An example of how terrorism succeeds in America, and why it does-- 

 by John Wheat Gibson

This summer 2005, an immigration judge in Dallas ordered the deportation of a young man who was eligible for legal resident status because his US citizen wife had filed a petition for him, which the government had approved.  They have five small children, all native-born Texans.  His father is a US citizen.  Ayman Ismail never had  been accused, much less convicted, of doing anything wrong.  He had lived in Texas for the past 16 years.

His legal status would have been a routine matter, except for one thing:  Ayman Ismail was Muslim and Arab, and a small gang of Jewish militants in the Dallas District of the Department of Homeland Security had made him a target of their crusade to rid the US of Muslims and Arabs.  After two years of hearings, all of which he appeared at faithfully, during a hearing in the immigration court on April 12, they assaulted and arrested Ayman, and threw him into a jail in Haskell, Texas, hundreds of miles from his home, his family, and his attorney.  Nothing had changed, except that the clique of Jewish militants realized there was no basis in the law for denying legal status to him.  They accused him of having raised funds for Hamas merely by virtue of his employment by the Holy Land Foundation, which ended in December 2001 when US Attorney General John Ashcroft’s Treasury Department shut down the Muslim charity.

To achieve by force what they never could have accomplished in the law, the Jewish militants put him in jail to break his spirit, so that he would despair of justice and agree to deportation.  After the July 30 deportation hearing, in which the immigration judge specifically found that not one shred of evidence contradicted Ayman’s insistence he never had any reason to think the HLF assisted Hamas (but ordered him deported anyway) Ayman decided not to appeal the order because he could not endure continued incarceration.

The Jewish extremists argued that the HLF was assisting Hamas by alleviating some of the misery of the victims of Israeli terrorism in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.  The reasoning of the Jewish militants went like this.  HLF relieves misery and starvation.  If Palestinians think that they do not have to stick around to relieve the misery and starvation of their parents and siblings, they will become suicide bombers and attack Israelis.  Since some suicide bombers are affiliated with Hamas, charity for the suffering people of the Occupied Palestinian Territories encourages suicide bombing, and therefore assists Hamas.

Since Ayman had worked at the HLF designing a web site and sending letters to donors reminding them to pay what they had pledged, he was supporting Hamas suicide bombers, and so was a terrorist.  The Jewish militants argued that the reason for suicide attacks against Israel had nothing to do with the cold blooded murder of hundreds of Palestinian children and thousands of adults by Israeli soldiers, nothing to do with the bulldozing of thousands of Palestinians’ homes with the furnishings, toys, and sometimes families still inside, nothing to do with the razing of thousands of acres of Palestinians’ farms and millions of fruit trees, nothing to do with the confiscation of Palestinians’ property to build racially segregated settlements and “bypass roads” for Jews only, nothing to do with dumping tons of toxic waste from Jewish colonies and factories on Palestinian towns; nothing to do with the Israelis’ reduction of Palestinian life to such unbearable pain without hope of improvement that the only reasonable alternative for a young Palestinian might appear to be a death that would take along some of the enemy.  No, the reason for Palestinian suicide attacks against Israel was the attackers’ expectation that some charity would feed their families.

Still, the cowardice of the immigration judge Anthony Rogers in condemning a man he knew to be innocent and deporting five United States citizens to Jordan is no more appalling than the obsequiousness of the coverage of the trial by CBS News.  One who relied on the CBS broadcast was not told that Ayman never was accused of any crime, or, for that matter, that the HLF to date has never been allowed to present evidence in its own defense in a court.  On the contrary, CBS turned its report over to a government agent who ranted in the manner of Julius Streicher about getting rid of terrorists.

CBS did not mention the five US citizen children.  Although a CBS reporter had attended Ayman’s immigration court hearing, the broadcast did not mention the finding by the immigration judge that no evidence contradicted Ayman’s protestations of innocence.  The immigration judge found that Ayman’s testimony was straightforward and truthful, and held explicitly that Ayman’s deportation would cause extreme hardship to his wife and children.  He found Ayman truthfully testified that while employed at the HLF he asked his employers about accusations in the Dallas Morning News that HLF was connected to Hamas, and that his employers consistently denied them.  He said that Ayman should have done more to find out whether there was any basis to the accusations.  He did not say what more Ayman should have done to investigate the truth of accusations that even the FBI did not believe—accusations that additional investigation would have confirmed to be false.

A viewer of the CBS broadcast, however, was not given such information.  Instead, the CBS report merely regurgitated government propaganda.  Josef Goebbels would have been envious.  CBS could have balanced its report with information about the trial and about Ayman’s history, but chose instead to make its broadcast an instrument of government terrorism—to convince its viewers that there are Muslim militants under their beds but the regime will protect them if only they will accept its racist assumptions and surrender their traditional liberty.

Most of all, the CBS report ignored the total absence of any evidence linking Ayman Ismail or the Holy Land Foundation to any illegal activity.  Instead, it relied on the buck naked lies of government public relations flacks, which easily could have been investigated.  Of course, such sycophancy is par for American journalism, which cannot be troubled to seek for the truth.  Terrorism does not work by damaging military targets.  It works by creating fear.  CBS thus conspired with the Jewish militants of the Department of Homeland Security in its terrorism against anybody in America who might pity the suffering of the Arab people in the Middle East.

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