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0:000 from Columbia Law School in 1993.
0:033 He worked as an in-house lawyer for the United Steel Workers for 26 years.
0:099 During that time, he spearheaded major litigation against US companies for egregious human rights violations in
0:1616 Colombia. He successfully defended the Palestinian Palestine Chronicle against
0:2323 legislation brought by Israelis attempting to end its journalist work.
0:2929 He is the author of numerous books which are over there if you want to take a look during dinner
0:3636 including the case for Palestine in Syria autonomy of regime change anatomy of regime change. So with all the honor
0:4545 from car Pittsburgh please welcome our keynote speaker to the podium.
0:5151 [applause]
0:5252 Thank you.
0:5757 Thank you so much. It’s a huge honor really for me to be here. In fact, I understand I’m standing in for summer leave. So, I feel [laughter] I feel really honored, double honored.
1:101 [laughter]
1:111 And uh just to tell you a little bit about myself uh and this builds a little on what Safh Brother Safar was saying
1:201 about the dark ages propaganda. I So, I’m Roman Catholic. I went to uh a Catholic high school and we were the and
1:281 I played football for them and we were the holy crusaders.
1:331 [laughter]
1:331 So we were sacking the Muslim world when I was in high school. But so anyway, it shows people can change, people can grow. I hope you hope you can see.
1:441 Um, the other thing I’ll say is what I tell I tell my kids and it annoys the heck out of them, but I tell them, you know,
1:531 minute, 53 secondsI said, “I didn’t know what hospitality was until I went to the Muslim world.” And that is a true statement.
2:032 minutes, 3 secondsThe first Muslim country I went to was uh Iran, actually, and I’ve never been treated better in my life. You know, if
2:112 minutes, 11 secondsif in a country like that, if you If you take a taxi from the airport and no one picks you up, they would hang their head in shame, right? I told my kids that. I
2:192 minutes, 19 secondssaid, “No one picks me up from the airport.” But actually now they do after my little speech, right? [laughter] Um
2:282 minutes, 28 secondsand it’s true. The other thing again the impact that I have had on my life
2:352 minutes, 35 secondsfrom the Islamic world is that you know I lost my faith actually in Catholicism a long time ago and I regained it and it
2:432 minutes, 43 secondsreally due to the Palestinian people in large part seeing their faith. You
2:502 minutes, 50 secondsknow, you remember that video uh you know, sometime after the the war began uh in October 2023
2:592 minutes, 59 secondsof the Palestinians praying on their rugs in the rain. Remember this with right next to a mosque that was destroyed.
3:073 minutes, 7 secondsThey’re soaking wet. Their rugs are soaking wet and they’re all, you know, doing the prayer. And I it just if if if
3:163 minutes, 16 secondspeople under those circumstances can have faith and so can I.
3:223 minutes, 22 secondsAnd honestly all my Palestinian friends in Gaza and the West Bank, they asked me to pray for them. And I thought, well, that’s the least I can do. So I better
3:303 minutes, 30 secondsget back to church so I can do that for you. But in any case, those are just some
3:363 minutes, 36 secondspersonal uh uh stories. Uh but the main gist of my talk I want to talk about today
3:443 minutes, 44 secondsis the war on terror at home and abroad.
3:493 minutes, 49 secondsWe’re now 25 years into it, right? It’s known as the war on terror, but as others much smarter than I have said, it’s the war of terror. Let’s face it.
4:004 minutesAnd so let me talk a little bit about the war abroad. Okay, first uh Brown University uh they have uh on
4:094 minutes, 9 secondstheir website they keep track of the cost human and other costs of the war on terror war of terror.
4:184 minutes, 18 secondsAccording to Brown University 4.5 to 4.7 million Muslims have been killed
4:284 minutes, 28 secondssince 2001 in the war on ter war of terror. Nearly five million.
4:354 minutes, 35 secondsRight? That is a holocaust number.
4:384 minutes, 38 seconds38 million have been displaced. 38 million.
4:464 minutes, 46 secondsYou know, and you’ll often see, you know, news reports out of Britain, people complaining, “Oh, Britain isn’t Britain anymore. Look, all the Muslims
4:534 minutes, 53 secondsare moving here.” Well, yeah, because you’ve destroyed the Muslim world. Where are they supposed to go?
5:035 minutes, 3 secondsAlso, according to Brown University, the war of terror has cost $8 trillion.
5:135 minutes, 13 secondsAs my dad used to say, that is a sin.
5:165 minutes, 16 secondsCan you imagine what this country would look like if the eight trillion dollars had been
5:245 minutes, 24 secondsspent on human needs on fixing our bridges and our roads and feeding people and housing people. And
5:335 minutes, 33 secondsby the way, plenty would be left over to fix infrastructure in other countries and feed other people.
5:405 minutes, 40 seconds$8 trillion on destruction.
5:455 minutes, 45 secondsAnd that doesn’t even get into the environmental cost. Doesn’t even get into the destruction of ancient historic sites,
5:555 minutes, 55 secondsIslamic and Christian, uh, which is happening daily as as many of you know.
6:056 minutes, 5 secondsThat is a brief and and and by the way, so what has this $8 trillion even gotten us? Um
6:146 minutes, 14 secondsit it it it’s pretty staggering what a waste it’s been. Of course, in the the the biggest cost was the 20-year war in
6:216 minutes, 21 secondsAfghanistan, which the great feat of course that was accomplished by the US was to replace
6:296 minutes, 29 secondsthe Taliban with the Taliban. Good job.
6:366 minutes, 36 secondsUh meanwhile, it should be pointed out as the US is destroying also huge swaths
6:426 minutes, 42 secondsof Latin America in its alleged drug war that when the US invaded Afghanistan in
6:506 minutes, 50 seconds2001, the Taliban, for all of its faults, had gotten poppy production down to almost nothing.
6:586 minutes, 58 secondsBy the time the US left, Afghanistan was providing the world with 85% of its heroin.
7:067 minutes, 6 seconds20 years the US was roaming around Afghanistan. The CIA, the DEA, all the alphabet soup of the US.
7:177 minutes, 17 secondsAnd yet drug production skyrocketed in Afghanistan. By the way, the Taliban has brought a lot of that down now.
7:277 minutes, 27 secondsAnd I’d be remiss to point out how the Taliban came to power to begin with.
7:347 minutes, 34 secondsAnd that was through the US’s war in Afghanistan beginning in 1979
7:427 minutes, 42 secondsunder the great peace President Jimmy Katada.
7:487 minutes, 48 secondsAnd just for those who don’t know it, because we’ve been lied to a lot about it, according to Ziggy Brazinski,
7:557 minutes, 55 secondsCarter’s own national security advisor who devised the war in Afghanistan.
8:028 minutes, 2 secondsThe US began that war six months before the Soviet invasion. The war was not in response to it. It was to draw the Soviets into Afghanistan.
8:118 minutes, 11 secondsAnd of course, the US supported the Mujahedin. One of whose leaders was a guy named Osama bin Laden.
8:208 minutes, 20 secondsAnd so when you look at Afghanistan alone, you see the insanity, the absolute insanity of US foreign policy.
8:318 minutes, 31 secondsAnd then of course you had the two wars in Iraq which caused again untold environmental and human uh destruction.
8:428 minutes, 42 secondsAnd of course, the US went in there, overthrew Saddam Hussein. And then what happened? The Shiite uh majority took
8:518 minutes, 51 secondsover as was predictable. And then the US complained, “Oh, because of that,” meaning because the US invaded, now Iran’s too strong because Iraq aligned
9:009 minuteswith Iran, so now we have to attack Iran.
9:059 minutes, 5 secondsAnd then of course you had Libya in 2011.
9:119 minutes, 11 secondsUm, uh, Libya was the most prosperous country in Africa at the time the US and NATO invaded. It’s now the poorest
9:199 minutes, 19 secondscountry in Africa and slaves are now being sold in markets for about $400 a pop thanks to President
9:299 minutes, 29 secondsObama. This is definitely a bipartisan issue issue. Then you have Syria. The US
9:379 minutes, 37 secondsspent about a billion dollars a year to overthrow al-Assad. And of course, they replaced him with the head of al-Qaeda.
9:459 minutes, 45 secondsRemember al-Qaeda?
9:509 minutes, 50 secondsWell, he may be, but he’s the head of he was the head of al-Qaeda. You can’t dispute that. That right. The US claims they were fighting al-Qaeda and they put
9:579 minutes, 57 secondsal-Qaeda in power. That’s cannot be disputed.
10:0310 minutes, 3 secondsAnd then you have Gaza and Lebanon and Yemen which are being destroyed
10:1110 minutes, 11 secondsuh right now with key US uh uh support.
10:2010 minutes, 20 secondsAnd so again uh this is a war against the [clears throat] Arab world against
10:2810 minutes, 28 secondsIslam uh also against Christians in in in the region and uh
10:3610 minutes, 36 secondsit’s something that if we are live uh after all this we’ll look back
10:4310 minutes, 43 secondsand be uh at least I will be ashamed of for sure. [clears throat] Now, meanwhile, as I said, I I entitled
10:5310 minutes, 53 secondsthis the war of terror uh at home and abroad. After 911, of course, the US passed the Patriot Act,
11:0111 minutes, 1 secondwhich continues to be renewed all the time. is still on the books which is alleged allegedly an anti-terrorist
11:1011 minutes, 10 secondsum uh legislation and that is has been used and is being used to curb
11:2011 minutes, 20 secondslegitimate disscent in this country.
11:2611 minutes, 26 secondsYou have people of course being fired from from universities.
11:3111 minutes, 31 secondsum you have people being deported um really just because of of association and in in one case I I do want to talk
11:4011 minutes, 40 secondsabout my Palestine Chronicle case because I think it really exhibits how the war on terror at home works. So, the
11:4811 minutes, 48 secondsPalestine Chronicle and Ramsay Barude, who’s the chief editor of uh the Palestine Chronicle, was sued
11:5711 minutes, 57 secondsin 2024 in in the federal court in Washington State
12:0212 minutes, 2 secondsuh by um for lawyers obviously being supported by
12:1012 minutes, 10 secondsby Israel. Um and the case against them was as follows. They claimed
12:1712 minutes, 17 secondsthat the Palestine Chronicle had on their payroll
12:2312 minutes, 23 secondsum an individual named Abdalah Al Jamal who lived in the Nusara refugee camp in
12:3212 minutes, 32 secondsGaza. Okay. And they said he was being paid for journalism. They acknowledged that he did publish various articles for
12:4112 minutes, 41 secondsthe Palestine Chronicle. But they also claimed that he held some hostages, Israeli
12:5012 minutes, 50 secondshostages at his home for several months after uh October 7, 2023.
12:5812 minutes, 58 secondsSo the argument went, you paid this guy as a journalist. We know that we did.
13:0313 minutes, 3 secondsWe’re not claiming you paid him to do anything bad, but because you paid him as a journalist and you knew they claimed and and you knew that he was
13:1213 minutes, 12 secondsdoing some bad things, maybe not specifically what we claimed he did, um you’re liable for the fact that he held
13:1913 minutes, 19 secondsthese hostages, which is an incredible leap of responsibility. But this is how the
13:2613 minutes, 26 secondslaws of terrorism work, right? And this is why they’re so dangerous.
13:3113 minutes, 31 secondsAnd in the case when Ramsay was deposed uh and I defended that deposition,
13:3913 minutes, 39 secondsit made it clear how how absurd this this linkage they tried to draw. I mean, they spent quite a
13:4713 minutes, 47 secondsconsiderable time saying, “Well, Ramsey, um you know, aren’t you afraid to send any money to to to Gaza and to the NES uh new Serat uh refugee camp?
14:0114 minutes, 1 seconduh because it might go get into the hands of someone with Hamas. Aren’t you afraid to do that? Meanwhile, Ramsay’s from that very refugee camp. His
14:0814 minutes, 8 secondsfamily’s from there. So, what are you supposed to do? Not help his own family?
14:1214 minutes, 12 secondsRight. And and and the whole thing is that they assume that everyone in Gaza and everyone and everyone in that
14:1914 minutes, 19 secondsrefugee camp is a potential terrorist, right?
14:2414 minutes, 24 secondsMeanwhile, Ramsay lost pretty much his entire bloodline in in in in Gaza, maybe a hundred family members.
14:3414 minutes, 34 secondsAnd I know there’s people in this room, I know some people very well who could say the same, which is a staggering fact.
14:4214 minutes, 42 secondsUh, and he lost al including his sister, which was probably the closest to to him. Um, and he’s the sweetest guy in
14:5014 minutes, 50 secondsthe world, you know, who’s just doing journalism. And they wanted to portray him as a terrorist. By the way, as it turns out, and we did extensive
14:5814 minutes, 58 secondsdiscovery on this, and they did third-party discovery on PayPal and other entities, there were no payments ever made to this guy.
15:1015 minutes, 10 secondsThere were no payments made to this Abdalah Alamal. So even if he did what they claimed, he did. They never, the Palestine Chronicle never gave him a penny.
15:2115 minutes, 21 secondsAnd so even by their own claims, there was no liability there. Though the other claim that they tried to make was,
15:3015 minutes, 30 secondswell, by merely publishing his articles, you gave him support.
15:3715 minutes, 37 secondsNow, we raised a first amendment free, you know, freedom of speech defense to that and the judge accepted that. She
15:4415 minutes, 44 secondssaid, “I don’t want to hear about that.” She says, “I agree that you have a right to publish from whoever you want to and I’m not
15:5315 minutes, 53 secondsgoing to look into that in terms of this aiding in a betting liability, which was good. And there were no
16:0016 minutespayments.” And uh in any case, so we won that case.
16:0616 minutes, 6 secondsBut now the IRS is going after them and they are looking into the issue of just
16:1316 minutes, 13 secondsmerely publishing people’s stories. They don’t care about the first amendment.
16:2016 minutes, 20 secondsAnd so the fight of the Palestine uh chronicle continues and it will be a long fight. They the whole goal is to destroy them. to destroy them, to
16:2916 minutes, 29 secondsdestroy Ramsay Bar, his daughter Zarifa, who was sued in two different forum
16:3716 minutes, 37 secondsuh on the on very similar uh claims and they tried to drag her into our case, but I they tried to sub uh depose
16:4616 minutes, 46 secondsher in our case, but I was able to quash the subpoena against her. But the whole goal is simply to destroy speech. I
16:5316 minutes, 53 secondsmean, that that is the goal, to quiet people. And that’s why we have to resist this.
16:5916 minutes, 59 secondsAnd it’s not just of course uh you know Arabs and Muslims they’re going after.
17:0517 minutes, 5 secondsThey’re going after anyone who supports Palestine, who opposes the wars in Iran and other places.
17:1217 minutes, 12 secondsAnd if we lose this battle, we’re going to lose our rights. And our rights are already being eroded. And again, these
17:2017 minutes, 20 secondsanti-terrorism laws continue to be expanded. So now um of course they’re being used against people who protest
17:2917 minutes, 29 secondsICE, who protest data centers, who pro protest flock cameras, and who defend the environment.
17:3817 minutes, 38 secondsAnd so all of the uh laws passed after 9/11 to go after terrorism, so-called
17:4517 minutes, 45 secondsterrorism, are now being used against these other forms of legitimate protest.
17:5117 minutes, 51 secondsAnd of course, now you see they’re going after Congresswoman uh Ilan Omar and trying to deport her and obviously politically motivated.
18:0218 minutes, 2 secondsUm so we live in very trying times.
18:0518 minutes, 5 secondsThere’s no question. And that’s why I guess I’ll just say an organization like care is so important
18:1218 minutes, 12 secondsbecause they help defend people against these types of assaults and there’s not enough money they could
18:1918 minutes, 19 secondsget uh to be able to do the work they need to do. I mean they could use all the money and all the support and again
18:2618 minutes, 26 secondseveryone in this room of course supports the mission of of care. Um, but even
18:3218 minutes, 32 secondsthose who don’t, if for no other reason, they’re going to come for you next.
18:4018 minutes, 40 secondsThat’s a fact if we don’t defend people like Ramsay Bar and the Palestine
18:4718 minutes, 47 secondsChronicle now. So, uh, with that said, I’m I I’m very honored to be here and I would just say keep resisting.
18:5618 minutes, 56 secondsAnd when you resist, you’re going to pay a price, you know. Um, I myself I lost my job at uh Pit Law School
19:0519 minutes, 5 secondsover my views. I I’ve been stopped twice uh by immigration authorities, once in the US and once in Great Britain at John Lennon International Airport.
19:1619 minutes, 16 secondsIronically, uh they took my phone, took my computer, took my DNA, took my fingerprints, you know, but that’s just the cost of
19:2419 minutes, 24 secondsdoing business, you know. And as Kate said, you know, we cannot guarantee victory. That would be foolhardy and a
19:3219 minutes, 32 secondslie for me to say. But what I can guarantee is the following.
19:3619 minutes, 36 secondsIf you resist, you’re going to live a meaningful life. And you’re going to meet some beautiful, wonderful people along the way. And it’s worth it. Thank
19:4419 minutes, 44 secondsyou very, very much. [applause]
