In the coming year, there will be an election for the Australian Parliament, at a time when the very future of human civilisation is precarious. Three important books have appeared in recent months that should be read by politicians and their constituents, everywhere. The first, “How to Fix a Broken Planet”, is by acclaimed, Canberra Continue reading »

The Westminster Town Hall Forum in Minneapolis in the US recently hosted the leading economist, Professor Keyu Jin, from the London School of Economics, where she spoke insightfully on where China has come from – and why – and where it is headed – and why. You can watch the entire presentation here: The German-American Continue reading »

There is much to reflect on in the local election results so far, and although the mayoralties might still swing some opinions, if not much about the reality about how truly dismal a night this was for the Tories. All that really surprised me about their result is that there are still people with any vague relationship to ethical principles who remain willing to vote for them. I really do wonder what planet they live on.

But they are not the only deluded people in politics. For all its claims that the election is not a foregone conclusion, the Labour leadership has, according to people I have been talking to, formed the opinion that they walk on water based on recent opinion polls. For the record, they don’t. And these results suggest that they really do not, precisely because most suggest that there is nothing like the level of support for Labour in English communities that general election opinion polls, rigged as they are by our first-past-the-post electoral system, imply.

In reality, the swing towards Labour was nothing as big as those parliamentary polls suggest. Given better choices, many people have chosen LibDems, Greens and other candidates instead of Labour, suggesting Labour’s support is soft and heavily based on antipathy for the Tories.

I really cannot see a Tory recovery from this point for some time to come. It will take a decade or more for the memory of Truss, Johnson, Sunak, May and Cameron - every one of them a dud - to fade. But that said, Labour is utterly delusional if it thinks this has won them real affection. It’s incredibly hard, I suspect, for almost anyone to feel that for a party that has abandoned all its principles and its only two identifiable policies in the form of the Green New Deal and the reform of worker rights. As we know, even its member’s loyalty is strained.

In contrast, the Greens are clearly creating true believers in places like Bristol.

I also suspect the LibDems, with their own peculiar (in the proper sense of the word) dedication to local issue politics, have done the same thing in many places.

Meanwhile, all that Ben Houchen has proved is that £3 billion of bungs from central government for a bankrupt idea buys short-term political favour.

But let’s also consider the bigger political issues for a moment.

Reform has failed. I think it has two seats. It is doing nothing like as well as UKIP did. It is annoying the Tories. It is giving racists and headbangers something to do. But is is not winning support. Its only real achievement seems to be to keep the Greens off the BBC.

There are two reasons for this. The first is the racists and headbangers already have the Tories singing their tunes, so they don’t need anywhere else to go.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, the message from these results is that Brexit has ceased to be a political dividing line. Or, to put it another way, people have seen through it and the lies and racism that underpinned the arguments of many (not all, in the latter case) of those who promoted it and want to return to the sanity of politics that deals with reality.

The messages to Labour on Gaza that are also very obviously being sent reflect the same theme. Those who are anti-Semitic are rightly not tolerated, but nor is blind faith in a form of Zionism that is racially exclusive tolerated either.

What do I read into all this? Essentially, I think that there is a search for sense and a bemusement as to where it might be found.

I also think that my belief that those voting for Labour in a general election might suffer the most considerable buyer’s remorse is reinforced.

Labour’s refusal to talk about Brexit is failing it, and the country.

Its failure to also commit to obviously needed policy on climate issues, worker’s rights, refugee rights, disability rights and much more is unacceptable to many, as is Starmer’s Zionism in the face of genocide by a government he will not condemn for its actions.

It is, however, austerity will condemn it when no one believes that there is nothing that can be done to address failing government services.

Labour is not as out of touch with reality as the Tories, but it has only a vague relationship with it. And that is why other parties are appealing.

The future is unclear, barring one thing. Enthusiasm for our two leading political parties is not strong, and not nearly as much as they still like to believe.

Nahla Al-Arian has been living a nightmare for the past seven months, watching from afar as Israel carries out its scorched-earth war against her ancestral homeland in the Gaza Strip. Like many Palestinian Americans, the 63-year-old retired fourth-grade teacher from Tampa Bay, Florida, has endured seven months of a steady trickle of WhatsApp messages about the deaths of her relatives.

“You see, my father’s family is originally from Gaza, so they are a big family. And they are not only in Gaza City, but also in Deir al Balah and Khan Younis, other parts,” Al-Arian told me. Recently, the trickle of horrors became a flood: “It started with like 27, and then we lost count until I received this message from my relative who said at least 200 had died.”

The catastrophe was the backdrop for Al-Arian’s visit last week to Columbia University in New York City.

Al-Arian has five children, four of whom are journalists or filmmakers. On April 25, two of her daughters, Laila and Lama, both award-winning TV journalists, visited the encampment established by Columbia students to oppose the war in Gaza. Laila, an executive producer at Al Jazeera English with Emmys and a George Polk Award to her name, is a graduate of Columbia’s journalism school. Lama was the recipient of the prestigious 2021 Alfred I. duPont–Columbia Award for her reporting for Vice News on the 2020 explosion at the port of Beirut.

The two sisters traveled to Columbia as journalists to see the campus, and Nahla joined them.

“Of course, I tagged along. You know, why would I sit at the hotel by myself? And I wanted to really see those kids. I felt so down,” she said. “I was crying every day for Gaza, for the children being killed, for the women, the destruction of my father’s city, so I wanted to feel better, you know, to see those kids. I heard a lot about them, how smart they are, how organized, you know? So I said, let’s go along with you. So I went.”

Nahla Al-Arian was on the campus for less than an hour. She sat and listened to part of a teach-in, and shared some hummus with her daughters and some students. Then she left, feeling a glimmer of hope that people — at least these students — actually cared about the suffering and deaths being inflicted on her family in Gaza.

“I didn’t teach them anything. They are the ones who taught me. They are the ones who gave me hope,” she recalled. “I felt much better when I went there because I felt those kids are really very well informed, very well educated. They are the conscience of America. They care about the Palestinian people who they never saw or got to meet.”

Her husband posted a picture of Nahla, sitting on the lawn at the tent city erected by the student protesters, on his Twitter feed. “My wife Nahla in solidarity with the brave and very determined Columbia University students,” he wrote. Nahla left New York, inspired by her visit to Columbia, and returned to Virginia to spend time with her grandchildren.

A few days later, that one tweet by her husband would thrust Nahla Al-Arian into the center of a spurious narrative promoted by the mayor of New York City and major media outlets. She became the exemplar of the dangerous “outside agitator” who was training the students at Columbia. It was Nahla’s presence, according to Mayor Eric Adams, that was the “tipping point” in his decision to authorize the military-style raids on the campus.

My wife Nahla in solidarity with the brave and very determined Columbia University students. pic.twitter.com/ximkHFbZeo

— Sami Al-Arian (@SamiAlArian) April 26, 2024

USA vs. Al-Arian

On February 20, 2003, Nahla’s husband, Sami Al-Arian, a professor at the University of South Florida, was arrested and indicted on 53 counts of supporting the armed resistance group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The PIJ had been designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization, and the charges against Al-Arian could have put him in prison for multiple life sentences, plus 225 years. It was a centerpiece case of the George W. Bush administration’s domestic “war on terror.” When John Ashcroft, Bush’s notorious attorney general, announced the indictment, he described the Florida-based scholar as “the North American leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Sami Al-Arian.”

Among the charges against him was conspiracy to kill or maim persons abroad, specifically in Israel, yet the prosecutors openly admitted Al-Arian had no connection to any violence. He was a well-known and deeply respected figure in the Tampa community, where he and Nahla raised their family. He was also, like many fellow Palestinians, a tenacious critic of U.S. support for Israel and of the burgeoning “global war on terror.” His arrest came just days before the U.S. invaded Iraq, a war Al-Arian was publicly opposed to.

The Al-Arian case was, at its core, a political attack waged by Bush’s Justice Department as part of a wider assault on the rights of Muslims in the U.S. The government launched a campaign, echoed in media outlets, to portray Al-Arian as a terror leader at a time when the Bush administration was ratcheting up its so-called global war on terror abroad, and when Muslims in the U.S. were being subjected to harassment, surveillance, and abuse. The legal case against Al-Arian was flimsy, and prosecutors largely sought to portray his protected First Amendment speech and charitable activities as terrorism.

The trial against Al-Arian, a legal permanent resident in the U.S., did not go well for federal prosecutors. In December 2005, following a six-month trial, a jury acquitted him on eight of the most serious counts and deadlocked 10-2 in favor of acquittal on the other nine. The judge made clear he was not pleased with this outcome, and the prosecutors were intent on relitigating the case. Al-Arian had spent two years in jail already without any conviction and was staring down the prospect of years more.

In the face of this reality and the toll the trial against him had taken on his family, Al-Arian agreed to take a plea deal. In 2006, he pleaded guilty to one count of providing nonviolent support to people the government alleged were affiliated with the PIJ. As part of the deal, Al-Arian would serve a short sentence and, with his residency revoked, get an expedited deportation. At no point during the government’s trial against Al-Arian did the prosecution provide evidence he was connected to any acts of violence.

For the next eight years following his release from prison in 2008, Al-Arian was kept under house arrest and effectively subjected to prosecutorial harassment as the government sought to place him in what his lawyers characterized as a judicial trap by compelling him to testify in a separate case. His defense lawyers alleged the federal prosecutor in the case, who had a penchant for pursuing high-profile, political cases, held an anti-Palestinian bias. Amnesty International raised concerns that Al-Arian had been abused in prison and he faced the prospect of yet another lengthy, costly court battle. The saga would stretch on for several more years before prosecutors ended the case and Al-Arian was deported from the United States.

“This case remains one of the most troubling chapters in this nation’s crackdown after 9-11,” Al-Arian’s lawyer, Jonathan Turley, wrote in 2014 when the case was officially dropped. “Despite the jury verdict and the agreement reached to allow Dr. Al-Arian to leave the country, the Justice Department continued to fight for his incarceration and for a trial in this case. It will remain one of the most disturbing cases of my career in terms of the actions taken by our government.”

That federal prosecutors approved Al-Arian’s plea deal gave a clear indication that the U.S. government knew Al-Arian was not an actual terrorist, terrorist facilitator, or any kind of threat; the Bush administration, after all, was not in the habit of letting suspected terrorists walk. Al-Arian and his family have always maintained his innocence and say that he was being targeted for his political beliefs and activism on behalf of Palestinians. He resisted the deal, Nahla Al-Arian said.

“He didn’t even want to accept it. He wanted to move on with another trial,” Nahla said. “But because of our pressure on him, let’s just get done with it [because] in the end, we’re going leave anyway. So that’s why.”

Sami and Nahla Al-Arian now live in Turkey. Sami is not allowed to visit his children and grandchildren stateside, but Nahla visits often.

NYPD Smear Campaign

New York City Mayor Eric Adams speaks at a “New York Stands With Israel” vigil and rally on Oct. 10, 2023, in NYC.
Ron Adar/Sipa via AP

The night of the raids on Columbia, police and other city officials began leaking to journalists that the wife of a convicted terrorist was on the campus, cavorting with the student protesters who had seized Hamilton Hall.

A reporter for CBS News tweeted the allegation, citing City Hall sources. During a broadcast on CNN late that night, the network showed Sami Al-Arian’s tweet with Nahla’s picture. “We’re learning tonight that the wife of an indicted terrorist was on the campus,” said host Laura Coates, adding that “a source” had tipped off CNN about Al-Arian’s tweet. (CNN and Coates, a former federal prosecutor, did not respond to requests for comment.)

Nahla was asleep in Virginia when the raids at Columbia unfolded and was unaware that she was becoming a figure in the emerging New York Police Department and media narratives. In the middle of the night, she checked her family’s WhatsApp group where her daughter had posted the since-deleted tweet from the CBS reporter and a clip from the CNN segment showing her photo.

“I felt betrayed by the authorities who resort to using these kinds of tricks, illegitimate, illegal tricks, shameful, shameful methods to attack those students.”

“I woke up at 2 a.m. And, unfortunately, I took my phone and I looked. I was shocked. I couldn’t sleep for two or three hours,” she said. “I stayed awake feeling very depressed and feeling very shocked. I don’t care about myself. I care about those students that I admired. I didn’t want any harm to happen to them because of me or anyone else. And I felt betrayed by the authorities who resort to using these kinds of tricks, illegitimate, illegal tricks, shameful, shameful methods to attack those students. So I felt betrayed and angry. Is that the America that we believe in, the democracy?”

In a blitz of interviews the next two mornings, Adams, the New York mayor, repeatedly mentioned Al-Arian’s presence at Columbia and said it was a crucial part of his decision to authorize the military-style raid on the building. As evidence of “outside agitators” directing the protests, Adam cited Al-Arian as the one specific example to make his case.

“One of the individuals’ husband was arrested for and convicted for terrorism on a federal level,” Adams said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “I knew that there was no way I was going to allow those children to be exploited the way they were being exploited, and many people thought that this was just a natural evolution of a protest. It was not. These were professionals that were here.”

Adams echoed the tone and tenor of his remarks on “CBS Mornings,” but on NPR’s “Morning Edition,” Adams went further, saying Nahla’s presence at Columbia was the impetus for the raid.

“What really was a tipping point for me was when I learned that one of the outside agitator’s, professional’s husband was arrested for federal terrorism charges,” he said. “I knew I could not sit back and state that I’m going to allow this to continue to escalate. That is why I made that determination” — to raid the campus. (The mayor’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

“The mayor’s inflammatory comments about my mother’s brief visit to Columbia are being used to justify the heavy-handed and repressive police raid of the student protest,” said Laila Al-Arian, Nahla’s daughter. “It’s equally shameful that some journalists are simply regurgitating these sensationalist claims that are intended to smear students protesting Israel’s daily killing and maiming of Palestinians in Gaza.”

In a press conference on May 1, the NYPD acknowledged that Nahla Al-Arian was not on the campus during the raids, but continued to use her visit the previous week as a justification for the police assault on the protests. “Last week there was the wife of somebody who had been convicted for material support to terrorism on campus,” said Rebecca Weiner, the NYPD deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism. “We have no evidence of any criminal wrongdoing on her part, but that’s not somebody who I would want necessarily influencing my child if I were a parent of somebody at Columbia.”

The smear campaign against Nahla went far and wide online, particularly in the right-wing media and social media ecosystem. The Israeli actor Noa Tishby posted a video featuring the picture of Nahla’s visit to Columbia and falsely said she had been “convicted with connections to terrorism financing.” Nahla has never been convicted or charged with any crimes.

The New York Post ran an article with the headline: “Wife of convicted terrorist Sami Al-Arian was hanging out at Columbia encampment before dramatic raid.”

Read our complete coverage

Israel’s War on Gaza

For Nahla and the Al-Arian family, none of this is shocking. They have endured more than 20 years of surveillance and trials that have displaced and scattered the family, continuing a long history of what happened to them and other Palestinians throughout the past 75 years. The Al-Arians themselves are descendants of Palestinians expelled from their homes during the 1948 Nakba.

“They just distract people so people will not think about what’s happening in Gaza.”

Even as they express outrage at how Nahla was smeared, the Al-Arian family is quick to point out that their suffering pales in comparison to the Palestinians of Gaza, including the scores of their own family members who have died in an Israeli war fueled by the U.S. government.

“I just feel angry because I am being used to hurt those students, to find an excuse to invade their place and to arrest those students. And I feel so terrible,” Nahla said. “It’s also a distraction from the genocide that’s happening in Gaza. Just focusing on a stupid thing like this — they just distract people so people will not think about what’s happening in Gaza. The killing that’s still happening every day, every minute, that destruction. I can’t believe it. They focus on my story and they ignore the most depressing story, which is the killing of innocent people. This is shameful.”

The post NYC Mayor Smeared a Grandmother as an “Outside Agitator” to Justify NYPD Assault on Columbia appeared first on The Intercept.