On Feb. 1, 2007, the Bush administration suffered another setback in its racist campaign against Arabs and Palestinians in the United States.
After a three-month trial, and three weeks of deliberation, a Chicago jury acquitted Muhammad Salah, a 53-year-old
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Salah and Ashqar have been persecuted by the Israeli and U.S. governments for decades. Salah was detained and interrogated by the Israeli Security Agency (ISA) in 1993. He was on a trip to Palestine to deliver money that he had assisted in collecting from Palestinian supporters in the United States. The money was going to organizations that were providing important humanitarian services to Palestinian communities after the Israeli government had deported approximately 400 Palestinian men to Lebanon just weeks earlier.
At the border of Israel and the Gaza Strip, Salah was arrested by armed Israeli soldiers and handcuffed, blindfolded, and forced to lie face down in the back of a jeep. The soldiers drove Salah around for several hours, striking him with their guns and stomping on his body. He was then taken to an ISA interrogation facility, where he was isolated and tortured during an interrogation that lasted over two months. This resulted in him signing a 53-page false confession.
New York Times reporter Judith Miller was invited by the Israeli government to view Salah’s questioning. Not surprisingly, she later testified for the prosecution in Salah’s federal criminal trial that the ISA interrogators had a collegial relationship with Salah.
Shortly thereafter, an Israeli military tribunal convicted him of aiding terrorism, and he was sentenced to five years in Israeli prison. The U.S. government’s only response to Israel’s detainment of Salah was to list him as a Specially Designated Terrorist.
Salah continued to face persecution when he was finally allowed to return to his family in the late 1990s. Although he secured a position as an instructor with the City Colleges of Chicago and as a substitute teacher with the Chicago Public Schools, he was later fired when someone leaked information that Salah had ties to terrorism.
In August 2004, federal agents raided the homes of Salah and Ashqar in the middle of the night and arrested them. Salah, Ashqar and Mousa Abu Marzook, a Palestinian currently residing in Damascus, Syria, were charged with racketeering conspiracy, under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (“RICO”).
The government basis was that they had conducted “the affairs of Hamas,” including the specific charge of “material support of terrorism.” Other charges included providing material support to a terrorist organization and obstruction of justice. The day after their arrest, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft publicly celebrated the indictment. His statement revealed the underhandedness of the prosecution itself:
“The indictment … seeks forfeiture of approximately $2.7 million from accounts in the defendants’ control. … The individuals named in this indictment are alleged to have played a substantial role in financing and supporting international terrorism. They are alleged to be material supporters of a foreign terrorist organization, taking advantage of the freedoms of an open society to foster and finance acts of terror. … This case would have been much more difficult to bring were it not for information sharing authorized by the USA Patriot Act.”
Evidence obtained via torture allowed
From the time that Salah and Ashqar were indicted until the end of the trial, the government continued to violate Salah’s rights.
Despite the fact that Hamas was not even considered by the U.S. government to be a “terrorist organization” at the time that Salah allegedly raised the funds, the federal court refused to dismiss any of the charges against him.
When Salah argued that the confession that Israeli interrogators had extracted through torture and humiliation should be excluded from evidence, the court permitted the two Israeli interrogators to testify about their interrogation techniques in a closed courtroom. Even Salah was not permitted to attend the hearing.
Based on this hearing, the court decided to admit the coerced confession—a confession that would have been illegal had it been extracted in the United States.
The Israeli government continually refused to turn over documents to the defense that detailed Israeli interrogation procedures, citing security concerns.
Finally, when the trial began on Oct. 12, 2006, the federal prosecutor introduced her case against Salah and Ashqar by using the words “terrorism” and “terrorist” over 40 times in her opening statement.
Nevertheless, the government lost on the most serious charge, racketeering, because the charge was based on shallow imperialist propaganda that the defense dispelled with facts and the history of the Palestinian people.
According to the government’s theory, Salah and Ashqar were guilty of racketeering because they raised funds for Hamas, which the government tried to portray as racketeering enterprise, similar to the mafia.
The government alleged that Hamas committed racketeering acts such as soliciting murder, conspiracy to kill and injure, kidnapping of hostages and money laundering. However, the government failed to report that Hamas operates as a central part of the Palestinian liberation struggle, something far different than organized crime.
Hamas and Palestine
Although Hamas was formed in 1987, even the U.S. government did not list Hamas as a “terrorist organization” for the first 10 years of its existence. It was not a crime to give money to Hamas during that time.
Hamas was founded as an Islamist movement in Palestine, with support from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Its orientation is bourgeois nationalist; its world outlook is based on Islam.
Although Palestinian popular resistance blossomed in 1987 with the Intifada, Hamas was not involved in resistance activities in its early years. It focused its efforts and funds on providing social services, such as caring for the sick and building schools in poor Palestinian refugee camps.
Hamas was initially supported tacitly by Israel and the United States as a religious counterweight to the secular Palestinian liberation forces, especially the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Israel had worked tirelessly to weaken the secular left, which it and the United States saw as the primary threat to their regional aims.
In the early 1990s, after the overthrow of the Soviet Union, Hamas gained strength. It entered a united front with Palestinian Marxists, nationalists and other anti-imperialist Islamist forces to reject the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords. The accords—pushed by the United States and Israel and accepted by the late Yassir Arafat’s Fatah party—represented a concrete step toward legalizing a colonial, two-state settlement of the Palestinian question without recognition of the right of return for the millions of Palestinian refugees.
In 2006, Hamas won a majority of seats in the Palestinian parliament despite U.S. imperialist threats of financial strangulation. The vote was seen as a rejoinder to U.S. imperialism, Israel and Fatah’s policy of accommodation. Since the elections, the United States has backed major Israeli invasions into Gaza and imposed an economic blockade on the West Bank and Gaza.
Palestinians in these areas struggle for access to the necessities of daily life. A 2006 U.N. survey revealed that 65 percent of Palestinian families living in the West Bank and Gaza live in poverty, defined as a monthly income below $600 for a family of six. At least 38 percent of Palestinian families live on a monthly income below $300 for the same sized household.
The Chicago jury’s decision to acquit Salah and Ashqar flies in the face of the U.S. government’s unrelenting quest to scapegoat Muslims and Arabs for its own imperialist ambitions in the Middle East. It is a setback for the imperialists and a small victory for all those who resist racism and imperialism in the United States and beyond.
