(Videos recorded by Rachel Tabachnick; more videos coming shortly.)

Vice President Joe Biden was greeted in Jerusalem with the announcement that the Israeli Interior Ministry approved the construction of 1600 new homes in Occupied East Jerusalem contrary to U.S. wishes and complicating Biden’s mission to help jump start the peace process. But Biden should have known that Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu intended to upset his plans by Netanyahu’s appearance with John Hagee.

The day after a series of talks between US Special Envoy for the Middle East George Mitchell and Netanyahu, and a day before Biden’s arrival, Netanyahu appeared onstage with Pastor John Hagee in Jerusalem. The occasion was Hagee’s Night To Honor Israel, an event the far-right Texas-based preacher arranged to tout his ministry’s millions in donations to Israeli organizations and to level bellicose rhetoric against Israel’s perceived enemies.

At the gathering, Hagee called Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “the Hitler of the Middle East” and denounced the Goldstone Report as “character assassination by an unbiased and uninformed committee.”

Netanyahu welcomed the crowd of 1000 American evangelicals to Jerusalem, a city he described as “the undivided, eternal capitol of the Jewish people. Then, he told them, “I salute you! The Jewish people salute you!” He used the rest of his speech to call for “tough, biting sanctions” against Iran that “bite deep into its energy sector.”

Hagee and Netanyahu appear together on stage:

In the audience were top-level members of the Israeli government, from Ambassador Michael Oren to Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat to Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon. Also present was Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, the chief rabbi of the illegal West Bank settlement of Efrat who gained notoriety for lobbying President Bill Clinton to pardon his friend, fugitive billionaire Marc Rich. Ayalon had stirred controversy days before when he refused to meet with a US congressional delegation brought to Israel by the progressive Jewish group J Street.

Part One of Hagee’s speech:

Part Two:

Pastor Hagee in Jerusalem 3/8/10 (Part II) from Max J Blumenthal on Vimeo.

Hagee’s ceremony featured a 15-minute film highlighting the recipients of donations from John Hagee Ministries that totaled $58 million since 2001. The recipients included Jewish settlements from the West Bank like Gush Etzion and Shomron, which was involved in promoting an “Obama Hilltop project” that promoted more settlement building and compared Obama to Pharoah. Hagee also announced funding for a pressure group run by the settlers evacuated from Gush Katif in Gaza in 2005. During Israel’s assault on Gaza in 2009, a group of Gush Katif residents lobbied the Israel government to allow them to resettle the Palestinian coastal region.

Who is Hagee funding in Israel?

Who Is Hagee Funding In Israel? from Max Blumenthal on Vimeo.

The most notable of Hagee’s funding recipients was an organization called Im Tirtzu. A student representative of this group appeared in the film to thank Hagee for “help[ing] us to ensure that students in Israel are on the right path, the path of Zionism, the love of Israel, the path of solidarity.” Another student called for “the second revolution in Israel.”

In February, Im Tirtzu funding a smear campaign against former Knesset member and New Israel Fund Director Naomi Chazan that included posters caricaturing her with a horn on her head. The group misleadingly accused the New Israel Fund of bankrolling 16 human rights organizations that contributed documentation to the Goldstone Report.

The smear campaign led to unsuccessful legislation in the Knesset designed to further cripple already marginalized Israeli human rights groups. Meanwhile, the Jerusalem Post fired Chazan as a columnist without explanation. Gideon Levy, a columnist for Ha’aretz, called Im Tirtzu “a McCarthyite movement” for its attacks on Chazan.

Although CUFI attempted to distance itself from Im Tirtzu’s campaign, the organization’s appearance during CUFI’s Jerusalem ceremony suggested that Hagee would continue to provide it with funding well into the future.

Republican Senator John McCain repudiated the endorsement of Hagee during his 2008 presidential campaign after Hagee’s statements describing the Holocaust as a fulfillment of divine prophecy came to light. Hagee has also said that he believed the anti-Christ was “partially Jewish, as was Adolph Hitler.” However, none of Hagee’s comments have deterred Israeli government officials from embracing him or accepting his millions in annual charity.

During Hagee’s speech, he made no secret of his support for the illegal settlement enterprise that has been the source of difficulties between the US and Israel. “The settlements are not the problem,” he boomed from the podium. “The problem is the refusal of Arab leaders to respect the right of Jewish people to live anywhere in the Middle East.”

Hagee received a rousing ovation from the crowd and the Israeli government officials seated beside the podium when he proclaimed, “World leaders do not have the authority to tell Israel and the Jewish people what they can and cannot do in the city of Jerusalem. They don’t have the authority to tell them what they can and cannot build, who can and and cannot live there.”

The following day, on March 9, Vice President Joseph Biden arrived in Israel to meet with Netanyahu and officials from the Palestinian Authority. He told reporters after touching down that he saw “a moment of real opportunity.”

A complete list of Israeli organizations funded by John Hagee Ministries is below the fold:

Alut Autism

American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee
Christian Friends of Israeli Communities — Gush Katif (settlement related)
Ariel Israel Sports Building (settlement related)
Council of Young Israel Rabbis (settlement related)
Barzilai Medical Center, Ashkelon
Ben Gurion University, Negev
Boys Town Jerusalem
Ehrenberg Endowment Holocaust education
Elon Moreh Shechem, “renewal of the settlement in shomron”
Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity
Eretz Neheredet
Yeshivat Reishit
Friends of Gush Katif (settlement related)
Hadadi Breast Cancer Survivors
Haamayan Banegev
Yeshiva Har Bracha
Herzog hospital
Im Tirtzu, student rep: “We thank you, John Hagee, for your support, which has helped us to ensure that students in israel and in jerusalem are on the right path, the path of zionism, the love of israel, the path of solidarity.” Other student: “We couldn’t have done it without the help of John Hagee Ministries this evening — the second revolution in Israel.”
Na’aleh — Jewish Agency
Jewish Federation, Greater Houston
Jewish Federation, San Antonio
Just Life
American Friends of Laniado Hospital
Leo Baeck Education Center
American Friends of Magen David
Meir Panim
Menachem Begin Heritage Center
Nefesh b’Nefesh (settles diaspora Jews in Israel, including in settlements)
Netanya Academic College (Hagee build the “Jewish Heritage Center, recruited the college rabbi, is paying for construction of dormitories, received an honoris causa degree)
John and Diana Hagee Lovingkindness Convention Center, Ohr Torah Stone (Efrat settlement, West Bank) founded by Rabbi Shlomo Riskin
One Family Fund
Save a Child’s Heart
Table to Table
Tikva Children’s Home
Western Galilee Hospital
Shurat Hadin Israel Law Center
Friends of Israeli Disabled Veterans
Ziporah Education center
OR movement’s information and relocation center (settling negev and galilee)
Gush Etzion settlement, West Bank: “We are thankful to Pastor Hagee for all of his efforts.”

In the days leading up to Israeli Apartheid Week’s opening event at Columbia University, leading anti-Muslim blogger Pam Geller posted an image of an SS officer with the name of one of the event’s speakers, Ben White, emblazoned on his uniform. (The image recalled placards held by far-right settlers depicting Yitzhak Rabin in an SS uniform just days before he was assassinated.) Geller was among the crowd at the Columbia event, making sure to catch White’s eye as he walked to the podium to speak. He told me that she mouthed to him, “You’re a Nazi.” The day after the event, Geller posted another characteristically juvenile screed describing White as “Nazi boy.”

There is little reason to engage a figure like Geller on the merits of her deranged characterizations. And it would be unfair to ascribe crude views like hers to the established pro-Israel groups working to discredit Israeli Apartheid Week. Their tactics are slightly more sophisticated, even if they have also demonstrated a reluctance to engage White and other participants on the facts about Israel’s systematic dispossession of the Palestinians. (Canadian pro-Israel students have united around a vaguely pornographic counter-campaign called “Size Doesn’t Matter” that invokes insecurities about penis length and equates traveling to Israel with the pleasure of oral sex.)

Pam Geller: "How I wish I could be there to stand with the English Defense League"

Geller’s attacks on White are worth discussing only in light of their irony. She is, after all, a fervent supporter of a British fascist group comprised of soccer hooligans and skinhead thugs who have delivered sig heil salutes en masse at their rallies while also displaying Israeli flags — a most bizarre melange. Geller’s endorsement of the shadowy fascist group, called the English Defense League, highlights the reorganization of the British far-right around an anti-Muslim, pro-Zionist platform designed to cultivate alliances with influential online fanatics like her.

On the same day Geller posted her smear of White, she promoted a rally in defense of the Dutch anti-Muslim extremist Geert Wilders by the English Defense League (EDL) (Wilders has called for a “head rag tax” on Muslim women who wear hijab).

“How I wish I could be there to stand with the English Defense League,” Geller pined.

The Pam Geller-approved EDL burns an anti-Nazi flag

So what happens at a typical EDL rally? According to a report by Wales Online, at an October 2009 rally in Swansea by the EDL’s Wales-based affiliate, the Welsh Defense League, “onlookers were confronted with scenes of jeering men giving Nazi salutes.” At another rally in Stoke on Trent in January, intoxicated EDL activists in black masks attempted to break through police lines to assault anti-racist protesters around the block, injuring several police officers in the process.

Who belongs to the EDL? The group’s muscle is provided by thugs affiliated with the right-wing football hooligan club, Casuals United. The Casuals are led by an infamous thug who goes by the name “Tommy Robinson” and who will only appear in public in a balaclava. The Casuals are themselves a front for the another violent football hooligan gang called Soul Crew. Soul Crew’s former leader, Jeff Marsh, is now the head of the Welsh Defense League and a recruiter for the Casuals.

According to the Daily Mail, neo-Nazis from Combat 18 and the British Freedom Front have insinuated themselves into the ranks of the EDL along with activists from the incipient neo-fascist British National Party (BNP), which is led by former white supremacist organizer Nick Griffin.

Though the BNP has distanced itself from the EDL, the two groups enjoy clear membership cross-pollination. For example, BNP activist Chris Renton helped set up the EDL’s website. While the EDL remains amorphous, its leadership appears to be following the organizational techniques employed by neo-Nazi groups like the British Peoples Party, which attempted to translate its acts of street terror into political power; and the BNP, which declared a “race war” on Muslims at a 2001 meeting. (Go here for a comprehensive look at ties between the EDL and BNP.)

British extremist right groups like the BNP have reorganized around a pro-Zionist, anti-Muslim platform to broaden their support. Israeli flags are a routine sight at EDL rallies.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the EDL is its identification with Israel. EDL activists routinely wave Israeli flags at rallies and carry placards declaring the groups support for Israel’s “right to exist” (go to :50 of this excellent BBC video report). The group’s support for Israel reflects a gradual reorientation of Britain’s far-right in favor of the policies of the Jewish state and against the rights of Muslim immigrants. While their motives for the strategic shift are largely cynical, they are also rooted in a genuine fascination with the image of Israel as a state fighting for ethnic purity against armies of Muslim marauders.

The BNP’s Griffin, who has openly denied the Holocaust and accused Jews of controlling the media, urged his allies to transmute their anti-Semitism into Islamophobia to broaden the party’s political appeal. He wrote in 2007, “It stands to reason that adopting an ‘Islamophobic’ position that appeals to large numbers of ordinary people – including un-nudged journalists – is going to produce on average much better media coverage than siding with Iran and banging on about ‘Jewish power’, which is guaranteed to raise hackles of virtually every single journalist in the western world.”

Ruth Smeed of the Board of Deputies of British Jews observed with astonishment, ”The BNP website is now one of the most Zionist on the web – it goes further than any of the mainstream parties in its support of Israel and at the same time demonises Islam and the Muslim world.”

When Israel attacked the Gaza Strip in 2008 and ‘09, leading BNP figures celebrated. ”This sort of ‘disinfecting’ process whereby Israel is required to sterilise areas of radical Islamist support … is what all nations have to do in order to eradicate Islamist cells who have managed to take over territory either within or on the edges of their borders,” BNP head of legal affairs Lee Barnes proclaimed on his blog on January 4. He continued, “Get used to the casualties – for without them any nation so infected with Islamism will surrender, rot away into liberal apathy and then dies as it is taken over.”

Griffin echoed Barnes’ comments in an essay called “Israel’s Gaza affair:” “The Israelis will NEVER get unbiased reporting on the Brussels Broadcasting Corporation, despite being the only civilised country in the region & fighting for their very existance [sic],” Griffin proclaimed. “It is NOT our place to get involved but you aren’t the only one to be 100% behind them, they are an example to us all because the only thing the Islamic Terrorists understand is FORCE.”

The reorientation of the BNP around a pro-Zionist, Islamophobic platform led directly to the rise of the EDL. Now Pam Geller has volunteered as perhaps the group’s most prominent online promoter. So who is the Nazi?

While I was filming for a forthcoming project at CPAC, I was confronted by Hannah Giles, Andrew Breitbart and a mob of crazed teabaggers. They were enraged by an article I wrote for Salon.com about James O’Keefe’s attendance of and assistance with a white nationalist event featuring open racialists Jared Taylor and John Derbyshire as well as Kevin Martin of the right-wing front group Project 21. Project 21, by the way, is a black front group created and is operated by white conservative operatives to provide cover to figures like Taylor.

Did O’Keefe plan the event with his friend, the white nationalist Marcus Epstein? O’Keefe’s role in helping out with and freely attending the event, along with his palling around with characters like Epstein and Taylor highlighted a career filled with racist pranks, from his ACORN pimp costume minstrel show (see Bradblog on the deceptive means Breitbart used to push the pimp costume myth) to his “affirmative action bake sale,” in which he and his friends charged white students extra for baked goods while minorities ate for little or nothing. Then there are his diaries about the hell of living in a multicultural university environment. James O’Keefe, the apparent hero of the conservative movement’s youth wing, is what racism looks like today.

The only time Breitbart and his goon squad get upset about racism is when they think it is somehow being directed against white people like themselves. That’s why a particularly manic mob member who wouldn’t stop using the word “rubric” seemed to argue to me against the existence of the Congressional Black Caucus because it would not allow a hostile conservative congressman to join. And it’s why when CPAC chose as its keynote speaker the race-baiter Glenn Beck, who claimed Obama has “a deep-seated hatred for white people.”

It is also worth noting that CPAC played host to Thomas Woods, a former leader of the white supremacist League of the South and contributor to the neo-secessionist Southern Partisan magazine. And that CPAC held a seminar called “Abraham Lincoln: Friend or Foe of Liberty?” led by Thomas DiLorenzo, another League of the South figure who insists Lincoln was the very embodiment of evil. The presence at CPAC of Islamophobes Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller (Geller once argued Obama was “involved with a crack whore in his youth”), promoters of the European neo-fascist Geert Wilders, can not be overlooked either. And stay tuned for my interview with Birther leader Philip Berg, who insisted Obama was actually an Indonesian Muslim who should be tried for treason and possibly executed. These people must have left their sheets at the dry cleaners.

Breitbart’s tirade against me was filled with irony. The most glaring projection was that I was using “Alinsky tactics,” referring to left-wing community organizer Saul Alinsky. For the record, I skimmed Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” about 14 years ago and can hardly remember what was in it. However, Breitbart’s boy, James O’Keefe, boasted to the LA Times that Alinsky’s book was the blueprint for his work.

Breitbart went on to say that calling someone a racist was the worst thing anyone could do. Actually, there is something worse than that: promoting and paying a racist. And that’s what Breitbart is doing with O’Keefe. Meanwhile, Breitbart has some interesting views of his own on racial issues. Besides calling the Holocaust Museum shooter James von Brunn a “multiculturalist, just like the black studies and the lesbian studies majors on college campuses,” Breitbart has howled about “black studies intimidation.” As usual, he only sees racism when it is supposedly directed against white people like himself.

According to a recent study by the Pew Center on the States, one out of every 100 adults in the United States is in prison. One of every nine black males between the ages of 20 and 34 has been behind bars, a scandalous statistic owing itself in part to the failed and racially biased drug war, which mandates the warehousing of non-violent drug offenders for long periods of time.

I look forward to working with James O’Keefe on prison reform.

I was mobbed on two occasions at CPAC while shooting a short documentary for the Independent Film Project. I was prepared for some hostility after the crazed Andrew Breitbart declared jihad but I have to admit that by the end, I was pretty drained. The first mob, which consisted of about 40 people, gathered after Hannah Giles confronted me and asked me to apologize to James O’Keefe, who is being hailed at CPAC as the movement’s victim hero. I talked to Giles, who was totally civil, along with a few more crazed members of the mob for about 45 minutes, until they dispersed. Giles refused to say who was funding O’Keefe but conceded that he never appeared in any ACORN offices dressed as a pimp. (That contradicts earlier claims by Breitbart and O’Keefe).

The second mob was inadvertently incited by Breitbart, who ran into me as I was trying to escape from a few parasitic and barely coherent characters who felt unsatisfied by their interactions with me during the second mobbing. Breitbart introduced himself by telling me (weirdly), “You’re the best at what you do,” or something to that effect, then came unhinged and unleashed a tirade of insults, refusing to let me speak. I’m sure some of his right-wing fans will celebrate his uninterrupted temper tantrum. Others will see Breitbart as the unstable and desperate character he is. Meanwhile, most sane people will not care.

Because I was shooting for an IFC show that is scheduled to air in May, I am awaiting authorization from the network to post a little footage online. If I get it, I’ll have some video out by late tomorrow or Monday.

Update: Video should be ready for tomorrow, assuming I get approval. Here’s a classic Breitbart freakout, courtesy of Tommy Christopher (highlights include Breitbart’s refusal to address O’Keefe’s pimp costume, his discussion of Gary Bauer, Dan Savage and mucus; his description of me as “evil, evil, evil;” and his blaming of Wade Rathke for the plight of inner city African-Americans):

When an architect named Norman Pfeiffer designed the Evo DeConcini Federal Courthouse in Tucson, Ariz., he claimed to have been inspired by its natural surroundings. “From afar,” Pfeiffer told Architecture Week, “the desert tells little of what it knows. … But upon closer scrutiny it reveals its true self.”

The 413,000-square-foot, $67.3 million monolith that Pfeiffer erected blends easily with the pale desert landscape flanking downtown Tucson. The earth-toned structure appears so bland a casual passer-by might not even take a second glance. Only a few observers have ventured inside to witness the spectacle that takes place on the third floor.

The show begins each day at 1 p.m., when about 75 undocumented immigrants just captured along the U.S.-Mexico border are marched into the room in leg irons and manacles and compelled all at once to plead guilty to entering the country illegally. Although the proceeding has the trappings of a trial, the defendants never challenge the charges against them, and are clearly discouraged from doing so. They know their fate is preordained: deportation to a border town, separation from their families and occasionally a few months in a privatized prison.

The daily trials are mandated by a program called Operation Streamline. When Streamline was announced by President George W. Bush’s Department of Homeland Security in 2005, Border Patrol officials argued that trying undocumented immigrants and keeping records of their illegal entries would deter them from coming back over the border. But over the two years since its 2008 inception, the program has failed to achieve any of its stated goals; only the shrinking job market has prevented impoverished Latin American migrants from venturing across the border in search of work.

Since Streamline arrived in Arizona in 2008 it has morphed into a pipeline transferring millions in federal funds into the state’s anemic economy. Almost everyone involved in the program is lining their pockets with taxpayer money, from a controversial private prison company to a rapidly growing pool of courthouse criminal defense attorneys to the grim federal marshals who herd migrants in and out of the courtroom. Thanks to Streamline, the number of public defenders has nearly doubled in Tucson, the Border Patrol has bolstered its ranks with new agents and the local prison industry is booming. The program represents the entrenchment of a parallel nonproductive economy promoting abuse behind the guise of law enforcement and crime deterrence.

Immigrant rights advocates appeared to have scored a decisive victory against Streamline when the 9th Circuit federal court of appeals ruled last Dec. 2 that trying defendants en masse violated established rules on legal procedure. “We act within a system maintained by rules of procedure,” Senior Circuit Judge John T. Noonan, a Republican appointed by President Ronald Reagan, concluded in his opinion. “We cannot dispense with the rules without setting a precedent subversive of the structure.”

The Obama administration and the Border Patrol, however, have sought to comply with the court’s ruling without having to scrap Streamline. They have ordered magistrates to hear each plea one by one when a group of migrants is brought into the court, turning already grinding hour-and-a-half proceedings into three-hour-long ordeals. “It’s not unprecedented. It can be done,” insisted Dennis Burke, the U.S. attorney in Arizona who was chief of staff to Department of Homeland Security Director Janet Napolitano when she was Arizona governor.

I witnessed Streamline last Nov. 30, just days before the court’s decision blocked the government from compelling migrants to plead en masse. Isabel Garcia, a public defender and fiery national immigrant rights icon, invited me to report the proceeding. Last summer, Garcia led a demonstration to the courthouse gates, directing the community’s indignation against what she described as unconstitutional factory justice. Local right-wing radio hosts and anti-immigrant activists have clamored for the city to oust her from her job as public defender. So far, Garcia’s antagonists have failed in their crusade.

The Nov. 30 trial began as soon as the migrants were marched into the room and seated wherever they could fit, from the jury box to the audience gallery. All of the migrants were young and brown-skinned, with combed black hair, wearing the same clothes they wore during their perilous trek across the Sonoran Desert but without the belts and shoelaces they were forced to surrender to prevent suicide attempts. A few men struggled to keep their pants from falling down as they ambled into their seats. The eerie clang of chains reverberated around the courtroom like the sound of wind chimes; the migrants were bound in manacles and leg irons, even the 11 young women who occupied the front row.

The judge summoned three migrants to the front of the room. They stood before the bench with expressionless looks and oversized, secondhand clothes hanging off their bone-thin frames. The judge quickly dismissed them from the proceeding, explaining that the court was unable to find anyone who could translate his English into Chatino, the indigenous dialect the three men spoke. The men remained frozen with blank stares, oblivious to the judge’s remarks. Finally, a marshal stepped forward to lead the three out of the room and into a holding cell.

Next, a group of about a dozen migrants with prior illegal-border-crossing convictions were summoned to the bench. The judge promptly sentenced each man to prison terms ranging from 30 to 150 days. Those who had incurred legal infractions during previous stays, no matter how minor, were given more time. After being sentenced to serve 150 days, one of the defendants piped up. “I’m just concerned about where I’ll serve my time in jail,” he declared plaintively in unaccented English. “I wonder if I could serve my time in Washington [state]. My daughters are there and so is my girlfriend and we’ve been living together for several years.”

“No way is the judge going to do that,” Garcia grumbled to me.

The judge replied that while he would issue a “recommendation” for the defendant to serve his time in Washington, the Bureau of Prisons had the final say on where he would serve his prison term. “See!” Garcia said, seething.

If the man’s request to serve his jail term near his family was not met—and it clearly would not be—he could expect to do time at the nearby Eloy Detention Center, operated by a controversial private prison firm called Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). Nine immigrants have died under mysterious circumstances under CCA’s watch at Eloy. The dead include an ailing 62-year-old Ghanian manimprisoned in 2006 for a misdemeanor he had committed in 1979 and a 36-year-old man from Ecuador who was refused treatment for testicular cancer even as he writhed in pain on the floor of his cell. In 2006, another detainee, a 27-year-old immigrant from Colombia who initially refused treatment for headaches and dizziness died weeks laterof a seizure when Eloy medical staff members ignored him for an hour after he collapsed. Reporters and lawyers seeking information on the deaths have been stonewalled by CCA and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE); the death of the Ecuadorean, Felix Frankin Torres-Rodriguez, was never reported by CCA.

When ICE conducted an internal investigation of CCA’s Eloy center in 2006, it found thatthe facility had “failed on multiple levels to perform basic supervision and provide for the safety and welfare of ICE detainees.” But thanks to Streamline, CCA’s nonunion prison operation continues to bring work to the town of Eloy.

In September, Money magazine ranked the home of Eloy Detention Center, Pinal County, as the county with the fastest rate of job growth in the country. “Over the past several years, we have welcomed three more CCA facilities in Eloy,” boasted Eloy City Manager Joseph Blanton. “CCA has brought nearly 1,500 new jobs to Eloy through these facilities.”

As CCA expands in Pinal County, so does the bill to American taxpayers. According to David Gonzalez, the U.S. marshal for Arizona, taxpayers pay from $9 million to $11 million a month to incarcerate immigrants at Eloy alone. To preserve the flow, CCA has cultivated high-level political connections on both sides of the aisle. Among its board of directors is former Democratic Sen. Dennis DeConcini of Arizona, a friend of Department of Homeland Security Director Napolitano and the former boss of U.S. Attorney Burke, who worked as a counsel at DeConcini’s law firm. (The courthouse where Streamline takes place is named for DeConcini’s father, Evo, who once was Arizona’s attorney general.) CCA’s lobbyists have become familiar faces in Congress and in statehouses across the country; the company spent $770,000last year to ply lawmakers.

Lawyer Land

As a new group of second-time border crossers appeared before the judge, one man was questioned about a conviction from 1997 for driving under the influence, a crime that could result in a longer sentence. Speaking through the public defender assigned to the group, the defendant pleaded for mercy. “His wife is a U.S. citizen,” the lawyer informed the judge. “He simply wanted to support his family by picking apples in Washington so he spent hundreds of dollars to take a bus from Acapulco to Nogales. He promises he will never come back to the United States.”

The heartfelt plea seemed to do little good. The judge slapped the man with a 150-day sentence and an admonition. “Don’t come back to the U.S. because it is not worth it,” the judge said in a firm but forced tone. “It’s not worth living in fear all the time. There are a lot of countries around the world that have good economies. You might want to consider immigrating to those countries instead.”

The judge, a bespectacled, dour fellow named Thomas Ferraro, sounded sincere issuing his ludicrous advice. Although he had been appointed head of a virtual kangaroo court for a day each week, Ferraro did not rush through the trial as other magistrates were known to do. He was doing his best to hear the concerns of the defendants, even if there was nothing he could do for them. Garcia whispered to me, “Ferraro feels guilty because it’s a total sham, so he’s putting his personal touch on it. He’s one of the nice ones.”

Finally, Ferraro directed his attention to the 50 or so remaining defendants who were first-time offenders. “Do you give up your rights and plead guilty to the crime of illegal entry?” he asked them.

From the gallery and jury box, a baritone chorus rose up: “Si!” None of the female defendants in the front row uttered a sound, however.

“Do each of you understand the essential elements of your guilty plea?” Ferraro asked.

“Si!” the defendants bellowed again.

Before sentencing the migrants to deportation, Ferraro took one last opportunity to scold them. “This is no way to live your life,” he declared. “Most of you are very young and can go back to Mexico and make a living for yourselves and your family. It will be much easier, believe me, and you won’t be separated from your families.”

While the migrants listened impassively on headphones to a translated version of Ferraro’s lecture, 14 criminal defense attorneys peppered throughout the audience gallery busied themselves jotting notes and playing with their BlackBerries. Though a couple of these lawyers with whom I spoke outside the courtroom seemed passionate in their opposition to Streamline, the vast majority were among the most predatory in town. Their participation in Streamline was motivated by the $110 an hour they earned without exerting a scintilla of effort. They operated as deportation conductors, not advocates. According to Heather Williams, the supervisor of the Tucson Federal Public Defenders Office, the federal government shells out between $6,000 and $12,000 each day to pay the private attorneys who represent Streamline defendants.

The migrants were finally led out of the courtroom by two marshals, including one who, like some of the lawyers, spent the entire trial tooling around with his cell phone. As the 11 female defendants filed by, they looked toward Garcia and a public defender representing several of them, Yendi Castillo-Reina. One of the migrant women appeared to be no more than 4 foot 10, so small and thin she seemed to be weighed down by the shackles around her wrists, waist and ankles. The women complained to Garcia and Castillo-Reina that they had not had any water in hours.

“They’ve had water. There’s a fountain right outside!” a beefy marshal bellowed.

Castillo-Reina handed me a stack of papers while she chatted with Garcia. It contained the files of the clients assigned to her that day. The file on the first page read: “Elsa Calderon-Diaz, an alien, was found by agents in the United States of America without proper documentation.” Beside the statement was a mug shot of a woman with short black hair and Mayan features—high cheekbones, full lips, thick, straight black hair—that looked especially stark in the black-and-white photocopy. She had come from a small town in Chiapas, the poorest state in Mexico and the home of the now-dormant Zapatista indigenous rebel group. The Border Patrol would decide where the woman went next.

Garcia explained that many of the migrants faced lateral repatriation, a relatively new Border Patrol practice that would take them by bus or a charter flight—chained during transit—to crime-ridden border cities like Ciudad Juarez and Presidio, hundreds of miles away along the Texas border, where they would be simply dumped, far from their families and often with nothing but the tattered clothes on their backs.

Though the repatriation program was briefly halted in 2003 after the Mexican government protestedto the Inter-American Council on Human Rights, the Border Patrol swiftly restarted it, claiming the program would reduce migrant deaths in the desert. The cost to taxpayers has been staggering; each flight costs the government around $28,000. Meanwhile, the migrant death rate has exploded. According to the Arizona Daily Star’s database, the risk of death for illegal border crossers is 1.5 times higher now than five years ago and 17 times greater than in 1998.

“We’ve been saying for as long as I can remember that more enforcement will mean more deaths,” Kat Rodriguez, coordinating organizer for Derechos Humanos Arizona, told me. “All this death is the natural consequence of a failed policy.”

‘We’re All Parasites’

There was agitation in Castillo-Reina’s voice as she spoke to Garcia. “I struggle with this all the time,” I overheard her say. “I’m just conflicted.” It suddenly occurred to me that Garcia and Castillo-Reina were the only Latinas in the room not in chains.

As the courtroom emptied, I walked down a long, empty hallway toward the exit with Castillo-Reina. A mutual friend had told me that unlike Garcia, who helped galvanize the immigrant rights movement in 1997 after a teenage shepherd, Ezequiel Hernandez, was shot to death by U.S. Marines involved in a covert drug interdiction exercise on the border, Castillo-Reina avoided demonstrations and political activity. She had strong convictions but they were closely held.

I asked Castillo-Reina why Streamline has continued to expand even as it failed to demonstrate any practical value. “The only reason I can come up with is that they do this for the benefit of the local economy,” she said in a hushed voice. “Our office size has doubled since Streamline came here, the number of prosecutors is huge, there is an endless supply of criminal defense lawyers in this town; this courthouse is worth 20 million a month for the local economy. And the corporate welfare keeps pouring in. There’s no way in hell the government’s gonna give that up in an economic crisis.”

Castillo-Reina is the daughter of immigrants from Mexico City who moved to Wisconsin to become social workers. She told me that when growing up she got to know the Mexican migrants who flocked to her area during the winter to harvest the pine trees   decorating living rooms across America on Christmas Eve. The severe conditions in the migrant camps galvanized her commitment to immigrant rights and eventually propelled her into law school. “I became a lawyer because I watched ‘School [House] Rock,’ ” she reflected. “I believed in the simple things that show taught me about the Constitution.”

But after running up against the draconian immigration system for so long, Castillo-Reina has concluded, “I have no hope. We’re watching an entire class of people get stripped of their constitutional rights, and because of the political climate and the economy, it’s somehow become OK.”

I asked her why she even bothered to participate in Streamline. None of the defendants were able to mount any defense, so what was the point? She paused. Her face began to tremble with emotion. Then tears came pouring from her eyes. “We’re all parasites,” she exclaimed, trying to regain her composure. “But there’s something to bearing witness. If I don’t do this, the reality is somebody else will be in there getting $110 an hour who doesn’t care.”

By now, we were standing outside in the shadow of the towering DeConcini courthouse. Castillo-Reina’s tear-streaked face seemed out of place here. Her outpouring of emotion contrasted with the indifference I had just witnessed in the courtroom. Other than the migrants, who received their sentences with stoic acceptance, hardly anyone in the courtroom seemed to view Streamline as anything more a slight annoyance. For the judge and the marshals, it was another day at the office; for most of the lawyers, it was a chance to make an easy buck; for the prison industry, it has been a cash cow.

Only a comprehensive immigration reform bill that includes a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants could put Streamline out of business. But the Congress has been fixated on more consequential matters: While I was in Tucson, members of the House Committee on Homeland Security were engaged in emergency hearings about the Salahis, the notorious White House gate crashers.

On February 9, Intelligence Squared sponsored a debate on the resolution: “The US should step back from its special relationship with Israel.” Debating in favor of the resolution were Roger Cohen and Rashid Khalidi; against it were former US Ambassador to the European Union Stuart Eizenstat and former Israeli Ambassador to the US and ex Tel Aviv University President Itamar Rabinovich. I was among the overflow crowd of several hundred people that packed New York University’s student union for the event.

The debate was introduced by Robert Rosenkranz, the insurance magnate who launched Intelligence Squared through his foundation. He set the tone by commenting, “Well this could be the year that Iran gets the bomb… And getting back to a nuclear Iran, Israel might well be our best shield. Israel did the U.S., in the region, a favor, I would argue, by bombing the Syrian reactor. Maybe it will do the dirty work again so we don’t have to tolerate a nuclear Iran.”

(Intelligence Squared Executive Producer Dana Wolfe is a former staffer to Benjamin Netanyahu; Rosenkranz’s daughter-in-law, Stephanie Hessler, who helps him direct the foundation, is an outspoken neocon who has defended torture and assailed Obama’s policies on prosecuting accused terrorists).

Eisenstat led the argument against the resolution. He insisted that pulling away from Israel would be “a sign of American weakness” that would send a chill down the spine of our European allies, as though America would pull away from Great Britain next. Then he made a point I’d never heard before: Israel, with its massive arsenal of nuclear weapons, was actually “stopping nuclear proliferation” in the Middle East. A few more of Eisenstat’s arguments:

–Israel “was forming a 21st century culture.”
–Ehud Barak offered Arafat 95 percent of the West Bank and Arafat “walked away;” “There is no reliable Palestinian partner.”
–Countries in the “Moslem” world were not sufficiently “dependent American allies” like Israel has been
–Saudi Arabia is not a reliable ally because it exports “Wahabinism.” Only Israel can be depended on in the Middle East.
–The Palestinian response to “dismantling settlements [in Gaza], dismantling 3000 people” was rocket fire. Again, there is no “Palestinian partner.”

The most baseless of Eisenstat’s points, in my view, was that, “The Palestinians would have a state by now if there was a Palestinian Martin Luther King.” This often repeated canard went unchallenged by Cohen and Khalidi, who had been handed a golden opportunity to inform the audience about Mubarak Awad, Jamal Juma, Mohammad Othman, and the hundreds, if not thousands, of non-violent activists who have been killed, deported, captured, and tortured by Israel. The debaters could have said, “If Martin Luther King were Palestinian, he would have been assassinated or jailed and tortured.” And they could have highlighted Eisenstat’s unintentional, but apt, comparison of Israel to the Jim Crow South. Instead, when Khalidi was asked about Eisenstat’s point during Q&A, he launched into an analysis of the Madrid conference of 1991. This was the biggest missed opportunity of the night, in my opinion.

Rabinovich supported Eisenstat’s argument by highlighting Israel’s value to the US as a military proxy. Omitting bin Laden’s stated grievances about Israel, Eisenstat remarked that the al-Qaida leader launched the 9/11 plot because US troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia. But Israel has no American troops on its soil (see Nora Barrows-Friedman’s expose on the massive US weapons stockpile in Israel), so it is the perfect ally. It can carry out attacks against American enemies, he suggested, without the same consequences to America. The argument reminded me of a funny t-shirt sold to tourists in Jerusalem that depicts an F-16 and reads, “Don’t worry, America. Israeli is behind you!”

Cohen spoke about his recent trip to the West Bank and the colonialism — he didn’t use the word apartheid — that he witnessed there. Cohen said the special relationship had prevented Barack Obama from meting out any consequences to Israel for its violation of his call for a settlement freeze. When Netanyahu recently planted a tree at a West Bank Jewish settlement and pledged settlements today, settlements tomorrow, settlements forever, he revealed the real character of the special relationship.

Cohen’s point was a good one, but he did not discuss Gaza; did not once discuss the plight of Palestinians living inside 48 Israel or the rise of the far-right; and did not mention the violent attacks on Palestinians by settlers or the Israeli Army in the West Bank. He was erudite and eloquent, but clearly not immersed enough in the day-to-day events, politics or trends of conflict to poke holes in the arguments of his opponents.

Khalidi argued that the special relationship had prevented the US from taking into account the security of the Palestinian people. He mentioned the 1400 deaths caused by Israel in the Gaza assault but did not go into much detail. He also noted that while Israel diverts US taxpayer money into settlement construction, US non-profits were sending tax deductible donations to the settlements as well. “We are in effect engaged in supporting an occupation that has been going on for 42 years and counting,” said Khalidi. ” We are in effect underwriting settlements.”

Nothing Cohen or Khalidi said was particularly revelatory. If anything, they seemed overly conciliatory to their opponents and defensive before an audience full of hardline pro-Israel forces. However, they were introducing ideas rarely heard in mainstream American discourse. Because the debate is supposed to air on Bloomberg in the near future, I think Cohen and Khalidi did the public a major service. On the other hand, they could have better recognized the significance of their platform and argued their position more forcefully and confidently.

When I first heard about the debate, I was puzzled by Rabinovich’s selection. The resolution seemed like a question Americans should be arguing, yet an Israeli was delegated to declare what the US should do in its foreign policy. Rabinovich’s very presence in the debate was an exhibit of the perversity of the special relationship.

During Q&A, the audience heard from a young Israeli woman from Herziliya Interdisciplinary Center (I corrected from Herzilya University). The woman, who had an Israeli accent, said she was enrolled in the Argov Program, which according to Herzliya IDC President Amnon Rubinstein, was “An important step to help refute the constant lies being told about the State of Israel abroad.” She was a hasbara soldier trained to catapult the propaganda around the world.

“All the studies and all polls show that the United States supports this special relationship,” the woman declared. “Isn’t it a shame to American democracy that this is not factored in the debate?” Here was another Israeli attempting to dictate to Americans — a perfect portrait of the special relationship.

Cohen responsed, as he should have, that the real shame to American democracy was that the Israel Lobby had obstructed the US from acting in its own interests vis a vis the Israel-Palestine conflict. However, Cohen did not state any facts or cite any on-the-record sources. Instead, he said, “I understand” that Obama has been told by a Jewish congressman from Florida that if he wanted his healthcare reform bill, he would have to step back on Israel. Predictably, the heavily Jewish audience booed and hissed.

There was little reason to doubt Cohen’s account. However, Cohen did not serve himself well by citing a background source when there is more than enough material on the public record about the Lobby’s strongarming of Obama and Congress. He handed Eisenstat the perfect opportunity to denounce with all the righteous indignation he could muster the “dangerous canard” of Jewish influence, thereby suggesting Cohen was endangering the safety of his people. If I were judging the debate on performance alone, I would have handed it to Eisenstat and Rabinovich.

Before the debate began, audience members were asked to vote on the resolution with little remote controls attached to their seats. The resolution lost by 10 points. But when the audience voted after the debate, the resolution won by a narrow margin. The silent majority had spoken.

“A disaster! And right in New York!” I heard an elderly man with a thick Israel accent say to his wife.

Outside the auditorium, I asked Khalidi about the results. “Very weird,” was all he said.

Matthew Vadum has taken to David Horowitz’s NewsReal blog to call me a “self-hating Jew.” Actually, Vadum attempted to distance himself from his predictable canard by saying I have been “frequently called a self-hating Jew by [my] critics.” (Marty’s boy once called me a self-hating Jew but Commentary apparently forced him to scrub his post; I don’t know who the other critics are). So is Vadum a Jew himself or is this just a particularly clear case of right-wing goyisherkop? And does David Horowitz, who was raised by Stalinists with no religion and who called his own father an “old Yid” in his memoir, “Radical Son” (then compared him to Mohammed Atta in a subsequent memoir), agree with the nature of Vadum’s attack?

Horowitz has harbored a vendetta against me ever since I pointed out that one of his writers was defending a neo-Nazi professor who called a college basketball team “nigger to the core” and denounced Fairleigh Dickinson University as “a Jewish plutocratic university.” Horowitz went on to embarrass himself in three separate interactions with me and now, he’s defending James O’Keefe’s weird minstrel show as some sort of payback. He is a very fragile and unstable personality. See his histrionics below the fold.

The Demons of David Horowitz

Horowitz vs. his own words

Horowitz loses it at CPAC at 5:10

No one is echoing Breitbart’s screeds. Okay, some people are. The Breitbart attacks by Larry O’Connor are getting lots of traction on the racist far-right, including support from a group called “European Americans United.” Surprise!

"Dear Pastor" Hagee with Elie Wiesel and far-right Israeli Minister Uzi Landau

For delivering one speech to Hagee’s congregation, Wiesel received a check for $500,000 toward his foundation, according to Marita Styrsky, the wife of Christians United for Israel Eastern Regional Director Victor Styrsky (Christians United is Hagee’s lobbying arm). So Wiesel got his money and Hagee got a photo with a Nobel Prize-winning Holocaust survivor. Everybody went home happy.

Since praising Hagee, Wiesel has gone on to condemn the Goldstone Report as “a crime against the Jewish people.” Wiesel’s remarkable statement prompted Richard Silverstein to ask, “What was the last event in world history you can recall being a “crime against the Jewish people?” The answer is pretty obvious.