Mireille Knoll and the Spirit of Unity

85-Year-old French Holocaust survivor Mireille Knoll

For many, days like Easter Sunday help to reinforce the importance of spending time with love ones, while remembering those who are no longer here with us.

As millions of people around the globe gather with family to observe one of the holiest times of the year for both Christians and Jews, the children and grandchildren of 85-year-old Mireille Knoll were cruelly denied the chance to celebrate Passover with their beloved mother and grandmother.

Her partially-burned remains were found on Friday March 23rd after two assailants brutally stabbed her eleven times then attempted to set fire to her body in a frantic effort to cover up the evidence of their heinous and cowardly attack on an elderly woman with Parkinson's Disease who lived alone. 

Because the assailants, one of whom was her neighbor, specifically targeted her because they believed she possessed large amounts of valuables or money in the apartment because she was Jewish, French investigators are calling it a hate crime.

"Hate crime" is probably putting it lightly, but perhaps it best summarizes the wanton criminal violation of someone's person or property based on assumptions or stereotypes about their religion, race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation.

However you wish to define it, the accused attackers who took Mireille Knoll's life two weeks ago displayed a remarkable contempt for human life.

A contempt rooted in the anti-Semitism based on time-worn stereotypes that have dehumanized, marginalized and vilified Jewish people based solely on their faith and customs since before the 1st century AD - when the Roman emperor Hadrian outlawed the Jewish tradition of circumcision because it offended some ancient Romans concept of the natural body.   

Thousands of French citizens turned out to honor
Mireille Knoll and oppose anti-Semitism

The thousands of people who marched in Paris last Wednesday to honor the 85-year-old Holocaust survivor know all too well that the ugly face of anti-Semitism is not an unfamiliar one in France.

In the same sense that Americans still struggle to reconcile with the institutionalized racism that fueled slavery, or the ethnic hatred and xenophobia the led to the forced internment of Japanese-American citizens into American concentration camps during World War II.

The murder of Mireille Knoll serves as a violent reminder that France as a society still faces the ethical challenge and moral responsibility of reconciling the French motto "Liberte´, Equlite´, Fraternite´ " (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity) with the fact that some French authorities cooperated with occupying Nazi forces during WWII to deport some 75,000 French Jews to German concentration camps where some 72,500 were eventually killed. 

The fact that Mireille Knoll was able to narrowly escape that fate in the summer of 1942 as a young girl because her mother had Brazilian passport only compounds the sense of outrage that accompanied her brutal death.

The same hatred that led to the death of millions of Jews, Roma and others during WWII at the hands of the Nazis eventually caught up to her inside the small apartment where she lived alone in the 21st century.

As Lelia Dessante, the home-care aide who cooked and cleaned for the Parisian grandmother who lived alone observed to a New York Times reporter:

"She survived the Holocaust in the last century, I think she had a happy life, and yet she was killed at home, frail and defenseless. What world are we living in?"

Steve Bannon and Marine Le Pen at a conference
held by French far-right National Front party 

It's a world in which right-wing political parties which embrace xenophobia and quietly (or openly) tolerate anti-Semitic views have gained footholds in legislatures across Europe.

It's a world in which the current American president refused to condemn a neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Virginia where some brandished flags with the swastika and chanted "Jews will not replace us."  

Those kinds of repugnant views aren't just relegated to the sidelines of global politics or in the dark corners of the internet either.

If you recall, back on Saturday March 10th, just about two weeks before Mireille Knoll's murder, former Trump campaign manager and senior White House adviser Steve Bannon was in Paris to address a conference of the French far-right political party National Front.

Bannon famously told the cheering crowd, "Let them call you racists. Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists. Wear it as a badge of honor."

Now I'm not suggesting that Bannon appearing alongside former right-wing French political candidate Marine Le Pen to encourage white supremacists to embrace being called racists directly led to Mireille Knoll's murder.

But there's little doubt that his championing of racist and xenophobic views as the basis of political policy, and the hatred that led to her death, are inexorably linked.

Some of the thousands of people who marched to honor Mireille Knoll last Wednesday felt so too.

Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front, whose anti-immigrant hatred and bigotry helped propel Emmanuel Macron to victory in the French presidential election back in May of 2017, was openly booed by some as she marched in the parade last Wednesday.

Lassana Bathily attends a memorial service for
Mireille Knoll in Paris last Wednesday

Some even chanted "N is for Nazi!" as she walked past in an expression of contempt for the intolerance and anti-immigrant hysteria she cultivates as a tool to boost her political power.

Those kinds of public reactions to her presence echo the overwhelming majority of the country who voted against her in the 2017 French presidential race.

Now obviously there's no changing the brutal circumstances of Mireille Knoll's horrific death.

But there are some positives that have come about as result of it - including a broad and diverse cross-section of French people, including many non-Jews, who came out to honor her memory last and march against anti-Semitism.

As Cnaan Liphshiz reported in an article for the Times of Israel, 27-year-old Lassana Bathily (pictured above), was one of many non-Jews who attended a vigil prayer service at the Tournelles Synagogue in Paris last Wednesday.

Bathily, an African Muslim from Mali, was the employee working inside the stockroom of a kosher store called HyperCacher in France back in January, 2015 when a radicalized Islamist terrorist named Amedy Coulibaly entered the kosher store and murdered four people.

He bravely guided twelve Jewish shoppers who were inside the store to safety and helped them hide inside a refrigerated room until the attack was over.

Mourners place flowers and candles at a makeshift
memorial outside of Mireille Knoll's apartment

The African immigrant was recognized as a national hero for his actions and granted French citizenship.

And as Liphshiz reported, Bathily was warmly received at the ceremony for Mireille Knoll last Wednesday by some of the French Jews in attendance - many of whom crowded around him to shake his hand or hug him to thank him for his actions.

As Liphshiz reported, a Jewish man from Sarcelles, France named David Mechal who attended the vigil on Wednesday, told reporters:

"The Minister is here and Mayor Anne Hidalgo is also here, and that's important because their commitment to the values of the French Republic is imperative for the survival of Jewish life here. But real change us not up to them. It's up to people like Lassana, so it's moving to see him with us here, standing with us in solidarity in our hour of need." 

That kind of spirit of cross-cultural unity is one way to respond to the hatred and anti-Semitism that has reared it's ugly head in France, America and other countries - but it must be accompanied with a justice system that demonstrates a willingness to treat hate crimes as the threat to law and order and personal human rights that they are.

That spirit of unity won't erase the brutal act that took the life of Mireille Knoll in Paris, but it shows that people of different races, ethnicities, religions and nationalities are willing to step forward and stand up for the rights of all - regardless of who the victim is.

Perhaps that's the most meaningful embodiment of the Easter and Passover season.

The Narrow Scope of Republican Justice

Trump's name is removed from a Panama hotel after
his company was accused of mismanagement  

Increasingly, it seems clear that the scope of "justice" as defined by the Republican Party that now controls both the White House and both chambers of Congress, is remarkably limited to targeting those seen by some conservatives as "others".

The traditional role of the Department of Justice, as the nation's top independent legal authority, has been usurped to function as a de facto enforcer of the right-wing ideology that defines the Trump administration.

While former top White House adviser Steve Bannon was over in Paris on Saturday extolling members of France's far right political party the National Front to embrace their racism and xenophobic views, here in the U.S., rampant violations of protocol, ethics, laws and morality by the White House go all but ignored by the racist perjurer masquerading as attorney general, Jeff Sessions.

Despite a court ruling in Panama last week in favor of a majority investor in the Trump Panama City hotel named Orestes Fintiklis, who filed suit to oust the Trump Organization because of serious lapses in management of the property, you won't find Sessions directing Department of Justice resources towards investigating any of Trump's numerous violations of the Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution - which expressly forbids those holding office from receiving "profit", "benefit" or "advantage of any kind" from the title of his or her elected office.

After directing Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to launch Operation Keep Safe, yet another round of crack-of-dawn anti-immigrant arrests in northern California two weeks ago, last Wednesday Sessions announced the DOJ was suing the state of California over three state laws intended to protect immigrant's rights.

As NBC News justice correspondent Pete Williams reported last Tuesday, Sessions' lawsuit targets SB-54, AB-450 and AB-103, three laws recently passed by the California legislature intended to put into place protections that would limit the federal government's ability to arrest undocumented immigrants at their place of employment, or target them in court or upon release from jail.
   

Part of California's Adelanto Detention Facility
owned and run by the GEO Group 

According to Williams, Sessions is even going after state law AB-103, "which requires the state to inspect detention facilities where federal authorities are holding immigrants who face deportation." 
 
Just consider that last one for a moment.

Jeff Sessions is suing California for passing a law that would mandate state inspections of federal facilities where deportees are being held.

Facilities like the Adelanto Detention Facility (pictured above), a privately-operated facility located in a remote desert region of San Bernardino County, California 85 miles northeast of Los Angeles with a capacity of about 2,000 male and female detainees.

As journalist Paloma Esquivel reported in an LA Times article in August, 2017, the Adelanto facility,  has gained notoriety for a series of suicides, hunger strikes and deaths of detainees while in custody since it first opened in 2011.

Deaths like that of Raul Ernesto Morales-Ramos back in 2015.

As Esquivel's LA Times piece notes, in the months leading up to his death, in one of the two written  complaints Ramos submitted to Adelanto officials, he told them:

"To who receives this, I am letting you know that I am very sick and they don't want to care for me. The nurse gave me ibuprofen, and that only alleviates me for a few hours. Let me know if you can help me, I only need medial attention."

GEO Group CEO George Foley

A medical report released after Ramos' death in detention noted that he had an abdominal mass which had been present for months - as Esquivel observed, a doctor who examined him wrote that it was "the largest she has ever seen in her practice."

As journalist Mirren Gidda reported in an article for Newsweek, two days after then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates announced that Department of Justice would begin scaling back federal use of private for-profit prisons on August 17, 2016, a subsidiary of the GEO Group donated $100,000 to Rebuilding America Now - a pro-Trump Political Action Committee.

A month later GEO gave $200,000 to another Republican PAC (the Senate Leadership Fund) and on November 1st, just days before the 2016 presidential election, GEO gave another $125,000 to the pro-Trump PAC.

So it's not surprising why Attorney General Jeff Sessions is suing California for passing a law mandating state inspections of federal facilities like Adelanto - shedding light on GEO Group's controversial record of management of juvenile and adult prison facilities across the U.S. is certainly not in the interest of the Trump administration.

Especially considering that as a U.S. Senator Sessions was not only one of the leading anti-immigration advocates on Capitol Hill, he also opposed bipartisan legislation to reduce mass incarceration in American prisons.

And as Trump's attorney general he's advocated ramping up the incarceration of undocumented immigrants as well as non-violent drug offenders since day one.

Given the fallout from media coverage of the rampant ongoing chaos of the White House following the recent resignations of Communications Director Hope Hicks and Economic Adviser Gary Cohn, it hardly comes as a surprise that Sessions would initiate a lawsuit against the state of California for its efforts to protect the rights of undocumented immigrants.

Republicans spent most of former President Obama's two terms in office whining about overreach by "Big Government", so the idea of a Republican attorney general expanding federal authority to try and trample individual state efforts to protect their immigrant populations represents a pretty remarkable change of government philosophy for both Sessions and the Republican Party.

In fact it's a total 180 degree turn that reveals that Republicans like Big Government when it suits their own ideological or financial needs and wants.

Spencer Hogue and Evelyn and Albert Turner, also
known as "The Marion Three"

Historically, when it came to the Republican Party using race as a wedge issue to expand its support among white working-class voters in the 60's, 70's and 80's, "States Rights" was the clarion call-codeword  used to champion the rights of individual states to oppose federally-mandated laws on school desegregation, voting rights and the enforcement of civil rights.

The Confederacy rallied behind "States Rights" as the right of southern states to keep the institution of slavery intact.

While Jefferson Beauregard Sessions (named after Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard) was born and raised in a rabidly pro-States Rights segregated Alabama, he demonstrated a willingness to use the power of the federal government to reflect his own racist ideology early in his professional career.

When he was serving as the U.S. attorney for the Office of the Southern District of Alabama in 1985, Sessions decided to try and prosecute three well-known and respected local civil rights activists, Albert Turner, his wife Evelyn Turner and Spencer Hogue, Jr. (pictured above) for voter fraud.

The Turners and Hogue, who became known as the "The Marion Three", had worked doggedly to help poor African-Americans in rural Perry County, Alabama register to vote and participate in the voting process in a county in which blacks were the numerical majority.

As Scott Zamost, Drew Griffin and Curt Devine reported in an article for CNN.com, Albert Turner had worked as an aide to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and marched alongside the civil rights icon in the Selma to Montgomery March in 1965 in support of voting rights.

Turner formed the Perry County Civic League to help consolidate and expand black representation in local politics, and Sessions tried to prosecute him, his wife and Hogue on 29 separate charges of tampering with voting ballots during the 1984 Democratic presidential primary.

Then-U.S. Attorney Jeff Sessions during 1986 Senate
hearings for his failed nomination to the federal bench

While a grand jury indicted The Marion Three, they were eventually found not guilty and acquitted of all charges in a highly-publicized case that was widely seen as "racially motivated."

Especially considering the institutional segregation and voter oppression which had left blacks in Perry County marginalized in terms of political representation and county services for years.

The Marion Three case exposed Sessions' views on race and eventually helped to sink his nomination to be a federal judge.

His highly-publicized Senate hearings in 1986 included testimony from four different lawyers who'd worked with Sessions in the Office of the Southern District of Alabama - all four testified about a variety of different comments Sessions had made in DOJ offices that were seen as racist and demonstrated his personal contempt for civil rights and organizations like the NAACP.

Coretta Scott King famously penned an open letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee urging Sessions's nomination to the federal bench be denied because of his having used the power of his office to "intimidate and frighten elderly black voters."

While he eventually withdrew his nomination to be a federal judge, he was later elected State Attorney General of Alabama in 1995 where he championed a state school funding model that disproportionally underfunded majority-African-American schools - a model which was later found to be unconstitutional.

Anyway that's who Jeff Sessions is.

ICE agents escorting an immigrant to plane

His announcement of a lawsuit against the state of California last week to try and attack legitimate efforts to protect immigrants within their borders is simply a reflection of the overt racial bias he demonstrated in his attempts to prosecute The Marion Three for voter fraud back in 1984.

As much as Trump demeans him publicly, including referring to him as "Mr. Magoo" recently, Jeff Sessions is exactly what the Trump administration ordered.

An attorney general whose archaic views on immigrants, people of color and mass incarceration are informed by his own personal bigotry.

One who is willing to use the power of the Department of Justice as a tool to enforce the "otherism" that lies at the heart of chaotic right-wing ideology of the Trump administration - and twist the DOJ's mission to enable it to function like a quasi-Gestapo where immigrants are concerned.

It's a reflection of the narrow scope of justice as interpreted by the Trump administration and the Republican politicians on Capitol Hill who remain silent - content to savor their precious tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, while chaos reigns in the White House.

And inside the immigrant communities they vilify.

From Russia With Love: French Voters Reject Le Pen

New French president Emmanuel Macron

Like millions of other people around the globe today, I spent much of this morning anxiously awaiting the results of the presidential elections in France.

Back in March there was a collective sigh of relief after the Dutch elections for prime minister when the more moderate conservative Mark Rutte held off the far right candidate Geert Wilders.

Today that political trend echoed across France.

Based on early poll results, it appears the people of France have soundly rejected the divisive political ideology of extremist rightwing nationalism, and embraced a strong European Union.

According to poll projections published by the BBC, the moderate centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron appears to have soundly beaten the far right extremist candidate Marine Le Pen, garnering (at the time I'm writing this) 63.3% of the vote to her 36.7% based on results from polling stations that have already closed.

By French political standards this campaign was a pretty brutal slugfest evidenced by a lengthy and combative nationally televised presidential debate last Wednesday evening in which accusations and political insults were lobbed by both candidates.

French voters watched the conservative National Front candidate Le Pen appear to take a page from the Donald Trump campaign playbook and resort to peddling "alternative facts" to enflame and exaggerate fears and anxieties over the immigration issue that has divided so many in Europe.

It's a strategy that appears to have backfired for a number of reasons, and from a strategic perspective, I think Le Pen and her campaign advisors wildly underestimated the depth of Trump's unpopularity both here in America and around the globe - particularly after his chaotic first 100 days in office.

Far right candidate Marine Le Pen   [AFP-Getty Images] 

There's no question this campaign bore similarities to America's divisive 2016 presidential campaign.

Particularly with regards to the rise of a far right extremist ideology born of a populace frustrated with an unpopular president, and a political status quo that appeared disconnected from, and unable to solve, the difficult economic challenges faced by average people.

The French campaign also revolved around issues similar to the 2016 U.S. campaign.

The French presidential race was waged against a backdrop of a Democratic nation coping with fears over terrorism and the impact of immigration still trying to find it's economic footing in the wake of a global recession which has left the country with high unemployment lingering at around 10% nationally.

But where Le Pen, in many ways, patterned her campaign on Donald Trump, Macron took his cue from the pages of President Obama's playbook from his brilliant 2008 campaign.

Macron, a former investment banker, served as economic minister under the unpopular current Socialist president Francois Hollande.

But he shrewdly launched his own grassroots political movement called En Marche! (which translates to On the Move) in April of 2016, carefully distancing himself politically and ideologically from Hollande by stepping down from his ministerial position.

Macron's campaign also used a political research firm that had done work for Obama's 2008 campaign to conduct an intense outreach effort, sending out people to knock on the doors of thousands of doors to personally engage with voters and understand their concerns and collect data.

Macron visits a school during the campaign  [Getty]

He also used focus groups to help craft his campaign message and target the issues most important to mainstream French voters in order to carve out a centrist space to the left of Le Pen's far right National Front, and to the right of Hollande's Socialist party.

He ran a much more upbeat and inclusive campaign than Le Pen.

Macron also got a huge boost on Thursday with a videotaped endorsement from Obama, who remains hugely popular in France and in much of Western Europe.

The result was the first victory by a French presidential candidate outside of the two main political parties since the 1950's.

But undoubtedly the most disturbing comparison between the 2017 French presidential campaign and the 2016 American campaign was the effort by the Russian intelligence apparatus to use a combination of illegally obtained hacked personal emails and fake documents to sew doubt about Macron in order to help Le Pen - whose nationalism and authoritarian views are widely seen as more aligned with those of Russian president Vladimir Putin.  

Just like in the American presidential race, Russia timed the dump of a huge volume of information to take place at a critical point in the elections - in the case of France on Friday evening just before a period when candidates are not permitted to campaign or comment publicly.

As Reuters reported on Saturday, representatives from Macron's campaign reported that a "massive" mix of documents containing campaign finance information and email correspondence were dumped into Pastebin - a site where documents can be uploaded anonymously.

According to Reuters, the cyber-intelligence firm Flashpoint reports that APT 28, a group with ties to the Russian military intelligence branch known as the GRU, was responsible for dumping the documents intended to harm Macron's chances.

But fortunately the French government and media moved quickly to ensure that none of the documents obtained in the Russian hack would be released prior to voters going to the polls.

"Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" banner unfurled under
the Eiffel Tower by Greenpeace on Friday

As Jason Easley observed in an article posted on Politicususa.com on Saturday afternoon, the French media collectively agreed not to publish any of the information hacked by the Russians.

Not just because there was not enough time to carefully evaluate the information and source it properly.

But because doing so would allow a foreign entity to undermine the legitimacy of free and fair elections in a Democratic nation.

Which in the case of America, allowed a petulant, incompetent narcissist with no political experience solely motivated by financial greed to be elected president.

Personally I'm wondering when the world's leading Western Democracies are going to have the balls to collectively stand up and deal with Russia's overt attempts to manipulate the outcomes of elections in foreign nations.

Here in America, the legitimacy of free and fair elections are already under threat from within by the Republican Party's policy of disenfranchising voters and putting up barriers for people of color, the elderly, legal immigrants and students to participate in the right to vote.

Now we have a Republican majority in Congress, to say nothing of a president whose administration
is rife with advisors and officials with proven links to Russia, that seems to be dragging its feet on conducting investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential elections.

But despite all that I am optimistic, because I think the outcome of today's election in France shows that mainstream voters overwhelmingly reject the kind of divisive rightwing nationalism that defines the Trump administration.

I think the outcome of the French election bodes well for the upcoming Congressional mid-term elections in 2018 here in America.

As Jean-Francois Julliard of Greenpeace, the group responsible for unfurling a huge banner beneath the Eiffel Tower on Friday emblazoned with the motto of the French Republic, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity", told public radio Francinfo:

"We wanted to say that we are against the rise of nationalism and authoritarianism in France and in other countries. This is our way of reminding everybody they all need to mobilize to defend these values of liberty, equality and fraternity."

Macron's election is a powerful reminder for us here in America as well.

Vive le France!

Warsan Ismail's Twitter Posts Spark Nationwide Discussion on "Norskrasisme" in Norway

Norwegian Tweeter Warsan Ismail

The immediacy, power and reach of Twitter, and its ability to migrate beyond the boundaries of social media to impact global mainstream media with just 140 characters has been seen and felt many times.

There was IT consultant Sohaib Athar who unknowingly became the first person to (publicly) report on the US raid on Osama Bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan on April 29, 2012 when he heard a noise outside his window, looked out and tweeted: "Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1am (is a rare event),".

According to a CNN article by Doug Gross, on Saturday the day before the raid, Athar had 751 followers; by Monday two days later he had 32,000 and had cemented his place in history. There were (and still are) myriad examples of people on the ground in Egypt, Libya, Syria and other hot spots around the globe using Twitter to report on uprisings and conflicts as they unfold.

But yesterday there was a really interesting article on the BBC Website about a Norwegian student of Somali origin named Warsan Ismail who's tweets about the kinds of racism and intolerance her family faces every day in Norway have exploded into a nationwide conversation on race, culture and immigration. As the BBC article by Cordelia Hebblethwaite revealed, Ismail posted a series of tweets describing various incidents (including one where a neighbor set his two dogs on her mother) using the hashtag #norskrasisme which translates to Norwegian racism, and very quickly other Norwegians began using the same hashtag to post similar stories.

To date there have been thousands of tweets in this evolving and revealing conversation and Ismail has been interviewed on Norwegian television and in newspapers. To me there's something fascinating, brilliant and powerful about this. By simply telling her story (in a 140 characters at a time no less) she has tapped into a nationwide need for Norwegians to begin having an open and frank discussion about an issue that many in Norway don't like to openly discuss.

Just last week the Independent reported on efforts by Marine Le Pen of France's National Front and Geert Wilders of the Dutch Freedom Party, the leaders of their countries respective right wing political parties, to form a cooperative voting bloc in the European Parliament.

These are just two of the many nationalistic right wing political movements in Europe that are becoming increasingly mainstream largely in response to frustration over lingering high unemployment, stagnant wages and resentment over the immigration of growing numbers of people from Asia, Africa and the Middle East seeking better jobs in Europe - or fleeing violence or political persecution in their own countries.

These parties, usually occupying the fringes of mainstream political movements, typically gain traction and popularity during times of economic downturns when they tailor their message to capitalize on frustration and find ways to entwine their brand with the struggles of the larger populace.  (Tea Party anyone?)

For example in the United States in the 1920's in the wake of a sluggish post-World War I economy fueled by global recession, membership in the Ku Klux Klan exploded, reaching an all-time high of between 4 and 7 million members nationwide; including US Senators, Congressmen, judges and police from all over the country.

Cultural diversity is not new here in the United States and we still collectively struggle with open and frank discussions about race and immigration. I can't help but wonder how things might have been different in the United States in the 1920's if there was some kind of platform like Twitter for people to engage in more open discussions across the perceived boundaries that kept society so segmented.  

What's positive about Warsan Ismail's tweets sparking discussion in Norway is that it's been a catalyst for people of different races and religions and from all sides of the issue to begin to talk openly about the shifting dynamics of race, identity and nationality in a nation for whom cultural diversity is relatively new. And that's a start.