US District Judge Amy St. Eve ordered Mohammed Salah to serve 21 months in prison, asserting that telling the truth is the “bedrock of our judicial system.”
The judge continued that a stiff sentence was needed to provide “a deterrent.” Salah was also ordered to pay $25,000 and do 100 hours of community service.
Are you kidding me?
President Bush has been lying to the American people on just about everything related to the Iraq War.
Does anyone care that the Bush lies have cost us more than 3,600 American lives and resulted in serious disabilities for 20,000-plus other American soldiers?
Lewis Libby, the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was convicted of lying and sentenced to 30 months in prison for obstructing an investigation into the outing of a CIA spy whose husband criticized Bush for the Iraq war lies.
But Bush commuted Libby’s sentence, although Libby still must pay the $250,000 fine.
Welcome to justice in America, where criminals with clout are given a pass, and those with Muslim names are given the hammer.
Salah has been punished enough.
He served five years in an Israeli prison accused of supporting the Hamas terrorist organization. Those Israeli prisons are nothing like the comfortable country-club resorts where most American politicians convicted of crimes are sent.
After serving time in the Israeli Gulag, Salah returned to the US to be with his family.
He would have been allowed to walk free except that Sept. 11, 2001 happened. The Bush administration needed scapegoats to show the American public that they were doing their job in fighting terrorism.
Salah suddenly became “Terror Suspect No. 1,” even though Salah’s anti-Israel activism has never been related to anti-American extremism nor tied to the Al-Qaeda terrorist organization.
During the trial, Salah’s attorneys demanded they be allowed to question Jack Mustafa, Salah’s “friend” who was also the undercover informant on the FBI payroll.
Rather than allow Mustafa to be questioned, the Justice Department dropped Mustafa’s evidence and were then forced to drop the terrorism charge, too. Mustafa was also dropped from the FBI payroll.
After a lengthy trial, the jury acquitted Salah on the racketeering charge, but convicted him on the “perjury” charge.
The perjury had to do with an unrelated, politically motivated civil lawsuit filed by
the parents of an American boy who was killed in a terrorist attack while in the occupied West Bank.
Naturally, the judge ruled against all the Arabs named as defendants in that lawsuit. What else is new?
The decision by Judge St. Eve follows in that tradition, a pathetic miscarriage of justice; the continued mistreatment of an innocent man whose only crime is that he is an Arab who has an unpopular view of Israel.
Salah’s family, meanwhile, has been devastated by the brutality of the federal prosecution. The case destroyed his life and the lives of his wife and children.
But who cares about justice for them? Apparently, not Judge St. Eve.
What Judge St. Eve did by sentencing Salah to 21 months in prison is to make a politically motivated statement declaring that an Arab can never receive justice in America. If there is a bedrock to anything, it is that this sentence proves the American justice system is politically corrupt, void of principles, absent of justice and so unfair that crooks with clout can walk while the “unpopular innocent” are forced to suffer the unjust consequences.
— Ray Hanania is an award winning syndicated columnist and author and is senior columnist for the Southwest News-Herald in Chicago. He can be reached at www.hanania.com.
