January 28
GUESTS: Leena Al-Arian, Executive Director of the Coalition for Civil Freedoms, and Zaira Abu Baker, the daughter of Shukri Abu Baker who was horrifically sentenced to 65 years for providing charity to Palestinians, talk about the criminal justice system's assault on Muslims families in the United States.
Demanding Justice for the Holy Land Five
It is difficult talking about the Holy Land Five. Their convictions for running a Palestinian charity are one of the worst examples of American cynicism when it comes to our criminal justice system. For people of Arab descent, it is all show and no substance. Their trial was a travesty of prosecutorial misconduct and judicial prejudice. It will eventually be put in our history books, along with other sinister examples of the empire's flagrant violations of human rights. In the meantime, The Holy Land Five sit in federal penitentiaries, isolated from their families and the outside world for the rest of their lives.
Read Injustice: The Story of the Holy Land Foundation Five written by a former Israeli Defense Force member, Miko Peled. Then see if you can forget what our country has done to these men. Maybe it is because I am a former soldier myself, having spent a year in one of America's long term colonies, Korea. Occupations are mostly all the same. People who are being occupied are treated like dirt until they finally free themselves from foreign armies. Israel treats its subjugated Palestinians in the same way, with ethnic cleansing thrown in.
And the US treats Arabs the same way even when they are American citizens. It doesn't matter to the empire what country you belong to, or even how innocent you might be. There are no laws for the empire; it destroys whole civilizations to preserve itself and its filthy system of racist exploitation.
