Dixie Justice
If anyone has a fondness for "justice, Dixie style," they should feel right at home in Federal District Judge Jim Moody's Tampa courtroom during the trial of Sami Al-Arian and three co-defendants.
I'm speaking of the days when juries were white, the accused were black, and the verdict was decided before the trial began. If the sentence wasn't carried out promptly, the lynching tree was a good substitute.
Judge Moody has revived those days in Tampa. In refusing to move the trial, he all but assured the verdict, regardless of what proof is offered by prosecutors. The 22 jurors and alternates have been saturated with prejudice; some undoubtedly are convinced that Arabs in general, and Al-Arian in particular, are evil. A few, maybe most, probably believe Palestinians were involved in 9/11 (wrong).
Combine that prejudice with Moody's decision stripping Al-Arian of the right to cite his people's plight, and we could save taxpayer money by today handing Al-Arian over to the mob. If Nelson Mandela were on trial in Moody's courtroom, he'd be gagged if he tried to criticize apartheid. If Martin Luther King stood in Al-Arian's shoes, he could say nothing about slavery and Jim Crow.
The Israeli point of view will, in this caricature of a courtroom, be fully explored. The prosecution not only will trumpet Israel's position on the Middle East, it is importing Israelis – the prosecution admits to calling 50; Israeli press accounts put the number at 100 – to testify about the horrors of terrorism. Of course, there will be nothing heard about the horrors of three decades of brutal military occupation, aka state terrorism.
Fair? Hardly.
Here's what you won't read in The Tampa Tribune. Federal prosecutors claimed in February that they had no foreign (interpreted: Israeli) intelligence in their possession, and that none would be used in the case. That means Israelis aren't the "accusers," and consequently Al-Arian can't, as the Constitution guarantees, confront them and test their evidence.
A May 22 article in Israel's Ha'aretz makes clear what any sane person has known all along: "Behind the scenes it was the Israelis who for years collected material, transmitted information about conversations and correspondence and generally connected the dots."
It appears the prosecutors lied. They've done that before, in claiming no informers were used to spy on Al-Arian.
Different Dixie. Same justice.
-John F. Sugg
For more, turn to www.johnsugg.com.
This article appears in Jun 2-8, 2005.