The UN report that was published by the South African jurist Richard Goldstone, a supporter of Israel, found that both Israel and Hamas committed war crimes during the Operation Cast Lead in Gaza last winter. According to the Goldstone report, Israel deliberately attacked civilian targets and did not take sufficient action to minimize civilian loss of life. For example, the report found that Israel even refused to allow the evacuation of the injured by ambulance. This report is the last in a series of reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch that also found Israel committed massive human rights violations and possible war crimes.

The present attitude that Israel can do nothing wrong is very destructive to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

However, there will always be hope when the likes of Doggett take the side of justice, even when it’s not politically convenient to do so.

— Hooman Hedayati

This firing line was first published by the Daily Texan on November 12, 2009

Would you oppose the death penalty if it were proven that Texas has executed an innocent man? If so, remember this name: Cameron Todd Willingham. He was innocent and Texas executed him. There are plenty of executed death-row inmates with strong claims of innocence, such as David Spence, Ruben Cantu, Carlos De Luna and Gary Graham. But the state of Texas has never admitted to killing an innocent person. Willingham’s case could become the first case in which the state of Texas will have to admit that it made
a mistake.

Willingham was executed for arson and murder in 2004. He professed his innocence until he was strapped down on the execution gurney, saying “I am an innocent man — convicted of a crime I did not commit. I have been persecuted for 12 years for something I did not do.”

Now, we know that he was telling the truth. In August, Craig Beyler, the investigator hired by the Texas Forensic Science Commission to review the Willingham case, released his report in which he found that “a finding of arson could not be sustained” by a scientific analysis. He concluded that the fire in the Willingham case was accidental and not arson. In fact, there was no arson, so there was no crime.

David Grann wrote a 16,000-word article for The New Yorker in which he discredited all the evidence used to convict and sentence Willingham. Barry Scheck, co-director of the Innocence Project said, “After reading Grann’s report, fair-minded people will know beyond a reasonable doubt that an innocent person was executed.”

The proven execution of an innocent person should have resulted in a call by Gov. Rick Perry for a statewide moratorium on executions and a commission to conduct a comprehensive study of the Texas death penalty system. But shortly before a scheduled Texas Forensic Science Commission meeting to discuss this case, in a move that looks like an election-year cover-up, Perry replaced several members of the commission with his own political allies, including John Bradley, a tough-on-crime Williamson County district attorney, as chairman. Bradley canceled the public hearing indefinitely, leaving the investigation in limbo.

Scott Cobb, director of the Texas Moratorium Network, said, “No matter how things turn out, people are looking at the death penalty in a new light. They’re thinking if it could have happened to Willingham, then it could happen to many other people.”

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in 2006 that in the modern judicial system there has not been “a single case — not one — in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit. If such an event had occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent’s name would be shouted from the rooftops.”

This Saturday, at the 10th Annual March to Abolish the Death Penalty, people from all walks of life and all parts of Texas, the U.S. and other countries will gather at the Texas Capitol to raise their voices and shout out Todd Willingham’s name. The march is a gathering of activists, exonerated inmates and family members of the victims and those on death row.

Eugenia Willingham, mother of Todd Willingham, will be among the special guests at the march on Saturday at 2 p.m. on the South Steps of the Capitol.

On Friday, students can also join a panel discussion with exonerated death-row inmates Shujaa Graham and Curtis McCarty (7 p.m. in the Texas Union’s Sinclair Suite, Room 3.128).

I encourage everyone to attend the march to support the Willingham family as they fight to prove that Todd Willingham was innocent.

For more information and to sign a petition, visit camerontoddwillingham.com and marchforabolition.org.

Hedayati is a government and Middle Eastern studies senior and member of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty.

Sharon Keller denied Michael Richard’s constitutional rights when she closed her courtroom at 5 p.m. and refused to accept his last-minute appeal (“Representative initiates efforts for impeachment of Sharon Keller,” April 28). Justice is not a 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. issue, and everyone deserves a fair hearing in the court of law, even those who we deem to be the worst of our society. HR 480 is the only way to get Keller off the bench promptly, rather than the long process through the Commission on Judicial Ethics.

I invite everyone to visit www.sharonkiller.com and contact members of the House Committee on Judicial and Civil Jurisprudence in support of Rep. Lon Burnam’s impeachment resolution. By removing Sharon “Killer” Keller from the bench, we can set the example for others that no one is above the law, even the presiding judge of Texas’ highest criminal court.

Hooman Hedayati
Government and Middle Eastern Studies senior
Campaign to End the Death Penalty member

Right-wing culture warrior David Horowitz has come out with yet another anti-academic-freedom book and accompanying campus tour. The book, “One-Party Classroom,” is a virtually unreconstructed rehash of his previous books, “The Professors” and “Indoctrination U.” In these works he announces the shocking news that they teach feminism in women’s and gender studies, social movements in courses on social movements, and Arab and Muslim culture and politics in Middle Eastern studies.

Once a prominent member of the New Left, Horowitz has since established himself as an outspoken conservative advocate. Through his writing and activism, he is trying to convince the public that there is a crisis of political bias in college classrooms — one that needs to be solved by censoring the free exchange of ideas critical to higher education.
In 2007 he unsuccessfully brought the Academic Bill of Rights to the Texas Legislature.

Sponsored by state Sen. Jeff Wentworth, R-San Antonio, SCR 3 encouraged state colleges and universities to implement policies to safeguard the academic freedom of faculty and students. After facing evidence mounted by students and professors, SCR 3 failed in the Senate Subcommittee on Higher Education. When Pennsylvania set up a committee to investigate academic-freedom violations in the classroom, they found there were few, if any, problems and that legislation was not necessary.

In the same year, Horowitz helped to organize the “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week,” a national campaign to mobilize college students in support of George Bush’s war on terror and the alleged threat that Islam poses to the very foundations of western civilization. The poster promoting the event featured a picture of a teenage girl being stoned as an example of the status of women in the Islamic world. As it turned out, the “stoning” pictured actually took place in the 1994 Dutch film “De Steen.” Horowitz opportunistically claimed to be defending the rights of women during this campaign even as he called for the censorship of courses in women’s and gender studies.

Free Exchange on Campus, a national organization committed to defending academic freedom, has investigated other claims Horowitz has advanced. They concluded that he has “played fast and loose” with the facts, inventing or distorting information from course syllabi and denying the relevance of political discourse in fields like communication, sociology and literature. Imagine if your favorite professors suddenly couldn’t connect the literature you were reading to current events or even teach in the subjects they were hired to teach simply because those areas did not meet the standards of orthodoxy demanded by Horowitz.

His efforts would seem feeble and irrelevant if not for the fact that academic freedom is still seriously threatened by the political right. University administrators, under pressure from the Department of Homeland Security and right-wing donors to University endowments, have been successful in key instances of harassing and firing outspoken left-wing intellectuals in recent years. Since 9/11, universities have largely cooperated with State Department and Homeland Security harassment, wiretapping and denial of entry to Middle Eastern and Muslim scholars, such as prominent Oxford theology scholar Tariq Ramadan.

Until last September, University of South Florida professor Sami al-Arian had languished in jail for more than five years as the victim of an ongoing government campaign of persecution. New hearings are exposing the over-zealous prosecution by and anti-Muslim bigotry of Assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon Kromberg, who claimed during al-Arian’s trial that “all Arabs lie.”

Israel’s critics face especially harsh attacks in the name of academic freedom, as DePaul professor Norman Finkelstein discovered in 2007, when he was denied tenure after an intense campaign against him was led by Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz. Now that campus activists across the country have begun campaigns to boycott, divest from and sanction the state of Israel for its actions in Gaza, we can expect such pressure from the right to continue, with demagogues like Horowitz leading the charge.

Horowitz’s efforts have had serious consequences in establishing a chilling climate on our classrooms and threatening activist professors around the country. Locally, his targets include affiliates of women’s and gender studies, including communication studies professor Dana Cloud, among others. While calling Cloud an “anti-American radical” who “routinely repeats the propaganda of the Saddam regime,” he has repeatedly denied her invitation to a debate.

UT students deserve more respect from Horowitz. We are not a bunch of mindless zombies, following the lead of every theory and idea that’s put before us. On Thursday, David Horowitz will be giving a lecture with the inflammatory title “Exposing Radically Leftist College Professors.” Let’s welcome him with a peaceful protest outside the Jackson Geology Building, Room 2.324 at 6:30 p.m.

Hedayati is a government and Middle Eastern studies senior and a member of Campus Progress at the Center for American Progress.

In 2007, I was one of the 1,900 people and several groups who filed a judicial complaint against Judge Sharon Keller. I waited, somewhat impatiently, 15 months until the State Commission on Judicial Conduct finally charged Keller with misconduct last week. Now, I believe Keller should be suspended from office pending the outcome of her upcoming public trial. Rule 15(b) of the Procedural Rules for Removal or Retirement of Judges on the web site of the State Commission on Judicial Conduct allows the commission to request that the Supreme Court of Texas suspend a judge until the formal proceedings, which include a public trial, are complete and the Commission votes to dismiss the case, issue a public censure or recommend to the Supreme Court that Keller be removed from office.

If the commission refuses to do so, the Texas House should pass HR 480 filed by Rep. Lon Burnam, D-Fort Worth, to create a Special Committee on Impeachment for “gross neglect of duty and willful disregard for human life.” If she is impeached by the House, she is automatically suspended pending the outcome of her Senate trial.

Hooman Hedayati
Government senior
Campaign to End the Death Penalty

Last week, the tabloid News of the World published a picture of swimmer Michael Phelps using a bong to smoke marijuana at a University of South Carolina party. By smoking pot, Phelps set a wrong example for his younger fans. He should have known that smoking pot has several adverse affects such as getting munchies and losing corporate endorsements or one’s celebrity status. However, Phelps’ most appalling action was apologizing for smoking pot. According to several studies, nearly one out of two Americans and most college students have smoked marijuana. This includes President Barack Obama and his two predecessors, Justice Clarence Thomas, Newt Gingrich and Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Most people who smoke marijuana do recreationally, similar to those who drink alcohol.

Rather than apologizing, Phelps should admit that like millions of other successful Americans, he smokes marijuana in moderation and evidently it has not affected his athletic performance. He should speak out against the failed war on drugs and the absurd and hypocritical laws that in 2007, resulted in the arrest of more than 700,000 Americans just for the possession of marijuana.

In August the nation saw the result of months of the Texas anti-death penalty movement’s tireless work: the commutation of Kenneth Foster’s death sentence, mere hours before his scheduled execution. In September the U.S. Supreme Court announced that it would take a Kentucky case to decide if the method of lethal injection used by many states, including Texas, constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. As a result, there could be a de facto moratorium on executions nation-wide, and possibly in Texas, until there is a ruling on this case. However, despite the recent successes at the Supreme Court and of the Kenneth Foster campaign, the Texas anti-death penalty movement is in troubling shape. Major foundations and national anti-death penalty leaders see Texas as a lost cause and are choosing not to fund a grassroots infrastructure here.

An enormous opportunity looms in Texas to actually achieve a moratorium on executions because of growing awareness that innocent people can be caught up in the system. But, lacking support on the national scale, Texas groups working to stop executions are not as well-equipped as they could be to take advantage of this ripe political moment.

The Kenneth Foster campaign taught us that organizing at the grassroots level works. Gov. Rick Perry would not have stopped Kenneth Foster’s execution if there had been no public outrage concerning the planned death of a person who had not killed anyone. The group that played the biggest role in stopping Foster’s execution was a student organization right here at UT: the Campaign to End the Death Penalty. In a thank-you letter after his commutation, Kenneth Foster wrote, “these people are gladiators when it comes to grassroots activism, and they definitely were the force behind this frontline.”

The Texas nonprofit groups dedicated to abolishing the death penalty are run mainly by volunteers, and they lack funding and professional staff. There is not a single person in any grassroots anti-death penalty organization in Texas who is paid to work full-time. However, other states with far fewer executions than Texas have several full time staff members and much more funding.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars have been directed to fight the death penalty in states such as New York and New Jersey, where there have not even been any executions since the 1960s. If that kind of money could come to Texas, it would be much easier to put pressure on policymakers. A bill to create an Innocence Commission in Texas died last May in the House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee, and its failure to pass was a direct result of misplaced priorities by the national anti-death penalty movement.

The Tides Foundation’s Death Penalty Mobilization Fund donated $50,000 last year to the Wisconsin Coalition Against the Death Penalty and $20,000 to Iowans Against the Death Penalty. What’s wrong with this picture? Neither Wisconsin nor Iowa even has a death penalty. Wisconsin has not executed anyone since the mid-19th century. Meanwhile, five Texas executions were scheduled in September alone, and more than 400 people have been executed in Texas since 1982. Still, a group of several Texas anti-death penalty organizations applied to the same Tides funding program but received nothing.

The JEHT Foundation (Justice, Equality, Human dignity and Tolerance) gave a total of $542,400 to New Yorkers Against the Death Penalty from 2004 to 2006, but there hasn’t been an execution in New York since 1963, and there is one person on that state’s death row.

Working against the death penalty in Texas is not a lost cause, as working against segregation in Montgomery, Ala., was also not a lost cause during the civil rights movement in the 1960s. While Texas is ground zero in the fight to abolish the death penalty, we are making progress. But to continue this progress, the national anti-death penalty movement should invest more time and money in our state. How many lives could have been saved, as was Kenneth Foster’s, if national campaigns channeled more funds into Texas over the last 10 years?

Equal debate (on opening the presidential debates) 10-10-2008

No moratorium on the death penalty’s flaws 9-2-2008