New wave of anti-Muslim repression
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SOCIALIST ACTION SEPTEMBER 2012 5 community that could be used in future whole sale crackdowns involving mass detentions.
And the focus on the alleged “ineffectiveness” of the NYPD spying ignores the entrapment and frame-up that has gone on during this same period. For instance, Michael Williams, who was trying to defend young Palestinian women from a physical and verbal attack by a racist at a Palestine demonstration, faced seven years in jail after his unjust conviction. Fortunately, a vigorous defense by NLG-MDP founder Lamis Deek got the sentence reduced to 90 days; an appeal of the guilty verdict is currently in process.
Deek is also representing another NYPD vic tim, Ahmed Ferhani, a young, mentally unstable Algerian American, entrapped and framed up by an agent who concocted a fictional scheme against a Jewish house of worship.
Another group central to the movement against police spying in New York, Desis Rising Up & Moving (DRUM), issued a statement after the Wisconsin Gurudwara shootings in which they pointed out that these crimes were “part of a history of targeting of communities of color that all too often goes unchecked and re mains rooted in a national climate bolstered by state policies. This climate of racism and intol erance targeting Sikhs, South Asians, Muslims, Arabs, and Middle Easterners, particularly since 9/11, has been fueled by frequent media distortions, governmental policies of racial and religious profiling, and the rise in hate groups. Yet, the media and public discourse mistakenly puts the Sikh and other religions on the hot seat rather than the vast network of organized hate groups.
“Organized white supremacist and hate groups re main largely unchecked. In 2009, when the Depart ment of Homeland Security (DHS) put out a report on the dangers of right-wing extremism in the U.S., it received severe backlash from many conservative policy makers. As a result of the criticism, the DHS dismantled and cut funding for the intelligence team that monitored such threats.”
After the shootings, Harsha Walia, a community organizer and writer based in Vancouver, described the logic behind hate crimes, including their roots in economic exploitation and the contribution of ra cial oppression in stifling a fightback against it: “The crimes of white supremacists are not exceptions and do not and cannot exist in isolation from more sys temic forms of racism. People of color face legislated racism from immigration laws to policies governing Indigenous reserves; are discriminated and excluded from equitable access to healthcare, housing, child care, and education; are disproportionately victims of police killings and child apprehensions; fill the floors of sweatshops and factories; are over-represented in head counts on poverty rates, incarceration rates, unemployment rates, and high school dropout rates. Colonialism has and continues to be shaped by the counters of white men’s civilizing missions. The occu pation of Afghanistan has been justified on the racist idea of liberating Muslim women from Muslim men.”
This theme was echoed by radical professor and activist Vijay Prishad, who wrote: “With the political class unwilling to reverse the tide of jobless growth and corporate power, the politicians stigmatize the outsider as the problem of poverty and exploitation. … Far easier to let the Sikhs and the Latinos, the Mus Tony Savino / Socialist Action lims and the Africans bear the social cost for econom ic hopelessness and political powerlessness than to target the real problem: the structures that benefit the 1% and allow them to luxuriate in Richistan.”
Meanwhile, activists in the antiwar and Occupy movement are increasingly finding themselves tar gets of state repression as they are framed up on bo gus “terrorism” charges (e.g. the NATO 5 and Cleve land 4, coming on top of the FBI/grand jury frame-up of antiwar and solidarity activists whose homes were raided two years ago).
The revelations by the NYPD’s Galati came out under questioning by a lawyer seeking to have the depart ment’s Demographics Unit dismantled under provi sions of the Handschu ruling. That ruling was a result of a lawsuit filed by activists seeking to dismantle the ubiquitous spying of New York cops on social move ments of the 1960s and ’70s. Handschu was largely eviscerated after 9/11, and efforts to restore it, and expand it, certainly deserve our support.
But the movements at the center of the Handschu case themselves raised even more radical demands against police spying, brutality and repression, de mands which are worth reviving today. We must de mand the opening of all police files, unredacted, so we can see the names of all cops and informers who have violated the rights of the oppressed. We must re-raise demands for community control of the police and their eventual replacement by community selfpolicing—a demand that will only be won as part of a society-wide movement against the capitalists’ state itself.
Getting to that point means joining today the grow ing movement around individual cases of entrapment, against policies of spying and frame-ups, against ver bal and physical attacks on Muslims and all other tar geted communities and movements, whether those attacks come from official or unofficial individuals and institutions. n