The so-called war on terror claimed another innocent casualty on Nov. 21. Abdelhaleem Ashqar, a 49-year-old anti-war activist and former Howard University business professor, was fined $5,000 and sentenced to over 11 years in prison for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury.
In August 2004, a week before the Republican National Convention, Ashqar was indicted, along with two co-defendants, for allegedly working to fund the Palestinian political party Hamas. The indictment relied on legal statutes designed to prosecute organized crime. It alleged that Ashqar and others made contact with Hamas in the early 1990s.
The implication was that Ashqar had abetted “terrorism,” although Hamas is a major political party in Palestine. The U.S. government itself did not officially designate Hamas a “terrorist” organization until years later, in 1995. But that did not stop the government from retroactively pressing charges.
Both Ashqar and co-defendant Muhammad Salah were acquitted on all charges.
Unable to win convictions based on the patently absurd charges, the government took revenge by attempting to bribe Ashqar with immunity if he agreed to testify against others.
But as he stated eloquently before the court, he was unwilling to betray his people. “The only option was to become a traitor or a collaborator, and this is something that I can’t do and will never do as long as I live,” he said.
Ashqar has been jailed twice for refusing to testify before grand juries, and has gone on hunger strikes in protest. He was convicted earlier this year of criminal contempt and obstruction of justice for refusing to testify in 2003.
The sentence, handed down in a Chicago courtroom by U.S. District Judge Amy J. St. Eve, a former federal prosecutor, showed how far the government will go to stamp out dissent in the Arab and Muslim communities and to punish those who refuse to collaborate in the government’s phony “war on terror.”
In a statement before the sentence was rendered, Ashqar described the suffering of Palestinians under Israeli occupation. He spoke of his own relatives who had been killed or jailed by the Israeli state. Ashqar has lived in suburban Virginia since 1997, but grew up in the Palestinian town of Seida in the West Bank, which Israel seized in the 1967 war.
Ashqar accepted the long sentence calmly, but one woman identified as Ashqar’s mother-in-law collapsed in the courthouse lobby. She was taken to the hospital in an ambulance.
The anti-war movement must stand up to the government attacks on Arabs and Muslims communities.
Just last month, after a decades-long legal battle, the Palestinian activists known as the Los Angeles 8 finally defeated their trumped up charges. Now it is time to free Abdelhaleem Ashqar!
