a different view on the Lynne Stewart & co-D's sentences

From: "justice4arabs@yahoo.com" <justice4arabs@yahoo.com>
Date: Mon, 23 Oct 2006 10:25:37 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: {Disarmed} [tupocc] a different view on the Lynne Stewart & co-D's sentences

Dear all,

 

My friend Lana Habash (who is based in Boston) wrote this thoughtful piece on the sentences of Lynne Stewart and her co-defendants.

 

Best salaams and eid mubarak,

saja

 

I read with sadness today the news that Ahmad Abdel Sattar one of the co-defendants in the "Lynne Stewart" case was sentenced to 24 years in prison. The other two co-defendants Lynne Stewart and Mohammed Yousry are free pending appeal of relatively shorter sentences: one year and eight months in the case of Yousry and 2  1/2 years in the case of Stewart.

 

It is strange to me that this is being celebrated as a "victory" in the movement.

 

As someone who is glad that there are lawyers like Stewart who defend their clients vigilantly, I am of course relieved and happy for Stewart as well as for Yousry that they are free and facing substantially shorter sentences than anticipated.

 

But would the movement be celebrating Sattar's release pending appeal if Stewart had been sentenced to 24 years in prison?

 

The sadness and anger regarding these recent events arise not only from the situation for Sattar-- which is horrific, but also the embarrassment regarding our lack of organization as a movement to defend Sattar in any significant way. There was no significant public defense committee support from the left for Sattar or Yousry  (that I am aware of) as there was for Stewart.  There was no linking of the cases in a political and public sense by our movement. In fact, it appeared that there was an effort  (within the movement) to distance Stewart's case from that of Yousry and especially that of Sattar. Rather than the Angola 3 or the Cuban 5, we heard about the case of Lynne Stewart and if one knew enough to ask, they might get an update on the status of Yousry and Sattar.

 

This treatment of Arabs and Muslims reveals the racism and discrimination against Islam that continues to be a persistent force in the movement today.

 

In a movement that claims that we  are anti-racist and pro-working class, why wasn't there  mobilization on the left to defend the rights of the Arab men who were being attacked as there was for the defense of Stewart, a white woman in the professional class?  I am not putting this forth as a  critique of Stewart who has vigilantly defended people of every class and race, but rather as a critique of our movement as a whole and how far we have to go.

 

The case of Sattar is only one example of the double standard applied by our movement to Muslims and Arabs. Even people in the radical movement who recognize the right of colonized people to defend themselves with arms,  in most cases, still fail to openly defend and more importantly support the rights of Arabs and Muslims to fight vigilantly by any means necessary against American empire and the Zionist settler army that continues to carry out genocidal policies against people in the Arab world.

 

Acts of resistance by Arabs and Muslims to defend themselves is labeled extremist, not just by the Western press and the right, but by our own movement. It is sometimes difficult to tell the difference between the right and the left when it comes to Islamic resistance-- the term "Islamofascist" is just as likely to be used by an American Marxist as it is by a right wing Republican.

 

None of the concerns that I am raising now are new. In fact, the observations are getting old and for that reason progressively more disturbing.

 

Our movement in the "US" needs to deal with this problem, not only on principle, but because it is affecting our ability to join the rest of the world as it resists American empire.

 

In Brazil, pictures of Hassan Nasrallah filled the streets this past year as a mark of support and an acknowledgement of the heroic resistance of Hezbollah in Lebanon. Chavez and Venezuela expressed solidarity with Arab and Islamic resistance to empire this past year. The Iraqi resistance continues to carry the world's fight against US empire on its back with honor (and they're winning) despite little support from anyone but the Arab world. At the same time, people here on the left and in the American feminist movement engage in petty attacks that invoke stereotypes about Islam that are not far from those depicted on FOX news. Even as "Israel" was dropping thousands of cluster bombs on Lebanon and devastating Gaza, the American anti-war movement could not even summon unified lip service to support the Islamic resistance in Palestine, Iraq and Lebanon.

 

In no other part of the world, save Europe perhaps, are the resistance tactics of people suffocating under the boot of American Empire, debated, discussed and dissected as thoroughly as they are here. How ironic. Despite all our relative privileges as "Americans",  mainstream dissent on this continent resembles a parade far more than it does resistance. Save our relatively few current and former political prisoners and the movements that they represent, there is no resistance in the "US" today in the sense that people in other parts of the world understand it.

 

The treatment of Sattar's case by our movement is just a small example of how far we have to go.

 

We cannot continue to live a life here of any integrity if we do not join the fight and unconditionally support those who are already in the battle.

 

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