Written on 08 September 2019.

Here’s What He Has to Say About What’s Going on Now.

Michael German, a former federal agent, sees cause for praise and concern

Michael German, a former federal agent who spent years infiltrating white supremacist groups, said the work of the groups constituted “organized criminal activity,” and he asked, in so many words, “Where is the FBI?”

   Federal authorities wound up arresting eight members of the Rise Above Movement, and five of them have since pleaded guilty to federal riot charges. This summer, FBI Director Christopher Wray testified that, over the last nine months, the bureau’s domestic terrorism investigations had led to 90 arrests, many of them involving white supremacists. And in recent weeks, there have been additional arrests: a Las Vegas man said to be affiliated with Atomwaffen and a young man in Chicago affiliated with Patriot Front, another white supremacist group.

   The activity concerning the threat of white racists has gone beyond arrests. There have been a variety of proposals making their way through Congress aimed at creating federal criminal statutes that might make prosecuting domestic terrorism threats more effective. The FBI Agents Association has supported new laws.

   We went back to German, a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program and the author of the forthcoming book “Disrupt, Discredit, and Divide: How the New FBI Damages Democracy,” to inquire about the significance of the seeming burst of enforcement efforts.

   The FBI, made aware of German’s observations and arguments, declined to comment, but it provided a link to recent testimony by bureau officials before Congress.

There have been a handful of arrests of alleged white supremacists in recent weeks. What do you make of them? A temporary reaction to the El Paso, Texas, massacre? Evidence of a deeper commitment by the FBI? Coincidence?

   First, the arrests of several white nationalists allegedly planning acts of violence since the El Paso attack demonstrate beyond question that the FBI has all the authority it needs to act proactively against white supremacist violence. Claims from the FBI Agents Association and other current and former Justice Department officials that the government needs new laws to target this violence are false. I worked successful domestic terrorism undercover operations against white supremacists in the 1990s, and no one ever suggested we didn’t have all the authority we needed.

   It is hard to know if these arrests mark a new increase in attention to far-right violence because the Justice Department doesn’t keep reliable data about how many investigations and prosecutions it conducts against white supremacists. It sometimes categorizes them as domestic terrorism, other times as hate crimes or even gang crimes, obscuring the true scope of the violence they inflict on our society. And since the Justice Department defers the investigation and prosecution of hate crimes to state and local law enforcement, the FBI doesn’t even know how many people white supremacists kill each year.

   The Justice Department and FBI de-prioritize the investigation and prosecution of far-right violence as a matter of policy, not a lack of authority. These recent cases are a result of increased public pressure to do something about these crimes. But the Justice Department and FBI have done nothing to amend their policies that de-prioritize the investigation of white supremacist crimes. Maintaining public pressure and focusing on changing the biases that drive these policies is essential to forcing a change in priorities at these agencies.

At least two of the arrests appear to have involved a certain infiltration of white hate groups online. Noteworthy? Overdue?

   Many researchers have suggested that the internet fuels white nationalist violence and therefore suppression of these online communities is necessary. But white supremacists have been killing people in this country for more than a 100 years before the internet was created. They use the internet more to communicate today than 20 years ago, just like all the rest of us do, but that doesn’t mean there is more violence. In fact, as the recent cases suggest, internet communications make them far easier to track and infiltrate, so it is more a boost to law enforcement more than to violent militants.

   But mass monitoring of social media for clues isn’t an effective strategy, as there are far more people expressing racist ideas online than committing violence. The FBI would be very busy chasing down false leads, which would only dull the response. Instead, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies should work from reasonable criminal predicates. Where there is objectively credible evidence that someone is planning to do harm they should act. The number of homicides in the U.S. has fallen significantly since the 1980s and 1990s, but so has the clearance rate. Even though there are fewer homicides now, fewer are being solved. I think it is because we are spending so much time and resources on suspicion-less surveillance and intelligence gathering rather than traditional evidence-based law enforcement tactics.

There is a variety of proposed legislation aimed at creating more specific federal domestic terrorism statutes. Worthy? Wrongheaded?

   Congress shouldn’t pass broad new laws or stiffer penalties, as there are already dozens of federal statutes outlawing domestic terrorism, hate crimes and organized violent crime that carry significant sentences. There are bills that demand better data collection by the Justice Department, which would reveal where counterterrorism resources should be devoted and where they are being wasted. This is the better approach. Proper policies can’t be developed without a better understanding of the crime problem.

   In the meantime, Congress should explore mechanisms to fund and implement community-led restorative justice practices that would redress the communal injuries hate crimes are designed to inflict. White supremacists try to intimidate and marginalize the communities they attack. Making sure these communities are cared for, protected and supported after an attack frustrates that goal. More policing isn’t always the right answer, and certainly not the only one.

There was recently news coverage of leaked FBI threat assessments listing the promotion of an array of political conspiracy theories as a domestic menace. What did you make of that?

   The FBI intelligence assessment declaring conspiracy theorists a domestic terrorism threat should worry all of us. It had a line defining conspiracy theorists as those who do not hold the “official” or “prevailing” view on a particular topic. Given that the intelligence community has often been the promoter of false narratives, particularly about the lawfulness of its own conduct, giving them license to target people who disagree with the “official” view is chilling. It is basically a declaration that the government will treat dissent as dangerous.

There was a recent case that has to puzzle the public. A Coast Guard lieutenant was arrested with guns and a target list of politicians and others, and held on firearms charges. At least one federal magistrate thought he deserved bail because the government had failed to provide evidence of terrorist acts and the simple gun charges didn’t merit him being held without bail. A judge overturned the magistrate and kept the lieutenant held. All that can be hard to follow for an American public concerned about safeguarding its rights and its citizens. Thoughts?

   It’s difficult to talk about cases that have not yet gone to trial because there is little information available outside the government’s allegations, which haven’t been proven yet. But there are some principles of our legal system that should be applied in all cases, including this one, even though we seem to have moved far from them over the years. First, people are innocent until proven guilty. That means, absent government evidence that a defendant poses a threat to the public or to abscond, that person should be released until trial, and bond should only be used to guarantee appearance. Of course, many people with allegations that seem less serious than those against the Coast Guard officer don’t receive bond, but that is a question for those judges and prosecutors, not the ones involved in this case.

   Obviously the government initially failed to present evidence that justified pretrial confinement, so based on the charged conduct the judge considered bond. This result should happen more often, not less. When the government got its act together, added charges and presented evidence of a potential threat to the public, the judge ordered him held. The burden is on the government and shouldn’t be met through sensationalized press releases but through reasonable evidence presented in court.

   Second, prosecutors can only charge people with crimes they committed, not crimes the government thinks they might commit in the future. Lots of people stockpile weapons in this country. And if keeping a creepy diary is against the law, plenty of people will go to jail. Where the government has evidence that laws were broken, they have the power to act, which — ironically given the hyperbolic news coverage of this incident — they did here. The officer was arrested and is being prosecuted for crimes the government alleges he committed, so there seems to be no problem.

   The Justice Department seems to have tried to make this into a test case for demanding new authorities, even though prosecutors obviously had enough evidence to address the threat. Compare this case to the Larry Hopkins case in New Mexico. There the FBI received a tip in 2017 that a formerly incarcerated felon who was the “commander” of a border militia group that harassed migrants was also planning to assassinate Hillary Clinton, George Soros and Barack Obama. The FBI went to Hopkins’ trailer and recovered nine firearms he was not permitted to own due to his previous felony convictions, which included weapons charges and impersonating a police officer. The FBI did not arrest Hopkins and instead let him continue to operate with his militia group for 18 months, harassing migrants in the desert, until a video of his group pointing weapons at a group of migrants they detained went viral and sparked public outrage. Only then did the FBI take action.

   Comparing the two cases, the FBI had much more significant evidence of potential dangerousness from Hopkins than from the Coast Guard officer, yet they took no action against Hopkins. I think they saw the Coast Guard officer’s case as a ready-made scandal near D.C. that they could sensationalize to pressure Congress into passing a broad new domestic terrorism law. Obviously, they already had enough authority to arrest him on the drug and weapons charge, and his possession of illegal silencers. So there was no lack of authority to arrest him in the first place. It was a manufactured scandal.

What, if anything, is different today than two summers ago in Charlottesville concerning the threat of white supremacists and the government’s response at all levels to it?

   I think the violence in Charlottesville was a wake-up call for everyone. The media finally recognized that white supremacists were engaging in terrorism, too. The level of violence these far-right groups inflict has been persistent over time, but studies show that the media gave terrorist acts perpetrated by Muslims 350% more coverage than violence committed by other terrorists. The increased reporting post-Charlottesville eventually caused policymakers to take notice, which in turn compelled the FBI and Justice Department to begin to take these crimes more seriously. The media coverage drives public perception, which causes policymakers to act. It remains to be seen whether they react in a way that improves the situation and builds a more inclusive society, or makes it worse by giving law enforcement broad powers to continue targeting marginalized communities agitating for civil rights and changes in government policies.

 Joe Sexton -- ProPublica

Written on 03 September 2019.

Written on 08 September 2019.

Old City, Kashgar, Xinjiang. (Joshua Kucera)

   It is coming up on a year since Zarifahona Islamova last heard from her cousin, Gulokcha.

   Gulokcha, who is in her late 50s, is from Urumqi, the capital of China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. She traveled to Uzbekistan last August and stayed at Islamova’s home for a month. Before leaving, she promised to post a message on Facebook to let friends and family know she had got home. The note of reassurance never appeared, said Zarifahona.

   By all appearances, Gulochka, whose name, like that of Islamova, has been changed in this article to preserve anonymity, is one of countless ethnic Uighurs to disappear amid the Chinese government’s relentless campaign of repression against Muslim communities in Xinjiang.

   The plight of China’s ethnic Kazakhs has been the object of vocal campaigning by some activists in Kazakhstan, despite the harassment of authorities there. But in Uzbekistan, the Uighurs are almost never mentioned. Their very presence in the country is sometimes questioned. 

   But Gulokcha exists.

   “Gulokcha was a shuttle trader. She brought goods from Urumqi and sold them in Uzbekistan. In the evening, we used to chat about all kinds of things, but mainly about our Uighur relatives in China,” Zarifahona told Eurasianet in her Tashkent home.

   Zarifahona’s eyes welled with tears as she spoke, recalling how she used to exchange messages with Gulokcha on Facebook and WhatsApp. That stopped once Beijing began clamping down.

   “I heard a rumor that all the popular messengers were blocked in China and that people were being punished for installing them on their phones. That the authorities did not want Uighurs to speak with their relatives from Uzbekistan,” Zarifahona said.

   All Zarifahona has left of Gulokcha are photos and a resplendent cotton robe she brought her from Urumqi.

   These tales of disappearance are easy to find in Uzbekistan, despite the official censorship hanging over the narrative. Farukh is also an ethnic Uighur but holds an Uzbek passport. He told Eurasianet about a friend in Urumqi who owned a factory manufacturing socks. About one year ago, the authorities confiscated the factory, said Farukh, who asked for his surname not to be published out of fear of reprisals.

   “They closed the mosques. And you cannot even observe the fast during Ramadan. Even the Uighurs who simply do business, peacefully, are being subjected to persecution. They confiscate their goods, take away their factories and seize their trading stalls,” Farukh said.

   Zarifahon said she reads Uighur websites almost every day. Uzbek media outlets almost never talk about Xinjiang. Reports about China in general, meanwhile, are reported in a relentlessly upbeat key and touch on inoffensive areas, like culture and business, and how Chinese investment is flowing into Uzbekistan.

   Sergei Abashin, a St. Petersburg-based ethnographer who has studied Central Asia for decades, is certain this censorship can be explained by the economic ties binding Tashkent and Beijing. 

   And there is “this fear among the authorities, that showing some kind of support for irredentism could stimulate radical, political and Islamic opposition sentiments inside the country itself,” Abashin said.

   Abashin said the veil of silence could also be attributed to the fact that Uzbekistan has so long been a closed country. 

   “Citizens had no access to outside information and had no particular interest in events taking place in other countries,” he said.

   Today, there are three Uighur national cultural centers operating in Uzbekistan. The community produces its own Uighur-language magazines, written in the Cyrillic alphabet. One is called Taklimakan, named for the desert in the Xinjiang autonomous province that occupies an area around the size of Germany.

   There are also three weekly programs aired in Uighur on state radio and short segments a couple of times monthly on television. Gulbahor Kurbanova has for some years been the voice and face of Uighur news in Uzbekistan. She professes, however, to be quite uninterested in what is happening in Xinjiang – a fact that generates no small dose of venom among the Uighur community.

   “Our programs are dedicated exclusively to covering the life and activities of ethnic Uighurs in Uzbekistan. The current situation of the Uighurs in China is not covered,” Kurbanova told Eurasianet.

   Even the size of the Uighur community is something of a mystery. According to the last census carried out in Soviet times, in 1989, there were almost 36,000 Uighurs living in the Uzbek Soviet republic. That accounted for one-fifth of 1 percent of the population. No proper census has been done since then, but official statistics in 2000 estimated the size of the Uighur community was around 19,500 – a considerable decrease.

    Ablat Khodjayev, a professor at Tashkent’s National University of Uzbekistan, an ethnic Uighur and the author of books about the ethnic group, proposes far greater numbers.

   “Eighty years ago, there were around 1.5 million Uighurs living in the republics of Central Asia,” Khodjayev said, citing his own research. “In Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, they preserved their identity. But in Uzbekistan, a portion of the Uighurs designated themselves as Uzbek. Many of them assimilated.”

   In truth, short of conducting a vast and exhaustive research exercise on the basis of genetic family trees, reaching any kind of clarity on the matter is almost impossible to imagine. Uighurs have migrated across Central Asia over centuries, be it for trade or work or as refugees from the various wars, repressions and revolutions that have convulsed the region.

   And it does not help that the Uzbek government has long showed signs of reluctance to even acknowledge its Uighur minority. Khodjayev tells a tale from the mid-1990s when the late President Islam Karimov met with then-Chinese Prime Minister Li Peng. Eurasianet has been unable to independently confirm that the incident occurred as told, although the persistence of the story speaks volumes about the anxiety Uzbek Uighurs have felt about the authorities.

   “Karimov was asked: “How many Uighurs are there in Uzbekistan?’ He answered that there were no Uighurs,” Khodjayev said, relating his account of this alleged exchange. “Karimov knew that there were Uighurs, but he did not want to get into a conversation about it.”

Originally published by EurasiaNet.org

Written on 10 August 2019.

   Während derzeit die Einschulung von Migrantenkindern mit geringen Deutsch-Kenntnissen in Deutschland kontrovers diskutiert wird, fehlt der Blick auf die langfristigen Aspekte der "Eindeutschung" eben dieser Kinder.

   In den USA gibt es Staaten, in denen das Vorrecht des Englischen als allgemein-gültige Sprache angesichts des rasch vordringenden Spanischen umkämpft ist. Zweisprachige Ausschilderung nicht nur von Flughäfen und Autobus-Bahnhöfen ist vielerorts seit Jahren die Regel.

   Nicht so in Deutschland. Mülltonnenbeschriftung in deutsch und türkisch, wie in Berlin, ergibt noch lange keine Zweisprachigkeit. Die Vielsprachigkeit der Zuwanderer -- von russisch bis Urdu und Haussa - beschert der deutschen Sprache die angenehme Rolle des gemeinsamen Nenners, die das Englische in Amerika allen Verfechtern einer schwindenden weissen Vorherrschaft zum Trotz allmählich einbüsst.

   Auch wenn auf Schulhöfen im Ruhrgebiet und in Berlin oft mehr türkisch und arabisch als deutsch zu hören ist: am Deutschen führt kein Weg vorbei.

   Die Mehrsprachigkeit der Grundschulklassen verdeutlicht allen Kindern zunächst, dass es mehr als nur eine Sprache gibt, in der man sich verständigen kann. Nicht nur Migrantenkinder lernen deutsch -- auch deutsche Kinder und Lehrer¹⁾ lernen zumindest Brocken in ein oder zwei fremden Sprachen. Ein paar Begriffe und Grüsse in türkisch und arablsch verstehen heutzutage wohl die meisten jungen deutschsprachigen Berliner, selbst wenn sie in Dahlem oder Reinickendorf aufgewachsen sind.

   Wer aber am meisten profitiert, sind die Migrantenkinder, so sie nicht aktiven Widerstand gegen die Zwangsbeschulung und Zwangseindeutschung leisten, weil ihr Lebensweg im Clan bequem vorgezeichnet ist und Schulabschlüsse und Deutschkenntnisse dabei unnötig sind.

   Für die nicht-clanverhafteten Kinder bietet das Erlernen einer Zweitsprache -- deutsch -- eine riesige Chance. Die intellektuelle Auseinandersetzung mit zwei verschiedenen Kulturkreisen stimuliert und bereichert.

   Mit zwei Sprachen und zwei kulturellen Grundlagen ins Berufsleben zu starten bedeutet einen Vorsprung gegenüber den einsprachigen Konkurrenten. Wer zwei Sprachen voll beherrscht, tut sich erfahrungsgemäss leichter, eine dritte Sprache -- etwa englisch -- zu erlernen. Drei Sprachen sind im Arbeitsmarkt schon eine kleine Berufsausbildung wert: ein Vorteil, mit dem Migantenkinder Nachteile kompensieren können, denen sie oft begegnen: einen fremdartigen Namen, eine wenig beliebte Religion, eine dunkle Hautfarbe, eine Adresse in einem Armenviertel.

   Während deutsche Landbewohner, die in der Dialektkultur leben und hochdeutsch nur in der Schule lernen, sich in Grosstädten bei der Jobsuche schwer tun, kann ein Migrantenkind mit akzentfreiem hochdeutsch punkten. Zweisprachigkeit schärft das Sprachbewusstsein und hilft, sprachliche Fehler zu eliminieren.

   Gerade Europa mit seiner Vielsprachigkeit und seiner immer beweglicher werdenden Bevölkerung, die gerne aus einer Vielzahl von Gründen den Wohnort und das Land wechselt, prämiiert die Mehrsprachigkeit und die damit verbundene kulturelle Flexibilität.

   Ein Haussa-sprechender, dunkelhäutiger Deutscher mit guter Ausbildung wäre ein gesuchter Kandidat für den diplomatischen Dienst ebenso wie als Vertreter der Wirtschaft in West- und Zentralafrika. Oder als hoch geehrter Vertreter des Ursprungslandes seiner Familie in Deutschland.

   Wenn es gut eingedeutschten Migrantenkindern gelingt, die Handicaps der Migration zu überwinden. so stehen ihnen mehr Türen offen als gleichaltrigen, ähnlich situierten einheimischen Kindern. Der Weg zur Elite-Bildung bietet sich.

   Dank Migration wird die deutsche Elite bunter werden und davon profitieren.

Heinrich von Loesch

1)

An der Mailänder Trotter-Schule lernen auch sieben ägyptische Kinder, ven denen zwei erst neu angekommen sind. Um die Kommunikation der Neuen mit den Lehrern zu verbessern, haben die perfekt zweisprachigen anderen ägyptischen Kinder ein Vokabularium in arabisch und italienisch geschrieben und lehren die Lehrerin Grundlagen in arabisch.