Monday, November 20, 2006

UK: Muslim cop banned from guarding Blair

The super-correct Mr Blair does not mess around with his own safety

Britain's Metropolitan Police is being sued by a Muslim officer upset he was removed from the force protecting dignitaries like Prime Minister Tony Blair. Constable Amjad Farooq, 39, had his special security revoked and was removed from the Diplomatic Protection Group after just six weeks, The Independent reported Tuesday. Farooq said he was told he had failed a security background check because two of his sons had attended a mosque associated with a Muslim cleric linked to a suspected terrorist group.

He claims in his legal challenge he was informed his presence on the unit might upset the U.S. Secret Service, which works with the department's close-protection unit, The Telegraph reported. Farooq is claiming racial and religious discrimination against the department for the December 2003 incident, and a tribunal will hear the case next year, the reports said. Last month, at the height of the Israeli-Lebanon conflict, another Muslim constable was excused from guarding the Israeli Embassy in London because of concern about his family's Lebanese links.

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Don't always believe the victim

Two recent news stories differ in significant details but share a common message: false accusations of sexual abuse kill innocent people and devastate lives. The stories reveal the terrible human cost imposed by the often heard demand, 'always believe the victim'. In these cases, the accuser should have been asked for more evidence.

Item One: A sailor kidnapped and killed a Marine corporal because a woman in whom he was romantically interested implicated the Marine in a gang rape that never happened.

Item Two: After learning from his wife that their 2-year-old daughter had been molested by a neighbor, a father stabbed the accused man to death. Police later determined no sexual assault had occurred.

Both men have been arrested for murder. The sailor has pleaded 'guilty'; the father, whom police found covered by the dead man's blood with the murder weapon nearby, has pleaded 'not guilty'.

The stories differ in significant ways. For example, the sailor's girlfriend admits to inventing the rape. Despite questions about whether a 2-year-old could coherently make the accusation, the girl's mother insists that her daughter said the neighbor "put it" on her belly and her nose..."He comes to me in the starry nights." In short, the first woman lied; the second may have been mistaken. Lies and mistakes are common causes of false accusations. But even if the causal factor differs, both stories highlight the need for accusations to be weighed and investigated by an unbiased third party before they are acted upon.

The stories share other common elements. Two innocent men are dead. The lives of two others are destroyed. No charges have been brought against the women although police are examining the possibility that the mother knowingly filed a false police report.

Those who committed the murders properly bear the brunt of legal and moral responsibility. But anyone who spreads a false or mistaken accusation must assume some responsibility for its fall-out, if only on a moral level. And society should realize that the death of two innocent men is the logical and predictable consequence of the demand to always believe the 'victim.'

It is natural for a man to believe his girlfriend and vice versa; it is natural for parents to believe a child. But acting to punish another person solely on the basis of belief literally kills innocent people. For ten years, I have argued that both the law and society have embraced a fundamentally wrong approach to accusations of sexual abuse. The approach reverses the presumption of innocence and assumes that an accused is guilty until proven innocent. It also includes giving false accusers a 'free pass'; that is, until recently, it was rare for those who filed false reports to be punished by law.

The issue of false accusations is often debated in terms of statistics and studies with ad hominem attacks punctuating the exchange. When a sympathetic face emerges, it is usually that of the 'victim' or of a hypothetical future victim who 'will be discouraged from speaking out' if society demands evidence before rendering belief. Only now, in debacles like the Duke rape case, have people started to look instead into the faces of those being destroyed by accusations.

No one wants real victims to suffer one moment longer or to repeat their stories one time more than justice requires. But real victims are not threatened by a demand for evidence. And, as difficult as it may be for lovers and parents who believe accusations, they must realize that acting on a mistaken belief has life-and-death consequences.

Two responses I commonly receive when asking for evidence before believing an accusation of sexual assault are: "you are only concerned with men's rights" - men being the presumed perpetrators; and, "you don't care if victims are discouraged from speaking out." (As a woman who has been raped, the latter has a bitter irony.)

The first charge is easily dispelled. Consider the two preceding stories. The name of the Marine who was murdered was Justin L. Huff, age 23. He was the husband of Rebecca Huff and the father of five-month-old Justin, who carries the name of a dad he will never see. The last text message on murdered Huff's cell phone came from Rebecca: "I love you and I miss you very much." The name of the neighbor who was stabbed to death in his own bed was Barry James. James' 87-year-old blind mother, for whom he cared, found the blood-soaked body of her son.

Those who demand automatic acceptance of accusations may harden their hearts against a murdered father and loving son. But they are also turning away from Rebecca Huff and James' mother. Are they not women?

The second charge is that punishing faux victims will discourage real ones from speaking. That's an odd loop of logic. It is equivalent to saying that exposing lies discourages the truth or stamping out fraud reduces honesty. The opposite is true. Women (and men) are brutally victimized every day. If victims get a reputation as being liars or careless about evidence, then instead of receiving automatic belief, they will be automatically dismissed.

Both responses are wrong. Accusations are deadly serious and they destroy lives. There is a necessary line between 'believing a victim' and acting against the perpetrator. Those who argue for believing accusations without hard evidence are helping to erase that line. In doing so, they do not defend victims. They create them.

Source



For someone who is "denied" free speech, this guy sure gets a big hearing

A leading British historian has sparked a row about free speech in America after an article criticising Israel prompted a backlash from Jewish groups and the cancellation of meetings where he was due to speak. Tony Judt, a liberal Jew and former kibbutznik, was accused of calling for the destruction of Israel after he wrote an article in The New York Review of Books in 2003, and in The Sunday Times, arguing for the creation of a secular bi-national state of Jews and Palestinians.

More than 100 leading academics signed a letter in last week's New York Review of Books protesting at the suppression of Judt's talks.

The former Oxford history don, who has been professor of European studies at New York University for 20 years, again became a magnet for criticism this year when he defended an essay written by Stephen Walt of Harvard and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago which criticised the "Israel lobby" in America.

Judt was due to give a talk on the subject of the lobby at the Polish consulate in New York last month, but it was cancelled at an hour's notice after two Jewish organisations, the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee, signalled their displeasure. "The phone calls were very elegant but may be interpreted as exercising a delicate pressure," said Krzysztof Kasprzyk, the Polish consul-general.

Judt said: "It is a very sensitive issue for Poles. They are uniquely vulnerable because the country has a long history of moral ambivalence towards Jews." The historian also withdrew from a lecture on the Holocaust at a Catholic college in New York after learning that it was to be picketed by Holocaust survivors dressed in pyjamas.

The academics' letter supporting Judt - whose latest book, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, was well received and was Cherie Blair's holiday reading this summer - said: "The Polish consulate is not obliged to promote free speech. But the rules of the game in America oblige citizens to encourage rather than stifle public debate."

Judt intends to hit back with a lecture on December 4 in New York on self-censorship and free speech in open societies. "I've been accused of being a self- hating Jew, a conspiracy theorist and an anti-semite," he said. "It's absurd but it is an echo of what is said to non-Jews when they criticise Israel."

He contrasted the lively debate about his views in Israel to the reaction in America, where he has been accused of advocating a "genocidal liberalism" that would lead to the slaughter of Jews. Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League, admitted that a member of his staff had rung the Polish consulate, but denied that he had sought to cancel Judt's talk. "We are perturbed by his views but not enough to prevent him from speaking," Foxman said.

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