Free Speech Is Dying In America

I was going to write about Tarek Mehanna based on an article in yesterday's NY Times by Andrew March, a teacher at Yale, who was an expert witness for the defense of Mehanna, who was convicted of material support for terrorism, conspiring to provide material support to terrorists and conspiring to kill in a foreign country.  

I was intrigued that, while March certainly was paid for being a defense witness, he felt deeply enough about the case to write an article about it.  March argues that basically Mehanna was convicted for his speech rather than his action.  He makes a number of good points.

My research led me to an article by Sahar Aziz in the Christian Science Monitor. He makes arguments similar to those of March.  But he also makes this analogy which I found quite interesting:

"Some Americans may view Mehanna’s conviction as legitimate and necessary to protect Americans from terrorists. But if Mehanna’s case becomes the norm for prosecuting people for vocalizing extremist views, then it is now incumbent on the government to be much more vigilant and file hundreds of indictments against white militia groups, patriot groups, and even some tea party chapters who spew vitriolic anti-government rhetoric and churn out extremist literature as some of them sit on large caches of weapons."

But the most interesting of the articles was Mehanna's speech to the court which I found in Glenn Greenwald's blog.   Here are some excerpts:

All those videos and translations and childish bickering over ‘Oh, he translated this paragraph’ and ‘Oh, he edited that sentence,’ and all those exhibits revolved around a single issue: Muslims who were defending themselves against American soldiers doing to them exactly what the British did to America. It was made crystal clear at trial that I never, ever plotted to “kill Americans” at shopping malls or whatever the story was. The government’s own witnesses contradicted this claim, and we put expert after expert up on that stand, who spent hours dissecting my every written word, who explained my beliefs. Further, when I was free, the government sent an undercover agent to prod me into one of their little “terror plots,” but I refused to participate. Mysteriously, however, the jury never heard this.

But when that home is a Muslim land, and that invader is the US military, for some reason the standards suddenly change. Common sense is renamed ”terrorism” and the people defending themselves against those who come to kill them from across the ocean become “the terrorists” who are ”killing Americans.” The mentality that America was victimized with when British soldiers walked these streets 2 ½ centuries ago is the same mentality Muslims are victimized by as American soldiers walk their streets today. It’s the mentality of colonialism.

In your eyes, I’m a terrorist, and it’s perfectly reasonable that I be standing here in an orange jumpsuit. But one day, America will change and people will recognize this day for what it is. They will look at how hundreds of thousands of Muslims were killed and maimed by the US military in foreign countries, yet somehow I’m the one going to prison for “conspiring to kill and maim” in those countries – because I support the Mujahidin defending those people. They will look back on how the government spent millions of dollars to imprison me as a ”terrorist,” yet if we were to somehow bring Abeer al-Janabi back to life in the moment she was being gang-raped by your soldiers, to put her on that witness stand and ask her who the “terrorists” are, she sure wouldn’t be pointing at me.

 What does all this say about America in 2012?