Anti-war youth activist faces FBI investigation

Ahlam Mohsen, a 22-year-old Arab-American and Michigan State University student, was arrested Aug. 16 and charged with two felony counts of stalking and assault after she pied U.S. Sen. Carl Levin at a Democrats meeting in the Michigan town of Big Rapids.

Ahlam Mohsen WW photo: Abayomi Azikiwe

Mohsen spent more than a week in the Mecosta County Jail, held on a quarter-million-dollar bond requiring $50,000 in bail. Her “crime” was that she carefully placed an apple pie into the senator’s face as an anti-war protest against U.S. involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan and occupied Palestine. Levin is chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee and fully backs U.S. slaughters and occupations around the globe.

A webpage in support of Mohsen on the social networking site Facebook has more than 300 members. Activists in Detroit with the Michigan Emergency Committee Against War and Injustice protested Aug. 20 at the federal building and called for Levin to have the charges dropped and release Mohsen from jail.

Her release on Aug. 24 could not be considered a victory, however. The state charges against Mohsen were temporarily “suspended” and the bond lowered because an FBI investigation was launched to determine whether Mohsen will be charged with federal crimes for assaulting a member of Congress. The state could pursue its case again at any time.

MECAWI organizers have called Mohsen’s case “an outrageous attack on free speech and the right to protest.” It involves, they note, an attempted takeaway of civil liberties compounded with anti-Arab, anti-immigrant and racist animus meant to divide and divert people.

Mohsen’s action took place after fellow activist Max Kantar read a statement to Levin that he and Mohsen had prepared. Regarding U.S.-led sanctions on Iraq during the 1990s, they told Levin: “The victims were poor people, children, the sick and the elderly. Publicly available declassified government documents now reveal the murderous (and ultimately successful) intentions of the U.S. government to destroy Iraq’s water system and then to systematically ban the importation of crucial items such as chlorine — the effects of which were designed, according to top officials, to unleash ‘disease epidemics’ which were predicted to affect ‘children in particular.’

“The result? Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children were deliberately murdered, perhaps up to half a million, according to mainstream estimates. Their blood is on your hands.”

Mohsen and Kantar decried Levin’s culpability in Israeli war crimes against the Palestinian people. They described the January 2009 Israeli war on Gaza and stated: “Your response to these atrocities was to co-sponsor a Senate resolution praising the U.S.-organized bloodbath. In fact, for years you have worked diligently to make sure that U.S. taxpayers subsidize these campaigns of murder and oppression against the Palestinian people. — The blood of thousands of Palestinians living under military occupation and apartheid is on your hands.”

The young anti-war activists denounced Levin’s support for U.S. attacks and warfare in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan. They said about Iran: “Your position on Iran — a country that, in stark contrast to Israel, hasn’t attacked its neighbors for centuries — is that ‘all options, including military options, should be on the table.’ In plain terms, this is a threat to bomb Iran, maybe even with nuclear weapons. Such threats are flagrant violations of the U.N. Charter. ... If and when the U.S. or its Israeli client attacks Iran, that blood, too, will be on your hands.”

Kantar and Mohsen called it “both perverse and shameful” that Levin “claims to uphold values like freedom and justice while actively taking part in the murder, mutilation, repression and infliction of suffering on millions of Iraqis, Palestinians, Lebanese, Afghans, Pakistanis and many more peoples living under the whip of U.S. imperialism, from Latin America to Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

“And back home in Michigan, you treat the people you purport to serve with equal contempt. While you go to sleep in your Detroit mansion as a millionaire each night, nearly 20,000 human beings in the same city go to bed homeless, on the streets. ... These people could be housed with money you prefer to spend on war. ... While you sit self-righteously in Washington making laws to protect power and privilege, the police systematically brutalize and imprison our state’s African-American population at [a] rate nearly THREE TIMES that of South Africa during the years of apartheid.”

The facts and figures in the statement to Levin are backed up with an attached five pages of documentation and sources. The entire statement and sources can be read online at www.mecawi.org.

A campaign to garner further support for Mohsen is being organized. In the meantime, anti-war and anti-racist activists and all progressives are urged to demand justice for Ahlam Mohsen by contacting Sen. Carl Levin’s office and demanding that he immediately have all investigations and charges against Mohsen dropped. Phone Levin at 313-226-6020; fax 313-226-6948; or e-mail by going to http://levin.senate.gov/contact/.