Since Congress, which appears to have a disproportionate number of genocidal maniacs in its ranks, is all right with the Palestinians being subjected to mass murder, it should come as no surprise that they are all right with their remaining unfree from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

As often has been the case in American history, the House of Representatives has failed to understand its role in the Constitution. The representatives might like to consult their own website, which notes that the First Amendment says,

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

The resolution passed Wednesday is a blatant attempt to abridge the freedom of speech. That is why it is a resolution and not incorporated into a law, because the law would be struck down immediately. As for the resolution, it is hateful hot air.

The resolution alleges that the phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is “antisemitic.” They seem to be worse readers of texts even than they are constitutional scholars. The phrase doesn’t mention Jews. It says that Palestine will be free.

Palestine is currently not free.

However, on 13 December, 1993, U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher signed the Oslo Peace Accords. These accords, which have the force of U.S. law, specified that Israel would withdraw from Gaza and the Palestinian West Bank by 1997 and turn their governance over to the Palestine Authority, that is, the state of Palestine. Had the Oslo accords been implemented, then from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, Palestine would have been free.

They were not implemented because the accords were deliberately derailed by the far right wing Likud Party led by Binyamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu boasted about his role in ensuring that Palestine did not become free. The Likud wants to annex the West Bank and Gaza and to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population (which the New York Times is forbidden to tell you).

Video: “Netanyahu boasting about Manipulating America and derailing Oslo peace process”

So the chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” can be read as an insistence that Oslo, which is US treaty law, actually be implemented.

The congressional resolution insists that the phrase must mean that the state of Palestine would constitute all the land of historic Palestine, i.e. the area of the British Mandate of Palestine. In such a scenario, there would be no place for Israel.

However, in those Oslo Peace Accords of 1993, signed by the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Yasser Arafat, that organization agreed to recognize Israel.

So supporters of the PLO and of the state of Palestine obviously do not mean by the chant to take back away that recognition. In fact, the ones who reneged are the Israelis, who took back away their recognition of Palestine.

It may be that some people who use the phrase “from the river to the sea” mean it in an anti-Israel fashion. That it always has this sense is not something that members Congress, most of whom are signally ignorant of the Middle East, can stipulate. If we stop letting Congress play ventriloquist with Palestinians, and listen to actual Palestinians, what do we hear?

Yusuf Munayyer wrote in Jewish Currents, “I wasn’t concerned with Israel’s identity crisis over whether it could be both Jewish and democratic; I was concerned that Palestinians were being denied basic rights throughout their homeland. My column, “From the River to the Sea,” would be focused on the unity of the Palestinian experience and how all Palestinians faced a shared struggle with Zionism regardless of where they lived.”

Rep. Rashida Tlaib wrote, “From the river to the sea is an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate.”

MSNBC: “Rep. Rashida Tlaib responds to House censure vote”

Congress complains that the phrase seeks to deprive the Jewish people of the right of self-determination. But the Jewish people in the sense of followers of the Judaic religion are not a national unit. American Jews are Americans. If Congress is saying that all Jews everywhere have the right of collective self-determination and that it can only be exercised in historic Palestine, then it is saying that the 6 million American Jews are deprived of that right. The resolution reduces American Jews to second-class citizens in the US. What could be more antisemitic than this resolution?

The statement is not about the Judaic religion but about the political doctrines of Zionism, which Congress is attempting to impose on us all. Moreover, the perspective adopted in the congressional resolution is not that of garden variety Zionism but that of the most extreme, fascistic forms of the ideology, which rule out a Palestinian state and any basic human rights for the 14 million Palestinians, who surely have as much right to collective self-determination as the 16 million Jews.

In contrast, the Mandatory authority in British Palestine, given that charge by the Versailles Peace Conference and its San Remo satellite conference after World War I, in its last official pronouncement of London’s vision of the future, the 1939 White Paper, said:

“The objective of His Majesty’s Government is the establishment within 10 years of an independent Palestine State in such treaty relations with the United Kingdom as will provide satisfactorily for the commercial and strategic requirements of both countries in the future. The proposal for the establishment of the independent State would involve consultation with the Council of the League of Nations with a view to the termination of the Mandate.

The independent State should be one in which Arabs and Jews share government in such a way as to ensure that the essential interests of each community are safeguarded.”

The mandatory authority envisioned that the Palestinian people in its charge would be no different from the Syrian people under French rule, the Iraqi people under British rule (class A mandates), or the people of French and British [formerly German] Togoland, which were Class B mandates. British Togoland became part of Ghana and French Togoland became the Togolese Republic or Togo. There is today a Syria, an Iraq, a Togo. There is no Palestine. International law was thwarted by hard line Zionists, in the crimes of whom Congress is an accessory after the fact.

The League of Nations and then the United Nations were committed to ending the problem of statelessness and would not have wanted the Palestinians to be colonized forever, and forever to lack collective sovereignty.

Again, this principle was made explicit by the British government:

“His Majesty’s Government are charged as the Mandatory authority “to secure the development of self governing institutions” in Palestine. Apart from this specific obligation, they would regard it as contrary to the whole spirit of the Mandate system that the population of Palestine should remain forever under Mandatory tutelage. It is proper that the people of the country should as early as possible enjoy the rights of self-government which are exercised by the people of neighbouring countries.”

So the first nation to pledge that “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” (by 1949!) was the United Kingdom, the mandatory authority to which the League of Nations and then the United Nations forwarded the rule of Palestine. Moreover, its pledges in this regard have continuing force in international law regarding the ultimate disposition of the Palestinian people.

The UN General Assembly partition plan of 1947 was no more than a (remarkably pro-Zionist) suggestion and did not have the force of law. Only the UNSC has executive authority, and that body never adopted the plan. Both the Zionists and the Palestinians rejected it. Some Zionist apologists pretend that David Ben Gurion and other Zionist leaders accepted the plan, but then why did they usurp territory such as the Galilee that was not awarded to them? Ben Gurion wrote in his diary when Israel was founded in 1948 that its borders were not specified in the constitution, just as those of the United States had not been in its. He had in mind an expansionist Manifest Destiny, and tried to annex Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, Palestinian Gaza and southern Lebanon, and officials around him plotted to get the West Bank from the late 1950s. Does that sound like he accepted the UNGA map?

Moreover, the Palestinian rejection of the UNGA proposal is no grounds for forever denying them the right to citizenship in a state, which is denied to no other people in the world. That is, there are peoples who chafe at the citizenship they have, such as Syrian Kurds, but there is no other group of several million people who have been kept stateless for many decades the way the Palestinians have been.

An end to this statelessness is one of the things that is meant by “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Congress has repeatedly obstructed any attempt to end Palestinian statelessness or to realize the vision of even the British colonialists, supercilious and racist as they were. Congress is clearly much more so. “It is proper,” British officials maintained, “that the people of the country should as early as possible enjoy the rights of self-government which are exercised by the people of neighbouring countries.” “As early as possible” was not envisioned in 1939 as some date after 2024.

Letter to Texas Governor Greg Abbott regarding Executive Order GA-44

( Tomdispatch.com) – When the Civil War ended in 1865, the 76-year-old Constitution needed an upgrading and those leading the country did indeed dramatically transform it with the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, known collectively as the Reconstruction Era amendments. The 13th (1865) abolished slavery, while the 15th (1870) gave voting rights to newly freed Black men.

However, it was the 14th Amendment, first drafted in 1866 and ratified in 1868, that would prove the most far-reaching and that today sits all too squarely between Donald Trump and his white nationalist and authoritarian dreams. While much attention has been rightfully focused on its “insurrection” clause (Section 3) and whether, thanks to it, Trump should be allowed to hold office, given his role in the January 6th attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, his actions are also at odds with other key provisions of that amendment.

Trump’s Constitutional Indiscretions

It hardly needs to be said that Donald Trump is no constitutional scholar. At this point, though, there can be little doubt that his instincts are distinctly focused on some version of autocratic rule and white male privilege. No surprise then that, in his adult life, including as president, he’s staked out positions and advocated policies that distinctly conflict with the letter of, and the tone of, the 14th Amendment.

Mind you, he’s brazenly violated other parts of the Constitution as well, including the “emoluments” clause of Article 1, Section 6, and the “appropriations” clause of Article 1, Section 9. The foreign emolument section states that, without congressional assent, neither the president nor other office holders can “accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” Yet, as the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee documented, “Trump’s businesses received at least $7.8 million in payments from foreign governments and government-backed entities from 20 countries,” in itself adding up to a set of gifts (or do I mean grifts?) of historic proportions. Moreover, that figure is undoubtedly a significant underestimate of what he actually received. According to reporting by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Trump’s businesses took in more than $160 million from international sources during his presidency.

Buy the Book

He also got away with violating the constitutional authority given only to Congress to appropriate federal spending by stealing funds from the military to try to build his border wall. To be specific, he diverted $2.5 billion from the military’s construction budget to that wall project of his. In June 2020, a federal appeals court found that the administration had acted illegally. By then, however, the money had been spent and Trump’s tenure would soon come to an end.

Preserving the 14th Amendment

Undoubtedly, however, his determination to put the 14th Amendment in the trashcan of history should draw the most concern. The rights that U.S. citizens cherish — from basic civil and human ones to not being ruled by insurrectionists — are most strongly protected by provisions in that amendment. The struggle to constitutionalize equal rights was one of the most important for the Black community after the Civil War. In November 1865, for example, a “54-foot long petition signed by hundreds of men,” organized by the State Convention of Colored People of South Carolina, was submitted to Congress demanding “equal rights before the law,” “an equal voice,” and “the elective franchise.”

The first line of the 14th Amendment states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Known as the “birthright citizenship” statement, it has almost universally been interpreted to mean that anyone born within the territory of the United States is automatically a full citizen. More than 30 countries have the principle of “jus soli” (of the soil) allowing citizenship with no qualifications to, or restrictions on, those born there, regardless of the status of their parents. Among the countries with no restrictions are Brazil, Canada, Cuba, El Salvador, Guyana, Mexico, Tanzania, Tuvalu, and the United States.

That statement was included in the 14th Amendment specifically to revoke the Supreme Court’s pre-Civil War 1857 Dred Scott v. Sanford decision — one of the most egregious it ever made — denying citizenship and any rights to Black people in the United States. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney infamously wrote that Black people and their descendants “had for more than a century been regarded as beings of an inferior order… they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

In the post-Civil War environment, that ruling clearly had to be corrected and so the 14th Amendment’s congressional authors wrote it in such a way as to include not just newly freed slaves but anyone born in the United States. (The one all-too-ironic and shameful exception was Native Americans who weren’t given legal citizenship until 1924 under the Indian Citizenship Act.)

Donald Trump has long expressed a deep opposition to birthright citizenship. He and much of the far right refer to it derogatorily as “birth tourism” and claim that thousands of women are coming to this country just to have children who would automatically become citizens. There should be no doubt that he and his followers are speaking of immigrants of color from the global South. When elected in 2016, he promptly declared that he would abolish birthright citizenship with an executive order. He was then informed that such an order would never stand up legally and only in January 2020 did he finally propose new rules for the State Department that were meant to stop it from issuing visas to visitors coming to this country supposedly for the purpose of birth tourism. It was notable, by the way, that the nations of Western Europe were excluded from those rules, which in any case were so vague as to be impossible to enforce without breaking laws on privacy. Ultimately, the consensus among scholars is that it would take a constitutional amendment to end what is now a constitutional right.

Yet Trump continues to declare that, should he win the presidency in 2024, one of his priorities will indeed be to abolish birthright citizenship. As he put it last year, “As part of my plan to secure the border, on Day One of my new term in office, I will sign an executive order making clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law, going forward, the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic U.S. citizenship.” His contention that he has a “correct” interpretation of the law is distinctly in conflict with the history of past challenges to that amendment. Previous Supreme Courts, whether dominated by liberals or conservatives, have upheld birthright citizenship on numerous occasions, starting with the 1898 Wong Kim Ark case. Trump, of course, is betting that his three appointments to the court and at least two other conservative justices will finally break with such precedents.

Section 1 of the 14th Amendment also guarantees “due process” and “equal protection under the laws.” That “due process” clause was specifically meant to stop southern whites who returned to power in the post-Civil War era from passing state laws and enacting other policies that would legally treat newly freed Blacks differently. In the immediate aftermath of the war, however, “Black codes” were indeed enacted by pro-slavery whites in southern legislatures. As a result, Congress felt called upon to pass laws, known as the Enforcement Acts, meant to ensure that the 14th and 15th Amendments would be the law of the land and that the rights of Black people would be protected.

In 1896, equal protection for African Americans and other people of color would nonetheless be nearly trampled to death by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson. That decision, in fact, would sanction racial segregation thanks to a perverse interpretation of the 14th Amendment under the banner of “separate but equal” (which, of course, actually meant separate and distinctly unequal). Almost 60 years of Jim Crow segregation followed until, in 1955, the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling reinterpreted the equal protection clause to ensure that “separate” could never be interpreted to mean “equal.”

Trump, however, has demonstrated strikingly little fealty to the principle of due process for all. From his 1989 call for the death penalty for five young Black and Brown men before they even had a trial to his threatening insistence that Hillary Clinton and others of his political opponents be jailed based purely on personal grievances and vendettas, he’s never faintly respected the constitutional rights of others. He’s called for protesters to be beaten at his rallies and mused that Black Lives Matter activists should be shot in the legs at demonstrations.

When it came to foreign policy and immigration policy, his administration (with his fervent backing) separated children from their parents in a fierce crackdown on undocumented aliens, while he demanded a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the U.S.” In addition to the racism and cruelty of such policies, they plainly violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

For the Civil Rights Movement and, more broadly, all movements for social justice and human rights in the United States, the equal protection clause has proven decisive. The 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act were typically passed on the principle of “equal protection.” It was also the basis for ending bans on interracial marriage (Loving v. Virginia), providing abortion rights to women nationally (Roe v. Wade), and allowing same-sex marriage in every state (Obergefell v. Hodges).

As demonstrated by their rulings to end Roe, as well as affirmative action in university admissions (with the exception of military academies like West Point), Trump-appointed Supreme Court justices simply don’t believe in equal protection. For a candidate and party that brand themselves as proponents of “law-and-order” above all else, it’s clear that a reactionary version of “order” is significantly more important than fairness or the equal application of the rule of law to every citizen.

Insurrectionists Can’t Hold Office

Of course, as even certain conservative legal scholars have noted, Trump played a key role in launching the January 6th insurrection and, under the third section of the 14th Amendment, should be ineligible to run again for president. As that section reads, someone — an officer of state — who violates his or her oath “to support the Constitution of the United States” and who “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof” cannot hold office.

Thanks to Trump, millions of Americans now believe that he won an election he distinctly lost. Although he was told by most of his own experts and in dozens of court decisions that he had done so, he didn’t bother to share that information with his followers. Instead, he continued to foster misinformation and deep anger about that election. Without him, that crowd would never have gathered in Washington to “save America” and “stop the steal.” (“Be there, will be wild!” he tweeted to his followers.) Without him, its participants wouldn’t have gone to the Capitol. Without his exhortations that they needed to “fight like hell,” that crowd he was addressing at the Ellipse in Washington on January 6, 2021, might never have become quite so riled up.

Courts in Colorado and Maine have determined that Trump should not be allowed to stay on the ballot because of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. In about half of the other states, cases have been filed to remove him due to his role in the insurrection (something on which the Supreme Court will seemingly soon rule).

Most telling, when it came to his cavalier disregard for constitutional rule, has been his claim that, since the oath of office he took as president only required him to “preserve, protect, and defend” the Constitution, he wasn’t obliged (as Section 3 demands) to “support the Constitution” on January 6th, a distinction only someone as venal as Trump would have made. But as CREW noted in response to the petition from Trump’s lawyers in the Colorado case, “The Constitution itself, historical context, and common sense, all make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s disqualification clause extends to the President and the Presidency.”

Even conservative lawyers J. Michael Luttig, Peter Keisler, Larry Thompson, Stuart Gerson, and Donald Ayer have argued in their amicus brief in the case that “Trump incited the threat and use of violent force as his last opportunity to stop the peaceful transfer of executive power.” They state unequivocally that he “had the intent that the armed mob, at the very least, threaten physical force on January 6, 2021, in response to his speech on the Ellipse.” And to be clear, as legal scholar and civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill argues in her brilliant amicus brief, Trump’s insurrection was targeted, in part, against the votes of African Americans.

No Understanding of, or Desire to Understand, the Constitution

In July 2016, as he was about to secure the Republican nomination for president, Trump had a closed-door meeting with House Republicans. In responding to a question about Article 1 of the Constitution that addresses the responsibilities, powers, and limits of the president, Trump stated: “I’m for Article I, I’m for Article II, I’m for Article XII.”

There are, in fact, only seven Articles in the U.S. Constitution.

From the day Donald Trump took office, he had no intention to “preserve, protect, and defend,” no less “support” the Constitution. Instead, he essentially ran roughshod over much of that document. And the issue was never simply his ignorance of the Constitution (though that should be taken for granted), but his outright hostility to it. That he has not yet been held accountable for that should be considered a disgrace in this era and will undoubtedly be seen as such by generations to come. Today, as in the years after its passage to defend the rights of the newly freed, the enforcement of the 14th Amendment remains as much a political question as a legal one.

In a sense, it couldn’t be simpler. President Donald Trump was an officer of the United States who incited and engaged in insurrection and so should be disqualified from ever again holding the office of the presidency. However, based on skeptical questioning by both liberal and conservative Supreme Court justices at the February 8th hearing on the case, it appears that the court will likely not allow Colorado or any other state to bar Trump from the ballot. If so, the Trump danger will continue — for now.

Copyright 2024 Clarence Lusane

Via Tomdispatch.com

( Michigan Advance ) – WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump can be prosecuted for charges he schemed to overturn the 2020 election, a three-judge panel of a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday, rejecting Trump’s argument he was immune from criminal prosecution for any alleged conduct during his presidential term.

In a unanimous opinion, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals panel denied Trump’s request to throw out the federal charges accusing him of lying to and encouraging supporters who turned violent on Jan. 6, 2021.

Trump and his attorneys argued the case should be dismissed because Trump was acting in his official capacity as president and that allowing a president to be sued would have disastrous consequences.

The court found those arguments were “unsupported by precedent, history or the text and structure of the Constitution.”

“For the purpose of this criminal case, former President Trump has become citizen Trump, with all of the defenses of any other criminal defendant,” Tuesday’s unsigned opinion said. “But any executive immunity that may have protected him while he served as President no longer protects him against this prosecution.”

Trump is expected to appeal the ruling, either to the full D.C. Circuit or directly to the U.S. Supreme Court, in a process that could take months while he continues his campaign as the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination.

Neither court is required to take the case, but exercising his appellate options will help Trump extend the case, potentially beyond Election Day, although Trump and his legal team have not explicitly said it is part of their strategy to delay the case as long as possible.

Further appeals

The full D.C. Circuit is “highly unlikely” to hear a further appeal of the presidential immunity ruling, according to legal experts Norman L. Eisen, Matthew A. Seligman and Joshua Kolb, who wrote an outline of potential timelines in the case for Just Security, a site devoted to foreign policy, democracy and security analysis, that published Jan. 9.

The Supreme Court is also “unlikely” to hear an appeal, they wrote.

Trump brought the appeal from a trial court in D.C., where he faces federal charges related to the 2021 attack on the Capitol. An investigation by special counsel Jack Smith resulted in a four-count indictment last year accusing Trump of conspiring to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

“MSNBC Video: “Maddow: Trump claim ‘outrighted mocked’ by court in immunity rejection”

The indictment accuses Trump of working with a group of co-conspirators to recruit false slates of electors, lying to the public about non-existent determinative election fraud and encouraging supporters to obstruct the election certification in a violent attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Trump raised a so-called presidential immunity defense in the trial court, saying he could not be prosecuted for the actions alleged in the indictment because he was acting in his official capacity as president to counteract election fraud.

U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan denied that claim, a decision Trump appealed to the D.C. Circuit. On Friday, Chutkan also officially postponed his trial, which had been set to begin March 4.

Hours before the three-judge panel issued its ruling, Trump posted in all capital letters on his online platform, Truth Social, that “IF IMMUNITY IS NOT GRANTED TO A PRESIDENT, EVERY PRESIDENT THAT LEAVES OFFICE WILL BE IMMEDIATELY INDICTED BY THE OPPOSING PARTY.”

“WITHOUT COMPLETE IMMUNITY, A PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES WOULD NOT BE ABLE TO PROPERLY FUNCTION!” he wrote.

Jacob Fischler

Jacob covers federal policy and helps direct national coverage as deputy Washington bureau chief for States Newsroom. Based in Oregon, he focuses on Western issues. His coverage areas include climate, energy development, public lands and infrastructure.

Ashley Murray

Ashley Murray covers the nation’s capital as a senior reporter for States Newsroom. Her coverage areas include domestic policy and appropriations.

Via Michigan Advance

Published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

 

The judge felt he had to dismiss the case, given a whole plethora of previous Supreme Court decisions. He clearly did so, however, with enormous regret.

White seems to be calling for mass political action by Americans on the issue. He asserted that “It is every individual’s obligation to confront the current siege in Gaza.” He went on to lament, however, “but it also this Court’s obligation to remain within the metes and bounds of its jurisdictional scope.”

He wrote in his conclusion,

“There are rare cases in which the preferred outcome is inaccessible to the Court. This is one of those cases. The Court is bound by precedent and the division of our coordinate branches of government to abstain from exercising jurisdiction in this matter. Yet, as the ICJ has found, it is plausible that Israel’s conduct amounts to genocide. This Court implores Defendants to examine the results of their unflagging support of the military siege against the Palestinians in Gaza.”

Here is a federal judge pleading with the president of the United States, the secretary of state, and the secretary of defense to cease their unstinting support for Israeli military tactics in Gaza that are so extensively harming the lives of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

White wrote, “On November 13, 2023, Plaintiffs filed this suit against the Defendants to ‘take all measures within their power to prevent Israel’s commission of genocidal acts against the Palestinian people of Gaza. (Compl., Prayer for Relief.) Plaintiffs allege that Defendants violate their duties under Article I of the Genocide Convention by supporting Israel’s military actions following the attacks of October 7, 2023.'” They asked the court to issue a preliminary injunction against the Biden administration from further participating in and aiding these genocidal acts.

The idea is that the US is a signatory to the Genocide Convention of 1948, which makes it US law, so that Biden and his cabinet secretaries are violating not just international law but American domestic law.

White noted that the International Court of Justice recently found that the charges of genocide against Israel are plausible, given the wholesale destruction of civilian life and property and given the public statements of intent voiced by Israeli leaders.

In the British and American tradition of common law, precedent can be cited from abroad, so it is legitimate for White to instance the ICJ preliminary order that Israel cease behaving in ways that can plausibly construed as genocidal.

White quoted the ICJ preliminary decision at length in his own ruling, saying, “The ICJ found that:

‘the military operation being conducted by Israel following the attack of 7 October 2023 has resulted in a large number of deaths and injuries, as well as the massive destruction of homes, forcible displacement of the vast majority of the population, and extensive damage to civilian infrastructure. While figures relating to the Gaza Strip cannot be independently verified, recent information indicates that 25,700 Palestinians have been killed, over 63,000 injuries have been reported, over 360,000 housing units have been destroyed or partially damaged and approximately 1.7 million persons have been internally displaced.'”

He further noted that “the International Court found that it considered it “plausible [that the] rights in question in these proceedings, namely the right of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to be protected from acts of genocide and related prohibited acts identified in Article III of the Genocide Convention, … are of such a nature that prejudice to them is capable of causing irreparable harm.”

Global News Video: “”It’s a death sentence,” Palestinians in Gaza say after UNRWA funding halt”

For a court case to go forward, certain basic criteria have to be met. Do the plaintiffs have standing? White appears to have accepted that they did. That is, real harm was being inflicted on the families of these Palestinian-Americans from the Gaza Strip. Is there firm evidence of a crime being committed? White says that there clearly is, and he joins his voice to that of the ICJ here. Has the action been brought in an appropriate venue? And here the case failed, not on its merits, but over this jurisdictional issue.

The problem with this case, White held, is that it concerns political policy, and the Supreme Court has a long history of holding that courts cannot interfere with executive decision-making in the purely political realm. Moreover, foreign policy is a primary example of executive decision-making of a political sort in which courts have typically declined to intervene. So the separation of powers between the judiciary and the executive disallows White from telling Biden what he can do in the political realm, especially in the area of foreign policy.

White writes, “Foreign policy is constitutionally committed to the political branches of government, and disputes over foreign policy are considered nonjusticiable political questions. See, e.g., Haig v. Agee, 453 U.S. 280, 292 (1981) (“[T]he conduct of foreign relations … [is] exclusively entrusted to the political branches … [and] immune from judicial inquiry or interference.”). “The President is the sole organ of the nation in its external relations, and its sole representative with foreign nations.” United States v. Curtiss-Wright Exp. Corp., 299 U.S. 304, 319 (1936.”

He noted that not only does the president have wide latitude in foreign policy that cannot be easily challenged in the courts, but that the policy of unstinting support for Israel’s actions is also rooted in Congressional legislation. So where can this action be brought, since it is so clearly meritorious in the judge’s eyes?

In asserting that “It is every individual’s obligation to confront the current siege in Gaza,” White seemed to be calling for mass political action by the people. It is a remarkable appeal for a federal judge. He recognizes that we won’t get justice on this issue from Biden or from Congress. If things are to change, all Americans must confront this genocide in the legal ways available to them.

( Florida Phoenix ) – From threatening students’ free speech on college campuses to making it easier for powerful people to sue for defamation, lawmakers have been filing bills in 2024 that are bad, according to Florida’s First Amendment Foundation.

The foundation is tracking the proposals and fighting back, hoping to get lawmakers to fix the problems in the bills or ditch them entirely.

“Our representatives need to know that you think these are bad bills and should not be passed,” said Bobby Block, executive director of the First Amendment Foundation.

“This is our fight every year.” Block said in a 2024 Legislative Action document.

Though a handful of bills are “pretty good,” Block describes the 2024 legislation as “many dreadful bills.”

He adds in the document:

“Some of these bills – especially the ones trying to make it easier for rich and powerful people to sue their critics for what they write or say online, on the airways, and in print – are among the biggest threats to free expression in the nation. They join other bills that would criminalize student’s right to protest and would turn university administrators into secret police, requiring them to report students to the Department of Homeland Security. Others would try again to exempt the identities of law enforcement officers who hurt or kill suspects in the line of duty, claiming they are victims, not civil servants doing their job in your name.”

Here’s a list from the First Amendment Foundation categorized as “bills we are dedicated to fighting.” They will be tracking those bills throughout the two-month session.

HB 85: Pub. Rec./State Banks and State Trust Companies.

“This bill seeks to create an exemption that would hide information, including shareholders and applications for new state banks and financial institutions, shielding the public from knowing who is behind them and stinging them. This also can shield these institutions from public scrutiny.”

HB 465: Postsecondary Education Students

This bill threatens students’ free speech rights by banning certain student groups from college campuses. It also threatens to increase college tuition or remove scholarship options from students who engage in certain pro-Palestinian speech. 

SB 470: Postsecondary Education Students

This is the companion bill to HB465. This bill threatens students’ free speech rights by banning certain student groups from college campuses. It also threatens to increase college tuition or remove scholarship options from students who engage in certain pro-Palestinian speech. 

HB 757: Defamation, False Light, and Unauthorized Publication of Name or Likenesses

We fought this bill last year, and now it is back in the House and Senate. This bill would decrease the free speech rights of media, journalists, broadcasters, radio, and religious publications by making it easier for powerful public figures to sue for defamation.

SB 1086: Defamation 

This bill is similar to HB757 and SB1780 in that it seeks to make it easier for powerful individuals to sue for defamation. It also seeks to reverse Floridian judicial precedent by introducing a “false light” standard for defamation … any of these would be a blow for free speech and free press … they would be a boon for trial lawyers and would turn Florida into the libel tourist destination of America. They are blatantly unconstitutional.

HB 1605: Crime Victim’s Rights

This bill redefines who is defined as a victim under Marsy’s Law, written to include “law enforcement officers, correctional officers, or correctional probation officers who use deadly force in the course and scope of their employment or official duties.”

HB 1607: Pub. Rec./Crime Victim’s Rights

Last year, the FL Supreme Court ruled that Marsy’s Law does not protect the identity of police officers involved in fatal shootings from disclosure. This bill seeks to reverse that decision and exempt the identities of police officers who claim to be crime victims. 

SB 1780: Defamation, False Light, and Unauthorizes Publication of Name or Likenesses

This is the companion bill to HB 757 that would decrease the free speech rights of media, journalists, broadcasters, radio, and religious publications by making it easier for powerful public figures to sue for defamation. It also seeks to reverse 60+ years of judicial precedent by changing the actual malice standard. 

Another category, “Opposed Legislation” are “bills we encourage you to write in opposition to your representatives about.”

Those bills include HB 395, Protection of Historical Monuments and Memorials, which “penalizes any individual, elected official, or city that attempts to or supports a movement to remove a historical monument.”

Another bill, HB 999, Gender Identity Employer Practices, “limits speech by prohibiting government workers or employees … from using preferred pronouns or names of themselves or of coworkers.”

 

Diane Rado

Diane Rado has covered state and local government and public schools in six states over some 30 years, focusing on policy and investigative stories as well as legislative and political reporting. She is married to a journalist and has three adult children.

 

Published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Florida Phoenix

Featured image: Digital, Dream/ Dreamland 3.0 .

At that event, President Gay fell into the trap of accepting Representative Elise Stefanik’s radical mis-characterization of two expressions that have a long history within Palestinian struggles for freedom—“intifada,” and the phrase “from the river to the sea,”—as calls for genocide against Jews, and then, when pressured, failed to state unequivocally that such speech was a violation of Harvard’s rules of conduct. That is, when pressed to state that pro-Palestinian perspectives, wherein the use of these terms is commonplace, should be forbidden from campus, she wavered, perhaps momentarily confused by her free speech concerns. It was this failure to denounce the illegitimacy of pro-Palestinian speech and activism—glossed as “genocidal” by Stefanik, and accepted as such by all present, including Gay—that ultimately spelled her downfall.

Embed from Getty Images
Supporters of Palestine gather at Harvard University to show their support for Palestinians in Gaza at a rally in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 14, 2023. (Photo by Joseph Prezioso / AFP) (Photo by JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP via Getty Images).

The main reason liberal pundits have downplayed the salient role of what could be called “anti-Palestinianism” in sealing Dr. Gay’s fate is that, unlike the attack on liberal education, it cannot be framed as a partisan issue. The termination of her presidency did not provoke any outcry among Washington Democrats largely because they also have embraced the position expressed in Rep. Stefanik’s rhetoric, namely, that anti-Zionism (i.e. expressed in calls for an end to the Israeli occupation) is equivalent to antisemitism or, in other words, that calls for Palestinian liberation, for full legal and political rights for Palestinians, constitute a murderous threat to exterminate Jews.

For clarification, let me note here that intifada, as used by Palestinians in recent history, simply means “uprising,” and more specifically, an uprising against the oppressive conditions of the Israeli occupation; “from the river to the sea (Palestine will be free),” for its part, is chanted at pro-Palestinian demonstrations, not as a call for genocide of Jews, but a demand that everyone inhabiting this geography have equal rights and freedoms. That scholars of the region have vehemently and publicly criticized the misuse of these terms within US political discourse has not hindered pro-Israeli pundits from rehashing such mistranslations.

Stefanik and co. have now demonstrated how the political class’s unwavering support for pro-Israeli perspectives and policies can be weaponized against the university, including its commitments to racial equality. The current chair of the Education and Workforce Committee, Representative Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, who originally organized the congressional hearings on antisemitism on college campuses, now plans to expand the scope of her investigation into antisemitism on campus to other elite schools, giving particular attention to the way DEI programs may have adversely affected Jewish students.

The congressional group, under Foxx’s leadership has already demanded that Harvard make available a list of “posts by Harvard students, faculty, staff, and other Harvard affiliates on Sidechat and other social media platforms targeting Jews, Israelis, Israel, Zionists, or Zionism.”

And who will be the primary victims of this congressional campaign targeting critics of Israeli occupation? Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims, of course, will find themselves directly in the crosshairs of this witch-hunt. But—and, for the critics of the liberal university, this is the genius of the Republican plan—so will the Black and Brown folk who have played a dominant role in urging universities to adopt DEI concerns and commitments. Why? Because the underlying values and principles informing DEI initiatives are radically incompatible with the ethnonationalism of the Zionist project. Indeed, if there are three terms that are completely foreign to Israeli political discourse on the Palestinian people they are Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

The Young Turks Video: “Right-Wing Activist BRAGS About His Scheme To Oust Harvard President Claudine Gay”

Will the Democratic majority in congress be able to counter this Republican assault on liberal education and on its recently bolstered commitments to anti-racism? Unlikely. As the congressional ambush of the presidents of Harvard, U Penn, and MIT demonstrated, the Democrat’s near total devotion to the cause of defending Israel, however egregious its violation of international laws, renders them largely incapable of defending the academic institutions they claim to value. Their blind dedication (“subservience” is probably a more accurate term) to Israel prevents them from calling out the weaponization of the antisemitism charge for what it is, a well-planned and orchestrated effort to silence any criticism of Israel’s decades-long brutalization of Palestinians.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that antisemitism is not a real issue in the US today, simply that its use to tarnish the struggle for Palestinian justice is based on a profound and dangerous political lie. As Bernie Steinberg, a previous executive director of Harvard Hillel, has written: “As a leader in the Jewish community, I am particularly alarmed by today’s McCarthyist tactic of manufacturing an antisemitism scare, which, in effect, turns the very real issue of Jewish safety into a pawn in a cynical political game to cover for Israel’s deeply unpopular policies with regard to Palestine.”

The fact that the Democrats are willing to throw their commitment to racial equality under the bus for the sake of demonstrating their infinite devotion to Israel suggests that such a commitment may have been rather thin to begin with. Can support for Israel’s apartheid system (as it has been described by most reputable human rights organizations), not to mention for the war crimes currently being committed in Gaza (again, the designation comes from those same human rights organizations), be squared with a politics of racial justice in the US? When push comes to shove, which is where we are now, then it is obvious the answer is clearly no.

• Abdelkader Sinno
• Indiana University
• Samia Halaby
Rahul Shrivastav, Provost and Executive Vice President
provost@indiana.edu
 
Rick Van Kooten, Executive Dean, College of Arts and Sciences
rvankoot@indiana.edu . . .
Dear Provost Shrivastav and colleagues:
 
We write on behalf of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) and its Committee on Academic Freedom to express our alarm at Indiana University’s suspension of Associate Professor of Political Science and Middle Eastern Studies Abdulkader Sinno as well as its abrupt cancellation of a retrospective of the work of renowned Palestinian artist Samia Halaby. These actions constitute a clear and egregious violation of the principles of academic freedom and a betrayal of the mission of our institutions of higher education.  
 
MESA was founded in 1966 to promote scholarship and teaching on the Middle East and North Africa. The preeminent organization in the field, the Association publishes the prestigious International Journal of Middle East Studies and has nearly 2,800 members worldwide. MESA is committed to ensuring academic freedom and freedom of expression, both within the region and in connection with the study of the region in North America and outside of North America.
 
Professor Sinno has served as faculty advisor to several IU student organizations, including the Palestine Solidarity Committee, which invited Miko Peled, an Israeli-American veteran of the Israel Defense Forces and a peace activist, to speak on campus on 17 November 2023. The administration sought to have the event cancelled, but it was held without incident as planned. The next day Associate Vice President for Public Safety Benjamin Hunter filed a complaint against Professor Sinno. The subsequent investigation by Vice Provost Carrie Docherty focused on errors allegedly made by Professor Sinno in filling out the room reservation form for the event at which Peled spoke. Almost a month later, the university suspended Professor Sinno from all teaching and mentoring duties for the spring and summer terms. In a 15 December 2023 letter to Professor Sinno informing him of the suspension, Vice Provost Docherty asserted that she had “serious concerns about the effect your behavior may have on members of the campus community. These concerns are enhanced by the potential impact that your inattention to university compliance requirements has on the students you influence in the classroom and in your role as a student organization faculty advisor.”
 
Suspending a tenured faculty member for alleged errors in routine paperwork is an absurdly harsh sanction; but it also appears that in suspending Professor Sinno, who by all accounts has been an exemplary scholar, teacher and member of the IU community, administration officials ignored or violated the university’s own procedures. According to university policies on Academic Appointee Responsibilities and Conduct and the Policy on Faculty Disciplinary Procedures, Vice Provost Docherty was obligated to file a complaint against Professor Sinno with the Faculty Misconduct Review Committee, which would then recommend whether to sanction him, rather than acting on her own. According to a statement by the university’s AAUP chapter, both Docherty and IU Senior Associate General Counsel Andrea Newsom failed to follow proper procedure even after they had been called upon to do so. By choosing to ignore proper procedure and acting arbitrarily, not only were faculty rights violated but university leadership made it impossible to have a serious discussion about how to balance campus security with the protection of free speech and academic freedom. Indiana University has thereby made a mockery of its avowed commitment to faculty governance and due process.
 
We are equally dismayed by the decision of IU’s Eskenazi Museum of Art to cancel the first American retrospective survey of the work of Samia Halaby. Though the event had been planned for three years, the director of the museum informed Halaby in December 2023 that her social media posts expressing support for Palestinians subjected to Israeli violence in Gaza and elsewhere had caused concern among some museum employees. A university spokesman offered the incoherent and implausible claim that “academic leaders and campus officials canceled the exhibit due to concerns about guaranteeing the integrity of the exhibit for its duration.”
 
Indiana University’s justifications for its arbitrary actions in both these instances are not convincing. We understand that the university may feel under pressure from outside forces seeking to silence the expression of opinions with which they do not agree, including a threat by Representative Jim Bank (R-IN 3rd District) in November 2023 to cut the university’s federal funding if it did not deal with alleged incidents of antisemitism, by which he seems to have meant criticism of Israel’s actions and policies. We believe that the proper response to such threats and pressures, especially in these fraught times, is to resolutely defend the free speech and academic freedom of faculty, students and staff.  Your university has not only signally failed to do this, but has also inexcusably violated its own procedures for addressing alleged infractions by faculty.
 
We therefore call upon you to immediately rescind Professor Sinno’s suspension and express your administration’s intention to adhere to university disciplinary policies and to the shared governance they require. We further call on you to do everything possible to ensure that the retrospective survey of Samia Halaby’s art open as originally planned in February 2024. Finally, we call on you to publicly and vigorously reiterate your commitment to protect the constitutionally protected right to free speech as well as the academic freedom of all members of the Indiana University community. 
  
We look forward to your response.
 
Sincerely,
 
Aslı Ü. Bâli 
MESA President
Professor, Yale Law School
 
Laurie Brand
Chair, Committee on Academic Freedom
Professor Emerita, University of Southern California