Prosecutors dropped their case against Tracy McCarter last December, citing insufficient evidence. In the lawsuit, which was filed on November 2 in the Southern District of New York, McCarter said she had “sustained serious physical and psychological harm as a result of being wrongfully arrested, charged, imprisoned, searched, and prosecuted.” 

The lawsuit names four NYPD officers who were involved with the arrest and one investigator from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office who worked on the case. All four of the police officers have previously faced civilian complaints of misconduct, though such allegations are famously hard to prove. A spokesperson for the NYPD declined to comment on whether any of the officers are being investigated in relation to McCarter’s case, citing the pending litigation. The district attorney’s office declined to comment on the allegation involving the undisclosed search warrant. 

According to the NYPD’s disciplinary guidelines, making false, misleading, and inaccurate statements is cause for termination. There’s no data showing how often that happens, however. 

Still, New York City taxpayers end up footing the bill when officers are accused of abusing their authority. The majority of lawsuits against the NYPD are settled, according to Jennvine Wong, a staff attorney with the Cop Accountability Project at the Legal Aid Society, a public defense organization in New York City.

“It seems like unless the story makes it to the press, somehow, cops are not actually paying the price for their perjury or for their false statements that are made in investigations.”

Those settlements are paid out from the city, not NYPD coffers, and New York City is on track to pay more than $100 million for such lawsuits this year alone, according to an analysis by the Legal Aid Society. As The Intercept previously reported, that figure is separate from the $30 million the city paid to settle lawsuits ahead of litigation, while 16 of the 20 officers named in the lawsuits with the highest payouts have been promoted. 

“It seems like unless the story makes it to the press, somehow, cops are not actually paying the price for their perjury or for their false statements that are made in investigations,” said Wong. “It’s obscured in a way that they’ve always been obscured, with DA’s offices pleading out a case to a lesser charge or dismissing cases, or avoiding calling that particular officer to the stand and calling a different officer instead.”

Police arrested McCarter, a nurse at New York-Presbyterian, after the death of her estranged husband, James Murray, in March 2020. The lawsuit provides the following account of their relationship and Murray’s death: Murray struggled with alcoholism and abused McCarter when he was drinking, including choking her. On the night of his death, he drunkenly went to McCarter’s apartment demanding money. After she refused, Murray put her into a chokehold. McCarter held out a kitchen knife in an attempt to ward him off, but Murray tripped and fell into the kitchen knife, piercing him in the chest. (This account was later confirmed by forensic experts hired by both McCarter’s team and the prosecution, according to the lawsuit.) McCarter said she immediately called for help and applied pressure to Murray’s wound. 

A transcript of body camera footage reviewed by The Intercept shows McCarter in distress and pleading for officers to help Murray. “Jim. Please stay with us,” she screamed, according to the transcript. “Oh god. Oh god. Why [unintelligible] did you do this Jim? Why did you do this? Why did you do this? He tried to take my money. Why did he do this? Oh my god.”

Shortly after, Officer Shahel Miah handcuffed McCarter. Another officer, Samantha Cortez, stated, “She said he tried to take her money and she stabbed him in the chest.” The transcript of the body camera footage does not show McCarter making the second part of that statement, but Cortez memorialized it in her report nonetheless, according to the lawsuit. 

Former Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance’s office cited the alleged confession to charge McCarter with second-degree murder, an offense that carries a possible sentence of 25 years to life. McCarter’s lawyers later tried to refute the claim with body camera footage, but the judge overseeing the case ruled against them. 

At the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, McCarter was jailed on Rikers Island; she was ultimately released on house arrest in September 2020. Meanwhile, the prosecution used Cortez’s account as probable cause to obtain search warrants on McCarter’s phone and computer, including for dating apps that she shared with Murray. District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who entered office in January 2022, dismissed the charge against McCarter in December of that year after determining there was insufficient evidence to prosecute her. 

Months after the charge was dropped, McCarter learned that the district attorney’s office had withheld information about its surveillance activities. In August 2023, Google notified McCarter that it had given prosecutors access to information about an email account she used to communicate with people who were advocating on her behalf. Google, in its email, wrote that a court order had previously prohibited the company from notifying her about the request. 

McCarter’s lawyers later obtained the warrant from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. It shows that prosecutors got a search warrant for the account, StandWithTracy, in December 2021, during Vance’s last month in office, on the grounds that it was being used to “commit or conceal the commission of a crime.” Prosecutors were seeking access to the emails, addresses, and calendars associated with the account, according to the warrant. 

New York law requires prosecutors to turn over all documents related to the case. The district attorney’s office provided McCarter’s legal team with documents related to other search warrants, but those records did not mention the activism account. 

In the lawsuit, McCarter alleges that the warrant was based on “false information from members of the NYPD.” Her lawyers asked the district attorney’s office — now run by Bragg — about the basis for searching the account, but prosecutors refused to turn over that documentation without a court order, the lawyers said. 

“We don’t know what could possibly have been used to justify searching an account that was created to advocate on Tracy’s behalf as a survivor of domestic violence who was criminalized,” said Tess Cohen, one of McCarter’s lawyers. “We didn’t even know the search happened or what the result of that search was.”

For McCarter, the surveillance of the account was “beyond terrifying.” 

“That is Orwellian,” she said. 

New Yorkers have previously complained about the conduct of all of the police officers named in McCarter’s lawsuit, according to The Intercept’s review of the public database for the Civilian Complaint Review Board, an independent agency that investigates police misconduct.

One detective, Carlos Pagan, has faced six CCRB complaints for offenses such as use of force and abuse of authority dating back to 2011. None of those complaints have ever been substantiated, an outcome that means the CCRB found enough evidence of wrongdoing to recommend discipline. The majority of CCRB complaints are found to be unsubstantiated, but that doesn’t always mean it’s because there was no misconduct — the process for proving a case is difficult and burdensome.

Miah, the officer who handcuffed McCarter, has been the subject of three complaints. One of them, for abuse of authority, was substantiated, though the CCRB does not publicly provide details of the basis for the complaint. Miah did not face disciplinary action from the NYPD, according to a department database.

Cortez, the officer who said that McCarter confessed to stabbing Murray, faced a complaint for abuse of authority in September 2021, yet the investigation has been closed pending the outcome of the criminal case. 

And Alexander Cruz, a detective who signed off on search warrants and the criminal complaint against McCarter, was the subject of a CCRB complaint in 2008 for abuse of authority. He was exonerated during those proceedings but was named in a lawsuit the following year alleging he filed false police reports and gave false testimony. The suit resulted in a $27,000 settlement that did not include an admission of wrongdoing. The NYPD later disciplined Cruz for knowingly filing “ inaccurate, and factually incorrect departmental reports” on 19 occasions and making “incomplete and inaccurate entries into the department memobook.” (His penalty was losing 15 vacation days.) The CCRB database lists Cruz as inactive. 

Miah referred questions to the NYPD press office, which responded with a link to the department’s discipline database. Cortez did not respond, and Pagan and Cruz could not be reached for comment. 

Emily Tuttle, a spokesperson for Bragg, told The Intercept that the district attorney’s office takes into consideration police officers’ records. The office maintains “records with any information that could negatively impact a testifying officer’s credibility and proactively disclose it in any prosecution where they may be called as a witness,” Tuttle wrote in an email.

McCarter is seeking an unspecified amount in damages related to her loss of income and the trauma she said she endured as part of her arrest. According to her lawsuit, the experience left her with post-traumatic stress disorder, suicidal ideations, and medical bills for in-patient counseling she sought for her PTSD. She was suspended from both her job and her master’s program during the case, and she opted for a hysterectomy instead of a simpler medical procedure out of fear she’d be incarcerated and not receive adequate medical care for her condition. 

In an interview, she said she hopes lawmakers in Albany, New York, will take note of the alleged misconduct in her case and review laws that protect police, prosecutors, and judges. She said, “The legislature actually prevents the accountability necessary in a just society to stop these abuses of power.” 

The post NYPD Accused of Fabricating Domestic Violence Survivor’s Murder Confession appeared first on The Intercept.

That figure is on track to exceed $100 million by the end of the year — but even that total doesn’t capture how much the city has to spend in cases where its cops are accused of everything from causing car accidents to beating innocent people.

The $100 million figure does not include lawsuits settled by the city prior to litigation, which reached $30 million in the first nine months of this year, according to data obtained from the office of the New York City Comptroller through a public records request. Pre-litigation settlements from July 2022 through September of this year totaled $50 million — meaning the city’s payouts in such suits since July 2022, including those settled after litigation, rose to a total of around $280 million.

“It says something that it’s just such a high amount even before people get to file in civil court,” said Jennvine Wong, staff attorney with the Cop Accountability Project at the Legal Aid Society, which provides public defense in New York City. ”And all it does is it helps obscure police misconduct.”

The information about pre-litigation settlements provided to The Intercept through a public records request included settlements ranging from $1.8 million to $119. The comptroller’s office did not have immediately available data on the amount paid in pre-litigation settlements prior to July 2022. 

In response to questions, an NYPD spokesperson pointed to a comptroller report that showed an 11 percent decrease in claims from 2021 to 2022, and a 52 percent drop in claims filed with the comptroller against the NYPD since 2013. 

“The NYPD carefully analyzes this information as well as trends in litigation against the Department,” said an NYPD spokesperson who did not provide their name. “When it comes to litigation data, the NYPD is seeing similar success in the declining numbers. There has been a nearly 20% reduction in police action filings against the NYPD from 2021 to 2022, and a nearly 65% reduction since 2013.”

The report notes that while the number of tort claims filed against the NYPD declined from 2021 to 2022, the amount of payouts increased by 14 percent, from $208.1 million to $237.2 million. 

Earlier this year, The Intercept reported that a new NYPD website dedicated to “transparency” around police misconduct and payouts leaves out cops accused of wrongdoing and only covers a fraction of the millions the city pays out in such cases. The website only includes those cases where there are findings of guilt, even as the police pay out millions of dollars precisely to avoid convictions and other findings of wrongdoing. 

Some of the police officers left out of the transparency database have been named in multiple misconduct lawsuits. In some of the cases, rather than receiving public scrutiny through the database, the NYPD cops have received promotions.

Correction: November 27, 2023, 4:22 p.m.
Due to an editing error, the previous headline incorrectly referenced the amount of time the NYPD paid out $30 million in pre-litigation settlements. It reached that number in the first nine months of this year, not six months.

The post NYPD Paid Out $30 Million in Misconduct Cases Before Litigation in First Nine Months of 2023 appeared first on The Intercept.

“No community member should remove or deface any poster,” administrators wrote in the November 16 email. “We are investigating incidents of poster defacement, including in some cases with our FBI partners, and they will be addressed through our policies and conduct process.”

The notice went out the same day a university official sent an email about a recital poster in the campus performing arts center that had been vandalized with “antisemitic language and symbols.” American University students told The Intercept they have seen other posters and campus materials vandalized and taken down, including ones critical of Israel’s killing of civilians in Gaza and U.S. backing for the war.

The FBI’s involvement at American University comes as college campuses across the country witness a heightened presence of law enforcement personnel amid student protests over the war in Gaza. At Columbia University in New York, police squads have ramped up their campus patrols, while police at Brandeis University in Massachusetts violently detained students demonstrating against the campus ban of pro-Palestinian student groups.

At Queens College, administrators contacted the New York Police Department in response to a student group’s social media posts about the October 7 Hamas attack. The Anti-Defamation League — which has demanded that schools investigate whether a Palestine solidarity group with chapters at universities nationwide is materially supporting terrorists — has called for the FBI and IRS to probe such campus organizations.

Kiah Duggins, a civil rights attorney at Civil Rights Corps, said that FBI’s involvement at American University, as well as the broader deployment of police agencies at college campuses, evokes the history of law enforcement agencies cracking down on students protesting for civil rights or against the Vietnam War decades ago. “It’s especially important that students’ First Amendment rights are protected because as we’ve seen throughout history, students when they speak up are usually speaking up for human rights, speaking up for civil rights, speaking up for peace, and so institutions should ensure that their rights to speak up for these kinds of really important issues are protected.” 

The university declined to comment on why the defacement of posters warranted FBI involvement, citing the ongoing investigation. The FBI did not respond to a request for comment.

“There are fears that this is going to be used to completely quash any free speech on campus.”

American University student Julie Austin told The Intercept that the increased police presence on campus is unnerving to students. “There are fears that this is going to be used to completely quash any free speech on campus,” she said.

The defacement of posters has become a flashpoint of its own in the U.S. debate over Israel’s war on Gaza, as people have been caught on camera removing posters related to the conflict, particularly ones depicting hostages Hamas took on October 7. In one high-profile example, a New York public defender took down posters of the hostages after hecklers put up ones that reportedly justified the bombing of Palestinian civilians. A video of her actions went viral, and she resigned amid the firestorm that ensued. 

The blowback from that incident has made its way to American University. “Obviously, taking down the provocative posters plays right into the hand of the group putting them up, esp if people document it,” one student wrote to The Intercept, noting that he was told by fellow activists to avoid removing posters.

Ever since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, the university campus has been papered with posters about the horrendous assault and Israel’s retaliatory attack on Gaza. Those include a poster bearing the logo for Standing Together, a joint Jewish and Palestinian-led organization, that read “only peace will bring safety,” with images of individuals whose family members were killed by Hamas. Other posters with messages like “kidnapped by Hamas” or “murdered by Israel” have been defaced or removed, students told The Intercept, as has one that brought attention to the U.S. government’s role in the conflict. 

“America gives over $3 BILLION PER YEAR to Israel to fund the military occupation of Palestine,” that poster read. “They are using OUR tax money towards genocide instead of healthcare, infrastructure, or education for Americans.” 

The university has called on the FBI and other law enforcement agencies to investigate other campus incidents in recent weeks as well.

Last month, American University President Sylvia Burwell warned of swastikas and “Nazi slogans” drawn in a first-year residence hall, on the doors of two rooms of Jewish students and in a bathroom. Days later, a note that read “GO BACK WHERE YOU CAME FROM” and “DEATH TO ALL PALESTINIANS” was found in a Palestinian staff member’s office.

Following those incidents, university officials wrote in another email that they are partnering with “area law enforcement and intelligence organizations across the city” to monitor “external threats and activities.” The university added that it was “working alongside the FBI as we continue to collaborate on the investigation of the incidents of hate on our campus targeted at parts of our community that impact all of us.”

In an email on Tuesday about the university’s efforts to address both Islamophobia and antisemitism on campus, Burwell reiterated that university officials were working with the FBI, but also appeared to acknowledge that not everything happening on campus warrants law enforcement intervention. “In addition to continuing to work with the FBI,” Burwell wrote, “we are addressing other harms that undermine our sense of community even if they may not involve law enforcement action.”

The post American University Called on the FBI to Investigate Defaced Posters appeared first on The Intercept.

The two online chairs, as they are called, had decided to solicit an essay from a Palestinian scholar for the journal’s website. Eghbariah was an obvious choice: A Palestinian doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School and human rights lawyer, he has tried landmark Palestinian civil rights cases before the Israeli Supreme Court.

Eghbariah submitted a draft of a 2,000-word essay by early November. He argued that Israel’s assault on Gaza should be evaluated within and beyond the “legal framework” of “genocide.”

In line with the Law Review’s standard procedures, the piece was solicited, commissioned, contracted, submitted, edited, fact checked, copy edited, and approved by the relevant editors. Yet it will never be published with the Harvard Law Review.

Following an intervention to delay the publication of Eghbariah’s article by the Harvard Law Review president, the piece went through several committee processes before it was finally killed by an emergency meeting of editors. The essay, “The Ongoing Nakba,” would have been the first from a Palestinian scholar published by the journal.

In an email to Eghbariah and Harvard Law Review President Apsara Iyer, shared with The Intercept, online chair Tascha Shahriari-Parsa, one of the editors who commissioned the essay, called the move an “unprecedented decision.”

“Let’s not dance around it — this is also outright censorship. It is dangerous and alarming.”

“As Online Chairs, we have always had full discretion to solicit pieces for publication,” Shahriari-Parsa wrote, informing Eghbariah that his piece would not be published despite following the agreed upon procedure for blog essays. Shahriari-Parsa wrote that concerns had arisen about staffers being offended or harassed, but “a deliberate decision to censor your voice out of fear of backlash would be contrary to the values of academic freedom and uplifting marginalized voices in legal academia that our institution stands for.”

Both Shahriari-Parsa and the other top online editor, Sabrina Ochoa, told The Intercept that they had never seen a piece face this level of scrutiny at the Law Review. Shahriari-Parsa could find no previous examples of other pieces pulled from publication after going through the standard editorial process. Another editor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, echoed the view that Eghbariah’s treatment is unprecedented.

The anonymous editor said that, based on their research, Israeli scholars had been well represented in the pages of the magazine, but not Palestinians. The editor also said that they could find no previous examples, based on their research, of a publication-ready article being pulled.

In one of his responses to the editors, Eghbariah wrote, “This is discrimination. Let’s not dance around it — this is also outright censorship. It is dangerous and alarming.”

According to emails shared with The Intercept, as well as Shahriari-Parsa and Eghbariah’s accounts, Iyer at first delayed the essay’s publication over what she said were safety concerns and the desire to deliberate with editors. According to an email from Shahriari-Parsa to the author, however, Iyer also said in meetings that “she was personally unwilling to allow the piece to be published.” (Iyer responded in the email chain with Eghbariah that there were “numerous inaccuracies” in the rejection email, claiming the story had gone through the normal process and that the piece had been rejected based on the requested publication timeline.)

Following requests from over 30 editors, an emergency meeting of the entire journal body was called. After nearly six hours, the more than 100 editors voted anonymously on running the piece or not, with a strong majority voting against publication.

“Like every academic journal, the Harvard Law Review has editorial processes governing how it solicits, evaluates, and determines when and whether to publish a piece,” the Harvard Law Review said in a statement. “An intrinsic feature of these internal processes is the confidentiality of our 104 editors’ perspectives and deliberations. After a full body meeting and vote of the entire membership last week, a substantial majority voted not to proceed with publication.”

Entirely run by students — Iyer and Shahriari-Parsa, like Eghbariah, attend Harvard Law School — Harvard Law Review is a well-known launch pad for estimable legal and political careers. Barack Obama was the journal president during his time at the law school, and graduates regularly go on to clerkships with Supreme Court justices and jobs at top-tier law firms. With careers potentially on the line, the Harvard Law Review’s decision on Eghbariah’s essay came amid a crackdown in academia, in Ivy League schools and elsewhere, against pro-Palestinian speech following the October 7 Hamas attack and Israel’s subsequent onslaught against the Gaza Strip.

“I can only speculate about the reasons of individual editors,” said Ryan Doerfler, a law professor at Harvard who attended a meeting with Law Review staff about the Palestine article. “What I can observe, though, is that the vote took place amidst a climate of suppression of pro-Palestinian advocacy.”

A second editor who asked for anonymity to speak freely about the process said that fear of backlash played a key role in their personal decision to vote “no” on Eghbariah’s piece. The editor said they found “substantive flaws” in the piece that were exacerbated by a fear among editors that they would have their names and faces plastered on billboard trucks around campus accusing them of being Hamas supporters — something that happened to pro-Palestine Harvard students who signed a controversial open letter.

The editor said substantive flaws are generally removed from pieces prior to publication, but they did not feel such edits would have been possible in this case because of the lack of agreement on underlying facts. “Reasonable scholarly debate couldn’t happen in that context,” they said. “Partly because we’re not at a point in time where that debate can happen without your face being put on a truck.”

Doerfler praised Eghbariah’s draft amid that climate of fear. “It is a forceful piece of legal scholarship,” he said, “and it articulates a position that takes real courage to put forward.”

Eghbariah’s article was published Tuesday night at The Nation, under the headline “The Harvard Law Review Refused to Run This Piece About Genocide in Gaza.”

“Threatens Academic Freedom”

For some of the more than 100 editors at the Harvard Law Review, the delay and subsequent killing of Eghbariah’s piece did not hew to the usual process. In a forthcoming public statement viewed by The Intercept, 25 Harvard Law Review editors objected to the move to squash the essay.

“We are unaware of any other solicited piece that has been revoked by the Law Review in this way,” the editors wrote. “This unprecedented decision threatens academic freedom and perpetuates the suppression of Palestinian voices. We dissent.”

In an interview, the first anonymous Law Review editor told me that they have evaluated “hundreds of submissions” for the journal and that Eghbariah’s essay is “more than just ‘good enough.’” Both this editor and Shahriari-Parsa said that they believe the primary reason for the “no” votes was fear.

“Editors expressed that they supported the piece and wanted to uplift marginalized voices,” the second editor said, “but were voting against publishing it because they were afraid of the consequences and had worked too hard to now risk their futures. Some also expressed concerns that the blowback to the piece would discriminatorily target editors of color more than others.”

Students, writers, and artists speaking out for Palestinian liberation are facing extreme levels of censorship and censure — especially in academia. Columbia University and Brandeis University have suspended the campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace on spurious grounds of violating campus protest policy and risks to campus safety. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis ordered public universities to shut down chapters of the groups. Harvard, too, has faced pressure from major donors to crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech. Students have been doxxed and harassed for writing a letter in the aftermath of October 7 saying Israel’s longtime oppression of Palestinians was “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”

“The Law Review specifically had just gone through an incident in which one of its members was doxxed after participating as a safety marshal at a ‘die in’ at the Harvard Business School campus organized by student activists,” said Doerfler, the professor. Doerfler, who had been brought into a meeting with Iyer, Eghbariah, and two Review editors on November 14 to discuss Eghbariah’s essay, said the editor who participated in the “die in” protest has been publicly criticized by a major university donor “as part of his broader criticism of the University’s handling of the crisis.”

“This is exactly the kind of work that good international legal scholarship should do.”

In the essay, Eghbariah argues that the atrocities in Gaza amount to genocide; he considers the frames used to name Israeli policies in Palestine more broadly and calls for a distinctive legal framework for Palestine. According to Eghbariah, just as “the South African experience brought ‘Apartheid’ into the global and legal lexicon,” the distinctive nature of the domination Palestinians have faced should demand a new category of crime: “Nakba,” the word Palestinians use to describe their dispossession and expulsion at the founding of the state of Israel.

Yale Law School professor Aslı Bâli, an international and human rights law expert who said she has never met or worked with Eghbariah but was sent his essay and aware of the Harvard Law Review situation, said in an interview that the article constituted an “excellent piece of legal scholarship.” She noted that the essay’s arguments are no doubt contested, as is the nature of legal argumentation. “This is exactly the kind of work that good international legal scholarship should do,” she said.

Bâli told The Intercept that in her “quarter century” of experience in legal scholarship, she has never heard of a contracted article, which has gone through the editorial process, being pulled before publication. She said, “I’ve never heard of anything of this sort.”

Update: November 22, 2023
This story has been updated to include a reference to the publication of Eghbariah’s essay in The Nation late Tuesday evening.

The post Harvard Law Review Editors Vote to Kill Article About Genocide in Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.

The submitted ads, in both Hebrew and Arabic, included flagrant violations of policies for Facebook and its parent company Meta. Some contained violent content directly calling for the murder of Palestinian civilians, like ads demanding a “holocaust for the Palestinians” and to wipe out “Gazan women and children and the elderly.” Other posts, like those describing kids from Gaza as “future terrorists” and a reference to “Arab pigs,” contained dehumanizing language.

“The approval of these ads is just the latest in a series of Meta’s failures towards the Palestinian people.”

“The approval of these ads is just the latest in a series of Meta’s failures towards the Palestinian people,” Nadim Nashif, founder of the Palestinian social media research and advocacy group 7amleh, which submitted the test ads, told The Intercept. “Throughout this crisis, we have seen a continued pattern of Meta’s clear bias and discrimination against Palestinians.”

7amleh’s idea to test Facebook’s machine-learning censorship apparatus arose last month, when Nashif discovered an ad on his Facebook feed explicitly calling for the assassination of American activist Paul Larudee, a co-founder of the Free Gaza Movement. Facebook’s automatic translation of the text ad read: “It’s time to assassinate Paul Larudi [sic], the anti-Semitic and ‘human rights’ terrorist from the United States.” Nashif reported the ad to Facebook, and it was taken down.

The ad had been placed by Ad Kan, a right-wing Israeli group founded by former Israel Defense Force and intelligence officers to combat “anti-Israeli organizations” whose funding comes from purportedly antisemitic sources, according to its website. (Neither Larudee nor Ad Kan immediately responded to requests for comment.)

Calling for the assassination of a political activist is a violation of Facebook’s advertising rules. That the post sponsored by Ad Kan appeared on the platform indicates Facebook approved it despite those rules. The ad likely passed through filtering by Facebook’s automated process, based on machine-learning, that allows its global advertising business to operate at a rapid clip.

“Our ad review system is designed to review all ads before they go live,” according to a Facebook ad policy overview. As Meta’s human-based moderation, which historically relied almost entirely on outsourced contractor labor, has drawn greater scrutiny and criticism, the company has come to lean more heavily on automated text-scanning software to enforce its speech rules and censorship policies.

While these technologies allow the company to skirt the labor issues associated with human moderators, they also obscure how moderation decisions are made behind secret algorithms.

Last year, an external audit commissioned by Meta found that while the company was routinely using algorithmic censorship to delete Arabic posts, the company had no equivalent algorithm in place to detect “Hebrew hostile speech” like racist rhetoric and violent incitement. Following the audit, Meta claimed it had “launched a Hebrew ‘hostile speech’ classifier to help us proactively detect more violating Hebrew content.” Content, that is, like an ad espousing murder.

Incitement to Violence on Facebook

Amid the Israeli war on Palestinians in Gaza, Nashif was troubled enough by the explicit call in the ad to murder Larudee that he worried similar paid posts might contribute to violence against Palestinians.

Large-scale incitement to violence jumping from social media into the real world is not a mere hypothetical: In 2018, United Nations investigators found violently inflammatory Facebook posts played a “determining role” in Myanmar’s Rohingya genocide. (Last year, another group ran test ads inciting against Rohingya, a project along the same lines as 7amleh’s experiment; in that case, all the ads were also approved.)

The quick removal of the Larudee post didn’t explain how the ad was approved in the first place. In light of assurances from Facebook that safeguards were in place, Nashif and 7amleh, which formally partners with Meta on censorship and free expression issues, were puzzled.

“Meta has a track record of not doing enough to protect marginalized communities.”

Curious if the approval was a fluke, 7amleh created and submitted 19 ads, in both Hebrew and Arabic, with text deliberately, flagrantly violating company rules — a test for Meta and Facebook. 7amleh’s ads were designed to test the approval process and see whether Meta’s ability to automatically screen violent and racist incitement had gotten better, even with unambiguous examples of violent incitement.

“We knew from the example of what happened to the Rohingya in Myanmar that Meta has a track record of not doing enough to protect marginalized communities,” Nashif said, “and that their ads manager system was particularly vulnerable.”

Meta’s appears to have failed 7amleh’s test.

The company’s Community Standards rulebook — which ads are supposed to comply with to be approved — prohibit not just text advocating for violence, but also any dehumanizing statements against people based on their race, ethnicity, religion, or nationality. Despite this, confirmation emails shared with The Intercept show Facebook approved every single ad.

Though 7amleh told The Intercept the organization had no intention to actually run these ads and was going to pull them before they were scheduled to appear, it believes their approval demonstrates the social platform remains fundamentally myopic around non-English speech — languages used by a great majority of its over 4 billion users. (Meta retroactively rejected 7amleh’s Hebrew ads after The Intercept brought them to the company’s attention, but the Arabic versions remain approved within Facebook’s ad system.)

Facebook spokesperson Erin McPike confirmed the ads had been approved accidentally. “Despite our ongoing investments, we know that there will be examples of things we miss or we take down in error, as both machines and people make mistakes,” she said. “That’s why ads can be reviewed multiple times, including once they go live.”

Just days after its own experimental ads were approved, 7amleh discovered an Arabic ad run by a group calling itself “Migrate Now” calling on “Arabs in Judea and Sumaria” — the name Israelis, particularly settlers, use to refer to the occupied Palestinian West Bank — to relocate to Jordan.

According to Facebook documentation, automated, software-based screening is the “primary method” used to approve or deny ads. But it’s unclear if the “hostile speech” algorithms used to detect violent or racist posts are also used in the ad approval process. In its official response to last year’s audit, Facebook said its new Hebrew-language classifier would “significantly improve” its ability to handle “major spikes in violating content,” such as around flare-ups of conflict between Israel and Palestine. Based on 7amleh’s experiment, however, this classifier either doesn’t work very well or is for some reason not being used to screen advertisements. (McPike did not answer when asked if the approval of 7amleh’s ads reflected an underlying issue with the hostile speech classifier.)

Either way, according to Nashif, the fact that these ads were approved points to an overall problem: Meta claims it can effectively use machine learning to deter explicit incitement to violence, while it clearly cannot.

“We know that Meta’s Hebrew classifiers are not operating effectively, and we have not seen the company respond to almost any of our concerns,” Nashif said in his statement. “Due to this lack of action, we feel that Meta may hold at least partial responsibility for some of the harm and violence Palestinians are suffering on the ground.”

The approval of the Arabic versions of the ads come as a particular surprise following a recent report by the Wall Street Journal that Meta had lowered the level of certainty its algorithmic censorship system needed to remove Arabic posts — from 80 percent confidence that the post broke the rules, to just 25 percent. In other words, Meta was less sure that the Arabic posts it was suppressing or deleting actually contained policy violations.

Nashif said, “There have been sustained actions resulting in the silencing of Palestinian voices.”

The post Facebook Approved an Israeli Ad Calling for Assassination of Pro-Palestine Activist appeared first on The Intercept.

Philadelphia City Council member and Minority Leader Brian O’Neill, the last remaining Republican on the council after this month’s elections, fired an administrative assistant in his office in April 2017, less than six months after she accused a co-worker of sexual harassment, according to court documents.

The administrative assistant, Linda Trush, sued the city in 2021 and alleged that she was repeatedly sexually harassed by a co-worker and subjected to a hostile work environment before being unlawfully terminated from her job. In her suit, Trush said she was retaliated against after reporting “severe and pervasive sexual harassment” and taking medical leave for mental health treatment as a result of the alleged harassment. (Trush’s lawyer did not respond to a request for comment.) 

“Despite Plaintiff’s aforesaid excellent performance, her work environment was tainted by the severe and pervasive sexual harassment that she was subjected to in 2014,” the lawsuit says, “and the retaliation that followed once she complained of the same.”

The city responded to the suit in January 2022 denying Trush’s allegations of harassment. Earlier, the city stated that it was “unable to substantiate” the harassment claim. The case is still pending. “As this lawsuit is in active litigation, the City declines to comment at this time,” Ava Schwemler, director of communications for the City of Philadelphia Law Department, which is representing the city, said in a statement to The Intercept. (O’Neill did not respond to a request for comment.)

O’Neill represents northeast Philadelphia and was first elected to the City Council in 1979.

Two of the council’s seven at-large seats are reserved for nonmajority parties and had historically gone to Republicans. In 2019, Working Families Party candidate Kendra Brooks was elected to one of the slots, making history as the first candidate outside the two major parties to hold a council seat in a century. After Brooks and Nicolas O’Rourke, another WFP candidate, won at-large seats in this month’s election, O’Neill is the last remaining Republican on the council.

While the WFP campaigned on shutting out GOP council candidates, the Philadelphia Democratic Party openly opposed the party’s candidates in this cycle. The week before the election, Philadelphia Democratic City Committee Chair Bob Brady emailed city ward leaders and threatened to expel those who had signed onto a letter supporting Brooks and O’Rourke unless they recanted before the election.

City Democrats backed O’Neill’s challenger Gary Masino, leader of the Sheet Metal Workers union. Masino lost to O’Neill by 22 points.

“You Will Lose Your Job”

O’Neill’s office hired Trush in 2010. Trush said she was harassed by a co-worker on multiple occasions starting in 2014 and that the harassment continued until the co-worker was moved to a different department in 2015, according to court documents filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

Trush claimed that on different occasions, the co-worker kissed her face, put his hands down her pants, and told her to kiss his genitals. When she refused his advances and threatened to report him, according to Trush’s suit, the co-worker told her, “If you report me, trust me you will lose your job over me first. They will believe me, not you.”

Shortly after her co-worker’s transfer, Trush said she experienced a decline in mental health including depression and panic attacks that led to a post-traumatic stress breakdown in November 2016. Trush told her husband about the harassment, and he contacted O’Neill by text message and asked him to investigate and take action. Following her husband’s outreach, Trush reported the harassment to O’Neill, and, according to Trush’s complaint, O’Neill told both Trush and her husband that the co-worker was a “predator who needed to be stopped.” (The city, in its response in court, said, “Councilman O’Neill stated that if what Plaintiff’s husband told him is true, then Shain is a predator, and Councilman O’Neill stated that the allegations should be reported to the police.”)

After reporting the alleged harassment, Trush requested and took a leave of absence, which she said in her suit was for mental health treatment. (In its response, the city only admitted she took leave, not the impetus.) She left work for three months and returned in February 2017. Upon her return to work, Trush learned that the office had not begun an investigation into her report of sexual harassment and that she would be returning to work in the same office with the co-worker she had reported. Trush complained and asked that her co-worker be moved to another office. Instead, the office reassigned her to its City Hall location, an hour from her home.

Trush alleged that the new office environment was hostile too. She was told she would no longer report directly to O’Neill as she had for the last six years, but to his executive assistant. She said office management refused to move her office supplies and items to the new location and that she was not given an employee access card, meaning she had to obtain a visitor’s pass every day and use public restrooms instead of employee restrooms.

After several requests for an update on her report of harassment, Trush said she received a letter from a human resources representative who said they had completed the investigation and could not substantiate Trush’s claims.

A week later, O’Neill informed Trush she was being reassigned to a new department. Trush asked O’Neill to reconsider the change and to accommodate her ongoing mental and physical health treatment stemming from the alleged harassment. She told O’Neill she believed the reassignment was retaliation for her complaint. One month after being reassigned, Trush was given a letter stating that after “an internal staff review,” her employment was being terminated. Trush asked her new manager why she was being terminated, who replied, “You know why,” according to the lawsuit. When Trush asked the manager to explain, they replied, “Maybe you shouldn’t have made a complaint.”

The post Last Republican on Philly City Council Fired Staffer Who Reported Sexual Harassment, Says Lawsuit appeared first on The Intercept.

Two of the organizations sent cease-and-desist letters to union shops considering resolutions calling for a ceasefire. Another group called staffers into meetings with human resources for using work channels to share links about Palestine and proposing to do fundraising for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund in lieu of an annual holiday party.

Management at several of the offices said statements on Gaza under consideration by their unions were jeopardizing funding. Pro-Israel activists launched a petition to defund the Bronx Defenders after its union issued a statement opposing Israel’s “genocidal intent in Gaza.” Public defender offices across the country are already severely underfunded. While most rely heavily on public funding, many also receive support from private institutions, including major law firms. Several firms have responded to criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza by rescinding job offers and threatening to curb recruiting efforts at law schools. 

On Thursday, ahead of the unionwide vote on a statement, the Legal Aid Society called a staff meeting. According to a partial recording of the meeting obtained by The Intercept, Chief Executive Officer Twyla Carter said the resolution’s language was antisemitic. Staff could vote how they wanted, she said, but she had an obligation to warn them about the impact on the organization’s work. 

Four law firms had already threatened to pull funding from the office over the resolution, Carter said. In discouraging union members to vote for the statement, she said, “I’m not trying to lose a dime.” 

A vote on the union resolution was halted by a court on Friday after members of the organizations, including union membership, sued. The union received the restraining order before it was over and could not tally the results.

The suppression of speech at publicly funded legal defense agencies comes as governments and workplaces around the world have disciplined and fired staffers for criticizing Israel’s nonstop bombing of Gaza. Suppression of speech about Palestine has come in the form of bans on rallies and vigils, suspensions of student groups, doxxing and death threats, and the cancellation of television interviews with Palestinian commentators. 

“Unions must act where the U.S. government will not. I proudly support Palestinian liberation and self-determination.”

The fight brewing in public defender offices escalated after recent union efforts to issue statements condemning the killing of Palestinian civilians. Since Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis last month, mostly civilians, Israel has killed more than 11,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, one out of every 200 people. 

“Unions must act where the U.S. government will not,” said Sophia Gurulé, a staff attorney in the immigration practice at the Bronx Defenders and a member of the Bronx Defenders Union – UAW Local 2325. “I proudly support Palestinian liberation and self-determination.” 

Stop the Count

The legal fight revolved around a statement from the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys – UAW Local 2325, which covers more than 25 organizations, including the Bronx Defenders, Brooklyn Defender Services, Neighborhood Defender Service, and the Legal Aid Society of New York City. Staffers across the four offices, as well as the New York County Defender Services, which is not represented by the union, have been retaliated against, reprimanded, surveilled, and encouraged to oppose the union resolution. 

The staffers spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional retaliation. In total, the five agencies provide legal and social services to more than 360,000 people each year.

The resolution expresses solidarity with Palestinians, calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, and demands an end to Israel’s occupation, decrying apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. With a “yes” vote, the union would also oppose future military aid to Israel and endorse the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel. 

At the Legal Aid all-staff meeting on Thursday, Carter, the CEO, said the resolution was antisemitic. “These statements call for the elimination of the state of Israel and the annihilation of the Jewish people,” Carter said. “You don’t have to agree, but that’s how some of our colleagues feel, and some of our supporters.”

“Accusing Israel of being an apartheid state and of genocide are all dog whistles for antisemitism,” she said. She suggested Jewish readers of the statement might see it the same way Black people would see pro-police sloganeering: “And, again, as a Black woman, my closest analogy is hearing how people talk about ‘blue lives matter’ or other things that land on me differently.”

“Accusing Israel of being an apartheid state and of genocide are all dog whistles for antisemitism.”

In a statement to The Intercept, the Legal Aid Society said it has a long-standing policy against taking positions on international political events and that it was focused on its mission to provide legal services to low-income New Yorkers. The organization said it rejected the union’s resolution, found it antisemitic, and hoped union members would vote against it: “The resolution is laden with coded antisemitic language and thinly veiled calls for the destruction of the State of Israel. At a time when our attorneys and staff should be united in support of the people we serve, the resolution does not advance the legal interests of our clients, does not comport with our mission and values, and is divisive and hurtful.”

Several hours after the meeting on Thursday, attorneys at the Legal Aid Society of Nassau County sued in New York State Supreme Court to stop the vote, saying it posed an ethical dilemma for attorneys that would make it “impossible for them to properly do their job as Public Defenders.” 

On Friday, the court granted a temporary restraining order enjoining the vote. Voting had gotten underway at 9 a.m. and only 15 minutes were left on the clock when the injunction was issued. The tally never got underway.

Cease-and-Desist Letters

On October 18, two days before the union at Bronx Defenders issued a statement opposing Israel’s occupation, ethnic cleansing, and “genocidal intent in Gaza,” management at the group sent a cease-and-desist letter warning that it would enforce trademark rights against any use of the organization’s name in the forthcoming statement. 

On Wednesday, the Bronx Defenders issued its own statement distancing itself from the union. The group said its union’s statement did not recognize the humanity of Israelis and was not consistent with the values or mission of the Bronx Defenders. 

Bronx Defenders staffers also reported to the union that human resources informed them that their draft emails were in violation of policies on internal communications. Management later apologized and said they hadn’t intended to look at staffers’ drafts. (Asked for comment, the Bronx Defenders referred The Intercept to its Wednesday statement.)

As staff at the Neighborhood Defender Services, a public defense group covering Harlem, considered putting out a union statement on Gaza in early November, they also received a cease-and-desist letter. The letter came attached to an email from managing director Alice Fontier, who said a public statement on Israel and Gaza fell outside the scope of the organization’s work. The attached letter, from an outside law firm, urged the union not to use Neighborhood Defender Services or any other trademarked nomenclature.

“We have seen the impact of a similar statement issued by Union members at the Bronx Defenders,” said the attached cease-and-desist letter. The letter noted that the petition to defund the Bronx Defenders had already gathered more than 1,500 signatures and was picked up by the New York Post, “which, unfortunately, is read widely by those in power in New York City government.” The city, the letter said, would soon be considering two major funding proposals for Neighborhood Defender Services. 

Neighborhood Defender Services’s Helmis Ortega Santana, who helped write the union’s draft statement, resigned on November 6 as union president after receiving the cease-and-desist letter. In his resignation letter, Santana said he was concerned that the statement would jeopardize the organization’s funding and its ability to serve clients, as well as ongoing contract negotiations.

Policies against international political speech in work channels weren’t previously enforced around discussion of the war in Ukraine, participation with pro-Israel groups, or international migration issues, according to public defense staffers who spoke to The Intercept. Now, these policies are being enforced for the first time in the case of speech related to Palestine, staffers said. Several of the public defense group have a record of putting out statements on major political events, including police brutality such as the murder of George Floyd, the movement to abolish U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and former President Donald Trump’s “Muslim ban.”

In the Legal Aid staff meeting Thursday ahead of the union vote, Carter referred to an organizational policy to “not talk about sociopolitical views or anything outside of our mission and our clients.”

Correction: November 17, 2023, 11:32 p.m. ET
This article previously stated that Lisa Ohta, who is the president of the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys, was a plaintiff in a suit brought against the union. Ohta was named as a defendant.

The post Public Defenders Get Restraining Order to Block Their Own Union From Voting on Gaza Statement appeared first on The Intercept.

According to the documents, obtained by the advocacy group Just Futures Law and shared with The Intercept, LexisNexis Risk Solutions began selling surveillance tools to the border enforcement agency in December 2022. The $15.9 million contract includes a broad menu of powerful tools for locating individuals throughout the United States using a vast array of personal data, much of it obtained and used without judicial oversight.

“This contract is mass surveillance in hyperdrive.”

Through LexisNexis, CBP investigators gained a convenient place to centralize, analyze, and search various databases containing enormous volumes of intimate personal information, both public and proprietary.

“This contract is mass surveillance in hyperdrive,” Julie Mao, an attorney and co-founder of Just Futures Law, told The Intercept. “It’s frightening that a rogue agency such as CBP has access to so many powerful technologies at the click of the button. Unfortunately, this is what LexisNexis appears now to be selling to thousands of police forces across the country. It’s now become a one-stop shop for accessing a range of invasive surveillance tools.”

A variety of CBP offices would make use of the surveillance tools, according to the documents. Among them is the U.S. Border Patrol, which would use LexisNexis to “help examine individuals and entities to determine their admissibility to the US. and their proclivity to violate U.S. laws and regulations.”

Among other tools, the contract shows LexisNexis is providing CBP with social media surveillance, access to jail booking data, face recognition and “geolocation analysis & geographic mapping” of cellphones. All this data can be queried in “large volume online batching,” allowing CBP investigators to target broad groups of people and discern “connections among individuals, incidents, activities, and locations,” handily visualized through Google Maps.

CBP declined to comment for this story, and LexisNexis did not respond to an inquiry. Despite the explicit reference to providing “LexisNexis Facial Recognition” in the contract, a fact sheet published by the company online says, “LexisNexis Risk Solutions does not provide the Department of Homeland Security” — CBP’s parent agency — “or US Immigration and Customs Enforcement with license plate images or facial recognition capabilities.”

The contract includes a variety of means for CBP to exploit the cellphones of those it targets. Accurint, a police and counterterror surveillance tool LexisNexis acquired in 2004, allows the agency to do analysis of real-time phone call records and phone geolocation through its “TraX” software.

While it’s unclear how exactly TraX pinpoints its targets, LexisNexis marketing materials cite “cellular providers live pings for geolocation tracking.” These materials also note that TraX incorporates both “call detail records obtained through legal process (i.e. search warrant or court order) and third-party device geolocation information.” A 2023 LexisNexis promotional brochure says, “The LexisNexis Risk Solutions Geolocation Investigative Team offers geolocation analysis and investigative case assistance to law enforcement and public safety customers.”

Any CBP use of geolocational data is controversial, given the agency’s recent history. Prior reporting found that, rather than request phone location data through a search warrant, CBP simply purchased such data from unregulated brokers — a practice that critics say allows the government to sidestep Fourth Amendment protections against police searches.

According to a September report by 404 Media, CBP recently told Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., it “will not be utilizing Commercial Telemetry Data (CTD) after the conclusion of FY23 (September 30, 2023),” using a technical term for such commercially purchased location information.

The agency, however, also told Wyden that it could renew its use of commercial location data if there were “a critical mission need” in the future. It’s unclear if this contract provided commercial location data to CBP, or if it was affected by the agency’s commitment to Wyden. (LexisNexis did not respond to a question about whether it provides or provided the type of phone location data that CBP had sworn off.)

The contract also shows how LexisNexis operates as a reseller for surveillance tools created by other vendors. Its social media surveillance is “powered by” Babel X, a controversial firm that CBP and the FBI have previously used.

According to a May 2023 report by Motherboard, Babel X allows users to input one piece of information about a surveillance target, like a Social Security number, and receive large amounts of collated information back. The returned data can include “social media posts, linked IP address, employment history, and unique advertising identifiers associated with their mobile phone. The monitoring can apply to U.S. persons, including citizens and permanent residents, as well as refugees and asylum seekers.”

While LexisNexis is known to provide similar data services to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, another division of the Department of Homeland Security, details of its surveillance work with CBP were not previously known. Though both agencies enforce immigration law, CBP typically focuses on enforcement along the border, while ICE detains and deports migrants inland.

In recent years, CBP has drawn harsh criticism from civil libertarians and human rights advocates for its activities both at and far from the U.S.-Mexico border. In 2020, CBP was found to have flown a Predator surveillance drone over Minneapolis protests after the murder of George Floyd; two months later, CBP agents in unmarked vehicles seized racial justice protesters off the streets of Portland, Oregon — an act the American Civil Liberties Union condemned as a “blatant demonstration of unconstitutional authoritarianism.”

Just Futures Law is currently suing LexisNexis over claims it illegally obtains and sells personal data.

The post LexisNexis Sold Powerful Spy Tools to U.S. Customs and Border Protection appeared first on The Intercept.

DEKALB COUNTY, Ga. — Dozens of protesters began gathering early Monday morning in a small, unremarkable park in southeast Atlanta. By 9 a.m., over 400 people — a coalition of local Atlantans and visiting activists from around the country — had assembled to attend a day of protests dubbed “Block Cop City.” The event was just the latest mass demonstration in over two years of resistance against the construction of a vast police training facility, known as Cop City, over hundreds of acres of Atlanta’s forest land.

Cops reacted to the day of action by attacking a slow-moving, peaceful march with tear gas and rubber bullets, just the latest reminder of why the compound, designed to further militarized counterinsurgency policing, should never be built.

Organizers were clear from the start: The protest activities — as had been agreed on in hourslong meetings in the prior days — would not involve property damage to construction vehicles at the site of the planned police facility. The tactic had been tried before, when a small amount of vandalism during a March day of action led to indiscriminate arrests and overreaching state domestic terrorism charges against 42 activists.

Monday’s participants planned simply to march, carrying banners and giant handmade puppets, to the Cop City construction area in the Weelaunee Forest, where they would plant nearly 100 saplings on cleared forest land.

Soon after the march turned onto a road with almost no traffic on it, lines of cops in riot gear amassed to block demonstrators’ route to the forest. Dozens of police vehicles swarmed the area, including an armored urban tank dubbed “the Beast.” As the marchers pushed slowly forward, the police moved in with shields and batons, shooting rubber bullets and launching flash-bang grenades and tear-gas canisters at the tightly packed group. Clouds of tear gas rolled over dozens of nearby, clearly identified journalists, myself included.

The protesters stayed in formation; they turned and marched back to their starting point, with a handful of activists hurriedly planting the tree saplings along the roadside.

“Ready to Plant Trees”

Now deep into its second year of organized, multifaceted resistance, the movement to stop Cop City and defend the Atlanta forest has again and again brought to glaring light the old lie: that police can be trusted to respect civil rights.

“Despite numerous stated commitments from religious leaders and city officials to honor the right to protest, armed riot police terrorized the crowd with tear gas grenades, attack dogs, clubs and ballistic shields,” said the Block Cop City organizers in a statement following the march.

The Cop City project was, of course, not blocked on Monday, but the abolitionist, environmentalist movement once again proved its staying power against aggressive police repression. Since its inception, activists opposing the $90 million police training facility have been attacked by police, mass arrested, and, in the intolerable case of Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán, riddled with 57 police bullets and killed.

Protesters face felonies for handing out flyers and fundraising for camping supplies. The government explicitly deemed opposition to Cop City a criminal enterprise when, in September, it announced racketeering charges against 61 activists, most of whom already face state domestic terror charges, for typical social justice activities like information sharing and mutual aid organizing. One such defendant, Indigenous activist Victor Puertas, was handed over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and remains in detention facing deportation in addition to the egregious criminal charges.

“Now planting shovels are weapons. What’s next? Midnight raids for owners of muck boots?”

Meanwhile, an activist effort to get a public vote on Cop City on the recent November ballot had garnered sufficient signatures from the public — over 100,000 of them — but was obstructed by the city government in a blatant assault on democratic processes.

Following Monday’s demonstration, Atlanta Police Chief Darin Schierbaum held a press briefing to defend the cops’ use of tear gas and other weapons. He claimed the protesters were “prepared to do harm” and pointed to a line of gardening tools — dibbles specifically — police had taken from the march site. These were, of course, the tools activists were using to plant saplings.

“People were really ready to plant trees,” said an organizer who helped bring 75 oak seedlings, 25 pines, and elderberry cuttings to the event. (She asked to remain anonymous for fear of police harassment.) “First it was terrorism if you had muddy clothes,” Sam, a Texas-based organizer with the Austin Weelaunee Defense Society who asked for anonymity, told me. Police had used mud on the shoes of activists, in a forest, to justify the March arrests for domestic terrorism. “Now planting shovels are weapons. What’s next? Midnight raids for owners of muck boots?”

“People Are Determined”

Despite the blunt, repressive instruments deployed by police, those fighting to defend the forest have never stopped. Instead, they adapted and shifted tactics. None of the activists I spoke to on Monday, many with skin and eyes still burning from tear gas, felt the march was a failure. They are already planning for their next steps.

A campaign, Uncover Cop City, is underway to put public pressure on insurance companies Nationwide and Accident Fund to end their subsidiaries’ liability contracts with the Atlanta Police Foundation, the corporate-backed nonprofit behind Cop City. Without the insurance contracts, Cop City’s construction is dead in the water. Previous direct targeting of companies involved in the project have led several contractors to drop out.

“People are determined to see this struggle through to the end,” May Johnson, a resident of the neighborhood next to the forest imperiled by Cop City who has been active in the movement since its beginning, told me. “The movement is quick to adapt its strategies and persist despite repression.”

The fight to defend the forest matters on its own terms for those living nearby. The forest’s destruction, air and noise pollution, flooding risks, and the considerable increase in police presence it will bring is a threat to the adjacent majority Black and low-income neighborhood. The cab driver who drove me to the protest staging ground, a Black lifelong Atlanta resident, was unequivocal. “Nobody wants that thing built,” he said. My Airbnb host opposes Cop City; his father grew up in the neighborhood on the forest’s edge.

The widespread opposition is how a small group of activists, in a matter of weeks, collected 100,000-plus signatures from locals who wanted a chance to vote down the project through a ballot measure.

It’s no secret that public funds into training police in urban warfare will not serve public safety. Cop City is an invitation for corporations and investors to see Atlanta as an attractive hub, a city with its own mini city for training defenders of private property. Greater funding and more training for police has not led to fewer police killings and less racist police violence. As Atlanta community organizer Kamau Franklin noted in a rousing speech prior to Monday’s march, “In 2022, police killed more people than ever.”

“We Know Why We’re Here”

Organizers insist on seeing beyond the local: Protests like Monday’s are intended to invite out-of-state participants. The old and racist canard of “outside agitators,” peddled by Atlanta law enforcement and other officials since Stop Cop City began, falls flat against a locally led effort that wins national and international support. 

“While there are hundreds of locals here, there are many who have come in solidarity,” Block Cop City organizer Sam Beard, an environmental activist from Chicago, told the assembled protesters on Monday. “We have descended into Atlanta because a call was made. And front-line activists in this struggle said, ‘We need your help.’ And we said, ‘We’ve got you.’”

The crowd roared with applause.

In an era of mass movements crushed swiftly and violently, the persistence of the fight for the Atlanta forest — even if relatively small in size — demands attention from those of us interested in forms of resilient resistance. It is consistent proof that anti-racist, environmental, Indigenous, and class-based battles can and must intersect.

Chants of “free, free Palestine” reverberating throughout the march made clear that Stop Cop City participants see their struggle over the forest acreage outside Atlanta as one among many fights to see land and territory liberated, rather than violently bordered and occupied.

“We’ve made the connections between the police, militarized complex, and international policing,” Franklin told the gathered crowd. “The murderous tactics of the Israeli police and military against the Palestinians. We’ve made those connections.”

Tortuguita’s father, Joel Paez, addressed the crowd, too, along with Belkis Terán, the late forest defender’s mother. “We know why we’re here.” Paez, who has regularly spoken out with fervor against Cop City since Tortuguita’s killing, told the protesters. “Do what you have to do.”

Within an hour of his speech, and within a mile of where his child was gunned down by police, cops beat slow-marching protesters and tear-gassed journalists.

The post Cop City Protesters Tried to Plant Trees. Atlanta Police Beat Them for It. appeared first on The Intercept.

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The Anti-Defamation League has classified the event — and dozens of other protests led by Jewish groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow — as “anti-Israel,” according to an analysis by The Intercept, and added them to their database documenting rising antisemitism across the U.S.

“We’re seeing a genuine rise in antisemitic attacks and white nationalist, white supremacist, antisemitic hate and violence,” Eva Borgwardt, the national spokesperson for IfNotNow, told me. “When white nationalism is on the rise, to cheapen the accusation of antisemitism by applying it to Palestinian rights advocates, including Jews, is incredibly irresponsible and dangerous.”

Since Hamas’s brutal October 7 attack on southern Israel where Palestinian militants killed over 1,200 Israelis — most of them civilians — and took over 200 hostages, the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish advocacy group that tracks antisemitism and extremism, has been keeping track of the alarming rise of antisemitic incidents.

In 2020, over 100 progressive organizations — including the Movement for Black Lives, Democratic Socialists of America, and Center for Constitutional Rights — signed an open letter asking the progressive community to not partner with ADL because the group “has a history and ongoing pattern of attacking social justice movements led by communities of color, queer people, immigrants, Muslims, Arabs, and other marginalized groups, while aligning itself with police, right-wing leaders, and perpetrators of state violence.” Now, ADL is targeting a new group of people: progressive Jews.

Israel’s indiscriminate massacre of civilians in Gaza — killing over 10,000 Palestinians so far in the densely populated Gaza Strip, including over 4,000 children — has led to the largest anti-war protests in the U.S. since the Iraq War, including a surge of renewed activism from progressive Jewish groups. Israel has bombed Gaza nonstop since the October 7 attack, ordered the relocation of over 1 million civilians, launched a ground invasion, and is blocking food, water, medical supplies, and fuel from making it into Gaza, triggering a humanitarian crisis and leading to what legal scholars call a genocide against Palestinians.

While the ADL told The Intercept that it does not consider the ceasefire protests “antisemitic,” just “anti-Israel,” its CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, has said otherwise. After several thousand Jews and their allies marched on the U.S. Capitol on October 18 calling for a ceasefire, ADL DC released a statement equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Greenblatt piled on, calling the groups that organized the protest, including Jewish Voice for Peace, “hate groups.”

Roughly 500 Jews, including 25 rabbis, were arrested at the Capitol protest.

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“It is important to note that these are radical fringe Jewish organizations and being Jewish does not exempt an organization or a person from being antisemitic,” an ADL spokesperson told The Intercept.

A 2021 poll of Jewish voters, conducted by the nonpartisan Jewish Electorate Institute, shows that pro-Palestinian views in the American Jewish community are far from fringe. At the time, 25 percent of the Jews surveyed believed Israel was an apartheid state, 34 percent believed that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians was similar to racism in the U.S., and 22 percent thought that Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians. These numbers are even starker for younger American Jews. This poll doesn’t reflect changes in how American Jews feel after Hamas’s brutal October 7 attack against Israel, or Israel’s subsequent massacre of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

Another poll, conducted by Data for Progress after the Israel–Gaza war broke out, shows that two-thirds of American voters as a whole support a ceasefire in Gaza, including 80 percent of Democrats, 56 percent of Republicans, and 57 percent of independents — despite President Joe Biden and most members of Congress, in both parties, opposing it.

Like much of the American Jewish community, progressive Jews who are protesting the genocide in Gaza are also grieving loved ones who were murdered by Hamas on October 7. “In the days after the [Hamas] attack, people on [IfNotNow’s] staff were finding out that they had relatives and friends, and those people’s kids, who were murdered on October 7,” Borgwardt said. “This was extremely close to home and painful.”

ADL’s “Stand With Israel” Map

On October 24, ADL published a press release noting a “nearly 400 percent increase in preliminary antisemitic incidents” across the U.S. since October 7, compared to the same period last year. The source for that statistic was ADL’s own dataset, published as an interactive map, of “Antisemitic Incidents and Anti-Israel Rallies in the U.S. Since Hamas’s Attack on Israel.”

While ADL doesn’t distribute its raw data in a usable format, when you load the map in a web browser, behind the scenes your browser downloads a copy of it. By monitoring what my browser downloaded while loading the map, I was able to extract a copy of the data and save it as a spreadsheet. The raw data is full of duplicates. After de-duplicating it, I ended up with a spreadsheet with 1,163 “antisemitic incidents and anti-Israel rallies.” ADL continuously updates the map, and the data I’m working with was last updated on November 9.

The data plotted in the map is split into the categories of “Assault,” “Harassment,” “Vandalism,” “Anti-Israel Rallies,” and “Anti-Israel Rallies w. Support for Terror.”

The assault, harassment, and vandalism categories, which made up 46 percent of the points on the map, are full of alarming evidence of the dramatic rise in antisemitism and white supremacy that the U.S. has been seeing, particularly since Donald Trump’s 2016 election. For example, according to ADL’s data:

• On October 8 in Salt Lake City, Utah, someone called in a bomb threat to a synagogue.
• On October 13 in Beverly Hills, California, someone yelled “kike” at a visibly Jewish family taking on walk on Shabbat.
• On October 18 in Manhattan, New York, someone found the words “Kill the Jews” written on the wall of a subway station.
• On October 23 in Washington, D.C., someone drew a swastika at an elementary school.
• On October 25 in White Plains, New York, a “car featuring a swastika and a Palestinian flag drove near a vigil for abducted Israelis.”
• On October 28 in Knoxville, Tennessee, members of the antisemitic hate group Goyim Defense League distributed flyers saying “Every single aspect of the LGBTQ+ movement is Jewish.”
• On November 3 in Seattle, Washington, a synagogue “received a suspicious letter containing white powder.”

The remaining 54 percent of the points on the map are Palestine solidarity protests which ADL dubs “anti-Israel rallies” (39 percent) and “anti-Israel rallies with support for terror” (15 percent). At these rallies, protesters have been calling for a ceasefire, the end of unconditional U.S. military aid to Israel, and the end of the genocide in Gaza.

“If an event is marked only as an ‘anti-Israel rally,’ then we do not consider it antisemitic,” the ADL spokesperson said.

By scouring the social media accounts of national and regional Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow groups, I was able to match rallies led by Jewish groups with the dates and locations of dozens of the rallies listed on ADL’s map — making up around 10 percent of all the rallies listed. ADL declined to provide a full dataset, so it’s possible that for some of the “anti-Israel rallies” organized by Jews I found, the corresponding ADL datapoints are actually referring to different events that happened in the same cities on the same days.

ADL confirmed to The Intercept that several massive Jewish protests, including the march on the U.S. Capitol on October 18 and the sit-in at Grand Central Station on October 27, are included in its map.

Here are a few of the ceasefire and anti-genocide protests that American Jews have organized since Israel started its indiscriminate bombing of Gaza, also confirmed by ADL:

On October 13, a group of 15 Jews occupied the office of Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., in Seattle demanding that she support a ceasefire, and that the U.S. stop arming Israel while the country has “openly declared their intention to commit war crimes.” Six were arrested.

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On October 16, over 1,000 Jews and their allies blockaded entrances to the White House, demanding that Biden support a ceasefire. In a tweet, IfNotNow stated, “We are also here raising our voices for our Israeli siblings — while burying their loved ones and awaiting news of those kidnapped — are screaming at their government for the bombs to stop.” At least 30 were arrested.

On October 23, hundreds of Jews protested outside the office of Rep. Troy Carter, D-La., in New Orleans demanding that he support a ceasefire, and a group of Jews occupied his office.

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ADL’s dataset does not include dozens of similar Jewish-organized ceasefire protests I found on social media. For example, on October 13, thousands of Jews shut down the street outside the Brooklyn home of Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., demanding that he support a ceasefire in Gaza. Dozens of Jews were arrested, including rabbis and the descendants of Holocaust survivors. And on October 19, Jews protested outside the Los Angeles home of Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff, who is also Jewish, demanding that she support a ceasefire. Neither of these protests, along with dozens of others like them, appear on ADL’s map.

“Support for Terror”

The Intercept also found some rallies organized by American Jews that ADL appeared to classify as “supporting terror.”

“Regarding our criteria for ‘w. support for terror:’ we include in this category when rally-goers use language or imagery that justifies or celebrates the Hamas massacre on October 7; there is rhetoric supportive of armed confrontation with Israel; or the flag of a U.S.-designated terror organization is identified,” an ADL spokesperson told The Intercept.

When asked specifically if ADL considers the phrase “from the river to the sea” in support of terrorism, the spokesperson said that it did. “In the immediate aftermath of the October 7 massacre of Israelis at the hands of Hamas, we interpreted calls for further Palestinian resistance and efforts to liberate the land, including the phrase ‘from the river to the sea,’ as implicit calls for violence against Israelis and support for Hamas’ actions,” the spokesperson said, “and therefore included rallies where those phrases were used in the category of ‘support for terror.’”

The phrase “from the river to the sea” has long been used in the pro-Palestinian movement to mean that Palestinians should be allowed to live in their homeland as free and equal citizens alongside Israelis. At the same time, Hamas, whose leaders aim to destroy Israel and make Palestine an Islamic nation, has adopted the phrase as slogan, and many Israelis and Jews know it only with the connotation of forced removal of Jews from Israel.

It is also worth noting that, since the October 7 attack, neo-Nazis have been attempting to insert themselves into Palestine solidarity protests — not because they care about Palestinians but because they hate Jews — as reported by Vice. For example, on October 28, roughly 40 members of the neo-Nazi group National Justice Party attempted to hijack a protest in front of the White House where they made antisemitic statements over a PA system; the hundreds of other protesters calling for a ceasefire had nothing to do with them. Likewise, neo-Nazi groups including NSC-131, National Socialist Florida, and White Lives Matter have all used pro-Palestinian language in their recent propaganda attacking Jews.

A Surge in Jewish Activism for Ceasefire and Against Genocide

In a recent episode of “On the Nose,” a podcast hosted by the magazine Jewish Currents, Elena Stein, director of organizing strategy for Jewish Voice for Peace, said that after the Hamas attack it was “immediately clear” that “the lives of Palestinians and Israelis are completely intertwined.” She said that Israeli apartheid and settler colonialism “enact daily horrifying violence against Palestinians” and “doesn’t make Israelis safer either.”

Stein argued that American Jews have an important role in stopping the violence and genocide in Israel and Palestine, and that this is important to protect the lives of both Palestinians and Israelis. “It’s on us — especially those of us here in the U.S. whose government is funding this, is fueling this, is protecting the Israeli apartheid government from accountability at all levels — to stop the complicity that puts Palestinians’ lives in danger every day and also puts Israelis’ lives in direct danger,” she said.

Jewish anti-war activism calling for a ceasefire and against the genocide in Gaza shows no sign of slowing down. On Monday, hundreds of Jews and their allies took over the Statue of Liberty calling for a ceasefire, with a banner saying “Never Again for Anyone.”

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Update: November 13, 2023
On Friday, Israel indicated the death toll of Hamas’s October 7 attack was closer to 1,200, not 1,400 as initially reported. The story has been updated.

The post Anti-Defamation League Maps Jewish Peace Rallies With Antisemitic Attacks appeared first on The Intercept.

Since the Supreme Court demolished the right to abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization last June, the GOP has been trying to douse the fury of reproductive justice defenders and dam the torrent of their victories at the polls.

They’ve been failing.

At first, they banked their hopes on changing the subject, from the pesky question of women’s existential equality to the rising prices of gas and groceries. That hopey-changey stuff did not work out for them in the 2022 midterms. After that, Republicans turned to election interference, trying to subvert reproductive freedom initiatives by making it harder to amend state constitutions. In both Ohio and Arkansas, that tactic lost big.

Where they couldn’t stand in the way of steamrolling support for a pro-abortion measure, they returned to a time-honored tactic: lying — replacing the texts of proposed constitutional amendments on the ballots with their own, baldly inaccurate summaries. The ruse didn’t stop Ohio voters from enshrining abortion rights in their constitution by healthy margins this week. Missouri’s attorney general is trying the same trick in anticipation of a 2024 initiative. But advocates are fighting back, and he looks weak.

So, after 18 months of watching its take-no-prisoners politics repudiated at the polls, the anti-abortion movement has adopted a new look: “moderation.” The centerpiece of this strategy is a “limit” on terminations after 15 weeks’ gestation, which proponents describe as “reasonable” and “commonsense.”

The first test of anti-abortion neo-moderation was in Virginia this week. Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin campaigned hard for his party members, leading his pitch with a “15-week bill.” His star candidate — and perhaps the most persuasive propagandist of this approach, after presidential contender Nikki Haley — was three-term state Sen. Siobhan Dunnavant. “Abortion should remain legal up to 15 weeks. After 15 weeks there should be reasonable exceptions, for rape, incest, life of the mother, and severe fetal anomalies,” said the OB-GYN and mom in a campaign ad. Claiming (falsely) that her state “allows for abortion up to the moment of birth,” she called current policy “unnecessary, extreme, and heartbreaking.” The Washington Post characterized Dunnavant’s approach as “a nuanced stance on a polarizing topic.” But, it turned out, not a convincing one.

Youngkin’s goal was to flip the Democrat-controlled Senate and, with an all-red statehouse, pass a conservative agenda that would set him up as Donald Trump’s 2028 heir apparent. Instead, the lower house flipped blue, and the Dems held the Senate — thanks, in part, to Dunnavant’s loss. In a term-limited seat, Youngkin is a lame duck. And neo-moderation took a hit.

Despite the setback in Virginia, the GOP is unlikely to ditch this strategy. National-level candidates are adopting it, following the lead of the influential Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, whose president, Marjorie Dannenfelser, has vowed that SBA will “oppose any presidential candidate who refuses to embrace at a minimum a 15-week national standard to stop painful late-term abortions while allowing states to enact further protections.”

In the second Republican presidential primary debate, in September, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis endorsed the 15-week federal limit. In the third, on November 8, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott did too. Haley has said she’d sign one but has also hedged, citing the unlikelihood of such a bill getting through Congress. In the debate she espoused, as usual, “consensus.” The next day, one New York Times commentator called her “sensible and realistic on abortion.” Another thought Haley’s stance would “connect with both primary and swing voters.”

Of course, not everyone in the movement is on board. Abortion abolitionists such as Students for Life of America and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul will accept nothing less than constitutional rights for every fertilized egg. National Right to Life Committee President Carol Tobias has called the 15-week limit a “mistake,” because it would permit most abortions, which occur before that time. 

Given the sensitivities of the anti-abortion base, it’s not surprising that many candidates are remaining as vague as possible. On ABC News, for instance, Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., spoke of a “middle ground,” which she defined as “some sort of gestational limits, not at nine months but somewhere in the middle.”

Against this thrust from the right, the left has not yet parried strategically. So far two responses have dominated. One is simply to assert that 15 weeks is not a limit or a standard. “Now they’re pushing for a 15-week ‘standard’ on abortion — which, to be clear, would be a ban,” wrote Jessica Valenti in the New York Times. “A ban is a ban,” said Schuyler VanValkenburg, Dunnavant’s Democratic opponent in Virginia, “and she’s proposing a ban.”

The other is to call the 15-week proposals undemocratic, because Americans show high levels of support for abortion in all or most cases. In an editorial condemning a North Carolina law shortening the period of legal abortion from 20 weeks’ gestation to 12, the Charlotte Observer referred to polls finding majority support in the state for the rights the old law protected. The ban’s partisans call it “mainstream,” said the Observer, but it “is anything but.”

These arguments have some strengths. Indeed, a 15-week limit does ban abortions after 15 weeks, which are now legal, for instance, in Virginia. A federal 15-week limit would slash abortion rights in the 24 states that have either left legal abortion in place or succeeded in protecting or expanding those rights. In another interview, VanValkenburg clarified: “If something’s legal and then it becomes illegal, it’s a ban.”

Majorities do support abortion in all or most cases, and that support has reached record highs since Dobbs, including in red states. But here’s the rub: The “most cases” that two-thirds of Americans support fall in the first trimester — before 12 weeks. Might this squishy pro-choice bloc look at a federal 15-week limit as a step in the right direction — a law protecting some abortion rights, when we’ve never had a federal law explicitly protecting any? 

Denying America’s nuanced — and yes, moderate — views on abortion does not magically make them more pro-abortion. Calling a law that doesn’t ban all abortions a ban is not effective argument. Facing a suddenly warm and fuzzy-looking opponent, how should defenders of reproductive justice proceed?

Seize the enemy’s most reliable weapon: fear.

What’s moved voters is not the exhortations of our side but the viciousness of theirs.

The purpose of moderation is to calm. If total bans, election interference, and transparent lies are fire, the 15-week limit is aloe. If you can’t win the other side over, you can soothe the middle into inaction. With electoral margins so slim, you don’t need many middle-of-the-roaders to roll over and go back to sleep on Election Day.

But if moderation calms, fear mobilizes. In fact, what’s moved voters thus far is not the exhortations of our side but the viciousness of theirs. Republicans have always been better at deploying fear than Democrats. The joke on them is that Americans have been pushed, trembling in fear, to the left.

Our job is to wake up the sleepy middle by scaring the bejesus out of them.

The first task is to disarm the disarming: expose the currently moderate as only temporarily moderate.

Dunnavant has lovely bedside manner. But her record belies the sweetness. NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia gave her 0 percent ratings in her first two terms, 25 percent in the third, and 17 percent in 2022. If she’d won, there’s no knowing what she’d have supported.

Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America is leading the charge on 15 weeks. But it is patently speaking to this moment. Its website declares that it “exists to end abortion” and that “every human life begins at conception.” Where does a 15-week limit fit in that vision? The organization’s dishonesty and expediency will attract and encourage more dishonesty and expediency. Case in point: Ron DeSantis. A month before he signed onto SBA’s pledge, he averred that abortion policy should be left to the states. To cover his bases, he signed two different bans in Florida: in April, six weeks; in September, 15.

Another peril to publicize is the one blowing from Washington. If the neo-moderates pull in enough middle-of-the-road voters in national elections, the gusts will build to a Category 5 hurricane. Not least of the coming destruction: A Republican Senate and White House will finish filling the federal bench with extreme right-wing judges, who hold lifetime appointments.

Anti-abortion activists, including many of these judges, never intended to stop at states’ rights to decide on abortion. Federalism was only a way station in the quest for the true grail, a nationwide ban superseding all state legal frameworks. Hence, the challenge in Texas federal courts to the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion drug mifepristone. Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs was the first brick in an edifice of precedent that could uphold the federal criminalization of abortion. If the court hears the FDA case, a ruling in the challengers’ favor might be the next.

Remember that the subject of Dobbs was Mississippi’s 15-week ban. But Mississippi was not defending a 15-week ban. Two weeks after the ruling freed it to do so, the state criminalized all abortion.

These arguments are mostly rational. They’re meant to invoke fear by unmasking the truth, exposing the pussycat’s claws. The left trusts reason more than emotion; the abortion rights movement has used facts to counter the other side’s lies, even as facts lose their persuasive potency. Truth is still good political discourse. But politics are 90 percent emotional.

The right’s advantage in stirring political emotion is the willingness to lie. When there’s not enough to fear (or the wrong things are fearsome, like the climate crisis), the right invents monsters: the Mexican rapist, the woke gender ideologue or critical race theorist, the abortion profiteer. The beauty of an imaginary opponent is that it can morph and multiply to fulfill any brief. 

Many on the left consider the political use of fear to be intrinsically dishonest and generative only of division and violence. They see instrumentalizing fear as fearmongering, the antithesis of progressive values, including the value of truth. But right now, both truth and fear are on our side. In case you haven’t noticed, reality is terrifying.

The most terrible of realities — the one that has driven millions to the polls to vote to protect reproductive rights — is the permanent loss of bodily freedom. And that is the post-Roe endgame: the enshrinement of fetal personhood, which is the denial of the personhood of already born pregnant people.

If bodily autonomy is a fundamental right, it is nonnegotiable.

Roe had its flaws, starting with the wobbly foundation on privacy rather than freedom. But the ruling changed the status of the pregnant and potentially pregnant in more than one monumental way. “While we conventionally think of Roe as the decision that defined the constitutional right to not be pregnant, it also delineated — and was in fact the first articulation of — rights a woman has while pregnant,” wrote Lynn Paltrow, Lisa Harris, and Mary Faith Marshall in the American Journal of Bioethics. That lasted 50 years.

In a short 18 months, their predictions about looming abortion bans have come hideously true: “Anyone who becomes pregnant … will become newly vulnerable to legal surveillance, civil detentions, forced interventions, and criminal prosecution.” As they warned, the red states have created “a new class of persons for whom fundamental constitutional rights don’t apply.”

Dobbs turned 25 million women of reproductive age into second-class citizens. But coast-to-coast criminalization will make of every uterus-bearing person what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben called a “margizen,” a nominally legal citizen of a nation-state, who lives both inside society and outside it. The margizen — the prisoner, the homeless person, the migrant — exists in a “state of exception,” their rights suspended until such time as full social and legal citizenship can be attained. It may never be attained.

Those who have been denied abortions, particularly when they or their fetuses are sick or dying, already have felt themselves slip from the inside to the outside. Those who live within the historical legacies of unfreedom and exclusion have felt it before, and the Dobbs decision reanimates that feeling. If you have not been there yet, imagining yourself or your daughter or partner in that place should be enough to displace comfort with legitimate anxiety. Enough to wake the complacent.

Fifteen weeks is not a step in the right direction. It is a step rightward, and downward. But even to be drawn into haggling over six weeks or 15, 26, or 40 sets us plunging. If bodily autonomy is a fundamental right, it is nonnegotiable. No compromise can be reached. From 15 weeks the distance down is immeasurable, and of that we should all be very afraid.

The post To Defeat Anti-Abortion “Moderation,” Mobilize Fear appeared first on The Intercept.

The activists of Siskiyou Rising Tide are not new to being watched. Founded in 2016 under the name Southern Oregon Rising Tide, the direct action climate justice group was a key player in the yearslong battle to stop the Jordan Cove Energy Project, a 229-mile natural gas pipeline that threatened to be the largest single emitter of greenhouse gasses in Oregon.

Alongside a coalition of environmental and Indigenous groups, Siskiyou Rising Tide faced major police counterinsurgency efforts, including aggressive monitoring funded by Pembina Pipeline Corporation, the Canadian fossil fuel company behind the project. But a dense web of interagency and corporate surveillance was unable to curtail the Jordan Cove opposition: In a rare victory for the climate movement, Pembina canceled the project in 2021.

A new trove of internal police emails, however, reveals that the intrusive and overreaching surveillance practices that developed around the pipeline project have remained firmly in place, even years after Pembina pulled out of the area.

Obtained through public records requests by Information for Public Use and Siskiyou Rising Tide and shared exclusively with The Intercept ahead of their publication, the emails show a policing apparatus that treats even the most placid social justice activities — like vigils and Juneteenth celebrations — as sites of criminal threat.

“As the Jordan Cove pipeline was defeated around 2020, Siskiyou Rising Tide pivoted to focusing on housing and racial justice issues, and these records requests were part of an attempt to understand what the surveillance landscape looked like post-Jordan Cove,” the Information for Public Use said in a statement shared with The Intercept.

The emails show that, from 2016 to 2023, the Medford Police Department coordinated heavy-handed police responses to peaceful rallies and protests, tracked activist groups’ social media pages, and consistently treated typical, First Amendment-protected activity as a potential crime worthy of law enforcement scrutiny.

Sam Becker, a member of Information for Public Use, wrote in a Signal message that the Medford Police Department’s overreach included surveilling a Black teenager’s vigil, pushing back against the Oregon Health Authority’s choice to fund a harm reduction nonprofit, and monitoring a reproductive justice organization after receiving a tip from a member of an evangelical anti-abortion group. 

Information for Public Use and Siskiyou Rising Tide believe that the surveillance activities revealed in the email trove constitute a violation of both First Amendment protections and an Oregon-specific law, ORS 181A.250, which prohibits law enforcement agencies from collecting and maintaining “information about the political, religious or social views, associations or activities” of individuals, groups, or business, unless the police have “reasonable grounds to suspect the subject of the information is or may be involved in criminal conduct.”

“Monitoring social media accounts available to the general public does not violate any part of the constitution or any Oregon statute,” wrote Medford City Attorney, Eric B. Mitton, in a statement to The Intercept. “Law enforcement agencies, including the Medford Police Department, actively look at the public social media profiles of organizations and individuals when there is reported or self-evident concern of a public safety interest.”

While some activists involved in Jordan Cove protests had been arrested in the past, the police department emails do not contain evidence of ongoing criminal conduct. Rhetoric about “usual suspects” is scattered throughout the emails, but the activities which they are suspected of carrying out are peaceful protests, mutual aid projects, and protected political speech. The surveilled events are often described as involving a few dozen activists, gathering to express support for social, racial, and reproductive justice, before returning home without incident.

Oregon has long been a hub for far-right, white supremacist organizing, and Medford is located in a firmly conservative county. As is all too common, and indeed unsurprising, antifascist and left-wing organizers take up an outsized amount of law enforcement focus. The obtained emails evidence both the police’s disconcerting commitment to monitoring the left and an embarrassing squandering of city, state, and federal resources toward activities like picking through social media posts about social justice issues.

In one email exchange from June 2020, Medford Police Department patrol lieutenant Darrel J. Graham asked then-Medford Police Department crime analyst Divya Fisher to identify and investigate Siskiyou Rising Tide’s members after the group condemned local law enforcement officers’ treatment of unhoused people during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In response, Fisher and other officers combed through social media posts until landing on a Facebook post of one man, Leonard Higgins, who cited the Rising Tide and encouraged people to email the Medford City Council to urge an end to police harassment of unhoused people. The police then ran a background check on the 68-year-old longtime environmental activist.

In the entire email thread, “there is no focus on addressing the complaints against the police, i.e. remedying the wrong being done to unhoused people,” noted the Information for Public Use’s statement. A member of Siskiyou Rising Tide told The Intercept that at the time of that email exchange, the online information was out of date and Higgins was no longer involved with the group.

The monitoring of protests and events for racial justice — predominantly after the summer of 2020, when nationwide Black liberation uprisings followed George Floyd’s murder — were particularly egregious in their overreach. The emails show numerous officers across departments dedicating hours of time and research to scrutinize people who attended a vigil organized for Aidan Ellison, a Black teen from nearby Ashland who was shot dead by a middle-aged white man.

Dozens of emails back and forth in late 2020 focus on the vigil and its organizers. One email thread contains an information sheet from the Medford Police Department’s “Tactical Information Unit,” offering a summary of research on the vigil plan. Other emails note that a camera installed by the city the previous summer could be used to watch the vigil, as well as the Facebook feeds of local activists known to the police.

As the vigil for the slain teen began, the cops quipped about the host of the Facebook livestream. “I figured he’d be there,” Jenette Bertocchi of the Ashland Police Department wrote to Medford’s Fisher while tuning in the organizer’s social media feed.

Fisher replied that “it wouldn’t be a party” without the activist in question. (Ashland Police did not respond to a request for comment. Fisher did not respond to The Intercept’s attempts to reach her.)

In another multi-agency email thread from 2022, officers discuss the then-upcoming trial of Floyd’s murderer, former cop Derek Chauvin. “As you know, I believe these officers will be acquitted of the murder charges,” wrote Medford Police Sgt. Jason Antley. (In 2012, Antley was cleared of wrongdoing by a grand jury for shooting and killing a man wielding a knife.)

“This is likely to spark another large scale set of protests,” Antley added and asked his colleague to “dig around on social media to see if anyone is talking about this.” No disruptive protests took place in the area.

Following the fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022, the police focus turned toward reproductive rights protests. One group, the Rogue Valley Pepper Shakers, a queer-led organization founded in 2020 by young people in the area, was actively monitored for its reproductive justice activism; the group distributes contraception and reproductive health information, shares information about anti-abortion extremists, supports local queer spaces, and promotes harm reduction. According to an email from Medford Police Department’s Antley, the police were alerted to one planned abortion rights protest by Brett White, a member of the Rogue Valley Saltshakers, a far-right anti-abortion group that galvanized the creation of the Pepper Shakers.

“Seeing these emails has proven to us that the police see us as an active threat to our communities, even in the absence of evidence.”

“Seeing these emails has proven to us that the police see us as an active threat to our communities, even in the absence of evidence,” Sam Strong, a member of the Rogue Valley Pepper Shakers, told The Intercept. “The observation and keeping tabs is no shock to us however it’s extremely concerning.”

In some of the most recent email exchanges obtained, police and city officials expand on their surveillance efforts with an attempt to intervene in a radical health care group’s funding. In March, Stabbin’ Wagon, a harm reduction group that distributes free clean syringes and opioid reversal medications like Narcan, was awarded $1.5 million from the Oregon Health Authority to build a peer-respite center: a community-based alternative to the hospitalization model of recovery and mental health treatment.

In one email, the Medford City Manager Brian Sjothun asks a city lobbyist who they “need to contact at the State regarding this grant,” calling it a “disaster waiting to happen.” In another email, Medford Chief of Police Justin Ivens contacted the Oregon Health Authority directly, expressing “concerns” — seemingly an effort to pressure a state agency out of awarding funds to a legitimate, deserving nonprofit. In a 2021 email between the police department’s former crime analyst, Fisher, and other officers, Stabbin’ Wagon’s founder Melissa Jones was named as one of the cops’ “known protest players.”

The specific emails discussing Stabbin’ Wagon’s funds were already reported by Oregon-based independent news service, The Lund Report, in September. Now, they can now be understood in the context of years of police communications committed to suppressing and criminalizing all aspects of liberatory organizing in the local area — including efforts like Stabbin’ Wagon to provide services to simply keep people alive during an ongoing, deadly opioid crisis. Despite police and city meddling, Jones is reportedly on track to receive the Oregon Health Authority grant.

“City staff expressing opinions about a State grant award or asking State officials questions about that State grant award is not uncommon,” wrote Mitton, the city attorney. “It is routine and appropriate for inquiries to be made to public entities like the State of Oregon about how that public entity is allocating its resources.”

Stabbin’ Wagon is not alone in continuing its work despite the knowledge of consistent police surveillance and targeting; the heavily surveilled activists in Medford and beyond expect little else from law enforcement. Strong of the Rogue Valley Pepper Shakers told The Intercept, “I hope the police enjoy watching us serve our community with dignity and autonomy and even learn something from it, but then again — if they had any dignity, they wouldn’t be cops.”

The post Oregon Police Obsessively Spied on Activists for Years, Even After Pipeline Fight Ended appeared first on The Intercept.

Animal rights activist and lawyer Wayne Hsiung was found guilty of felony conspiracy and two misdemeanor charges on Thursday for rescuing ailing animals from factory farms in Sonoma County, California.

Hsiung and fellow activists with the animal liberation group he founded, Direct Action Everywhere, or DxE, have for years engaged in the public removal of sick and injured animals from farming facilities — a tactic known as “open rescue,” since they are publicized. The rescues regularly lead to criminal charges, which for the most part have been dropped or led to acquittals in court. Hsiung’s conviction marks the first time a DxE open rescue case has ended with an activist’s incarceration: He faces up to three years in prison.

“I could be going to jail for organizing others and trying to take sick and injured animals to the vet,” Hsiung said in a video posted on social media the day before his conviction. “That’s all I did.”

Following the guilty verdict, Hsiung was indeed put in jail, where he awaits his November 30 sentencing hearing.

After several trials of dropped charges and not-guilty verdicts for DxE open rescues, Hsiung’s felony charges suggest a shift in tactics by the authorities — and a troubling prosecutorial overreach. Past cases against DxE activists had often involved theft or burglary charges based on allegedly stolen animal property. Hsiung was convicted of felony conspiracy to commit misdemeanor trespass; the punishment for planning to trespass in this case is far heftier than for the trespassing itself.

Cassie King, an organizer with DxE, told The Intercept that, a week before Hsiung’s trial began, the government dropped theft and burglary charges, while pushing forward with felony conspiracy and trespassing.

“The prosecutor was very strategic. I’m sure he’d followed what happened in other cases that led to acquittal.”

“The prosecutor was very strategic,” said King, who has faced charges for open rescues. “I’m sure he’d followed what happened in other cases that led to acquittal.”

Hsiung’s charges stem from DxE mass actions in Sonoma County at two poultry farms: one at Sunrise Farms in 2018, one at Reichardt Duck Farm in 2019. Prior investigations by DxE and other animal welfare organizations had found rampant violations of animal cruelty law at the facilities, prompting the open-rescue plan. At both locations, over 500 activists demonstrated outside, while a smaller number entered the properties to identify and remove dozens of sick and injured animals, which were then brought to a vet.

Hsiung was convicted on misdemeanor trespass for both events; his felony conspiracy conviction relates only to the Sunrise Farms action, for which he was a lead organizer. The jury could not decide on a similar felony conspiracy charge for Reichardt Duck Farm rescue, leading to a mistrial on that charge.

While hundreds of demonstrators were initially arrested, many faced misdemeanor charges and chose to enter diversion programs to see the charges removed; six people were charged with felonies, four of whom took plea deals, while one person’s charges were dropped. Hsiung was the only remaining defendant.

Prosecutorial Overreach

The practice of open rescue is an end in itself — saving individual, suffering animals — but the broader aim is to bring attention to the brutalities of factory farming, especially farms that brand themselves as cruelty free. Sunrise Farms, for example, is a major egg supplier to Whole Foods.

Hsiung and others welcomed the opportunity to bring their cases to trial, with the aim of shifting legal precedent around animal cruelty and the rights of nonhuman animals in the legal system.

In a number of recent cases, DxE activists have been successful: Juries in St. George, Utah, and Merced, California, found open-rescue participants not guilty. Hsiung was a defendant in the Utah case and, in his capacity as an attorney, led the legal defense in the Merced case. Other activists had charges dropped in various jurisdictions.

In 2021, Hsiung was convicted of larceny and breaking and entering for his rescue of an ill baby goat from a North Carolina farm but was given a six-to-17 month suspended sentence, a year’s probation, and no prison time. His conviction and expected prison sentence this time marks a potentially troubling shift in prosecutorial approaches to these cases.

In both the Utah and California acquittals, the activists faced theft or burglary charges — for taking animals that the farming corporations considered property. Since the rescued animals were sick or injured, however, the defendants were able to show that the animals had no value, as understood by agribusiness; their removal could not be shown to be a loss of value to the company. Prosecutors in the Sonoma County trial avoided the question of theft and property all together, relying instead on trespassing charges, which were then trumped up with a vague felony conspiracy statute.

Hsiung’s defense was in many ways stymied from the jump. The judge barred almost all photo and video evidence of animal cruelty from the trial, as has been the case in a number of previous DxE trials. As I’ve previously noted, the decision to disallow such evidence is usually made to benefit a defendant — not showing gruesome images of a murder victim, for example. Such logic has been flipped in DxE cases, including Hsiung’s most recent, to the benefit of powerful agribusiness.

Meanwhile, the judge also barred Hsiung from making a so-called necessity defense, based on the right to aid animals who were being subjected to criminal animal cruelty. DxE has long hoped to bring a necessity defense in court. The activists argue that the legal justification that allows a person to break into a car to save a suffocating dog should apply in open rescue cases; the logic is the same, and the only difference lies in the power of the agriculture industry.

“Judge Laura Passaglia prohibited the defense from showing the jury photo and video evidence of animal cruelty.”

Judge Laura Passaglia denied Hsiung’s use of a necessity defense but did permit him to make a “mistake of law” defense: the argument that the defendant had a good faith belief that their actions were legal. Under California’s animal cruelty statute, a person is permitted to trespass onto private property to aid ailing animals. Hsiung claimed that he believed DxE’s actions to be legal, as extensive research had provided evidence that animal suffering and illness was rife at both farm facilities. Since almost all video and photo evidence of animal cruelty was banned from the trial, however, the defense was kneecapped.

“Throughout the trial, Hsiung encountered numerous judicial obstacles, including a gag order barring him from speaking with the media about the case,” said a statement from DxE, adding that the judge did not respond to the American Civil Liberties Union’s argument that the order violated Hsiung’s First Amendment rights. “Although prosecution witnesses repeatedly testified that the treatment of the animals at their facilities is humane, Judge Passaglia prohibited the defense from showing the jury photo and video evidence of animal cruelty that disproved these testimonies, except on a few limited occasions for direct impeachment.”

Hsiung plans to appeal, citing what he believes were prejudicial rulings and significant error on the part of the judge. The animal liberation movement is hopeful too that an appeal provides another opportunity to raise a necessity defense and fundamentally change case law around animal welfare.

“Activists have won and will continue to win cases based on a legal right to rescue animals from abuse,” said University of Denver law professor and civil rights attorney Justin Marceau. “No legal strategy ever works 100 percent of the time, but this conviction is less a setback than an opportunity to litigate the legal status of animals in the appellate court and in the court of public opinion.”

The post Animal Rights Activist Convicted of Felony for Rescuing Sick Chickens appeared first on The Intercept.

Behind the scenes, however, powerful art dealers and gallerists who control the cultural and monetary tides of the art world began a private campaign to force some of the biggest names on the letter to retract their support, according to a half dozen sources, including letter signatories as well as others informed about the influence campaign. 

Soon after the letter was posted, Martin Eisenberg, a high-profile collector and inheritor of the now-bankrupt Bed Bath & Beyond fortune, began contacting famous art world figures on the list whose work he had championed to express his objections to the letter. 

Eisenberg, who owns millions of dollars’ worth of work by Artforum letter signatories, contacted at least four artists whose work he owns to convey his displeasure at seeing their names on the letter. (Eisenberg did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.)

On Thursday, a week after the letter was posted, Artforum editor-in-chief David Velasco was summoned to a meeting with Jay Penske, the CEO of Artforum’s parent company, according to three sources. The son of billionaire Roger Penske, Jay oversees the conglomerate Penske Media Corporation. (Penske Media did not respond to a request for comment.) Before the day was out, Velasco was fired after six years at the helm of the magazine.

“This magazine has been my life for 18 years and I’ve given everything to it.”

“This magazine has been my life for 18 years and I’ve given everything to it,” Velasco, who rose from being an editorial assistant to the coveted editor-in-chief job, told The Intercept. “I have done nothing but exceptional work at the magazine for 18 years and this is a sad day. It breaks my heart.”

In a statement to the New York Times, Velasco said, “I’m disappointed that a magazine that has always stood for freedom of speech and the voices of artists has bent to outside pressure.”

The pressure campaign against the letter echoes a wave of repercussions faced by writers, activists, and students who have spoken out for Palestinians. Right-wing groups lobbying for Israel, as well as donors to prominent institutions and various other wealthy interests, are condemning open letters and using the lists of signatories as blacklists across cultural, professional, and academic spheres. 

“Anecdotally, I know that a majority of people in the art world are devastated by the genocide in Gaza but many are scared to speak out or even join the call for a ceasefire,” said Hannah Black, an artist and writer who signed the Artforum letter but was not pressured to remove her signature. “It is absolutely McCarthyite and many of the dogmatic anti-Palestinians within the art world have, as Joseph Welch said of McCarthy, ‘no sense of decency.’ They are willing to destroy careers, destroy the value of artworks, to maintain their unofficial ban on free speech about Palestine.”

“They are willing to destroy careers, destroy the value of artworks, to maintain their unofficial ban on free speech about Palestine.”

In a testament to the efficacy of the campaign against the Artforum letter, artists Peter Doig, Joan Jonas, Katharina Grosse, and Tomás Saraceno all withdrew their support. According to an Intercept analysis, the four artists were among 36 names removed from the online version of the letter between October 20 and October 26. (An additional 32 names were added during that period.)

Artforum, a premier international art publication, published the October 19 open letter calling for humanitarian aid to Gaza, accountability for war crimes, and an end to violence against civilians. The letter — which was not commissioned or drafted by Artforum, but published on the magazine’s website as well as in other publications like e-flux — went on to condemn the occupation of the Palestinian territories and reiterate its demands with a call for peace.

“We believe that the arts organizations and institutions whose mission it is to protect freedom of expression, to foster education, community, and creativity, also stand for freedom of life and the basic right of existence,” the signatories concluded. “We call on you to refuse inhumanity, which has no place in life or art, and make a public demand from our governments to call for a ceasefire.”

In a post on the Artforum website before news broke of Velasco’s firing, the publishers Danielle McConnell and Kate Koza wrote that the publication of the letter was “not consistent with Artforum’s editorial process.”

“The open letter was widely misinterpreted as a statement from the magazine about highly sensitive and complex geopolitical circumstances,” the publishers wrote. “That the letter was misinterpreted as being reflective of the magazine’s position understandably led to significant dismay among our readers and community, which we deeply regret.”

Backlash

Critics of the letter said its failure to mention the surprise attack by Hamas on October 7 — in which some 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians, were killed — was offensive and, according to some, antisemitic. Four days after the letter was published, Artforum posted an update reiterating the letter organizers’ condemnation of the loss of all civilian life, adding that they “share revulsion at the horrific massacres” of October 7. 

The response published in Artforum the day after the original letter came out was signed by three influential gallery owners: Dominique Lévy, Brett Gorvy, and Amalia Dayan. In their critique, the gallerists wrote:

We are distressed by the open letter recently posted on Artforum, which does not acknowledge the ongoing mass hostage emergency, the historical context, and the atrocities committed in Israel on October 7, 2023—the bloodiest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust. 

We denounce all forms of violence in Israel and Gaza and we are deeply concerned over the humanitarian crisis. We—Dominique Lévy, Brett Gorvy, Amalia Dayan—condemn the open letter for its one-sided view. We hope to foster discourse that can lead to a better understanding of the complexities involved. May we witness peace soon.

The authors of the response letter — the joint directors of Lévy Gorvy Dayan, which has gallery spaces and offices in New York, London, Paris, and Hong Kong — curate shows with some of the most prolific and highest grossing artists in the world, both living and dead. Their website lists Jean-Michel Basquiat, Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, Joel Mesler, and Adrian Piper as representative artists and collaborators. Dayan is the granddaughter of Moshe Dayan, the Israeli politician and military commander who is alleged to have ordered the country’s military to attack the American naval ship the USS Liberty during the Six-Day War of 1967.

Lévy Gorvy Dayan is more than a series of galleries; the venture is a powerful consortium, described by the New York Times as a “one-stop shop for artists and collectors,” representing artists, organizing exhibitions and auction sales, and advising collectors. In 2021, Lévy told the Financial Times, “I grew up feeling that art was freedom and fresh air.” She said she did not believe in gallerists and representatives “controlling them” — the artists — “completely.”

According to two artists who appeared as signatories on the first Artforum post, the Lévy Gorvy Dayan letter was a shot across the bow by powerful art dealers and influencers, warning others to stay in line. One artist who spoke to The Intercept said a collector offended by the Artforum letter returned a work by the artist to a dealer. The collector did not contact the artist prior to returning the work, according to the artist, who asked for anonymity to protect their livelihood. 

Another open letter posted under the title “A United Call from the Art World: Advocating for Humanity” called the original Artforum letter “uninformed.” It offered no criticism of Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, which has killed an estimated 7,000 people in the last 19 days. This letter, issued under the banner of “peace, understanding, and human dignity” garnered over 4,000 signatures. Among them was that of Warren Kanders, who resigned from the Whitney Museum of American Art board following protests over the fact that his companies sell chemical weapons. (The Intercept reported last year that, despite claims of divestment, Kanders remains in the tear gas business.)

“It really shows that they never cared about the art.”

Penske Media Corporation, Artforum’s parent company, drew criticism in 2018 for selling a $200 million stake to Saudi Arabia’s public investment fund. That same year, Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi was brutally murdered and dismembered under orders from Saudi’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Another artist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their livelihood, said the affair with the Artforum letter showed that many of the gallerists and collectors whose money makes the art world turn did not understand artists’ subject matter.

“It really shows that they never cared about the art,” the artist said. “My art, like a lot of the people facing this, has always been political, about oppression and dispossession.”

The post Bed Bath & Beyond Scion Pressured Artists to Retract Gaza Ceasefire Call in Artforum Letter appeared first on The Intercept.

Three days before Hamas committed the bloodiest attack on Israeli civilians in that country’s history, four days before the Israel Defense Forces responded with the most devastating collective punishment of Palestinian civilians in a long history of collective punishment, Palestinian and Israeli feminists gathered to demand peace.

On October 4, hundreds of them, dressed in white and turquoise, in hijabs and sun hats, met at the wall between West Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank (many Palestinian women missed the event because they could not get authorization to cross). Under a canopy of white umbrellas, they walked to the Tolerance Monument in Jerusalem for a rally, then rode to the Dead Sea. On the beach around a symbolic negotiating table, alongside diplomats and other public figures, they read a “mothers’ call” for a nonviolent resolution to the conflict.

Written jointly by the Israeli organization Women Wage Peace and the Palestinian Women of the Sun, the declaration begins: “We, Palestinian and Israeli mothers, are determined to stop the vicious cycle of bloodshed and to change the reality of the difficult conflict between both nations, for the benefit of our children.”

Or, as Huda Abu Arqoub, director of the Alliance for Middle East Peace, put it: “We want our kids to be alive rather than dead.”

Calling the document a “mothers’ call” is both heartfelt and strategic. “Women and children,” especially “mothers and children,” is both powerful and pernicious. For the press, it is convenient shorthand for “human.” For propagandists, it raises any stakes. Hamas is “a murderous terror group, responsible for the murders and kidnappings of babies, women, children and the elderly,” declares the IDF. For some feminists, it signals that the biological capacity to give birth makes women naturally pacific and confers a unique responsibility to oppose violence.

At the same time, the trope “women and children” infantilizes women. It’s worse to kill a woman than a man because women, like children, are defenseless, passive, innocent. This is ironic in Israel, a nation that prides itself on gender equality as a founding principle and mandates military service for all adult Israeli citizens (except Arab Israelis and Orthodox Jews). It is insulting in a conflict where women, both Israeli and Palestinian, are the boldest peacemakers.

Should women speak as women against war? It’s a point of perpetual feminist debate. But this much is indisputable: Feminists should, and must, speak as feminists against this war, against Israel’s occupation and its current pummeling of Gaza. Said the veteran Israeli feminist Hannah Safran: “How can you ask freedom for yourself if you don’t ask it for other people?”

In fact, as the guardians of everyday life, women are disproportionately affected by war and occupation. A 2022 statement from the director of the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling, a feminist human rights organization in the West Bank city of Ramallah, describes how Israeli policies such as home demolition, movement restrictions, night raids, and child arrests increase the burdens of family and household, reinforcing women’s “traditional roles within the Palestinian patriarchal society.” Coupled with discriminatory laws pertaining to family reunification and marriage and cultural policing by radical Islamists, these policies exaggerate male domination and female dependency and trap women in abusive relationships.

Women are also differently affected: Violence is gendered. “In conflict settings, rape and sexual violence are used as strategic, systematic, and calculated tools of war, ethnic cleansing, and genocide,” write the authors of a recently published study of wartime rape in Ethiopia. They cite some rough prevalence rates: 39 percent of women raped during the Rwandan genocide, 25 percent in Azerbaijan, 33.5 percent in Liberia. Rape, they write, may also be “a final act of humiliation before killing the victim.” Those who survive often become social pariahs, their children banished from the community as spawns of the enemy. 

But if this specificity of experience inspires women to speak as women against war, it is the embrace of universal human rights that has mobilized contemporary feminist movements for Palestinian liberation and nonviolent reconciliation.

For Palestinian feminists both in the Middle East and the diaspora, the connections between male domination and colonial oppression are self-evident. The U.S.-based Palestinian Feminist Collective, for instance, describes itself as “a body of Palestinian and Arab feminists committed to Palestinian social and political liberation by confronting systemic gendered, sexual, and colonial violence, oppression, and dispossession.” The Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling bridges “the need to address discrimination and violence against women within Palestinian society, and the need to support the national struggle for freedom and independence from Israeli occupation.”

Filastiniyat, which supports female journalists, particularly from Gaza, and publishes their work on the NAWA Online Women Media Network, also advocates “on issues related to freedoms, media development, women’s rights, and human rights.” Lest anyone think this media organization is a neutral platform, its hashtag is #GazaGenocide.

It took Israeli feminists a while to connect the dots. “In the past we would say we are feminist to struggle for women’s rights and to go to the army, and it had no relationship to the situation of Palestine,” Safran told the journalist Peter Beinart. The Israel Women’s Network, founded in 1984 by the recently deceased second-wave leader Alice Shalvi, has long advocated for women’s equal participation in every aspect of Israeli public life, including the military.

But not every second-wave feminist wanted in on everything Israeli men were doing. Marcia Freedman, a U.S.-born left-wing feminist who was the first openly lesbian member of the Knesset, was early to champion a two-state solution. The IDF’s rhetoric about protecting women and children notwithstanding, she saw the link between militarism and violence against women. In 1976, Freedman introduced the issue of domestic violence to the governing body, where she was ridiculed and dismissed.

The Israel Women’s Network “were fighting for women to be pilots. [They believed] we have to be in every place where there is decision-making power,” said Safran. In Israel, a high military rank is almost a prerequisite for high political office. “We did not support women” — or anybody — “joining the army.”

On this point, liberal feminism won the day. Thanks to decades of lawsuits and legislative battles, women’s presence in the IDF has steadily increased in every function and at every rank. But a thoroughly militarized society like Israel’s — basic training “turns civilians into soldiers,” boasts the IDF — is a masculinist society. And that means women must be feminized, even while carrying guns. Women are exempted from service when they start doing womanly things, like marrying and having children. They are rarely called up as reservists, 360,000 of whom have been mobilized to fight in Gaza. And while women have risen in the ranks, male soldiers keep them in their place. A 2021 government report found that over a third of women serving in the armed forces had been sexually harassed.

The public demonstration by Israelis of the conviction that a movement for women’s full citizenship must be for everyone’s full citizenship was a first step toward collaboration across the checkpoints. During the Second Intifada, the leaderless Women in Black began vigils every Friday against the occupation. Soon, Arab Israelis joined the demonstrations, and Women in Black spread to Palestine and around the world.

Eventually, some liberal feminists came around too. In 1991, after more than a decade directing an experimental school in Jerusalem for Orthodox girls, Shalvi was forced to resign. It was not because she instituted controversial programs, like classes in family planning and conflict resolution, but because she invited Arab girls to those classes, participated in dialogues with Palestinian women, and supported the Israel–Palestine peace process.

If not every feminist, whether Palestinian or Israeli, makes these links among women’s, Palestinians’, and human rights, their enemies certainly do. The situations are not exactly parallel, but feminists in both Israel and the Palestinian territories are under attack by the most tribalist elements of their societies, each of which envisions its own version of a “pure” society, whose achievement requires the modesty, piety, and subservience of women.  

In forming a coalition between his own Likud and the extreme-right Religious Zionists, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu created the most radically nationalist and religiously influenced government in Israel’s history. Among its targets for destruction are women’s and LGBTQ+ rights. It turned the formerly independent Authority for the Advancement of the Status of Women into a politically appointed body. It rescinded support for the Istanbul Convention on combating violence against women and weakened anti-discrimination laws and enforcement of protection orders against domestic abusers — even as femicide is reportedly rising, with most of the murders committed by male partners or family members.

The messianic Zionists who want to expand Jewish ownership to every inch of territory from the Jordan River to the sea are equally eager to erase women from every inch of public life. The effort to kneecap the Supreme Court is coupled by efforts to fortify the rabbinic courts and, indeed, transform Israel into a theocracy where civil, criminal, and personal life conforms to rigid halachic, or religious Jewish, law. One of the goals of the religious parties is to end gender integration in the army and finally get women out altogether. Women’s job is to make and raise as many Jewish babies as possible.

In Netanyahu’s administration, only nine of 64 positions are occupied by women. Perhaps the most cynical appointment is May Golan as minister for the advancement of women. A virulent hawk and self-proclaimed “proud racist,” Golan is also no friend of feminist peaceniks, to say the least. “I’ve never seen so many feminists being silent at the same time,” she told a sycophantic interviewer on TalkTV last week. “The only time they’re silent is when a Jewish woman or an Israeli woman is being raped or murdered.” During a 20-minute rant, she invoked her bona fides “as a woman and as the minister for the advancement of women” to legitimize her conviction that Palestinians in Gaza, all of them, deserve no mercy. “I know the situation of Arab women around the world,” she declared. “This is a dark, dark culture. … The difference between us and them [is] between good and evil.”

Meanwhile, in Gaza and the West Bank, radical Islamists including Hamas are growing increasingly repressive and aggressive. At mosques and on social media, campaigns against child marriage and gender-based violence, and for safe abortion, gender equality within the marriage, LGBTQ+ rights, and sexual freedoms are denounced as corrupting “foreign agendas” in violation of Shariah law. Attacks on feminists, journalists, LGBTQ+ people, and human rights advocates are constant, and sometimes fatal. These are not the acts of rogue terrorists. The Ministry of Education in the West Bank, for instance, is cracking down on women’s studies and eliminating many secular, rights-based programs in public schools.

According to Amnesty International, “Palestinian authorities in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip continued to heavily restrict freedom of expression, association, and assembly. They also held scores of people in arbitrary detention and subjected many to torture and other ill-treatment.” Twenty-nine killings of women and girls by family members were reported in the occupied territories in 2022, but the courts impeded complaints of domestic violence. In July of that year, “security forces stood by and watched as a mob beat youths and children participating in a parade … in Ramallah that included rainbow flags.”

Religious fundamentalists on both sides accuse feminists of fomenting chaos by undermining gender and the patriarchal family. Ultranationalists condemn feminist human rights advocates for muddying the lines of battle by insisting on the equal value of every life. These accusers are right.

Feminism is, at heart, a movement against domination. It is feminist to demand an end to Israeli apartheid and occupation of Palestinian lands. Feminism is a movement against violence. It is feminist to denounce barbarity, no matter how enormous the crimes that motivate it. To oppose domination and violence, feminists — not as women or mothers, Israelis or Palestinians — must demand an immediate ceasefire and end to the siege, an arms embargo from the Western powers, and the implementation of a massive humanitarian operation in Gaza.

Feminism is a movement built on the possibility of profound human transformation. That means sustaining a belief in the possibility of a negotiated solution in Israel–Palestine, whether one state or two, with freedom and democratic rights for all.

The post It’s Feminist to Demand a Ceasefire in Israel–Palestine appeared first on The Intercept.

“They’re kind of failing upwards when they’re not only staying in the department but they’re also being promoted,” said Jennvine Wong, staff attorney with the Cop Accountability Project at the Legal Aid Society, a public defense organization in New York City. Last month, Legal Aid released an analysis of data on settlements in cases alleging police misconduct. 

NYPD Sgt. David Grieco, a cop with the street nickname of “Bullethead,” was named in at least 17 suits between his hiring in 2006 and his first promotion in 2016. After advancing to the rank of sergeant in 2017, he was named in at least eight more suits. That promotion came less than one week after Grieco was named in his 28th suit. Since his last promotion, Grieco has been named in at least 27 additional lawsuits. Payouts for suits naming Grieco exceeded $1 million this year.

Few of the officers named in lawsuits, and none in this story, ever face judgments in court — criminal or civil. New York City, whose lawyers defend NYPD cops, often arrange out-of-court settlements, paying huge sums to make cases going away under the frequent condition that the police admit no wrongdoing. The city has already paid out more than $50 million in lawsuits in the first half of this year. (The police did not respond to a request for comment.)

Grieco is not the only officer who the NYPD promoted after being named in multiple lawsuits alleging misconduct. The NYPD has a history of promoting officers who have been found to lie in cases or engage in misconduct. 

Detective Specialist Wilfredo Benitez was hired in 2008 as a police officer. Over the next nine years, Benitez was named in at least nine suits alleging misconduct. He was promoted to detective in 2017 and has been named in at least 11 additional suits since then. Settlements in suits naming Benitez have paid more than $480,000. 

Lt. Henry Daverin started at the NYPD in 2008 and promoted to sergeant in 2013. Daverin was named in at least 19 suits between 2013 and 2017, when he was promoted to his current role as lieutenant. Settled police misconduct suits that named Daverin have paid out at least $1.5 million since 2013. 

Detective Jodi Brown joined the force as a police officer in 2005. He was named in at least seven suits alleging misconduct between then and his first promotion to detective in 2015. Since then, Brown has been named in at least 30 more suits that have paid a total of $1.3 million in settlements. 

Detective Abdiel Anderson was hired as a police officer in 2003. He was named in two lawsuits shortly afterward. In 2008, he was promoted to detective. Anderson has been named in at least 43 suits since then, with settled cases paying out more than half a million dollars. 

Detective Eugene Keller first became a police officer in 2012 and was named in at least three lawsuits over the next decade. Keller was promoted to detective last year. Suits naming him have paid more than $4.1 million. 

“You have officers that are just repeatedly costing the city quite a lot.”

The promotions given to cops repeatedly named in lawsuits that have cost the city tens of millions of dollars suggest that the department isn’t invested in addressing misconduct. 

“It just becomes a cost of doing business,” Wong said. “That’s a problem.”

Police officers who carry out misconduct don’t come out of nowhere, Wong said. “You have officers that are just repeatedly costing the city quite a lot,” she said. 

Findings of liability in civil suits trigger investigations by the NYPD, but with most suits settled, there is often nothing to trigger that response, Wong said. 

Considering the number of lawsuits, though, it stretches credulity to suggest that nothing is amiss simply because there are no judgments in court or internal investigations, Wong said: “It shows a pattern of misconduct.”

The post NYPD Cops Sued for Misconduct Cost City Millions in Settlements — Then Get Promotions appeared first on The Intercept.

Workman told The Intercept that the intention was an intra-community message that spoke to Israel’s 75-year violent regime over Palestine and expressed support for Palestinians’ basic human rights. 

Yet the newsletter drew widespread criticism for not directly condemning Hamas’s killing of Israeli civilians — and the backlash was swift. Workman was ousted as student body president; had a job offer rescinded by a firm they previously interned at, Winston & Strawn; and received a litany of threats online.

Workman told The Intercept they maintain resolve for the sake of two goals: that people should not be punished for advocating for Palestinian human rights; and that everyone who cares about human life should be doing what they can to call for an immediate ceasefire and humanitarian assistance to the people of Gaza.

“What’s been driving me is the resilience of Palestinians in this moment,” Workman told The Intercept in their first interview with the news media. “The fact that they are still using their voice, that they are still standing strong, that they are still here, and that they are asking us to continue to speak out and show up for them through this and to not let this be their end.” 

“And so for me, I will continue to speak out for them and ask for these demands of an immediate ceasefire and this provision of this humanitarian assistance in a safe, secure, and timely fashion to the people of Gaza.”

“I will continue to speak out for them and ask for these demands of an immediate ceasefire and this provision of this humanitarian assistance.”

Workman is not alone in facing backlash, with students across the country, particularly at Harvard, facing condemnation for similar statements and even broadly protesting Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. The attacks in universities and colleges are part of a longer history of people being targeted for expressing support for Palestinians or criticizing Israel’s policies. Palestine Legal, an advocacy group that supports threatened pro-Palestinian activists, says it has responded to 1,707 incidents between 2014 and 2020 alone, including cases of discrimination, disciplinary investigations, and censorship.

“This is an unprecedented moment of anxiety and fear for everyone speaking out publicly in support of Palestinians, who are compelled to do so to stop an unfolding genocide in Gaza,” Palestine Legal Director Dima Khalidi told The Intercept. “There has always been a concerted effort to shut down the movement for Palestinian rights through censorship, legal bullying, doxxing, and more, as Palestine Legal has been documenting for years. Now that attack has been magnified by 100.”

Blacklists and Harvard

The most notorious anti-Palestinian campus operation is Canary Mission, which compiles dossiers on students, teachers, professionals, or organizations that, according to its website, “promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews on North American college campuses and beyond.” The blacklist targets supporters of BDS, the movement to boycott, divest, and sanction Israel and Israeli companies, in order to pressure Israel to respect Palestinian rights and cease its occupation. 

Canary Mission’s targeting of BDS activists came as many state legislatures pushed to ban and, in some cases, criminalize boycotts of Israel. The blacklist fostered an environment where students speaking out in support of Palestinians or against Israel’s policies became vulnerable to targeted harassment and discipline in both the academy and employment. The FBI has even targeted activists whose names appeared on Canary Mission’s website.

Such efforts have intensified in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel and the retaliatory war against Gaza. At Harvard University, 34 student groups co-signed a statement similar to Workman’s, casting blame on Israel for its deadly attacks, denouncing it for maintaining an open-air prison over Palestinians, and calling on Harvard to “take action to stop the ongoing annihilation of Palestinians.”

Subsequently, numerous CEOs, from billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman to Sweetgreen CEO Jonathan Newman, called for the lists of signatories to be made public, so their companies, as Ackman put it, would not “inadvertently hire” any of them. Last Wednesday, a mobile-billboard truck drove around the Ivy League campus, blasting the names and faces of signatories, describing them as “Harvard’s biggest antisemites.” The Guardian revealed that the funders of the truck are connected to a complex network of right-wing organizations buoyed by millions of dollars.

Several students and groups removed their signatures after the backlash, with some people saying they had not known their group was a signatory or were not aware of the exact content of the statement.

The targeting of the student activists at Harvard has met some resistance — even among those who disagree with the initial statement.  

While Jewish Harvard College student Maya Bodnick disagreed with the Harvard students’ statement, she was incredulous that Ackman didn’t consider the potential for endangerment in such doxxing. In the Forward, Bodnick wrote, “Ackman’s actions do not make this painful moment safer for my Palestinian, Jewish, and Israeli peers.”

The Harvard chapter of Hillel, a Jewish student organization, similarly condemned the truck. While the Hillel chapter said it rejected the student groups’ statement and demanded accountability for the signatories, “under no circumstances should that accountability extend to public intimidation of individuals.”

Last week, at least four websites circulated the personal information of Harvard students affiliated with groups that signed the statement, including their full names, past jobs, and hometowns.

The negative attention has stretched to campuses all across the country, as students at Arizona State University, Butler University, Ohio State University, and the University of North Carolina have protested in support of Palestinian rights.

Job Loss — and Support

For some, the consequences of the attacks were immediate. In Workman’s case, beyond being ousted as a student leader, their prospective employer, the law firm Winston & Strawn, rescinded their offer in a post on LinkedIn last week, writing that Workman’s “comments profoundly conflict with Winston & Strawn’s values as a firm.”

In a statement Monday, Workman described the various reactions to their newsletter as deflecting from what’s really at stake. “Regardless of how terrible my week has been, this attention on one student’s email to their fellow law students is entirely misplaced and a dangerous distraction,” Workman said, citing Israel issuing an extreme 24-hour evacuation order to people in northern Gaza, and its moves to cut off food, water, and electricity.

“My intent was to call attention to the lack of coverage about Palestinians and to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.”

Beyond their own consequences, Workman told The Intercept, “I am concerned that this backlash against me and other people who have spoken out as well will have this chilling effect that allows for this unbalanced and dangerous media narrative to continue in which violence against Palestinian civilians is normalized.”

Various groups have announced their support for Workman and Palestinian solidarity more broadly, including over 100 NYU law alumni, and 51 students and alumni of NYU Law Jews for a Free Palestine. Both groups sent letters directly to Dean Troy McKenzie, who had distanced himself and the university from Workman’s newsletter. 

“My message came across as insensitive to the suffering of Israelis during a time of crisis and that is not what I intended,” Workman said in their press release. “The killing of children and other innocent civilians is horrific.”

“What I wrote was inspired by, and in line with, what many Jewish peace activists and Israelis,” they said, “including the editorial board of Israel’s largest newspaper, have voiced over the past week in response to the violence.”

“My intent was to call attention to the lack of coverage about Palestinians and to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza,” Workman said, “a crisis that has only escalated exponentially since I sent that email on Tuesday.”

The post Pro-Palestine NYU Law Student Speaks Out After Job Offer Was Rescinded appeared first on The Intercept.

Abed Ayoub, executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, or ADC, said that his organization has fielded multiple reports of individuals and mosques being visited by the FBI this week. The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, a police accountability group, also said it had received reports of federal agents intimidating Palestinians and their supporters. 

The interactions are reminiscent of surveillance and targeting of Muslim and Arab communities in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and Ayoub told The Intercept that they are contributing to a resurgence of fear among Muslim communities. “Like, ‘Oh my god, this is happening again, how are we going to protect ourselves?’”

The reports come after President Joe Biden issued a warning this week about potential “domestic threats” across America. “This is not some distant tragedy — the ties between Israel and the United States run deep,” Biden wrote on Tuesday. “In cities across the country, local and federal law enforcement partners are closely monitoring for any domestic threats in connection with the horrific terrorist attacks in Israel.”

In a press call Thursday, Department of Homeland Security officials said they do not have any specific credible intelligence indicating a potential threat to the United States, but that they are monitoring “a variety of threat actors who might be driven by anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, or anti-Arab sentiment.” The officials also said they were monitoring potential threats in relation to a video statement by former Hamas political leader Khaled Meshal, who called for a broad, global mobilization in support of Gaza on Friday. Meshal’s statement prompted mass speculation and hysteria about a “Day of Jihad” across the United States, with schools in some places shutting down. 

Ayoub said that the reports that the ADC received included FBI officers visiting a Texas mosque to meet with leadership and ask about any “troublemakers” in the community, and FBI agents seeking to question an individual who was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement two months ago for a green card issue. That individual, Ayoub said, “has never had any issues” prior to his run-in with ICE. Ayoub added that the ADC received a report of the FBI visiting a mosque in a different state from a partner civil rights organization.

The FBI declined to specifically comment on The Intercept’s questions about the reported visits. “The FBI can never initiate an investigation based solely on an individual’s race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, or the exercise of First Amendment rights,” an agency spokesperson wrote in an email. 

ICE deferred questions to DHS, its parent agency, which did not respond to a request for comment.

Human rights attorney Azadeh Shahshahani told The Intercept that greater surveillance and targeting of Muslim and Palestinian community members wouldn’t come as a surprise — and is rather a part of a pattern of federal law enforcement practices. “We get contacted by community members saying that the FBI has come to their house without any type of prior notice or any type of prior suspicion or any reason whatsoever, other than the fact that they’re Muslim or Palestinian or Iranian.” These visits often take place in response to an event happening somewhere in the world, Shahshahani said, or simply because the FBI is engaging in a “fishing expedition.”

Raed Jarrar, advocacy director at Democracy for the Arab World Now, or DAWN, said it was important to consider federal targeting of Palestinians in the context of broader U.S. policy on Israel–Palestine. “The U.S. government is not only sending more weapons to kill Palestinians in Gaza; it is going after Palestinians here at home,” he said. “With thousands of Palestinians killed and injured this week by the criminal apartheid regime in Israel, which treats Palestinians as second-class humans, the U.S. government goes on to treat us like second-class citizens in our own country.” 

Meanwhile, Muslims and Palestinians have reported incidents of discrimination throughout the nation this week. In New York, for example, a group of men waving Israeli flags assaulted an 18-year-old Palestinian in Brooklyn. Numerous individuals at a rally looked directly into a camera as they exclaimed threats including “Kill all Palestinians, all of them!” and “Flatten them like a parking lot … once and for all.” 

On Thursday, when asked what her message is to Palestinians who fear for their loved ones as Israel maintains a siege in Gaza, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul called on “law-abiding Palestinians to reject Hamas,” without addressing the question of Palestinians’ own concerns.

While the FBI has activated resources to investigate Palestinians in the span of just a few days, its track record of successfully investigating crimes committed by Israelis against Palestinian American citizens has proved far less urgent, noted Jarrar of DAWN. 

He pointed to the cases of Alex Odeh, an activist who was assassinated in California in 1985, and Shireen Abu Akleh, a journalist who was killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank last year. “When Palestinian Americans like Shireen Abu Akleh and Alex Odeh are murdered by Israel, the FBI does nothing about it,” Jarrar said. “But when we protest injustice by Israel, the FBI knocks on our doors.”

After the FBI announced an investigation into Abu Akleh’s killing, which multiple organizations reported was premeditated last year, the Israeli government announced that it would not cooperate with the investigation. Israel’s then-Defense Minister Benny Gantz told the press that the FBI’s inquiry represented “interference in Israel’s internal affairs” and that he had “made it clear to the American representatives that we stand behind the [Israel Defense Forces] soldiers, that we will not cooperate with any external investigation.”

Decades earlier, Odeh, who was the West Coast regional director at ADC, was murdered before speaking at Congregation B’nai Tzedek, a Reform synagogue in Santa Ana, California. As The Intercept previously reported, two prime suspects in Odeh’s killing escaped to Israel, where they continue to live public lives. The FBI, meanwhile, continues to list a $1 million reward for information leading to the successful arrest and conviction of Odeh’s murderers.

The post FBI Targets Muslims and Palestinians in Wake of Hamas Attack, Civil Rights Advocates Warn appeared first on The Intercept.

Late last month, federal prosecutors in Arizona invited the family of 58-year-old Raymond Mattia to meet in Sells, Arizona, a main population center of the Tohono O’odham Nation, which spans large swaths of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Mattia’s loved ones and legal team attended the September 19 meeting under the impression that lingering questions surrounding Mattia’s May 18 killing would finally be answered. Instead, the family says they were given general descriptions of the law alongside confirmation that the officers and agents involved in the shooting would not face charges. Federal prosecutors, joined by a tribal liaison and an FBI agent, refused to answer questions as to how, specifically, the government reached its conclusion.

“It felt like we lost him again.”

“It’s kind of still surreal,” Mattia’s niece, Yvonne Nevarez, who attended the meeting, told The Intercept. “It felt like we lost him again.”

Prosecutors gave the family the impression they would have their questions answered at the meeting, said Ryan Stitt, a California-based attorney for Mattia’s relatives. Stitt said the refusal to answer questions undercut new Justice Department guidelines on the rights of crime victims.

“We wanted to have a fact-driven discussion about what happened to better understand their decision not to prosecute,” Stitt told The Intercept. “I was very clear that I did not want to recommend to the family that they come to this meeting if it wasn’t going to be a fact-driven discussion.”

In the absence of answers, Mattia’s relatives plan to file a civil rights lawsuit against the federal government. “It was disappointing and upsetting for the family,” Stitt said. “It puts them in a position where they have to file a lawsuit to get basic questions answered, like who shot Ray and why.”

In a statement to The Intercept, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Arizona said, “Department of Justice employees, including supervisory and line Assistant U.S. Attorneys, a victim advocate and an FBI agent, met with Mr. Mattia’s family and the family’s lawyers in Sells on September 19 for more than an hour.”

“The employees explained our conclusion in the criminal investigation — that the agents’ use of force under the facts and circumstances presented in this case does not rise to the level of a federal criminal civil rights violation or a criminal violation assimilated under Arizona law — and addressed questions posed by the family and the lawyers,” spokesperson Zach Stoebe said. “We decline to comment more specifically on the meeting between the family and the Department employees: victims have an inherent right to speak with the press, and to criticize their government.”

Edited Body Camera Footage

Mattia spent the entirety of his life in Menagers Dam, a remote Tohono O’odham village situated directly on the border, where he was an active member of the community, artist, and avid hunter. In June, Customs and Border Protection, the Border Patrol’s parent agency, released body camera footage of his final moments there, compiled in a 28-minute edited video.

Shortly before he was killed, Mattia had exchanged a series of text messages with his sister, reporting that three men — presumed border crossers — had been in his home demanding to use his phone. The confrontation was apparently tense, with Mattia grabbing his hunting knife to run the men off. Mattia told his sister he called authorities to report the incident.

Soon after the exchange, a convoy of law enforcement vehicles rolled into the village. According to CBP, Border Patrol agents were responding to a call for back-up from Tohono O’odham police, who had received a report of shots fired in the area. No names or addresses were given, and the origin of the purported shots was unclear.

The team met in the dark at a recreation center. The Border Patrol agents wore tactical gear and carried rifles. “It’s going to be a little bit of a guessing game trying to find it,” a Tohono O’odham police officer said of their target, according to the body camera footage. “I don’t know exactly where that motherfucker’s at.”

The tribal officer led the agents to Mattia’s home. Mattia stepped out in the dark to greet them. He was ordered to step forward and show his hands. As Mattia complied with the commands, law enforcement officials mistook a cellphone in his hand for a gun. Initial reports indicated as many as 38 rounds were fired. A medical examiner’s report, ruling the case a homicide, said Mattia was shot nine times. The body camera footage indicated that roughly 31 seconds passed from the moment Mattia received his first command to the moment the first shot was fired.

Though Mattia’s family went into last month’s meeting with notice that charges would not be filed, they still had questions. From the outset, the edited body camera footage had raised their concerns.

“We mostly wanted to know why we weren’t allowed to view the entire video,” Nevarez said. “We also wanted to ask if there was something that they saw that we didn’t.”

Additionally, the family sought clarity on the murky circumstances that brought the authorities to Mattia’s door in the first place. They wanted to know if investigators had considered the mindset of the agents who responded to the call. Having reviewed the body camera footage herself, Nevarez thought it looked like less like law enforcement and more like battlefield prep for a night raid on an enemy compound.

“They were all there, hyped up, walking in like a war zone,” she said. “He really didn’t have a chance. They were out to get somebody.”

Victims’ Rights

Ahead of the meeting, at the request of the assistant U.S. attorney leading the government’s case, Stitt shared a list of the family’s questions. The two sides had agreed that they qualified as victims under the Crime Victims’ Rights Act. That meant the family was entitled to rights established in revised guidelines Attorney General Merrick Garland unveiled in 2022.

The new rules — which went into effect this year and which Garland described as “victim-centered and trauma-informed” — advise federal authorities that a “strong presumption exists in favor of providing, rather than withholding, assistance and services” to victims. In meetings, the guidelines say, prosecutors should strive to both obtain and share information.

“We were very clear we wanted to assert their rights under the rules as victims to the fullest extent possible,” Stitt said. The questions the family had were neither complicated nor sensitive, he argued. They wanted to know how many shots were fired and if the Tohono O’odham police officer on hand participated in the shooting.

“They would not answer that question,” Stitt said. “They would not answer the question about how many shots were fired or why. They said that all the Border Patrol officers made statements to the FBI but would not disclose any detail about those statements other than they exist.”

At one point, Stitt said, the family was told that the purpose of the meeting was not to gather ammunition for a civil lawsuit. The comment was surprising and unsettling, given that the same federal prosecutor responsible for overseeing the decision to not bring criminal charges in Mattia’s case would also defend the federal government if his family brought a civil suit.

“It seems like it was an inappropriate response to the family to treat the meeting as just a way to tell them that no charges will be filed.”

“No civil case has been filed, and the family is looking for honest questions about what happened,” Stitt said. “We certainly can’t say that they’ve acted unethically, but we obviously have a lot of questions, and we were hopeful to get answers during the meeting. It seems like it was an inappropriate response to the family to treat the meeting as just a way to tell them that no charges will be filed and to provide no further factual explanation why.”

Among the most pressing of the family’s concerns, Nevarez said, was the unanswered question of what — if anything — the federal government intends to do to disentangle the relationship between the Tohono O’odham Nation Police Department and the U.S. Border Patrol going forward.

“We feel like we don’t even want to call TOPD or trust TOPD anymore because they can call Border Patrol just like they did for my uncle Ray,” she said. “We’re afraid the same thing would happen to us.”

The post Justice Department Won’t Charge Border Patrol Agents Who Killed Native Man appeared first on The Intercept.

Though President Joe Biden declined to issue the executive order granting the WMD designation, which would have come with extraordinary powers to combat the scourge, federal agencies — including the Department of Defense, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security — had already begun preparing for a fentanyl WMD attack as far back as 2018.

Government documents obtained by The Intercept reveal that national security agencies have for years been advancing the narrative that the drug could pose a WMD threat, going so far as conducting military exercises in preparation for an attack by a fentanyl weapon.

The push to declare fentanyl a WMD — and the security state approaching the drug that way even absent the declaration — has been a boon to federal agencies’ budgets. It’s not clear, however, that reimagining the highly toxic drug as a superlethal weapon has had any effect of combating the ongoing crisis of fentanyl overdoses. What it has done, though, is help kick off a panic.

“In the WMD world, there’s an industry built on taking a bit of a threat du jour and, like a few egg whites and a whisk, whipping it into an expensive meringue,” said Dan Kaszeta, a former adviser to the White House on chemical and biological preparedness and longtime expert on WMDs. The push to treat fentanyl like a WMD so far “involves emergency responders giving fentanyl mythical properties that toxicologists and anesthesiologists who use the stuff all the time refute,” added Kaszeta, who is currently an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank.

“Is it,” Kaszeta asked, “the next anthrax scare — a way to beg for budget, training, equipment?”

Even as it produced material warning of a fentanyl weapon, the government at times assessed such an attack was unlikely. One internal 2018 FBI bulletin, obtained by The Intercept from a former federal law enforcement official, calls the possibility of a chemical attack using fentanyl a “low probability high impact event.” 

In a statement to The Intercept about the report, an FBI spokesperson said, “While our standard practice is not to comment on specific intelligence products, the FBI regularly shares information with our law enforcement partners to assist in protecting the communities they serve.”

Can’t Touch This

“Fentanyl Very Likely a Viable Option for a Chemical Weapon Attack in the United States for Extremists and Criminals, Low Probability High Impact Event,” reads the title of the July 2018 FBI intelligence bulletin. 

The assessment, produced by the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate, cites bureau and Centers for Disease Control information to conclude with “high confidence” that the likelihood of such an attack is a remote probability. The long odds are “due to no known credible threat reporting regarding the use of fentanyl for a CW” — chemical weapon — “event in the United States.”

The intelligence bulletin, marked “FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY” and not disseminated to the public, also references a since-removed Drug Enforcement Agency fentanyl briefing guide for first responders. Under a red, boldfaced “WARNING,” the briefing guide incorrectly cautioned that mere incidental skin contact or inhalation of even just a small amount of fentanyl can result in death. 

The DEA blasted out the warning to law enforcement agencies all over the country, including the FBI, generating panic among police.

The DEA later revised its guidance after the American College of Medical Toxicology and the American Academy of Clinical Toxicology issued a joint report concluding that “the risk of clinically significant exposure to emergency responders is extremely low.” 

The hysteria, however, continues to this day. Around 80 percent of police officers surveyed believe you can overdose by touching fentanyl, according to three different studies.

In 2021, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department released dramatic body cam footage of a deputy collapsing after contact with fentanyl. “My trainee was exposed to fentanyl and nearly died,” Cpl. Scott Crane remarks in the video. 

News media echoed the department’s claims, with the San Diego Tribune running an article headlined, “‘I’m not going to let you die’: Deputy overdoses after coming in contact with fentanyl.” 

Medical experts promptly took issue with the story, saying incidental contact with fentanyl can’t cause an overdose and suggesting that the officer’s reaction was more likely an anxiety response. 

The Tribune’s public safety editor responded with a statement saying the publication asked the sheriff’s department to respond to the criticisms and for more information on the incident — once again relying on the account of law enforcement officials rather than medical experts.

DHS Push to Label Fentanyl as WMD

In 2019, the assistant secretary in charge of the Department of Homeland Security’s newly created Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office referenced the FBI report from the previous year.

“In July 2018, the FBI Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate assessed that ‘… fentanyl is very likely a viable option for a chemical weapon attack by extremists or criminals,” said the February 22, 2019, DHS memo, sent by James McDonnell to the DHS secretary, first reported by the military news website Task & Purpose.

The memo didn’t mention the next sentence in the FBI document: a warning that the event was “low probability” due to there being “no known credible threat reporting” on the matter. (Asked why the memo did not mention this, the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.)

The omission appears to be part of a bureaucratic turf-grab. Since the office was created by consolidating DHS’s Domestic Nuclear Detection Office with its Office of Health Affairs, if fentanyl, a public health threat, could be portrayed as a WMD threat, it could fall under the new office’s purview. 

The memo went on to suggest that the creation of the new office under the Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Act of 2018 “provides an opportunity to apply DHS CWMD assets and capabilities to the fentanyl problem through the lens of WMD.” Suggested applications included the development and deployment of sensor technology to detect fentanyl.

The DHS memo’s proposals were criticized as misguided when they were reported on, and the CWMD office did end up getting involved in the fentanyl response. In July 2019, DHS’s Science and Technology Directorate announced that it had begun work with a private firm to develop a miniaturized nanofiber device capable of detecting fentanyl. In the announcement, the DHS office repeated the false claim that “fentanyl can be absorbed through the skin … putting many first responders at risk of a fatal contact overdose.”

In 2020, the CWMD office awarded a contractor $1.7 million to produce a trace chemical detector designed to screen for trace amounts of fentanyl on the outside of parcels — the same kind of sensor technology referenced in the DHS memo.

Under Pressure

Politicians are under intense pressure to respond to the epidemic of fentanyl overdoses, a crisis that claimed almost 70,000 lives in 2021 alone, according to Centers for Disease Control data.

In April last year, Ambrose Partners lobbyist Kevin Fogarty, the former longtime chief of staff to Rep. Pete King, R-N.Y., registered to lobby on behalf of the nonprofit Families Against Fentanyl. The group released a 2021 letter by former top national security officials — including top CIA brass and a cabinet secretary — calling for a declaration making fentanyl an official WMD. Fogarty would be a natural choice to lobby Capitol Hill: King, his old boss, served as the chair of the Homeland Security Committee before retiring in 2021.

Several Republican members of Congress, like Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., have introduced legislation that would label fentanyl a WMD. 

In September 2022, 18 state attorneys general signed a letter urging Biden to classify the drug as a WMD. Led by Republican Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody and Democratic Connecticut Attorney General William Tong, the officials said the move “would require the Department of Homeland Security and the Drug Enforcement Administration to coordinate a response with other agencies, including the Department of Defense — as opposed to the federal government simply treating the substance as a narcotics control problem.”

The White House quickly swatted down the proposal.

The Military Gets Involved

“It may seem odd to classify fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction like a chemical or biological warfare agent, but as a threat to our first responders and in the interest of public health and safety we handle it as a threat in exactly the same way,” Lt. Col. Tyler Royster, commander of the 10th Civil Support Team of the Washington state National Guard, said in a March 30 press release. The unit provided support to state police responding to the Thurston County, Washington, jail following six fentanyl overdoses.

Civil Support Teams, also known as WMD-CSTs, are federally funded, active duty military personnel under the National Guard that provide support to civil authorities in cases of the use or threatened use of a WMD.

The Washington WMD-CST unit worked with a SWAT team to “eliminate on-site hazards,” using a sophisticated spectroscopy device to scan for fentanyl.

None was detected.

The U.S. military has also sought to conduct military exercises simulating fentanyl WMD attacks. In June, the Wyoming National Guard’s WMD civilian support unit, as part of an exercise called “Vigilant Guard,” planned a scenario in which a conflict between rival drug gangs escalates into a weaponized fentanyl attack.

“International narcotics networks, in coordination with international military competitors, exploit regional narcotic distribution networks to increase violence between rival gangs and push a narrative of America being unsafe via social networks,” says the ominous description of one scenario in a procurement document. “Additional targeting information reveals plans for a retaliation shooting and use of aerosolized car fentanyl on a rival gang location in Cody, Wyoming and Powell, Wyoming.”

The post The U.S. Government Is Preparing for a Fentanyl WMD Attack appeared first on The Intercept.