Boim Case overturned: American persecution of Muslims & Arabs hits another road block

by Ray Hanania (Palestine/USA)

Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush administration and conservative extremists in the United States government have persecuted Arabs and Muslims with extremist and unpopular views, charging them with terrorism and criminal acts related to terrorism.

Nearly every single prosecution has proven to be false.

Mohammed Salah and Abdelhaleem al-Ashqar were both accused of supporting terrorism, charges that stemmed in part from Salah’s torture and imprisonment in Israel many years before. Before going to trial, the government dropped the main terrorism charge against Salah and dropped their informant, the source of the charges. The trial went on and Salah beat back the main claim of racketeering, a prosecution used against members of “criminal conspiracies” like the Mafia and organized crime. Salah was convicted of perjury, that is, lying to the Justice Department in denying that he was a member of Hamas. Although the government could not prove that Salah was supporting terrorism acts through fundraising, they did convince a jury that Salah had lied about his association with Hamas.

Salah, who defeated the terrorism charges and proved that the government’s case was phony, was convicted of perjury and sentenced to 21 months in prison, this after he was persecuted and slandered not just by the government but by representatives of the Jewish American community. The government confiscated his assets, his home, got him fried from his jobs, prevented him from earning a living and threatened anyone who tried to help him by donating money to him and his wife and children, who were forced to live int he basement of an apartment in Bridgeview, Illinois.

I am proud of Mohammed that he stood up to this system of American injustice and the American Gulag. He beat them but he continues to suffer because in America, Arabs are never innocent,t hey are merely guilty of lesser crimes.

The same is true for Ashqar and another man falsely accused of terrorism, Sami al-Arian. All of them defeated the government’s phoney charges of terrorism but continue to be persecuted by the government.

This week, four Arab and Muslim charities and individuals accused of funding terrorism and who were essentially destroyed by those government charges were finally acquitted by an appeals court. The five charities (read my column at www.ArabWritersGroup.com) were shut down in high profile raids across the country. Their leaders were slandered and defamed, accused of terrorism. Their charitable work was destroyed and people who once donated money to them feared they, too, would be persecuted.

Their charges were based on a lawsuit filed by the parents of a 17 year old boy, David Boim, who was murdered in a terrorist attack in the Israeli occupied West Bank in 1996. Boims parents immigrated to Israel and allowed their son to travel to and from the West Bank with the settler movement, which many Palestinians compare to terrorist organizations themselves. David Boim, the victim, held both an American citizenship and an Israeli citizenship and the parents sued under a law that allows victims, mainly Israelis and Jews, killed in terrorist acts to file lawsuits against their killers in American courts.

The case went to trial in 2004. The attorneys for the Boims said they hoped to win $15 million. The jury, after four days of trial in which the defendants were not permitted to argue that their only connection to the terrorist act might have been through their political opinions (which is not a crime in America for most people), found all of the defendants guilty and assessed damages of $56 million. The judge in the case, U.S. Magistrate Arlander Keys, a U.S. Marine whom some have criticized as being a conservative extremist when it comes to the Middle East) tripled the fine against the defendants to $152 million.

This week, an appeals court judge threw the convictions out, saying there was absolutely no evidence linking the defendants with the terrorist acts.

Writing for the majority, Appeals Judge Ilana Diamond Rovner wrote: “Belief, assumption, and speculation are no substitutes for evidence in a court of law. However the plaintiffs might establish a line of proof connecting the defendants with the murder of David Boim, the law demands that they demonstrate such a nexus before any defendant may be held liable for David’s death. We must resist the temptation to gloss over error, admit spurious evidence, and assume facts not adequately proved simply to side with the face of innocence and against the face of terrorism. Our endeavor to adhere to the dictates of law that this great nation has embodied since its founding must persevere, no matter how great our desire to hold someone accountable for the unspeakably evil acts that ended David Boim’s life and created a lifetime of grief not only for the Boims but also for every other family scarred by terrorism.”

In fact, the two Palestinians who were involved in the killing of Boim were arrested and charged with murder. One of them committed another terrorist act while fighting the charges (committing a suicide bombing) and the other was sentenced to 10 years hard labor by a Palestinian court. (Compare that to the weeks and days given to Israelis in Israeli court who are “convicted” or murdering Palestinians — a good example is the case of Kafr Qassem, the Israeli Arab village that, in 1956, was placed under a shoot-to-kill curfew and Israeli border guards ended up killing 56 of the villagers (as they returned from work unaware of the curfew). The Kafr Qassem murderers, Israeli soldiers, were convicted and sentenced to prison but were quickly pardoned. The commander who issued the illegal shoot-to-kill order was pardoned and forced to pay a token “10 cents” symbolizing a guilt that is viewed in Israeli society as justifiable.

But this case was never about prosecuting those behind the Boim murder. It was about persecuting individuals and organizations who embraced unpopular views that were anti-Israeli and pro-Hamas, in some cases. But simply supporting Hamas’ political extremism is not on its face evidence of supporting terrorism. There are many Palestinians who support Hamas but oppose Hamas’ strategy of suciide bombings and terrorist violence. But few in America or the Jewish American community really cares about those facts, or about any facts.

Here is a link to a summary of the original Dec. 8, 2004 conviction.

Here is the link to the Appellate Court Ruling (PDF Format).

A few facts that are also being distorted in the reporting by bigots like Daniel Pipes: Boim was killed in 1995 and Hamas was declared a “terrorist organization” earlier that same year. BUT … Mohammed Salah, who was accused of funding terrorism and aiding Hamas, was a supporter of Hamas in 1990, within a year after it was founded during the first Intifada, but he was arrested and sent to jail in 1992 after he was tortured by Israel to confess. He was in jail through November 1997 when he returned to live in the United States. These are facts buried in the case to make the argument of supporting Hamas sound stronger. Taking the time chronology out of the picture can distort anything and it does in the Salah case and all of the alleged terrorist cases.

Some will argue that the ruling proves that the American Justice System is fair. But I argue just the opposite. The ruling only exposes the hypocrisy of the American Justice system and the American Gulag. The fact is there is nothing fair about the phony Boim case and the persecution of the Arab and Muslim charities, and there is nothing fair about the cases involving Salah, Ashqar and al-Arian. All of these men and women and organizations have been turned into victims, punished, slandered, their lives destroyed, their assets stolen and their families punished. They have been forced to pay the price of being guilty until proven innocent because when it comes to Arabs and Muslims in America, a country with a growing disease of hatred, Arabs and Muslims are always guilty until proven innocent.

And even when they are finally proven to be innocent and after years of suffering and being defamed, the American Gulag and the political persecution continues.

No one cheers the murder of David Boim. He was as much a victim of his own parents who dragged his young life into the heart of the Palestine-Israel conflict which has been a war zone since the 1940s, as he was the victim of extremist Palestinian fanatic terrorists. But those who killed Boim were punished.

The same cannot be said about those in Israel who have murdered Arabs and Muslims and even Americans, like Rachel Corrie. She has never received justice. The American Justice system did not come to the defense of this young girl who was standing up to the Israeli army as they bull-dozed the home of Palestinian civilians. Had Corrie’s case been reversed and she were run over by Palestinians, many Israelis and many American Jews would have celebrated her as a victim of Palestinian terrorism, and her case would be winding itself through the justice system. The only difference is that int he case of Rachel Corrie, had she ever received justice and a conviction against Israel, it would never have been overturned.

Ray Hanania