the coverup is the president of the police union, who told the media that McDonald “lunged” at Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke. The Fraternal Order of Police also paid the $1.5 million to bond Van Dyke out of jail and is also handling his attorney fees as he defends himself from the first-degree murder charge.
But we expect that from police unions which have proven to defend police officers at all costs. We even expect that from police chiefs.
But we should expect more from our prosecutors and mayors.
Saudi Arabia to execute 52 prisoners, including juveniles, en masse
Reprieve | December 2, 2015
The government of Saudi Arabia is preparing to execute some 52 prisoners at once, including several juveniles arrested at protests, according to reports.
Several Arabic media outlets have this week reported official sources as saying that 52 prisoners are set to be executed in the near future. The reports appear to suggest that among those executed will be six youths arrested at protests in the country’s Eastern Province – including juveniles Ali al Nimr, Dawoud al-Marhoon and Abdullah al-Zaher. All three were tortured into bogus ‘confessions’ that would be used to convict them.
The reports say the 52 prisoners – all of whom were convicted in the secretive Specialized Criminal Court – will be executed across nine different cities in the Kingdom in a single day. They suggest that preparations for the executions will be made in the next two weeks. It appears that Sheikh Nimr – Ali’s uncle and an outspoken critic of the Saudi government – is among those set to be executed.
Sheikh Nimr and the juveniles are currently understood to be held in isolation, awaiting execution. All have reportedly recently been given an unexplained medical examination, and there are concerns that this could be a prelude to their being executed at any time. Abdullah – who was 15 when arrested – has recently been moved to a prison some 1,000km from his family, who are now unable to visit him.
The news comes amid outrage at separate plans by the Saudi authorities to execute Ashraf Fayadh, a Palestinian poet who was convicted of ‘apostasy.’ There have been widespread calls for the execution to be halted, including from the Palestinian Authority. Recent research by international human rights organization Reprieve has found that a large majority of those facing execution in Saudi Arabia were convicted of non-violent offences such as apostasy and political protest.
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From the Archives
Confronting the Threat of Ethnic Bioweapons
By Tony Cartalucci – New Eastern Outlook – 29.11.2017
The United States Air Force’s 59th Medical Wing’s molecular biology branch recently was revealed to have been collecting specifically Russian RNA and synovial (connective) tissue samples, prompting fears in Russia of a possible US directed ethnic-specific bioweapons program. … continue
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