Dear Friends,

I have been increasingly concerned over the last few weeks about the anti-Muslim rhetoric that has been spreading across the country, from opposition to mosques in places like Tennessee and California to voices calling September 11 “Burn the Koran Day.” It saddens me personally and worries me from a national security perspective because it fuels the terrorists’ propaganda. Moreover, I don’t believe it is a true reflection of America. I have worked with a few other individuals to put together a statement reaffirming America’s commitment to religious freedom and tolerance, which is pasted below. We are hoping to get as many signatures of ordinary Americans as we can to correct the record on what America stands for.

I firmly believe these are values shared by Americans of all stripes. This is why we are doing this as individuals, rather than as any particular organization. The effort will not be used to harvest names or email addresses for future communications. We are not soliciting money for this effort — just asking people to add their voices to the following statement:

We are proud to live in the United States, a country founded on constitutional principles of tolerance and religious freedom.

We affirm America’s commitment to these principles.

We condemn bigotry and intolerance by any and all, especially those who murder others in the false name of their religion.

We condemn the act of burning the Koran, a sacred text for millions of Americans and others around the world, as we would condemn the burning of all sacred texts.

We pledge to remember Americans and others from around the world, including Muslims, Christians, Jews, and people of other faiths, who were murdered on September 11, 2001, American service men and women of all faiths who have lost their lives in the wars since then, and innocent civilians, of all faiths, who have died in those wars, and to honor their sacrifice by reaffirming our commitment to the principles of tolerance and religious freedom.

We encourage all to light a candle on the evenings of September 10 and 11 in memoriam and in reaffirmation of these principles.

If you agree with this statement, I hope you will sign the pledge at: http://tiny.cc/Tolerance .

And please urge your friends, family, colleagues and others to consider this, too, so that we can clearly show that the voices of intolerance do not reflect the true America.

Thanks very much for considering this.

Warmest regards,

Suzanne Spaulding

A very worth project that I would encourage everybody to consider.

(HT: Neal Sonnett)

The Daily Beast

In the neverending “ground zero mosque” debate, many people have been asking one question: Where are the moderate Muslims who denounce terrorism?

To that I answer: They are everywhere. I am one. Countless Muslim-American organizations from mosques to community centers also have denounced terrorism. Most noteworthy is the Muslim Public Affairs Council, which has published a video on YouTube highlighting American imams who reject terrorist ideology.

The Park51 project indirectly combats terrorism by debunking terrorist rhetoric that proclaims the U.S is incompatible with Islam and will show that Islam can flourish in its most beautiful forms, openly and freely in the U.S.

But I’d like to give you a better answer: Muslim Americans not only are denouncing terrorism—as denouncement often can be the simple manifestation of political rhetoric and empty words—but also are fighting terrorism.

The fight against terrorism is deeply personal for Muslim Americans who seek to quell extremist operations that unfairly kill innocent human beings and disproportionally promulgate a distorted picture of Islam.

As for the terrorists you despise—al Qaeda, the Taliban, etc.—who do you think understands their language and culture better in the U.S. than Muslim Americans? The Muslim diaspora in America is best equipped to aid and abet the U.S. government in its counterterrorism missions.

Muslim Americans are not monolithic, speaking many languages and representing many cultures. The linguists who exploit high-priority extremist communications and enable our nation to identify potential threats are often Muslim Americans.

But Muslim Americans don’t just translate for the United States, they die for it. Here are a few examples of true Muslim-American heroes who have given their lives to protect our nation and help curb the terrorist threat:

• Capt. Humayun Khan was killed after a terrorist vehicle packed with explosives drove into the gate of his compound while he was inspecting soldiers on guard duty.

• After serving the military for more than 18 years, Major James “Jimmy” Ahearn died in July 2007 in a roadside bombing in Iraq, leaving behind his wife and young daughter.

• Another well-known American hero is the recipient of the Purple Heart and Bronze Star, Kareem Khan, who was “spurred by the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center [and] wanted to show that not all Muslims were fanatics and that many, like him, were willing to lay their lives down for their country.”

Upset by the Islamophobic treatment of Muslims in America, former Secretary of State Colin Powell cited Kareem’s ultimate sacrifice and asked, “Is there something wrong with being Muslim in this country? No, that’s not America.”

On Aug. 17, the Pentagon held its 13th annual iftaar and honored the families of the aforementioned Muslim-American heroes. (An iftaar is a dinner ceremony held at sunset to commemorate the end of a Muslim’s day of fasting during the Islamic month of Ramadan.) On Aug. 20, the National Security Agency also held its 2nd annual iftaar. During these iftaars, hundreds of Muslim Americans broke bread with non-Muslims and prayed together in two of the United States’ most secure locations. Their prayers are no different from the prayers that will be held at the Park51 Community Center, commonly referred to as the ground zero mosque.

Both of these iftaar ceremonies highlighted themes of unity and tolerance. The NSA’s iftaar was called “Serving Proudly, Our Diversity Is Our Strength.” If the U.S. government, using tax-funded resources, can host, honor, and respect Muslim Americans for their service to our country, I think it is time for the American public to appreciate the motivations of the Cordoba Initiative’s Park51 Community Center, as well.

Why? Because the Park51 project indirectly combats terrorism by debunking terrorist rhetoric that proclaims the U.S is incompatible with Islam. The Park51 project will show that Islam can flourish in its most beautiful forms, openly and freely in the U.S.

As a result, in different ways, Muslim Americans from all parts of the United States are fighting terrorism. Thousands of Muslim-American intelligence analysts, linguists, Navy, Army, Marine, and Air Force officials are handling classified information and conducting critical operations for our country. They have dedicated their lives to fighting terrorism.

Without the language, cultural, and analytical skill sets of such Muslim Americans, U.S. counterterrorism operations would not be nearly as robust as they are today. Muslim Americans are valuable, if largely unrecognized, assets to a variegated American fabric. During the  mosque debate, I hope they can be appreciated, not demonized, for their outstanding efforts to make the United States a safer place for all.

Very well said.

As far as I can tell, what is valued these days are:

• Ability to network with people you knew in graduate school that got hired last year
• Having a PhD
• Having multiple publications, even if they demonstrate the author’s utter lack of doctrinal knowledge or inability to do basic legal research
• Knowing what Rawls (or Dworkin) would think of X
• Being able to run linear regressions
• Being able to run regressions about what Rawls would think about X

As Steve goes on to note, these criteria really don’t have anything to do with the practice of law. He then reflects on the importance of having clinical professors who are valued equally with the non-clinical faculty– as is the case at UCLA (and, I would argue, at Georgetown as well.) His bottom line: “To my way of thinking, whatever flaws the old criteria may have had, at least they valued basic legal skills, something the new criteria utterly ignore.”

I agree. It worries me that we can have law professors that actually know very little about law and basic legal research!

Matthew Alexander

Former Air Force interrogator, who writes under the pseudonym, Matthew Alexander, has an outstanding piece over at The Huffington Post in support of building Cordoba House– the proposed Muslim  community center and mosque. Alexander writes:

The debate over the mosque in lower Manhattan has caused our country’s political volcano to erupt. Republicans and Democrats, among them Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, have argued that the designated site for the Cordoba House, a Muslim community center and mosque, is too close to hallowed ground. President Obama defended the mosque supporters’ Constitutional right to build it where they choose.

But there is a much larger rationale for building a Muslim community center near the former site of the Twin Towers: It can be used as a weapon to defeat al Qaeda.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, our counterterrorism strategy has focused on stopping terrorist attacks. That’s an important goal, but only part of the equation. A comprehensive strategy should include a greater focus on removing the root causes of terrorism. The only way to deliver a sustainable defeat to al Qaeda is to both destroy its leadership and cut off its ability to recruit.

Building a Muslim community center near the site of Ground Zero will bolster our ability to do the latter. Imagine an al Qaeda recruiter attempting to sway a potential charge by citing an imaginary American war against Muslims but having to face the counterargument that Americans built a Muslim community center near the site of the former Twin Towers.

The Cordoba House would be a powerful symbol of U.S. tolerance and freedom that will stand in direct contradiction to al Qaeda’s narrative that Americans hate Muslims. As a symbol, its construction demonstrates that the U.S. is not at war with Islam and that Muslims are welcome in America. It communicates a message of moderation that stands in stark contrast to al Qaeda’s bankrupt ideology.

As I discovered as a high-level interrogator of al Qaeda members in Iraq, symbols like this matter. Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and the policy of torture and abuse handed al Qaeda its number one recruiting tool. Those who think al Qaeda will not be able to spin this controversy to their advantage are disastrously mistaken — but it can be a victory for America as well.

The political uproar over the Cordoba project, and in particular the use of harmful, bigoted rhetoric by some opportunists, leaves America facing a choice. It can project one of two symbols: One of integration, acceptance and positive affirmation of American values; or one of intolerance, rejection, and animosity. The former will work to undermine al Qaeda as part of a long-term strategy to defeat them. The latter will bolster Islamic extremists’ arguments that America is an intolerant country hell-bent on war with Islam, aid recruitment efforts and add support for more terrorist attacks.

The choice is obvious. Let’s build the Cordoba House.

Well said.

(HT: Neal Sonnett)

Delighted to announce that IntLawGrrls again will cosponsor the International Humanitarian Law Dialogs at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York, not far from another cosponsor, the Robert H. Jackson Center.

The theme of this year’s 4th annual Dialogs, to be held August 29 to 31, is timely given the outcome of the International Criminal Court Review Conference in Uganda. IntLawGrrls wrote a Kampala series of posts about that conference, as well as a crime of aggression series about a key conference outcome, the adoption of provisions designed to make the crime punishable by the ICC.

The Dialogs’ theme, in short, is: Crimes Against Peace – Aggression in the 21st Century.

Exploring it will be prosecutors from international criminal fora, plus many international criminal law scholars. (Prior IntLawGrrls posts.) Last year was a great opportunity to meet such colleagues at Chautauqua, a picturesque lakefront venue. It was also the source of 2 IntLawGrrls guest contributions: a trilogy of posts by Judge Patricia M. Wald (here, here, and here), plus a post by Judge Marilyn J. Kaman (here).

Many present and former international prosecutors are expected to take part this year. In addition to those mentioned as specific speakers in the program that follows, prosecutors set to attend include the following from the:

► International Criminal Court, Deputy Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda (left);

► International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, former prosecutor H.W. William Caming;

► Special Court for Sierra Leone, Chief Prosecutor Brenda Hollis (below right), recently in the news for calling a supermodel to testify at the ongoing Hague trial about diamonds received from defendant Charles Taylor, former President of Liberia, and former Chief Prosecutor David M. Crane, the founder of the Dialogs who’s now a Professor of Law at Syracuse University, another cosponsor, and the founder of the Dialogs;

► Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia: Co-Prosecutor Andrew T. Cayley and former Co-Prosecutor Robert Petit; and
► International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and for the former Yugoslavia, former Chief Prosecutor Richard J. Goldstone.

Sessions on the current program include:

Sunday, August 29

► Showing of War Don Don, an award-winning HBO Documentary film about a Special Court trial in Sierra Leone, moderated by filmmaker Rebecca Richmond Cohen (left).

Monday, August 29

► Keynote speech by Benjamin B. Ferencz, formerly a prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and a lifelong activist on behalf of international criminal justice, introduced by Professor Michael P. Scharf of Case Western Reserve University School of Law, another cosponsor.

► Updates from all the current prosecutors, moderated by Professor John Q. Barrett, St. John’s University School of Law.

► Keynote speech by Judge Hans-Peter Kaul, 2d Vice President of the International Criminal Court, introduced by Leila Nadya Sadat, an IntLawGrrl guest/alumna who contributed to our Kampala series, and Director of the Whitney R. Harris Institute at the Washington University School of Law, another Dialogs cosponsor.

► Dialog on the crime of aggression, with Ferencz, John Washburn, Convener of the American Non-Governmental Organizations Coalition for the International Criminal Court, and William R. Pace, Convenor of the Coalition for an International Criminal Court, moderated by Professor David J. Scheffer of Northwestern University School of Law, formerly U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes.
► Keynote address by Stephen J. Rapp, currently the U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes, and formerly the Chief Prosecutor at the Special Court for Sierra Leone, introduced by David Sullivan of Enough Project, another cosponsoring organization.

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

► Year in Review — International Criminal Law, by IntLawGrrl Valerie Oosterveld (left), a Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Western Ontario, and frequent contributor to our Kampala series.

► Keynote speech by Professor William Schabas, Irish Centre for Human Rights, National University of Ireland, Galway.

► Issuance of the 4th Chautauqua Declaration & Conclusion of Dialogs, hosted by IntLawGrrl Diane Marie Amann (yours truly, also a Kampala series contributor), Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis, wearing my hat as a Vice President of the American Society of International Law, another cosponsor of the IHL Dialogs.

For more information, contact Carol Drake at cdrake@roberthjackson.org

Should be a great event!

Over at TechCrunch, Michael Arrington tells the story of Samasource, a nonprofit organization working to help those in the developing world:

San Francisco based Samasource is on a mission to help women, refugees and young people in developing countries earn a living wage on the Internet. The model is straightforward – Samasource works with companies that need certain types of relatively simple tasks done, like database cleanup, translations, transcriptions, etc. Samasource charges companies on a per action basis, and then pays workers in Kenya, Uganda, India, Pakistan and Haiti to do the work.The tasks are generally more complicated than Mechanical Turk stuff, and the company pays a minimum of $1/hour to workers who were previously living on less than $3/day. Some workers, who build up to more complex tasks, make as much as $10/hour.

And what’s more important is that these workers develop a long term relationship with Samasource. They work via local companies that organize and hire the workers and do quality control, and that model seems to work. Today the company has 800 workers in various countries and wants to scale that up significantly. CEO Leila Janah says there is an infinite amount of labor available at a few dollars per hour, and that these jobs make a huge difference in the lives of the workers. There are 4 billion people living on less than $3/day, she says, and $1.4 billion living on less than $1/day.

They are building slowly because they don’t want to lay people off if there’s no work, so part of their job is to find long term customers with a steady work flow. They recently signed a $450,000 contract with a new customer that will allow them to hire another 200 or so workers, for example. To date Samasource has made $1.2 million in gross revenue, and all but 15% or so of that was distributed to workers.

Samasource is, like Kiva, a non profit organization. What this company really needs is to get a large government or other grant to try to scale their work. A large part of Janah’s time seems to be spent on chasing that money, and a few million dollars as a grant would go a long way to providing thousands of people with work. Or, Samasource could turn into a for-profit entity and raise more traditional venture capital for growth. But that would limit a lot of the goodwill the entity now receives as a full fledged non profit. We discuss all of that in our interview. And we also discover that Janah believes in her company so much that she had it tattooed onto her wrist.

I actually didn’t know much about Samasource before meeting Leila last weekend at Foo Camp. But we’re already likely to become customers – we have a huge need for data massaging on Crunchbase as well as transcriptions for TechCrunchTV.

HT: jranck

My great friend and rights advocate extraordinaire, Joe Grieboski, is taking on a noble project: tweeting the Constitution of the United States. Over at Just Joe, he explains:

I have watched with great interest and concern over the last few years as the Constitution of the United States, one of man’s most brilliant developments and the foundation of all that we as Americans are as a people, a nation and a state — is used as a cover for some particular political and ideological concerns and then discarded when it conflicts with other particular political and ideological concerns.

The recent case of the Ground Zero Mosque has been the most demonstrative of this concern, as both sides have used some parts of the Constitution to advance their cause while ignoring other parts.

As a result, I have decided that starting today, I am going to tweet the entire Constitution, starting with the Bill of Rights and Amendments.

While I expect that this will be an exercise futility, as my desired goal of people reading the Constitution before throwing around its contents like al dente pasta and seeing if it sticks is in direct contravention to the psychological make-ups of the people intended to effect, I nonetheless consider it an important and useful act.

So without further ado…

Amendment 1 – Freedom of Religion, Press, Expression. Ratified 12/15/1791.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

38.809779 -77.046304

Outstanding! I encourage everybody to re-tweet Joe! Click here to follow him on Twitter.

Charli Carpenter and Dan Drezner have an article on new media and international relations in the new International Studies Perspectives. Focusing on blogs and social network sites, they explain in their abstract:

The International Relations (IR) profession has not fully taken stock of the way in which user-driven information technologies—including Blogger, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Wikipedia—are reshaping our professional activities, our subject matter, and even the constitutive rules of the discipline itself. In this study, we reflect on the ways in which our own roles and identities as IR scholars have evolved since the advent of ‘‘Web 2.0’’: the second revolution in communications technology that redefined the relationship between producers and consumers of online information. We focus on two types of new media particularly relevant to the practice and the profession of IR: blogs and social networking sites.

Professor Robert J. Beck

My dear friend and collaborator, Professor Robert J. Beck, has just published an article in International Studies Perspectives on the use of an online component in teaching international law. Entitled, “Teaching International Law as a Partially Online Course: The Hybrid ⁄ Blended Approach to Pedagogy,” the abstract of the article follows:

This article recounts the author’s experience of teaching International Law as a ‘‘blended’’ or ‘‘hybrid’’ course. In hybrid teaching, a significant portion of the learning activities is moved online, and time traditionally spent in the classroom is reduced but not eliminated. The article first briefly reviews the literature on international law pedagogy. Next, it describes the particular context within which the author redesigned the author’s traditional course. It thereafter highlights the key aspects of the author’s redesigned course. Finally, it shares some practical lessons that the author has learned and more general conclusions that the author has reached in hybrid teaching.

I look forward to drawing upon Bob’s insights!