Max Blumenthal writes: In late April, Geert Wilders arrived in New York City to tell his quixotic tale to a rapt American audience. The far-right Dutch Party of Freedom leader—perhaps the world’s most prominent anti-Muslim populist—was poised to release Marked for Death: Islam’s War Against the West and Me, a memoir just out from Regnery, the right-wing US publishing house, in which he recounts his courageous efforts to stop the “Islamicization” of Europe. On his US tour, Wilders proudly portrayed himself as a man on the run—a round-the-clock security detail guarding him against radical Muslims whose violent passions he had supposedly inflamed by his truth-telling—and as a man on the rise: the exodus of his party from the governing coalition had forced new elections in the Netherlands, throwing the country’s ossified establishment into chaos.

Upon Wilders’s arrival in New York, a little-known think tank called the Gatestone Institute rolled out the red carpet for him. On April 30, before a select crowd that according to Gatestone’s website had paid $10,000 a head, he held forth on the persecution he had endured during his recent trial for incitement to hatred and discrimination. “This charade that happened in the Netherlands for the last few years could not have happened in your great country,” Wilders said in his speech. Then he cut to the heart of his appeal: “Islam is primarily a dangerous ideology rather than a religion. This is the truth. This violent ideology wants to impose Islamic Sharia law on the whole world, including us—the Kafirs, the non-Muslims…. Islam is the largest threat to freedom which the world is currently facing.”

Some Dutch liberals have branded him a demagogue who summons the ghosts of Europe’s dark past, but Wilders counters the accusation by assiduously cultivating Jewish support. He quotes Zionist forefather Theodor Herzl and boasts of his more than forty trips to Israel, where he once toiled on a rural kibbutz. Wilders, in fact, has made a special friend of right-wing Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. In Wilders’s world, the Jewish state represents Fort Apache on the frontiers of the war against the barbarians threatening Western civilization. “Mothers in the West can sleep safely because Israeli mothers at night worry about their sons in the army,” he told the Gatestone Institute. “Their fight is our fight. We should support it.”

At the April event, Wilders’s seamless fusion of anti-Muslim bombast and pro-Israel cant was gratefully received by the Gatestone Institute’s founder and director, Nina Rosenwald, whom he acknowledged at the top of his jeremiad as another of his good friends. An heiress to the Sears Roebuck fortune, Rosenwald spreads her millions through the William Rosenwald Family Fund, a nonprofit foundation named for her father, a famed Jewish philanthropist who created the United Jewish Appeal in 1939. His daughter’s focus is more explicitly political. According to a report by the Center for American Progress titled “Fear Inc.,” Rosenwald and her sister Elizabeth Varet, who also directs the family foundation, have donated more than $2.8 million since 2000 to “organizations that fan the flames of Islamophobia.”

Besides funding a Who’s Who of anti-Muslim outfits, Rosenwald has served on the board of AIPAC, the central arm of America’s Israel lobby, and holds leadership roles in a host of mainstream pro-Israel organizations. As groups like AIPAC lead the charge for a US military strike on the Islamic Republic of Iran, threatening to turn apocalyptic visions of civilizational warfare into catastrophic reality, Rosenwald’s wealth has fueled a rapidly emerging alliance between the pro-Israel mainstream and the Islamophobic fringe. (In 2003 alone the Rosenwald Family Fund donated well over half of its $1.6 million in total contributions to pro-Israel and Islamophobic organizations.) This alliance serves to sanitize and legitimize professional anti-Muslim bigots like Wilders, allowing their ideas to mingle easily with those of neoconservative foreign policy heavyweights intent on promoting the appearance of a convergence between US and Israeli interests by invoking the specter of a common “Islamofascist” enemy. With Gatestone — which publicizes the writings of figures ranging from pro-Israel super-lawyer Alan Dershowitz to “counter-jihad” propagandist Robert Spencer, and boasts Harold Rhode, a neoconservative former Pentagon official credited, as a senior fellow, with helping to try to push the Bush administration to invade Iraq — Rosenwald has attempted to shift the alliance into overdrive. [Continue reading…]

The Associated Press reports: A Muslim civil rights group that has worked closely with the Obama administration to build better relationships with American Muslims is suing the New York Police Department over its surveillance programs.

Eight Muslims filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday in New Jersey to force the NYPD to end its surveillance and other intelligence-gathering practices that have targeted Muslims since the 2001 terrorist attacks. The lawsuit alleged that the NYPD’s activities were unconstitutional because they focused on people’s religion, national origin and race.

It is the first lawsuit to directly challenge the NYPD’s surveillance programs that targeted entire Muslim neighborhoods, chronicling the daily life of where people ate, prayed and got their hair cut. The surveillance was the subject of series of stories by The Associated Press that revealed the NYPD intelligence division infiltrated dozens of mosques and Muslim student groups and investigated hundreds.

The Muslims suing the NYPD are represented by Muslim Advocates, a California-based civil rights group that meets regularly with members of the Obama administration. Its executive director, Farhana Khera, said she was disappointed that the Obama administration hasn’t been more involved.

“We do not think that they’ve been given sufficient attention and attention in a speedy manner,” Khera said. “We do think this is an immensely important issue to have the nation’s largest police department targeting Americans based on religion. We do think it merits the attention of the federal government.”

The bigotry that has made many Americans afraid of Muslims has been reinforced by people like Sam Harris who, because he seems smart, has led others to believe that profiling Muslims in airport security is just a matter of common sense.

To his credit, at least Harris was rational enough to allow someone else explain to him why he’s wrong and post the following on his own website, explaining why profiling makes no sense.

Bruce Schneier writes: Why do otherwise rational people think it’s a good idea to profile people at airports? Recently, neuroscientist and best-selling author Sam Harris related a story of an elderly couple being given the twice-over by the TSA, pointed out how these two were obviously not a threat, and recommended that the TSA focus on the actual threat: “Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim.”

This is a bad idea. It doesn’t make us any safer—and it actually puts us all at risk.

The right way to look at security is in terms of cost-benefit trade-offs. If adding profiling to airport checkpoints allowed us to detect more threats at a lower cost, than we should implement it. If it didn’t, we’d be foolish to do so. Sometimes profiling works. Consider a sheep in a meadow, happily munching on grass. When he spies a wolf, he’s going to judge that individual wolf based on a bunch of assumptions related to the past behavior of its species. In short, that sheep is going to profile…and then run away. This makes perfect sense, and is why evolution produced sheep—and other animals—that react this way. But this sort of profiling doesn’t work with humans at airports, for several reasons.

First, in the sheep’s case the profile is accurate, in that all wolves are out to eat sheep. Maybe a particular wolf isn’t hungry at the moment, but enough wolves are hungry enough of the time to justify the occasional false alarm. However, it isn’t true that almost all Muslims are out to blow up airplanes. In fact, almost none of them are. Post 9/11, we’ve had 2 Muslim terrorists on U.S airplanes: the shoe bomber and the underwear bomber. If you assume 0.8% (that’s one estimate of the percentage of Muslim Americans) of the 630 million annual airplane fliers are Muslim and triple it to account for others who look Semitic, then the chances any profiled flier will be a Muslim terrorist is 1 in 80 million. Add the 19 9/11 terrorists—arguably a singular event—that number drops to 1 in 8 million. Either way, because the number of actual terrorists is so low, almost everyone selected by the profile will be innocent. This is called the “base rate fallacy,” and dooms any type of broad terrorist profiling, including the TSA’s behavioral profiling.

Joshua Holland writes: For years, Charles Johnson was a prominent right-wing “war-blogger.” On his site, Little Green Footballs, he coined the term “anti-idiotarian,” wrote frequently of a “leftist-Islamist axis,” called Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas “a fanatical, deadly enemy of Western civilization” and inspired the hawkish Israeli journalist Gil Ronen to gush, “If anyone ever compiles a list of Internet sites that contribute to Israel’s public relations effort, Johnson’s site will probably come in first, far above the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s site.” His comments section became an infamous hotbed of xenophobia and wingnuttery.

That was then and this is now. Visit LGF today, and you’ll find posts decrying his former fellow travelers’ knee-jerk Islamophobia, debunking the Breitbrats’ steaming piles of nonsense and defending the Obama administration against scurrilous charges from Fox News. Johnson has undergone a remarkable political transformation over the past five years, but it didn’t come without a cost; he is now among the top targets of the right blogosphere – an apostate drawing an enormous amount of venom from people he once considered his allies. [Continue reading…]

Nayantara Mukherji reports: Former Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold is known for taking on monumental challenges. In 2001 he was the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act. These days, Feingold has turned his attention to another cause — US foreign policy. At a talk in Madison, Wisconsin, about his new book, While America Sleeps, Feingold argued for increased American engagement with the rest of the world. He said 9/11 highlighted the importance of engaging and understanding the rest of the world, and criticized Democrats and Republicans alike for failing to heed the message.

In making his case, Feingold, a Jewish-American, did not lose sight of domestic issues, pointing out the impact 9/11 had on the lives of Muslim Americans. He likened the situation to Japanese internment during World War II.

In the last couple of years, there have been a number of incidents where people have used the issue of alleged Muslim extremism in this country to justify things like outlawing a mosque in Southern Manhattan, the burning of Qur’ans and most despicably, hearings held by Peter King in Washington specifically focusing on so-called Muslim terrorism, as opposed to the terrorism phenomenon in general.

Feingold bemoaned the fact that the post-9/11 era has made Muslims feel like second-class citizens in their own country. [H/t Loonwatch]

Paul Hockenos writes: The biggest mistake that Europeans could make while watching the ongoing trial of Anders Behring Breivik in Norway is to discount his rambling tirades against Islam and multiculturism as the ravings of a crackpot. Whether clinically sane or not — the Norwegian psychiatrists at the pretrial flip-flopped on this — Breivik’s thousand-page manifesto and his convictions in general are not the bizarre product of a “delusional thought universe,” as the first psychiatric report concluded. On the contrary, Breivik’s “thought universe” bears all the staples of a political ideology that accurately reflects a potent Islamophobic discourse that has taken hold across the continent and beyond since the 9/11 attacks. Breivik’s monstrous crimes must serve as a shrill wake-up call for Europeans — and not just Europeans — to acknowledge the very real potential for violence inherent in this movement and take action to stem it, at its source.

Breivik is not a Norwegian novelty but, rather, symptomatic of a growing culture of politically motivated violence across the continent (just check out the London-based Islamophobia Watch, which chronicles anti-Muslim violence). Muslims have been assaulted and killed, their mosques and institutions smeared with graffiti and bombed. Rampages that copycat Breivik’s, say experts, aren’t out of the question. Indeed, security services have been far too lax about the threat of the far right, especially its most radical, Islam-obsessed currents.

Yet the source of the discrimination, hate speech, and violence increasingly directed at Europe’s Muslim communities lies much closer to home: Islamophobia has won an accepted presence in mainstream discourses and politics from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean. Political parties that espouse a somewhat milder version of Breivik’s thoughts sit in parliaments across Northern Europe, including in the European Parliament, and even participate in ruling coalitions. In some countries, like once proudly multikulti Denmark, these politicos have had a pronounced impact on migration, asylum, and cultural, social, and anti-terrorism policies, as well as on the entrenchment of a growing popular animus against Muslims.

Even proper democrats have capitulated to Islamophobia, unable to field the complex issues of Islam and Europe’s Muslims constructively. Last year, Denmark’s opposition Social Democrats, for example, though fiercely split, backed a landmark tightening of immigration requirements for non-Westerners, a bill the anti-Islam Danish People’s Party co-wrote and pushed. The burqa bans in France and Belgium had similar support. Acts like these stigmatize Muslims further and play straight into the hands of this new generation of Europe’s right, which includes extremists like Breivik who are inspired by its arguments. An international network of “counter-jihad” groups are expanding in reach and influence, according to a report released by the British group Hope Not Hate on the eve of Breivik’s trial. Far-right organizations are forging new alliances throughout Europe and the United States, according to the group, which documented 190 groups promoting an Islamophobic agenda. [Continue reading…]

Glenn Greenwald writes: It’s sometimes easy — too easy — to think, talk or write about the assault on civil liberties in the United States, and related injustices, and conceive of them as abstractions. Two weeks ago, the Editorial Page Editor of The New York Times, Andrew Rosenthal, wrote that ever since the 9/11 attacks, the United States has created “what’s essentially a separate justice system for Muslims.” That should be an extraordinary observation: creating a radically different — and more oppressive — set of rules, laws and punishments for a class of people in the United States based on their religious affiliation is a disgrace of historic proportion. Yet here we have someone occupying one of the most establishment media positions in the country matter-of-factly observing that this is exactly the state of affairs that exists on American soil, and it prompts little notice, let alone protest.

There are many factors accounting for the willingness to tolerate, or even approve of, this systematic persecution, most of which I’ve written about before. But one important reason I want to highlight here is that — as is true of America’s related posture of endless wars — its victims, by design, are so rarely heard from. As is true for most groups of humans who remain hidden, they are therefore easily demonized. This invisibility also means that even those who object in principle to what is being done have difficulty apprehending in a visceral way the devastation that is wreaked in the lives of these human beings who have done nothing wrong. Their absence from our discourse can confine one’s understanding of these issues to the theoretical realm, and thus limit one’s ability to truly care.

I spent the last week traveling to several cities where, without planning to do so, I met dozens of people whose lives have been seriously impeded or fully wrecked by the abuses carried out in the name of the War on Terror. This happens whenever I travel to speak at events, and it’s one of the reasons I do it. Meeting such people isn’t the reason for my travel. These meetings usually are unplanned. But the decade-long abuses carried out in the post-9/11 era are so pervasive, so systematized, that no matter what city I visit, it’s very common for me to end up meeting people — usually though not always Muslims — whose lives have been unjustly and severely harmed by these state actions. And it’s not only the targeted individuals themselves, but entire communities of people, whose lives are substantially damaged. Being able to meet and speak with people directly affected personalizes the issues for me that are most frequently written about here, and so I want to describe several of those encounters I had just in the last week. [Continue reading…]

Timothy Stanley writes: The trial of mass murderer Anders Breivik has confirmed one thing so far: He seems quite mad. Looking plump and dumb, with a slightly receding hairline, the Norwegian gave a right-wing salute as he entered the courtroom and smirked his way through CCTV footage of his handiwork.

Breivik claims that he killed 77 people as an act of self-defense against the Islamification of Norway, that he is a member of the Knights Templar and part of an “anticommunist” resistance to multiculturalism. Reading his insane manifesto, it is tempting to dismiss him as a nut with a gun.

Nevertheless, there’s no denying the political context to what Breivik did. Since 9/11, fringe and mainstream politicians in Europe and America have spoken of Islam as incompatible with Western values. Breivik quoted many of them in his manifesto. This is not to say that he took direct inspiration from those public figures, or that they bear personal responsibility for his crimes. But Breivik’s paranoia does conform to a popular — wholly negative — view of the twin problems of Islam and multiculturalism. Tragically, it is a view that few mainstream politicians have been willing to challenge.

Breivik makes two false claims. The first is that Islam is ethically inferior to Christianity and cannot exist peacefully within the secular democracies of the post-Enlightenment West. That is the open view of the Dutch Party for Freedom, the French National Front, the English Defense League and the Finnish True Finns. It was implicit in Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain’s aversion to the building of mosques. We might also infer it from much of the testimony presented at Rep. Peter King’s congressional hearings into the radicalization of American Muslim youth. King has opined that there are “too many mosques” in the United States and that roughly 80% of American Muslims are radical.

The mistake being made by all these people is to conflate a tiny minority of political Islamists — whose precise ideology has only really emerged in the last 30 years — with the entire global and historical community of Muslims. [Continue reading…]

In The Independent, Freya Berry writes: What does a country do with a remorseless, apparently sane, mass-murderer? Unusually, Anders Breivik, perpetrator of the Utoya massacre, was left alive – something even he finds surprising. Now, safely in custody, famously liberal Norway is struggling to know how to deal with him.

The maximum prison sentence Norway offers is 21 years: roughly a third of a year for every person he killed. An insanity plea would render him liable for locking up indefinitely in a psychiatric unit – but Breivik insists he is sound in mind.

Norway has so far preserved its political ethics, balancing Breivik’s democratic rights with human decency and caution. Yet what is most notable is not the actions of the judiciary, but the response from the people. A poll by Dagbladet newspaper showed 68 per cent of the population remain opposed to the death penalty. The same newspaper has also introduced a “No Breivik” button, which removes him from its news feed. And of the 139 public tickets for Breivik’s hearing, just 50 have been taken up. This behaviour shows a dignified refusal to let his actions and beliefs affect their lives.

This is a country whose Prime Minister, Jens Stoltenberg, regularly cycles to work without security, without a chauffeured car following behind (David Cameron, I’m looking at you). At the memorial service to Breivik’s victims, he said “we will never give up our values. Our response is more democracy, more openness, and more humanity.”

Meanwhile, since the 7/7 bombings, the UK has sustained wars against two countries; tried to impose 42-day detentions without trial; and is now threatening to introduce secret courts.

Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer who killed 77 fellow Norwegians last July, wants to portray himself as both sane and the champion of a righteous cause. In his testimony before a court in Oslo he has said that he and other militant nationalists in the West are “selling dreams” to inspire others.

Can a man who has displayed such ruthlessness become a source of inspiration? The answer is clearly yes and one of the most obvious parallels to Breivik would be Baruch Goldstein.

After the American-born Jewish Israeli physician killed 29 Palestinians and wounded another 125 at the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre in Hebron in 1994, thousands of people visited Goldstein’s grave to pay their respects.

A few days after the massacre, the New York Times reported:

Dr. Goldstein, who was finally overcome and beaten to death by the worshipers, was buried today in Qiryat Arba after a funeral service in which some mourners praised him as a hero and a righteous man. His grave was said to be temporary, and there are plans to move him to the Jewish cemetery in Hebron when tensions ease.

“One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail,” Rabbi Yaacov Perrin said in a eulogy. At the service in Jerusalem, attended by 300 people, one man shouted, “We are all Goldstein,” an opinion echoed across Qiryat Arba by neighbors who said variously that they approved of his attack on the Arabs or at the least could not judge him.

Goldstein was a follower of Rabbi Meir Kahane and belonged to Kahane’s Jewish Defense League.

After Breivik’s bombing and shooting rampage, those in Europe and the United States who share his views about an “Islamic threat” have largely wanted to distance themselves from his actions even while defending his outlook.

There are however a few exceptions.

“Anders Breivik, The Kangaroo Court and The Lies of The Left,” a post at the Jewish Defence League UK website says (excerpt posted here without corrections):

At the beginning of the trial, Officials and Court members shook Breivik’s hand as if to give a Façade that they were not corrupt in the trial of this man. Anders Breivik spoke out and refused to recognize the court as The court room was being held by Leftists who were connected to the Marxist government of Norway. Quite rightly, because it was a classic Kangaroo court. the judges and prosecution were constantly staring at Breivik wide eyed, they were like a bunch of children trying an adult, they looked completely unprofessional and out of their league. A man like Breivik in a case such as this surely deserves a better trial than that?
[…]
[W]hat happened on Utoya was regrettable, but those to blame are those who held the rally, the Labour Youth and the Norwegian government. Breivik killed nobody under the age of 14 in the shootings, they were young adults. The rally at Utoya was certainly no “kids day out” it was an Far Left indoctrination weekend, set on a picturesque island, only the day before those attending were holding “Boycott Israel” banners to show the cameras. You tell me what “child” attends political meetings? You tell me what “child” is classed as an up and coming Politician? They were not children, they were young adults. I hold the same amount of sympathy for the those on Utoya as I would if somebody committed this act on a Hitler Youth camp in the 1940’s, or were they just “children” as well?

“There are thousands and thousands of people desperate like [Breivik]” says co-founder, spokesman and leader of the English Defense League, “Tommy Robinson” (Stephen Yaxley-Lennon).

Breivik’s prosecutors will no doubt work hard to portray the accused as delusional in the hope that the “dreams” he wants to sell will find no buyers. But though his view of the world is no doubt twisted, it is shared far too widely to be dismissed. And were Breivik not a rightwing extremist and white, he would without question have been branded a terrorist and those who share his views be seen as terrorist sympathizers.

The label “terrorist” has little value if it serves as nothing more than as an expression of antipathy, but the ranks of Breivik’s fellow travelers are all too easy to identify.

Robert Spencer and Pamella Geller’s Stop Islamization of America Facebook page has 7,668 likes: Stop Islamization of Norway (Stopp islamiseringen av Norge), 10, 348 members; Stop Islamization of the World, 8,466 likes; Anti-Islam Alliance, 6,312 likes; United States Defense League, 2,321 likes; English Defence League, 13, 679 likes; Stop Islamization of Denmark (Stop Islamiseringen Af Danmark), 2,321 members; and Stop Islamization of Europe – Bulgaria (ДА СПРЕМ ислямизацията!/SIOE Bulgaria), 4,077 members.

Even if the Knights Templar network to which Breivik claims he was recruited doesn’t actually exist, such a group with the aims he has outlined could certainly be created.

The idea that Breivik’s trial and conviction should serve as a warning to those who might contemplate following his lead reflects the slanted view of justice which puts all the emphasis on punishment. Indeed, punishment — whatever form it takes — will for Breivik be turned into some kind of ideological reward.

The most valuable function his trial can serve is as a demonstration that the actions of an individual or handful of individuals should not be used as a justification for abandoning the legal and democratic principles upon which a free society is based.

Erik Dale writes:

Much has been said about how Norway reacted as a nation in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, but in 10 weeks we will know what this nation is really made of.

The first challenge is to accept that no punishment can ever fit the crime. Some have called for changes in the legal system to allow for longer prison sentences or even death, but even if those had been real possibilities no punishment in the world is ever going to feel enough. Others have reacted strongly to pictures of the terrorist smiling and giving extremist salutes in the courtroom, pointing out that he is getting exactly the kind of attention he wants.

We should be outraged by the ideas that motivate him, but if we deny him the chance of explaining himself in an open court, we let the essence of those ideas, oppression and intolerance, dominate us. Although my heart is filled with anger, fear and sorrow, I am glad the Norwegian legal system treats everyone the same and is not subject to popular opinion. Its objective rules are there to deliver justice when emotions get the better of us. If Norwegians can hold on to that, they have already won a great victory.

The second challenge is to remain true to the values of Norwegian society. It is easy to be sympathetic to demands for stronger censorship, policy controls and online surveillance. Many will suggest that Breivik could have been stopped if only we had adopted some measure or other. But such doubts must not be allowed to change Norway. Even more important than the terrorist’s right to speak in court is that the right of opinion and right of organisation keep forming the core of our free society. Right of opinion, the heart of freedom of speech, also includes right of privacy and anonymity.

Extremism of any creed is not fuelled by those who speak in public, but by those who feel that no one speaks for them at all. There must be room for even the dark sides of human nature if Norway is to remain Norway. Only then can Norwegians emerge on the other side of this challenge as a greater and stronger people than they were before.

Chris Hedges writes: Tarek Mehanna, a U.S. citizen, was sentenced Thursday in Worcester, Mass., to 17½ years in prison. It was another of the tawdry show trials held against Muslim activists since 9/11 as a result of the government’s criminalization of what people say and believe. These trials, where secrecy rules permit federal lawyers to prosecute people on “evidence” the defendants are not allowed to examine, are the harbinger of a corporate totalitarian state in which any form of dissent can be declared illegal. What the government did to Mehanna, and what it has done to hundreds of other innocent Muslims in this country over the last decade, it will eventually do to the rest of us.

Mehanna, a teacher at Alhuda Academy in Worcester, was convicted after an eight-week jury trial of conspiring to kill U.S. soldiers in Iraq and providing material support to al-Qaida, as well as making false statements to officials investigating terrorism. His real “crime,” however, seems to be viewing and translating jihadi videos online, speaking out against U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and refusing to become a government informant.

Stephen F. Downs, a lawyer in Albany, N.Y., a founder of Project Salam and the author of “Victims of America’s Dirty War,” a booklet posted on the website, has defended Muslim activists since 2006. He has methodically documented the mendacious charges used to incarcerate many Muslim activists as terrorists. Because of “terrorism enhancement” provisions, any sentence can be quadrupled—even minor charges can leave prisoners incarcerated for years.

“People who have committed no crime are taken into custody, isolated without adequate recourse to legal advice, railroaded with fake or contrived charges, and ‘disappeared’ into prisons designed to isolate them,” Downs told me when we met last week at Brown University in Providence, R.I.

Downs calls the process of condemning people before they have committed a crime “pre-emptive prosecution.” The concept of pre-emptive prosecution mocks domestic law as egregiously as pre-emptive war mocks the foundations of international law. [Continue reading…]

The Independent reports: They met for the first time on 19 February: Terje Torrisen, the Norwegian psychiatrist given the task of assessing the sanity of a mass murderer, and Anders Behring Breivik, the man who today goes on trial for one of the most shocking crimes in European post-war history.

Breivik was well-mannered and co-operative, according to Mr Torrisen: “My first impression was that he was a polite man. He was answering all of our questions and did whatever he could to make the process as smooth as possible.”

Throughout the 24-hour-a-day observation Mr Torrisen and the rest of his team were able to watch and analyse how the self-confessed mass murderer eats, sleeps and interacts with others. When Breivik sleeps alone in his cell – or spends time weight-training, or reading world history – the team has always been around him, scrutinising his behaviour for more than 200 hours, building up the most complete profile of Norway’s worst-ever serial killer.

“He’s not like a normal person,” Mr Torrisen told The Independent, seemingly stating the obvious by adding that Breivik has an extreme personality. “During conversations, he is friendly,” Mr Torrisen explained. He said Breivik spends a lot of time, as he has done during his handful of public appearances, talking about his own thoughts and political opinions. He “smiles every time he discovers himself in newspapers or on television,” Mr Torrisen said.

Breivik has told the psychiatrists and doctors that he is “incredibly proud” of what he has done, and that “the operation was a major ego boost, in a way I am probably a little attention-whore”.

Last week, Mr Torrisen and Agnar Aspas, the other analyst to assess Breivik’s mental state, delivered a report about his mental health to the court in Oslo. The report was commissioned after an earlier assessment declared him insane. According to newspapers in Norway, the new report – still confidential – concludes that Breivik has a narcissistic and antisocial personality disorder – a diagnosis that has certain similarities with other psychopaths. It concludes, however, that he is mentally fit enough to face trial.

The Guardian reports: The international network of counter-jihadist groups that inspired Anders Behring Breivik is growing in reach and influence, according to a report released on the eve of the Norwegian’s trial.

Far-right organisations are becoming more cohesive as they forge alliances throughout Europe and the US, says the study, with 190 groups now identified as promoting an Islamophobic agenda.

This week Breivik will appear on trial in Oslo after confessing to the murder of 77 people in Norway last July, killings that he justified as part of a “war” between the west and Islamists.

The report, by anti-racism group Hope Not Hate, states that since the 33-year-old’s killing spree, the counter-jihad movement – a network of foundations, bloggers, political activists and street gangs – has continued to proliferate.

Campaigners cite the formation three months ago of the Stop Islamization of Nations (Sion) group, designed to promote an umbrella network of counter-jihad groups across Europe and the US, as evidence of a global evolution.

An inaugural Sion summit is planned in New York this year to coincide with the anniversary of 9/11. Speakers are set to include Paul Weston, chairman of the anti-Islamic British Freedom Party (BFP), which recently announced a pact with the English Defence League. In the manifesto that Breivik published online 90 minutes before his attacks, he cited blog postings by Weston which discussed a “European civil war” between the west and Islam.

Researchers at Hope Not Hate name the UK as one of Europe’s most active countries in terms of counter-jihad extremism, with 22 anti-Islamic groups currently operating.

In Europe as a whole, 133 organisations were named in the report, including seven in Norway, and another 47 in the US, where a network of neo-conservative, evangelical and conservative organisations attempts to spread “negative perceptions of Islam, Muslim minorities and Islamic culture”.

For over a decade, Americans have been told that the threat of terrorism lurks everywhere — that it is the preeminent threat to security across the globe and that, if politicians and other public figures are to be taken seriously, it poses an even greater threat to life on this planet than climate change.

Not surprisingly, this fear-mongering has had an effect and produced what arguably actually poses a greater threat to the citizens of this country: the creation of Americans whose fear of “terrorists” provokes murderous rage.

Realistically, such Americans can probably be assumed to be much more numerous than would-be terrorists in this country. The existence of such individuals does not seem to cause much public concern however, for the simple reason that they only pose a threat to a relatively small minority of Americans: anyone who appears to be Muslim.

The Associated Press reports: A woman from Iraq who was found beaten next to a threatening note saying “go back to your country” has died, and police are investigating the possibility of a hate crime.

Hanif Mohebi, the director of the San Diego chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said Shaima Alawadi was taken off life support Saturday afternoon.

“The family is in shock at the moment. They’re still trying to deal with what happened,” said Mohebi, who met with family members.

Alawadi, a 32-year-old mother of five, had been hospitalized since her 17-year-old daughter found her unconscious in the dining room of the family’s suburban San Diego house on Wednesday, police Lt. Steve Shakowski said.

“A hate crime is one of the possibilities, and we will be looking at that,” Lt. Mark Coit said. “We don’t want to focus on only one issue and miss something else.”

The daughter, Fatima Al Himidi, told KUSI-TV her mother had been beaten on the head repeatedly with a tire iron, and that the note said “go back to your country, you terrorist.”

While Alawadi is widely being described as an Iraqi immigrant, it’s worth noting that having arrived here in 1993, she had spent most of her life and all of her adult life in the United States.

Justin Elliot writes: In July 2004, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg presided over a celebratory signing ceremony at City Hall for a new law that banned the NYPD from racial or religious profiling. Advocates gushed. The mayor hailed the new law.

“Racial profiling will not be tolerated in our city,” Bloomberg declared after reading the law’s definition of racial profiling, which includes religion. “New York City is home to 8 million people of every race, ethnicity and religion from all over the world.”

Fast-forward to the present, and the NYPD has come under fire for spying on the Muslim community in the city and beyond, including using informants to prepare reports on political speech at mosques and dispatching undercover officers to map Muslim-owned businesses in Newark, N.J.

The activities seem to counter at least the spirit of the law. So, why hasn’t there been an investigation or enforcement?

The answer may lie in the text of the law itself, which experts say is vaguely worded and lacks a clear enforcement mechanism. Further, there appears to be little political will among city and state officials and prosecutors to go after the NYPD over profiling.

“The racial profiling law, to me, does not appear to be worth the paper it’s written on,” says Eugene O’Donnell, a former NYPD officer and prosecutor who is now a professor of police studies at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York.

O’Donnell and others point to the section of the law defining profiling. Here it is:

an act of a member of the force of the police department or other law enforcement officer that relies on race, ethnicity, religion or national origin as the determinative factor in initiating law enforcement action against an individual, rather than an individual’s behavior or other information or circumstances that links a person or persons of a particular race, ethnicity, religion or national origin to suspected unlawful activity.

Those two bold-face phrases are at the heart of the matter. The law does not define either phrase. “The word ‘determinative’ 2013 what does that actually mean?” asks O’Donnell.

“The devil is in the details, and it all boils down to how we define profiling,” says Udi Ofer, advocacy director at the New York Civil Liberties Union. “Right now, the definition is very weak. “

That may be by design. The original version of the bill drafted by the city council defined racial profiling somewhat differently 2014 it focused on the NYPD’s practice of “stop and frisk,” and it outlined specific penalties. Officers could have their leave reduced, be ordered to do community service, and be suspended or fired for violating the law. But the final version was watered down, reportedly following objections by Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. The measure was “reduced from a toughly worded proposal several pages long to a single paragraph,” the Associated Press noted at the time.

“Unless there’s an explicit enforcement provision, it’s difficult to enforce laws,” Ofer says. On Wednesday, City Councilman Jumaane Williams introduced a tougher anti-profiling bill, which outlines how victims of profiling can sue the city.

The city and state officials who might investigate have so far declined to do so or aren’t commenting.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman last week said he would not to look into the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslims, citing “significant legal and investigative obstacles.” Asked by ProPublica about potential violations of the 2004 law, the office of New York County District Attorney Cyrus Vance declined to comment. The office of Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, which plays a watchdog role for city residents, also declined to comment on the surveillance of Muslims by the NYPD.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder did say this week that the Justice Department is beginning to review whether to investigate possible civil rights violations by the NYPD.

The 2004 anti-profiling law has apparently not yet come up in court, so there is no precedent that might offer clarity on its phrasing. “The 2004 law, as far I know, has never been used in terms of someone claiming in court that it’s been violated,” Ofer says.

As we noted earlier this week, the NYPD’s activity also raises questions about potential constitutional violations and other rules that govern police investigations.

Bloomberg’s office and the NYPD did not respond to requests for comment. The mayor recently maintained that the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslims is “legal” and “constitutional,” though he has not repeated his earlier claim that the NYPD merely follows threats and leads, and does not consider religion.

Since August, AP has been publishing stories from its ongoing investigation into secret intelligence operations set up by the New York Police Department following the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.

AP’s investigation has revealed that the NYPD dispatched undercover officers into minority neighborhoods as part of a human mapping program. Police also used informants, known as “mosque crawlers,” to monitor sermons, even when there was no evidence of wrongdoing.

The AP also determined that police subjected entire neighborhoods to surveillance and scrutiny, often because of the ethnicity of the residents, not because of any accusations of crimes. Hundreds of mosques and Muslim student groups were investigated and dozens were infiltrated. Many of these operations were built with help from the CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans but was instrumental in transforming the NYPD’s intelligence unit after 9/11.

Click here to see the AP investigative team’s body of work to date.

Justin Elliott at ProPublica reports: The Associated Press published a story last week detailing how, in 2007, undercover New York Police Department officers investigated the Muslim community in Newark, N.J., producing a secret report profiling mosques, Islamic schools and Muslim-owned businesses and restaurants.

The story, based on a copy of the 60-page report obtained by AP, concludes that the surveillance project was undertaken despite “no evidence of terrorism or criminal behavior. It was a guide to Newark’s Muslims.”

Besides being significant on its own, that conclusion contradicts claims by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg last year about how the NYPD operates.

In August, after AP published the first story in its series documenting the NYPD’s extensive surveillance and investigation of Muslims, Bloomberg denied that the NYPD launched investigations based on religion in the absence of suspicion of a crime.

“If there are threats or leads to follow, then the NYPD’s job is to do it. The law is pretty clear about what’s the requirement, and I think they follow the law,” Bloomberg said at an Aug. 25 news conference, the local news site DNAInfo noted at the time. “We don’t stop to think about the religion. We stop to think about the threats and focus our efforts there.”

In October, New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly made similar comments under questioning from the city council.

“We simply follow leads,” Kelly said. “Now, those leads may take us into religious institutions; it may be people in a particular religion. But we’re going to follow those leads wherever they take us. We’re not going to be deterred, but we’re certainly not singling out any particular group.”

AP’s previous stories showed the NYPD scrutinized Muslim communities in part based on ethnicity. Today’s story, as well as others earlier this month, showed the NYPD focusing solely on religion.

The secret dossier on Newark published by AP shows the NYPD both thinking about religion and singling out a particular group in the apparent absence of any leads.

The report mapped so-called Locations of Concern in Newark, which were defined to include “Localized center[s] of activity for a particular ethnic group.” The only ethnic groups that are highlighted in the report are those that include Muslims. The report noted that the city’s “largest immigrant communities … are from Portugal and Brazil” but that “No Muslim component within these communities was identified.”

Bloomberg’s press office did not respond to our request for comment about the mayor’s August remarks and the new AP report. The NYPD also did not respond to our request for comment; nor did it comment on the AP’s story.

The report includes multiple maps marking mosques and Islamic schools in Newark like this one:

It also includes a one-page guide to each Muslim institution, with a picture and basic information such as name, address, phone number — and two categories for “sect” and “imam.” A section of the report that includes a similar guide to Muslim businesses includes comments like “location has a donation box inside for unknown Masjid” (the Arabic term for a mosque) and “location is a small restaurant that serves Halal food.”

This week, Bloomberg echoed his August remarks following another AP report on the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslim Student Associations at colleges around the Northeast despite the absence of suspicions of criminal activity.

“The police department goes where there are allegations. And they look to see whether those allegations are true,” Bloomberg said. “That’s what you’d expect them to do. That’s what you’d want them to do. Remind yourself when you turn out the light tonight.”

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, called AP’s report “disturbing” and said the state attorney general is investigating.