Also, I agree that the governor’s race shouldn’t be seen as just a circus because of the large number of candidates. We should be glad there are meat packers and honest workers running, instead of just the usual Democrats and Republicans.

There are big stakes involved, and perhaps we can even see some hint of what could happen in bourgeois (and working-class?!) politics in the next year.

Phil McCracken
Berkeley, California
 
 
Protest move to deport
The American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) Los Angeles and Orange County chapters strongly condemn the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) decision to seek the deportation of two Palestinian permanent residents for their political associations in violation of their constitutional rights.

In papers filed last week, the DHS announced that it will seek to deport Michel Shehadeh and Khader Hamide under provisions of the McCarran-Walter Act that were declared unconstitutional by a federal district court in 1989, and repealed by Congress in 1990. The DHS is also seeking to add new charges under the USA PATRIOT Act, marking the first time the government has enforced a PATRIOT Act provision making foreign nationals deportable for their support of “terrorist groups,” broadly defined as any two or more persons who have threatened to use or used a weapon to endanger person or property.

Hamide and Shehadeh, both green card holders, have built their lives with their families in the United States for the last three decades. The government charges that Hamide and Shehadeh were associated with and supported the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a faction of the PLO, in the mid-1980s.

However, when they were arrested (with six other student activists in Los Angeles) in 1987, the then-FBI Director William Webster testified in Congress that after an extensive three-year FBI investigation, the respondents “have not been found to have engaged themselves in terrorist activity,” and admitted that “if these individuals had been United States citizens, there would not have been a basis for their arrest.”

ADC
Los Angeles and Orange County
 

The letters column is an open forum for all viewpoints on subjects of interest to working people.

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