Associated Press

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — Jake Delhomme was asked Thursday about Carolina Panthers teammate Muhsin Muhammad’s big block in the win over Denver and interrupted the questioner.

“Which one?” Delhomme asked.

Told it was when the receiver took out two Broncos on Steve Smith’s 15-yard touchdown catch in the first quarter of Carolina’s 30-10 win Sunday, Delhomme nodded, then brought up a block he thought was even better.

“He did a block that didn’t show up in the second quarter,” Delhomme said. “He blocked this cornerback and he blocked him again, and he blocked him past the ball and as the whistle blew he slammed him down. And there is a presence that is set right there.”

When the Panthers brought back Muhammad in the offseason after his three-year stint in Chicago, they planned to again make him the No. 2 receiver opposite Smith, the role he played in Carolina’s Super Bowl season in 2003.

But the Panthers also thought the 35-year-old Muhammad could help resurrect Carolina’s dormant running game because of his history of being one of the NFL’s top blocking receivers.

“If there’s a better one out there I haven’t seen him,” coach John Fox said.

Delhomme believes Hines Ward of Pittsburgh is Muhammad’s only competition. At 6-foot-2 and 215 pounds, Muhammad has the size and strength to flatten or “pancake” defensive backs, plus other intangibles, too.

“If you want to do it, you’re going to do it,” Muhammad said. “If you don’t want to do it, you aren’t going to do it. I think my game is a lot different than most players who play this position. I think I bring a little something different to the table.”

Muhammad’s blocking prowess was born from his late switch to receiver. Muhammad played running back and linebacker in high school. He moved to receiver in college at Michigan State, where he learned the art of blocking downfield.

Carolina’s second-round pick in 1996, he’s been in on several big blocks this year to boost one of the NFL’s top running games. DeAngelo Williams and Jonathan Stewart have combined for 1,980 yards rushing and 23 touchdowns, and the Panthers are 11-3 heading into Sunday’s showdown at the New York Giants (11-3).

“It helps out DeAngelo,” Muhammad said. “I think he said it best this week: the offensive line and the fullbacks help him get those 15-yard runs. And when you have receivers who block down the field, that is when you get your 20-, 30- and 40-yard runs or even more.

“I think the ultimate goal most guys are focused on is trying to win a championship. My focus is how do we get there? How do we make this team better? That is the goal, to make the team better. With blocking, I think I’m good at it and I help out in that way.”

Delhomme said his favorite Muhammad block this season came on Williams’ 15-yard touchdown run against Arizona in Week 8.

“He blocked the (nickel back) into the safety into the backside corner and DeAngelo Williams scored,” Delhomme said. “He blocked three people. He blocked one into another and the other guy couldn’t come up and DeAngelo scored. That’s him.”

Muhammad has also proven to be the steady No. 2 receiver opposite Smith, with 54 catches for 764 yards and four touchdowns. His presence means teams can’t automatically double-team Smith.

But Muhammad’s blocking is what separates him from others at the position. Reserve cornerback C.J. Wilson, who goes up against Muhammad in practice, buried his head in his hands and sighed when asked about the experience.

“You know how they advise you not to stand in front of a train or bad things could happen?” Wilson said. “Well, that is what it is, because you can’t stop it.”

Muhammad’s return has coincided with the Panthers’ best record after 14 games. A win Sunday would give them home-field advantage throughout the NFC playoffs for the first time.

“I think Moose has got more pancakes on the season than me,” Bridges said. “Moose is one of the more aggressive blocking receivers that I’ve ever seen in the NFL. It’s magical.”

11-1

Much has been hidden from the new president by the Bush team

Courtesy Nat Hentoff

No presidential transition team in recent history has ranged as widely as Barack Obama’s in its attempt to find out what minefields he may be walking into. For example, The Washington Post notes, 10 teams of 135 explorers, wearing yellow badges, have descended on dozens of Bush administration offices and agencies to look into their programs, policies, and records.

However, I keep remembering a dark warning to the successors of the Bush-Cheney legacy in a January 3 letter to The New York Times by Arthur Gunther of Blauvelt, New York: “Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney have so deeply embedded tacit approval for illegal acts in government agencies that wrongdoing by their philosophical sympathizers will continue in shadow operations for years to come.”

How many of those shadow sympathizers will remain deep in the CIA, the FBI, Homeland Security—and, as I shall later emphasize, in the omnivorous National Security Agency, with its creatively designed submarine that, on the bottom of the ocean floor, will be tapping into foreign cables carrying overseas communications, including those of Americans?

Will the Obama sleuths be able to peer into plans of the military Special Operations forces around the world, whose SWAT-style moves can quickly inflame even our allies? Covertly autho rized four years ago by Donald Rumsfeld, these warriors are empowered to attack secretly any apparent terrorist venture, anywhere. No press allowed.

Will the new president, cognizant of the proliferation of retaliatory nuclear arms, presumably among our enemies, insist on signing off on each of those Special Operations forays?

Back at home, will President Obama order the countermanding of the FBI’s return to the unbounded surveillance practices of J. Edgar Hoover? In an order implemented as recently as this December—by FBI Director Robert Mueller (who says he’d like to stay on) and Attorney General Michael Mukasey—the FBI can start an investigation without requiring any evidence of wrongdoing. That is not change we can believe in.

Among many Obama voters, much optimism is created when he pledges that we will not torture. But even if he makes his intent official, emphasizes Mark Kukis (Time, December 8), “the Executive Order would have to be sweeping and reach deep into the government’s darker recesses. That’s because the Bush team has written so many legal memos okaying various techniques for interrogators working at a wide range of agencies [not just the CIA]. Some of these opinions have been disclosed publicly, but an unknown number remain classified.”

It will be up to the new Attorney General, Eric Holder—not a notably passionate constitutionalist in his previous role in the Justice Department—to, as Kukis adds, “issue new legal guidance that supersedes all those legal opinions, seen or unseen, if he hopes to prevent a return to such practices in the future” (emphasis added).

So, keep an eye on Mr. Holder. And if he does bury those John Yoo–style torture memos and other (and, here, I use the term loosely) “legal opinions,” Holder should be tasked by the president to reveal what they permitted.

For a long time, Senate Judiciary chairman Pat Leahy, a Democrat, and leading Republican member Arlen Specter have been trying to get those deeply hidden authorizations for war crimes that contradicted the broken-record insistence (“We do not torture!”) of George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice.

Of all our intelligence agencies, the most unabashedly un-American is the NSA, because it has the continually expanding technological resources to make George Orwell’s Big Brother look like a cantankerous infant. No American president has come close to reining in the NSA, let alone bringing its officials up on charges of murdering our Fourth Amendment privacy rights.

In case you’ve forgotten, those specific constitutional protections were a result of the general searches conducted by British soldiers that turned American colonists’ homes and offices upside down. NSA’s eavesdropping on our phones and Internet activities have largely destroyed some of our rights as mentioned in the Constitution: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall be issued but on probable cause. . . .”

(Computers and the Internet are now included.)

Of all the investigators of the formidably guarded privacy of the NSA, the most feared by these omnipresent spies is James Bamford, who for years has been penetrating their secrets in his books—Body of Secrets, The Puzzle Palace, etc. This year, he’s gone much deeper into that bottomless cavern than ever before, in The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America (Doubleday). I hope President Obama reads this book himself and demands that his intelligence directors also plumb it and give him their reactions—or better yet, their confessions of complicity with NSA.

There will be more on the “Shadow Factory” next week, as well as on Senator Obama’s startling (to me) vote for the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Amendments of 2008—after he had insisted he would filibuster against its passage. In view of the sweeping spying powers that this law, championed by George W. Bush, provides the NSA, will President Obama be a dependable restorer of at least some of our privacy rights?

John McCain, of course, would not have been.

Bamford ends his new book by bringing back one of my Bill of Rights heroes, the late Senator Frank Church of Idaho, whose Senate investigating committee, during the 1970s, first uncovered the frightening range and depth of NSA’s spying on us. “That capability,” said Church, “at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such [is the NSA’s] capability to monitor everything. . . . There would be no place to hide. . . . If this government ever became a tyranny . . . the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because resistance . . . is within the reach of the government to know.”

After quoting that warning from Frank Church, Bamford ends: “There is now the capacity to make tyranny total in America. Only law ensures that we never fall into that abyss—the abyss from which there is no return.” Are you listening, President Obama?

With ALLAH’S name, The Merciful Benefactor, Merciful Redeemer

By Imam Abdullah El-Amin

“None of you are believers unless you love for your brother/sister what you love for yourself.”  –

Hadith of the Holy Prophet Muhammad (s)

How often have we heard the above words of our beloved Prophet (s)?  I’m sure there are not many Muslims who have not heard this phrase.  It is one of the most oft-repeated and famous hadiths of all time.  But as is so often the case, sometimes we can hear something so often that it’s deep meaning can escape us.  This hadith is primarily referring to your Muslim brothers or sisters–and rightly so.  If you look to give to another person what you would desire for yourself, you have given the utmost respect to that individual.

But sometimes we overlook our blood brothers and sisters as we dish out our love.  We can get so caught up trying to show how righteous we are that we miss the point of what righteousness is.  This is especially true of some of us converts (reverts) to the religion who have family members who are not Muslim.

The Christmas season gives us an excellent opportunity to show love and respect to our Christian relatives and friends.  Saying “Merry Christmas” to them is actually a way of endearing them to you and your beliefs and practices.  It is them celebrating the birth of Christ Jesus and even though we don’t believe the story exactly as they do, they appreciate you recognizing their observance.  And it is not harram offer them your best wishes.

This is especially true if you want them to respect your holy days of the two Eid celebrations.  If we want the Islamic observances to be important in US society, we must also recognize and respect their holy days.  

It’s even more important when dealing with blood relatives.  Maintaining love and relations with our blood relatives is a very important part of our religion.  ALLAH, The Almighty, has put blood relations pretty much at the top of the list in importance.  Some erroneously think our non-Muslim relatives don’t count.  I even heard one brother refer to his own mother as a kafir.  I happen to know his mother and she is a nice lady.  She goes to church and is a believer in G-d.  But just because she had not received or understood the spiritual connection to Prophet Muhammad (s), he was cutting off relations with her.  This is crazy, and shows the depth that misunderstanding of the religion can take you; because there is something special about your own family, and especially your mother.  There is not another human being in the world that will go to the end of the earth with you.   Sometimes your family members, no matter how estranged, are the only people you can count on in time of need.  A famous author coined the phrase, “home is the place where when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

No where else fits that bill.  Your friends and acquaintances will sympathize with you and probably make dua for you; but that’s about as far as it goes.  They don’t have to take you in… and probably won’t. 

You can lift your relatives up by you being the best Muslim you can be.  It does a lot for you and the religion with the superior Islamic character dominating all situations.  By the Islamic character dominating, I actually mean it being submissive.  Don’t air your family’s dirty laundry in public with other people.  If your cousin, brother, sister or aunt has done something to offend you, make the Islamic decision to go no more than three days before reaching out to reconcile your differences.  And by all means, get over petty differences. 

Lastly, if you have aging parents, make them your priority.  Cherish them now that they are weak, as they cherished you in your weak childhood.  If there are more than one offspring, share the responsibility.  Don’t leave all the work on one person even though they may be residing with them.  Take turns watching and washing if need be.

ALLAH loves relationships that follow His rules for success.  You will too.       

As Salaam alaikum
(Al Hajj) Imam Abdullah El-Amin

11-1

By Nilofar Suhrawardy, courtesy The New Indian Express

If Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s apology for failing to stop the Mumbai terror strikes had moistened even a few eyes, it may perhaps have been considered worthwhile.

One does, however, think about it, not because of the apology or the manner in which it was made, but simply because it came from a person holding the highest office in the government.The constitutional duties and rights of Indians are not limited to those holding political power. Any citizen should be asking questions and even criticizing those in power if needed.

Sadly, the apology fell flat on every count, even by the standards of rhetoric.This is not the first time Indians were killed in terrorist attacks. But it was the first time that a few militants specifically targeted British and American passport holders, Jews and rich Indians, in addition to the common citizens belonging to poorer classes, who have always borne the main burden of such attacks.

One wonders what stopped our political leaders, including the Prime Minister, from apologizing in earlier cases. Are the lives of a few foreigners truly more precious than those of hundreds of Indians who have fallen victim to terrorist attacks this year alone?

If the Prime Minister assumed that a few dismissals and his apology, together with aggressive postures towards Pakistan would enough by way of damage control, clearly he has ignored the hard fact that this half-hearted mea culpa cannot set his record straight.

Despite home minister Shivraj Patil, Maharashtra chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh and deputy chief minister R R Patil being forced to resign over the attacks, not all are satisfied.

Questions are being asked about the continuance of the National Security Adviser in office and why the defense minister has been spared. There is nothing new about militant groups based in Pakistan engaged in anti-India activities.

What is, however, perplexing is that despite being conscious of this fact, the government remained oblivious to security lapses (and probably still is) till the Mumbai terror strikes actually took place. Why? The question assumes greater significance in view of the warnings about the possibility of Mumbai being hit by militants. With other parts of the country targeted earlier in the year, it became all the more important for the government to enhance security for Mumbai. Clearly, this suggests widespread negligence.

New home minister P Chidambaram’s acknowledgement of “security lapses” only confirms this. A mere apology does not mean the Prime Minister can avoid explaining what action was taken following the warnings they received about Mumbai being on the hit list.

It is strange that nothing of substance has come from the authorities on the steps they had considered or were in the process of taking after receiving the warnings.

One is thus compelled to interpret the Prime Minister’s apology as being not merely for failing to prevent terror strikes, but more so for the government’s callous approach towards tightening security in Mumbai, despite the specific intelligence on the subject.

Of course, it is possible that the government became “aware” of having earlier received warnings only after terrorists struck. This further exposes the administrative and, of course, political set-up, with serious issues demanding immediate action locked up in files till the damage was actually done.

Did the warnings reach the PMO, the home and defense ministries, the NSA’s office and the Maharashtra government? If they did, who should be blamed for not paying attention till after the terrorists struck? Yes, even a false warning through a hoax telephone call, e-mail or other means is expected to put the security personnel on alert lest it prove genuine.In the Mumbai case, there are reports of even the United States having alerted India. The PM may be content with his apology as a crucial move, diplomatically as well as politically, but that does not absolve him of anything.It’s not an apology but an explanation that is needed on why the government erred in having let Mumbai-terror strikes take place.

11-1

Courtesy Rebecca Solnit, TomDispatch.com

What do you do when you notice that there seems to have been a killing spree? While the national and international media were working themselves and much of the public into a frenzy about imaginary hordes of murderers, rapists, snipers, marauders, and general rampagers among the stranded crowds of mostly poor, mostly black people in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, a group of white men went on a shooting spree across the river.

Their criminal acts were no secret but they never became part of the official story. The media demonized the city’s black population for crimes that turned out not to have happened, and the retractions were, as always, too little too late. At one point FEMA sent a refrigerated 18-wheeler to pick up what a colonel in the National Guard expected to be 200 bodies in New Orleans’s Superdome, only to find six, including four who died naturally and a suicide. Meanwhile, the media never paid attention to the real rampage that took place openly across the river, even though there were corpses lying in unflooded streets and testimony everywhere you looked – or I looked, anyway.

The widely reported violent crimes in the Superdome turned out to be little more than hysterical rumor, but they painted African-Americans as out-of-control savages at a critical moment. The result was to shift institutional responses from disaster relief to law enforcement, a decision that resulted in further deaths among the thirsty, hot, stranded multitude. Governor Kathleen Blanco announced, “I have one message for these hoodlums: These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so if necessary, and I expect they will.” So would the white vigilantes, and though their exact body count remains unknown, at least 11 black men were apparently shot, some fatally.

The parish of Orleans includes both the city of New Orleans on one side of the Mississippi and a community on the other side called Algiers that can be reached via a bridge called the Crescent City Connection. That bridge comes down in another town called Gretna, and the sheriff of Gretna and a lot of his henchmen turned many of the stranded in New Orleans back at gunpoint from that bridge, trapping them in the squalor of a destroyed city, another heinous crime that was largely overlooked. On the Gretna/Algiers side of the river, the levees held and nothing flooded. Next door to Gretna, Algiers is a mostly black community, but one corner of it down by the river, Algiers Point, is a white enclave, a neighborhood of pretty little, well-kept-up wooden houses – and of killers.

What do you do when you notice that there seems to have been a killing spree? By my second visit to New Orleans almost a year and a half after the hurricane that devastated the place, I had more than enough information to know that something very wrong had happened in Algiers Point. In a report on New Orleans for TomDispatch in March of 2007, I wrote:

“During my trips to the still half-ruined city, some inhabitants have told me that they, in turn, were told by white vigilantes of widespread murders of black men in the chaos of the storm and flood. These accounts suggest that, someday, an intrepid investigative journalist may stand on its head the media hysteria of the time (later quietly recanted) about African-American violence and menace in flooded New Orleans.”

I found that journalist in my friend A.C. Thompson who, backed by the Nation magazine, launched an investigation just concluded this week, 21 months after I first approached him. His courageous and meticulous investigation tracked down victims and persecutors, clarified what happened on those days of mayhem in Algiers Point, sued to gain access to, and sifted through, the coroner’s records that mentioned some bulllet-riddled bodies, and dug up some previously unreported police crimes. His stunning report in the Nation, “Katrina’s Hidden Race War,” suggests that there’s still more there to find.

A lot of the pieces of the Algiers Point killing spree were out in the open. Several weeks after Hurricane Katrina, community organizer and former Black Panther Malik Rahim had told Amy Goodman on her nationally syndicated program Democracy Now!, “During the aftermath, directly after the flooding, in New Orleans hunting season began on young African American men. In Algiers, I believe, approximately around 18 African American males were killed. No one really know[s] what’s the overall count.”

Rahim’s count seems high, but the real toll remains unknown. The young medics who staffed the Common Ground Clinic, co-founded by Rahim, also knew that there had been a spate of killings: like everyone else who came in, the killers and their associates had felt the need to tell their stories, as well as get their tetanus shots or blood pressure meds. The medics, whom Rahim credits with defusing a potential race war in Algiers by reaching out to everyone equally, told me they’d heard murder confessions from the vigilantes and their cohorts (but respected their confidentiality by not passing along names or identifying information).
CNN and the Times Picayune, New Orleans’s paper of record, both published a photograph of a member of the “self-appointed posse” in Algiers Point napping next to five shotguns, an AK-47 assault rifle, and a pistol, but they never got around to asking if the band of white guys had actually used the guns. As it happened, not only did they use the guns, but they confessed – or boasted – on videotape to their shootings and killings, tape that ended up in a little-seen documentary called “Welcome to New Orleans.” I passed along what I knew to A.C., but a lot of it hadn’t been a secret, just easily visible dots no one was connecting. None was more visible than the attempted murder of Donnell Herrington.

What It’s Like to Be Murdered

One balmy September afternoon, under the shade of the broad-armed oaks of New Orleans’s City Park, Donnell Herrington told us what it’s like to be murdered – for the men who attacked him shortly after Hurricane Katrina drowned his city intended to kill him and nearly succeeded. Donnell is a soft-spoken guy now in his early thirties and he worries the question of why they shot him, of what they thought they were doing. On what possible grounds could you blast away with a shotgun at a guy walking down a public street who hadn’t even seen you, let alone threatened you?

He knows they consider themselves justified, and he wrestles with the question, but each time it comes up he finally concludes it was a hate crime. It was because he was black.

“I didn’t approach these guys in any way possible for them to react the way they did. It wasn’t a reaction at all it. It was just a hate crime, because a reaction is when somebody try to bring bodily harm on you and you react in self-defense. When the guy actually stepped out and pulled the trigger, I didn’t see him, I didn’t even know what happened to me. The only thing I can remember is feeling a lot of pressure hit my neck and it literally knocked me off my feet.”

The close-up shotgun blast had punctured his jugular vein and he had only a little time to get help before he bled to death. He told his friend and cousin to run, found his way to his feet, only to be shot in the back yet again. He fell down again, got up again – a former athlete, Herrington is many kinds of strong – and stumbled away, one hand to the blood spurting from his neck.

Herrington had been desperate to get out of the ravaged city where, two days earlier, he’d seen his grandparents’ neighborhood flood, rescued them and a lot of neighbors by boat, left them to be evacuated from the elevated Interstate, walked across the Crescent City Connection to his home in Algiers on the other side of the Mississippi, found its roof crushed by a huge bough, and decided there was nothing left to do but get out himself. On September 1st, day three of the catastrophe, he had set out with his teenage cousin and a friend for the ferry landing in Algiers Point. There, they had been told, you could actually be evacuated when so many people were stranded in the heat and chaos of a drowned city. Not long into that flight they ran into the white men with guns.

On the one-year anniversary of the catastrophe, millions of Americans watched Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts on HBO. Most of the film is made up of people talking straight into the camera about their Katrina, and one of the talkers is a sweet-voiced, brown-skinned guy: Herrington. He tells the camera:

“We walking down the street, which was in Algiers and I’m talking to my cousin. I had a bottle of water in my hand, and I’m talking to him, we’re talking about different things and before you know it, I heard a boom, a blast. My body lifted up in the air, and I hit the ground, and, you know, my cousin was standing over me and he was howling and he hollering my name and asking if I was okay, and he was hysterical at this time, and looking at the blood on my shirt and my arms.
“And I looked up and saw a white guy with a white t-shirt in his hands coming toward me, so I managed to get up by the grace of God. I managed to get up, and they had some debris in the street, and so when I turned away from the guy he turned toward me with the shotgun, looked like he was trying to reload. So as I turned away from him I jumped over the debris and I heard another bang. Some of the buckshots hit me in the back, and I hit the ground again.”

In the film, Herrington pulls up his shirt and shows his torso, peppered with lumps from the buckshot. And then he gestures at the long, twisting, raised scar wound around his neck like a centipede or a snake: “And this is the incision from the surgery from the buckshots that penetrated my neck and hit my jugular vein.”

A victim of a horrific attempted murder told his story in a national television special and, though I’m sure lots of viewers wanted to do something, those who really could have done something did nothing. Lee’s film cut away to then governor Kathleen Blanco vowing more law and order against the supposedly rampaging African-American menace of New Orleans.

Herrington is a kind man; one of the first things he said to us was, “I asked God to forgive those guys that done this thing to me. It was kind of hard to even bring myself to that but I know it’s the right thing to do, but at the same time those guys have gotta answer for their actions.”

He was a Brink’s truck driver at the time of Katrina, a man with a clean record routinely in charge of hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, and he attempted to evacuate Katrina with a pocketful of his own cash – which only underscores how preposterous it was for his prospective murderers to see him as a thief. He nearly bled to death before a local couple drove him to the nearest medical center, where his throat was sewn up. More than three years later, it’s clear that the trauma is still with him.

His friend and cousin were chased down, threatened with pistols, called “nigger,” but finally allowed to go, traumatized by their own brush with men who made it clear they’d be happy to kill them. 

“Like Pheasant Season in South Dakota”

In 1892, Homer Plessy, a light-skinned black man, was arrested in New Orleans for riding a streetcar then reserved for whites only. A precursor of Rosa Parks, he pursued a landmark lawsuit that went all the way to a racist Supreme Court, which issued the infamous “separate but equal” doctrine that stood until the civil rights battles of the postwar era.

That same year Charles Allan Gilbert drew a picture of a beautiful woman sitting in darkness at her dressing table, her head with mounded hair and its reflection arranged so that if you look at the celebrated drawing another way you see a grinning skull whose teeth are the rows of bottles of perfume and powder. For a year or more – Katrina was one of the biggest news stories of the past century – journalists swarmed like ants over New Orleans. The national and international news media, left, right, and center, big and small, print and radio, television and film, saw the beautiful woman and saw as well bogeymen in the shadows of their own lurid imaginations. And they declined to see the big white skull laughing at them.

That death grin can, however, be caught on the faces of the tipsy white people who confess on camera to murdering their neighbors. Separate but equal may have been abolished in the courts, but these people were gunning down African-American men just for walking in the streets in the aftermath of the storm – segregation by bullet – gunning them down on the grounds that no black man had the right to be there and any of them was a menace.

On one of my visits to New Orleans after Katrina, I met with Rahim, a solid older man with long dreadlocks who told me in his rumbling voice of the bodies he’d seen in the streets of Algiers and gave me a copy of the documentary Welcome to New Orleans. It showed one of the corpses rotting, in plain sight, under a sheet of corrugated sheet metal. It also showed white vigilantes whooping it up and talking openly about what they had done. At a barbeque shortly after Katrina struck, a stocky white guy with receding white hair and a Key West t-shirt chortles, “I never thought eleven months ago I’d be walking down the streets of New Orleans with two .38s and a shotgun over my shoulder. It was great. It was like pheasant season in South Dakota. If it moved, you shot it.”

A tough woman with short hair and chubby arms adds, “That’s not a pheasant and we’re not in South Dakota. What’s wrong with this picture?”

The man responds happily, “Seemed like it at the time.”

A second white-haired guy explains, “You had to do what you had to do, if you had to shoot somebody, you had to shoot. It’s that simple.”

A third says simply, “We shot ‘em.”

I vowed to Rahim then that I would get the murders investigated. After all, it wasn’t just rumors; it was a survivor telling his story on national television and apparent murderers telling theirs in a documentary. Despite the solid evidence, no one was following up – not the Pulitzer-winning journalists I contacted through friends, nor the filmmaker who captured Herrington, nor the national radio host Rahim spoke to of mass murder, nor the coroners who had some very interesting corpses on their hands, nor the New Orleans police who talked to Herrington in the hospital and whom he approached afterward, no one until the Nation provided A.C. the resources to do it right.

The worst crimes in disasters are usually committed by institutional authorities and those aligned with them. They fear an unpoliced public and believe private property so sacred a right that they’re willing to kill to defend it, or in this case, just on the off-chance that a passerby might fancy their television set. This is the conclusion of the sociologists who have been studying disasters for decades, many of whom I’ve spoken with in the past few years. And this is the pattern of disasters, like the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, in which the public behaved well but the military – which essentially became a hostile occupying army – terrorized the public in the name of preventing looting, shot many innocents, and may have killed scores overall. (In some outrageous incidents, New Orleans police evidently gunned down unarmed African-Americans themselves in the wake of Katrina.)

Looting is a term that should be abolished. In major disasters, when the monetary economy evaporates and needs are desperate, taking water, or food, or diapers, or medicine from shuttered stores – which is what much of the so-called looting consisted of – is largely legitimate requisitioning. The rest is theft, and in the days after Katrina there was also some theft – by the New Orleans police, for example, who cleaned out a Cadillac dealership and helped themselves to goods in a WalMart, as well as by stranded citizens who figured they’d been abandoned or imprisoned in the ruined city and that all rules were gone.

Looting is an incendiary, inexact word, suggesting mayhem far beyond the acquisition of commodities. One Algiers Point vigilante claimed to fear that they would come for his elderly mother, but most of the flooded-out evacuees were looking for food, water, information about family members, and a way out of the wreckage. Another vigilante told A.C. that they could tell the three black men they blasted with a shotgun were looters because they were carrying sports apparel with them. That the victims might be evacuating with their own clothing did not occur to these homicidal fabulists, nor did they seem to think that shooting men who might possibly have taken something of modest value from elsewhere was an overreaction.

The vigilantes of Algiers Point seem to have killed, by their own admissions – or boasts – several African-American men. A.C. was able to get first-hand accounts of eleven shootings, and my initial sources had told me they heard admissions of about seven killings. One militia member shot a black man dead at close range as he attempted to break into a corner store, another member told A.C., the only time one of the shootings seems tied in any way to a potential property crime. The police and coroner produced almost no record of what went on there and then.

The vigilantes of Algiers Point were classic white-flight people. They had spent decades regarding the central city with terror and resentment, and so saw Katrina not as a tragedy that happened to the neighbors, but as a moment when the dangers confined to the other side of the river were swarming across it. Because the riot was already in their heads, they became the crazed murderers they claimed to fear – though fear may not have been the driving motive for all of them.

A.C. was told that they turned themselves into an informal militia after one of their number was brutally carjacked by a black man, but another source told me that her relatives were gleeful about the chance to fight a race war against African-Americans and encouraged to do so by law enforcement. Like Rahim, she calls what went on “hunting” and spoke of a photograph she was sent of a vigilante posing like a big-game hunter next to a black murder victim. Which suggests the catastrophe of Katrina was just cover for getting away with a Klan-style killing spree.

“Look Away, Look Away, Look Away, Dixie Land”

Why couldn’t anyone in the mainstream see the story of vigilantes on a rampage? Why didn’t anyone want to see it?

Racism is the obvious answer, the racism that made the killings invisible to some and made others think they weren’t an issue. The racism and corruption of the New Orleans law enforcement system is old news, and it’s not surprising, though it is shameful, that stories like Herrington’s didn’t even trigger police reports, let alone investigations. But the whole world was watching New Orleans and, at one point or another, every major news outlet in the country had someone on the ground there. Maybe a deeper racism made these crimes unimaginable, even when enough evidence was there, even when the skull was laughing out loud. Certainly the murderers have, until now, lived with a strange sense of impunity that has made them cocky and candid about what went down in Algiers Point in the wake of the storm.

These were the people who broke down in the aftermath of Katrina, who reverted to savagery, not the crowds stranded in the Superdome, or the Convention Center, or on the elevated freeways, or in schools and other inadequate refuges from the flooding that overtook New Orleans. It’s important to keep in mind, despite the false stories the media spread in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, and this grim, true story three years later, that the response to Katrina was mostly about altruism, courage, and generosity. That was the case whether you are considering people like Herrington, who stayed behind to take care of others, or the “Cajun Navy” of white guys with boats, who headed into the city immediately after the storm to rescue the stranded, or the many who took in evacuees or otherwise tried to help, or what, by now, must be hundreds of thousands of volunteers who arrived in the months and years after the storm to cook and build and organize to bring New Orleans back.

It’s also important to keep in mind that, while the small minority who became a freelance militia murdered casually, the catastrophic loss of life in Louisiana – about 1,500 people, disproportionately elderly – was largely due to decisions made by another small minority: elected and appointed government authorities, from Mayor Ray Nagin, who hesitated to call a mandatory evacuation and never provided the resources for the most destitute and frail to evacuate, to FEMA director Michael Brown, who posed and dithered while tens of thousands suffered, to New Orleans’s police chief and Louisiana’s governor, both of whom chose to regard a drowned and overheated city as a law-enforcement crisis rather than a humanitarian relief challenge.

In many, many cases, supplies and rescuers were kept out of the city, hospitals were prevented from evacuating the dying, and the ability of civil society to do what the government would not – save the stranded, succor the sick – was hindered at every turn. But this story we know. Now, it’s time to know the other half, the grinning skull, the version that turns everything we were told in the first days upside-down and inside out, the story of murders in plain sight almost no one wanted to see. Look at them. Now, may some measure of justice be done.

——–

Rebecca Solnit’s book about disaster and civil society, “A Paradise Built in Hell,” will be out in time for Katrina’s fourth anniversary. It includes a much more extensive report on the crimes of Katrina, as well as the achievements of civil society in that disaster and others. To listen to a TomDispatch audio interview in which Solnit discusses how the importance of the story of the New Orleans killings dawned on her, click here.

[People with information on murders in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina are encouraged to write to Thompson and Solnit at justiceinorleans << at >> gmail <<dot>> com. Anonymity will be protected.]

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By Ilyas Choudry, MMNS Houston Correspondent

The City of Houston Councilman Masrur Javed Khan on behalf of Mayor Bill White handed the Proclamation Certificate of Houston Honorary Citizenship to Former Field Hockey Gold Medalist and Pride of Performance Islahuddin Siddiqui at a ceremony in local restaurant, in the presence of prominent members of the community.

Islahuddin Siddiqui was visiting family members and friends in Houston, after attending the International Hockey Federation (FIH) Congress Week in Los Angeles California, where he also attended meeting of FIH Rules Board (presently he is the only member on this important committee from Sub-Continent).

This decree of Houston Honorary Citizenship is given to personalities, who have immensely contributed to the world society in various fields and the City of Houston wants these personalities to become goodwill ambassadors, by informing about the hospitability and uniqueness of this city of diversity (immigrants of more than 90 cities reside in this city).

This program was specially arranged by close friend of Muzaffar Siddiqui and his friends like Dr. Azam Kundi, Attorney Noami Hussein and others. The Honorable Consul General of Pakistan Aqil Nadeem and salient members of Islahuddin family were in attendance.

On this occasion, Islahuddin gave Pakistan Hockey Team Ties as souvenirs to Consul General Mr. Nadeem, Councilman Mr. Khan and Officer Siddiqui.

Consul General Aqil Nadeem, Councilman M. J. Khan, Muzaffar Siddiqui, Former Swimmer of Pakistan and President of Pakistani-American Council of Texas (PACT) Sajjad Burki and Director of Karachi University Alumni Ghulam Mohiuddin Chisti gave glowing tributes to this super-hero of Pakistan. They emphasized that books should be written and videos should be archived of heroes like Islahuddin for the generations to come and benefit from their experiences. Islahuddin himself is writing a book, which will soon be launched.

Amidst standing ovation, Islahuddin came to the podium and gave a most thoughtful presentation about Pakistan’s Sporting Glory of the past in Field Hockey, Cricket, Squash, Snooker and other sports and the present downturn. He combined serious talk with colorful jokes, which everybody enjoyed. Everyone was impressed that despite being a big star, Islahuddin has a down to earth personality.

Islahuddin said that in various facets of life, things go up and down. Things may not bright at the moment, as we are going through a recuperating phase. As far as Hockey is concerned, with proper planning and vision, we are confident that from existing limited pool of players and resources, we will see abundance of talent coming out and public-private sector coming together to provide enough resources to polish this talent into world champions, just like in the past. He informed that during his career, he played 130 matches, scoring 117 goals.

Islahuddin informed that Leandro Negre of Spain has been elected as the new President of FIH in place of Dutch Els Van Breda Vriesman and with that new appointments are expected in FIH. Under Els Van Breda Vriesman, he has been part of the Rules Board and informed that new rules and regulations are usually made to make the game exciting, high scoring, more marketable, etc. Players from sub-continent should keep these feelings aside that these rules are made against them: With such negative mindset, Asian Hockey cannot flourish.

Earlier the local freelance journalist (writer of this report) gave highlights of the career of Pride of Performance Islahuddin Siddiqui. He was born on January 10, 1948 in Meerat India and people of Pakistan are lucky that his parents migrated to Pakistan. He is a graduate of Karachi University and by profession is Collector in Customs. He was awarded Diploma of Merit by FIH. During his career as player from 1967 till 1979, he won 10 Gold, 3 Silver & 1 Bronze Medal and won various tournaments & series for Pakistan. As Manager and Coach of Pakistani Team, he won 5 Gold, 5 Silver and 1 Bronze Medal. He has also been a famous TV and Radio Commentator with very exciting and inspiring commentary.

Other than scoring over 100 goals and decisively contributing in the scoring of so many crucial goals being a right out, Islahuddin also had this immense talent of running fast, which helped him to make the dash during the penalty corner to distract world renowned penalty corner experts like Paul Litjens (Holland) and Wolfgang Strödter (West Germany), in not scoring most of the time against Pakistan.

Islahuddin informed that in Montreal Olympics 1976 during the Third and Fourth Position match, after missing eight penalty corners, Paul Litjens out of frustration on the instruction of his coach deliberately hit the ball into Islahuddin’s right knee during the ninth penalty corner to put Islahuddin out of the game for months. Later on in the Olympics Village, Paul Litjens, a lawyer by profession and his good friend outside the ground, was the first person to visit Islahuddin and said sorry by admitted he did that deliberately out of frustration.

Islahuddin had the distinction of captaining the Pakistani team to Grand-Slam in the year 1978 by winning all the major tournaments that year, including Buenos Aires Argentina World Cup, First Champions Trophy, Asian Games and first ever Pakistan-Vs-India Series. Islahuddin received Pride of Performance Award from Government of Pakistan in 1982.

One of the most memorable tournaments of Islahuddin World Cup 1978, where he scored the only and winning goal in sudden-death against West Germany in the Semi-Final, scored the equalizing goal against Holland in the Final and right towards the end of the game, Holland got Penalty Corner and that tournaments’ highest scorer Paul Litjens was to take the hit, but due to superb dash by Islahuddin, the ball went out and Pakistan won by 3-2. Pakistan remained the only undefeated team in that World Cup under the leadership of Islahuddin. Pakistanis played such attractive hockey that Islahuddin informed three players of Argentina were also in their country’s football (soccer) team and told him they learnt from Pakistani Hockey Team techniques to win the World Cup Soccer at home that year.

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BEIJING (Reuters) – China said on Tuesday it wants 17 Muslim Chinese terror suspects returned if the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba is closed by U.S. President-elect Barack Obama.

Obama has pledged to close the prison at the U.S. naval station in southeastern Cuba, which has come to symbolize aggressive detention practices that opened the United States to allegations of torture.

Although the U.S. military no longer considers the 17 Chinese Uighurs “enemy combatants,” they have remained at Guantanamo because the United States has been unable to find a country willing to take them.

“The 17 terror suspects imprisoned in the U.S. military base of Guantanamo Bay are members of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, which has been listed as a terrorist organization by the United Nations,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said.

“For these terror suspects, the Chinese government has always requested they be sent back to China and firmly opposes any country accepting them,” he told a news briefing.

In 2006, the United States allowed five Chinese Muslims released from Guantanamo to go to Albania. The U.S. government has said it cannot return the Uighurs to China because they would face persecution there.

The Obama camp has not made clear what it would do with the Uighurs. But State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the Bush administration understood China’s point of view but needed to “assure ourselves that if people are transferred out of Guantanamo under whatever status that they are not going to be mistreated in any way, shape or form.

“At this point we don’t believe that it would be the right thing to do to transfer these individuals back to China,” he told reporters in Washington.

Many Muslim Uighurs, who are from Xinjiang in far western China, seek greater autonomy for the region and some want independence. Beijing has waged a relentless campaign against what it calls their violent separatist activities.

The Uighurs had been living in a camp in Afghanistan during the U.S.-led bombing campaign that began in October 2001. They fled into the mountains and were detained by Pakistani authorities, who handed them over to the United States.

(Reporting by Liu Zhen and Paul Eckert; Editing by Ben Blanchard and Bill Trott)

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Courtesy India Post and New America Media

Editor’s note: This story appeared in New York Community Media Alliance’s “Voices That Must Be Heard.”

In a disturbing incident reminiscent of widespread discrimination in 2001, three eminent Sikh classical religious musicians, Gulbag Singh, Davinder Singh, and Iqbal Singh were kicked off a U.S. Airways flight, and were told that the U.S. Airways pilot for the plane was refusing to fly with them on board.

The incident occurred after Gulbag, Davinder, and Iqbal Singh cleared Transportation Security Administration (TSA) security and boarded U.S. Airways flight No. 0493, on Nov 15, 2008, in Sacramento, California, on their way to Salt Lake City, Utah.

The three were sitting together in the rear of the plane, in their assigned seats. After having been on the plane for approximately 10 minutes, they were approached by one of the ticket-reception desk workers and asked to exit the plane. While none of the three adequately comprehend or speak English, the group complied and exited the aircraft.

When it became apparent that the group was unable to converse with U.S. Airways representatives, a Punjabi interpreter was called to assist. The Punjabi interpreter informed Iqbal Singh, on behalf of the U.S. Airways representatives, that the U.S. Airways pilot for the plane was refusing to fly if they were onboard the aircraft. When Iqbal Singh asked why, airline representatives were unable to give a clear answer, and the interpreter went on to persuade the three not to raise any objection because it could lead to more problems.

The group, having become concerned, fearful, and worried about what had happened, took the only option they were given, which was to stay the night in a hotel and depart on a Delta Airlines flight the following morning to Salt Lake City, Utah. Commenting on the discriminatory and publicly humiliating treatment, Gulbag Singh commented,

In the formal complaint letter to U.S. Airways, United Sikhs, a Sikh advocacy group, stressed the severity of the racial profiling and discriminatory treatment, asked for an apology and compensation for the three Sikhs, and offered training for U.S. Airways staff. Sikhs will not stand to be discriminated against.

“I would like to ask the average American to think about how they would feel if they were cleared by security, were sitting on their plane, and then were asked to leave for no good reason. It is ridiculous that a person should be submitted to such second class treatment,” said the complaint in Punjabi.

“There is no satisfactory justification for U.S. Airways to treat people in this way. This is a clear violation of civil rights and they must take immediate actions to address this issue,” stated Harpreet Singh, legal director, United Sikhs. The organization has written to the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) and U.S. Airways, warning legal recourse against the airline unless prompt action is taken to redress the incident.

In a separate incident, on Nov. 17, at Logan International Airport, in Boston Massachusetts, a Sikh man, Jaspal Singh, was sent to secondary screening where he was subjected to humiliating treatment when a Transportation Security Officer (TSO) roughly searched his turban, almost untying it, after threatening him with arrest. United Sikhs has written to and spoken with the TSA [Transportation Security Administration], which is currently reviewing video footage of the incident.
The organization has meanwhile cautioned the Sikh American community that due to the high volume of passengers during the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday season, they may face improper or discriminatory treatment while traveling, and that they should contact United Sikhs to seek legal recourse.

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Courtesy InFocus, Angie El Sherif

IRVINE, Calif. — New children’s book authors, Amira Gadd and Mariam Saada, released their first book entitled “4-3-2-1 Eid ul-adha is so much fun!” on Nov. 20.
Gadd and Saada have written this book in hopes that it will be the first of many.

The book is available on their educational Web site designed for Muslim kids and families.

Sonbolight kids was created because Saada and Gadd, who are local Orange County moms, felt there a lot of books for Muslim children, but they are more informational books than they are fun, attractive and appealing.

“We were complaining about the fact that Muslim kids’ books are not very attractive-looking and not molded to our children in terms of topics and presentation,” Saada said.

According to their Web site, Sonbolightkids.com, their company aims at “providing quality products geared to enhance a child’s Islamic character and to assist parents, educators and caretakers to instill values in a persuasive yet fun and appealing fashion.”

“Our motto is Read. Think. Learn. Inspire,” Saada said.

The book “4-3-2-1 Eid ul-adha is so much fun!” is sold for $5.99, and the authors plan on marketing it in Barnes and Noble and Borders as well as Islamic book stores.

The book is about how children raised in the West celebrate Eid ul-Adha by decorating, exchanging gifts, etc.

“The thing about this book is that it is very simple in terms of the language. The children can read it on their own without their parents’ help,” Gadd said.

“We would like to also present our book to non-Muslims. It can help them understand what Eid is all about. We feel that there is a gap, and we are trying to fill this gap,” Saada said.

Sonbolight Kids has a line of products – dedicated especially to Ramadan, Eid ul-Fitr and Eid ul-Adha – designed to make the holiday experience fun and attractive.

The Web site is interactive; there you can find printable activities like dot to dot, word search, decorative activities, stickers and arts and crafts.

They plan to also include games, music, videos and movies as well.

“We have big dreams for the Web site,” Saada said, adding that they also hope to publish four books every year.

All their books and products strive to be properly researched and based on the holy Qur’an and Sunnah.

The name Sonbolight defines the organization. The word Sonbol means a grain of wheat in the Arabic language, which represents the fact that good deeds done are multiplied.

Gadd is a graphics designer who is completing her master’s in e-marketing. She is the illustrator of the book as well as the Web site designer.

Saada is currently doing her Ph.D. in Spanish linguistics. Their children attend Islamic elementary schools in Orange County.

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