Law and Disorder January 8, 2024

Israel Is Terrified The World Court Will Decide Its Committing Genocide

Since Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis on October 7, Israel has launched a full-scale genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. As of this broadcast, Israeli forces have killed at least 22,100 Gazans, about 9,100 of whom are children. At least 57,000 persons have been wounded and at least 7,000 are reported missing. Untold numbers of people are trapped beneath the rubble. Israel has expelled and forcibly displaced more than 85% of Gaza’s population from their homes, and has cut off their access to food, water, fuel and electricity.

Although the International Criminal Court (ICC) has been investigating what it refers to as the “Situation in the State of Palestine” for nearly three years, calls for prosecution of Israeli officials have been ignored. This blind eye comes as the chief prosecutor of the ICC demonstrates blatant bias in favor of Israel.

The ICC’s Rome Statute provides for the prosecution of individuals who commit, or aid and abet the commission of genocide. By contrast, the International Court of Justice (ICJ or “World Court”) — the judicial arm of the UN system — resolves disputes between countries.All the 153 countries that have ratified the 1948 Genocide Convention have a duty to prevent and punish genocide and they can submit the issue of Israel’s genocide to the ICJ.

On December 29, South Africa launched a well-documented case at the ICJ, alleging that Israel’s military campaign in Gaza amounts to genocide. South Africa is asking the court to order provisional measures to “protect against further, severe and irreparable harm to the rights of the Palestinian people under the Genocide Convention.” It also asks the court “to ensure Israel’s compliance with its obligations under the Genocide Convention not to engage in genocide, and to prevent and to punish genocide.”

A hearing in the ICJ on South Africa’s application is scheduled for January 11 and 12. Other parties to the Genocide Convention are being approached to join South Africa’s petition.

Marjorie’s recent article : Israel Is Terrified The World Court Will Decide Its Committing Genocide

Guest – Marjorie Cohn – Law and Disorder co-host Marjorie Cohn, who is Dean of the People’s Academy of International Law and a member of the Bureau of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. She is Professor of Law Emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and former president of the National Lawyers Guild and she has written extensively about the Israeli genocide in Gaza for Truthout.

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Remembering Australian Journalist John Pilger

Today we re-broadcast a recent interview we did with the great Australian journalist John Pilger about his film titled The Coming War On China. With the exception of a short break at the conclusion in 1975 of the Vietnamese war, the United States has been at war continually. The momentum of what President Eisenhower warned us against and described as being led by, “the military industrial complex” has been going on with successive wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and now the American proxy war in Ukraine. The military industrial complex has been augmented by support from the CIA, Congress, and the corporate media.

As Pilger demonstrates, the United States, is building up for a war against China. This build up is both military and ideological and shaped by hostile propaganda. In this respect, an alarming full page New York Times article, 11 weeks in the making, and written by seven reporters, appeared on August 5, 2023. The article targeted the American peace organization CODEPINK as well as one of its financial backers. It is a hit piece that has alarmed many of us in the movement. John Pilger gives us the background to it.

Guest – John Pilger covered that war as a young reporter and understood that it was based on the lie that Lyndon Johnson told falsely stating that the North Vietnamese had attacked an American ship in the Gulf of Tonkin. Another 1 million people died in the Iraq war That war was based on the now well known lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that he was going to use against us and that he was responsible for 911. A similar campaign of fear mongering is going on now about China. The major news media parrot the government’s fact free line that China is our enemy. In his article “The Coming War With China” John Pilger wrote “a US war against China beckons and we have a responsibility to speak out. We know what is coming. Silence must be broken.”

Hosted by attorneys Michael Smith, Maria Hall, Heidi Boghosian and Marjorie Cohn

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Law and Disorder January 1, 2024

What Kind Of Nation?

What kind of nation cuts off of food, water, medicine, electricity, and fuel to 2 1/3 million Palestinians and then bombs them as they sit trapped in the open air prison which is the Gaza Strip? What kind of national leader in his capacity as Israeli Minister of Defense, says “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.“ Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu promised that “We will turn Gaza into a deserted island.”

What kind of a nation vetoes a cease-fire as the US did in a 13 to 1 vote when it was proposed at the United Nations Security Council? The Israeli and American nations finds themselves morally isolated on the world stage.

The American government supplies the weapons of war to a nation that has so far annihilated at least 20,000 people, including 8000 children. The Israelis use weapons made in the US and paid for by our tax dollars.

American foreign policy is driven by the military industrial complex. It’s a country whose weapons industry is closely allied with the weapons industry of Israel and a country whose government is heavily influenced by the Israeli lobby, a lobby that should be forced to register as an agent of a foreign country.

Guest – Aaron Maté about the continuing genocide in Gaza, which is now approaching 100 days. He is a journalist with The Gray Zone where he hosts “Pushback“. He is the co-host of Useful Idiots. In 2019 Aaron Maté won the Izzy award for outstanding achievement in independent media for his Russiagate coverage in The Nation.

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Unilateral Sanity Could Save The World: Nothing Can Be Changed Until Its Faced

As we begin 2024, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists just reset its nuclear doomsday clock for the 24th time in its 76-year history. They created the doomsday clock just after WW2 to visually represent the threat of global nuclear annihilation. Although the precise time won’t be announced until later this month, the most recent change was just one year ago: in January 2023, when the clock was moved forward to 90 seconds til midnight – the closest to midnight ever.

What will 2024 bring? Will we get swept up in momentum and fervor toward global catastrophe? Or can we muster the will and courage to act … and try to save one another – other animals, the earth, and ourselves?

In his article, Unilateral Sanity Could Save the World, our guest: author and political analyst Norman Solomon, invokes Antonio Gramsci’s philosophy of keeping a “pessimism of the intellect,” but “an optimism of the will.”

Guest – Norman Solomon is a long-time associate of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, the national director of RootsAction.org, and the Executive Director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death; and his latest book, War Made Invisible: How American Hides the Human Toll of its Military Machine which was published by the New Press in June 2023.

Hosted by attorneys Michael Smith and Maria Hall

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Law and Disorder December 18, 2023

Unwavering U.S. Support Of Israeli War Atrocity

Israel, with indispensable American support, is destroying the people of Gaza. They are being bombed by American planes dropping American bombs and shot at by Israeli soldiers, using American weapons and ammunition. Israel has prevented them from getting food and water, medical supplies and fuel. They are sick and starving. 85% of the population of 2.3 million have had their homes destroyed and are living outside in the cold without food, fuel medicine or clean water

Already some 20,000 Palestinians have been murdered, the majority, women and children. At least 800 children have had their limbs amputated. It is a one-sided war. The American equipped Israeli Air Force and Army is the fourth largest military force in the world. The Palestinians are essentially defenseless against this. They have been herded to the south tip of tiny Gaza, their homes, schools, hospitals pulverized. They are living in the streets, in the cold, with no sanitation, awaiting their certain destruction by starvation, dehydration, and cholera.

The American government has fully supported this genocidal operation with military supplies, diplomatic, cover, and propaganda. Last week, the United States voted to block a cease-fire resolution at the UN Security council – 13 to 1. The US and Israel are looked upon as moral outlaws by the rest of the world.

Why has the American government supported Israel?  What is the history of this support for the Israeli colony which was set up in 1948 in the heart of the Arab world and has been expanding and displacing Palestinians ever since?

Professor Khalidi OpEd LA Times

Guest –  Columbia University Professor Rashid Khalidi is a Palestinian American historian of the Middle East, the Edward Said professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, and Director of the Middle East Institute of Columbia School of International and Public Affairs. He was educated at Yale and Oxford universities and is the author of many books on the Middle East. He is also the author of Under Siege: PLO Decision Making During the 1982 War, Brokers of Deceit: How the US Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East and recently The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017.

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Anti-Semitic or Pro Palestine, Quick Silencing Of Student Protests

Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past week or so, you know about the firings and attempted firing of university heads at M.I.T, Harvard, and Penn in the wake of the new Israeli-Palestinian war. At M.I.T. and Penn, their top bosses were, in fact, fired. So far, Claudine Gay at Harvard has held on to her job, but many still think her days there are numbered. The moves to get rid of these university bosses flowed from the claim that they were not strong enough in their condemnation of the October 7th Hamas attack, and of the way their students sloganized in the course of their boisterous on-campus protests against Israel, because of the humanitarian crisis resulting from what Israel is doing in Gaza.

In short, they were deemed to be, if not out and out anti-Semantic themselves, clearly insufficiently pro-Israel in their over-all statements and actions since this latest Israeli/Palestinian war began. Of course, there have been conflicts at many, many other U.S. colleges and university arising from the war, often resulting in the outlawing on campus of campus groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace.

Put simply, despite the fact that a very significant pro-Palestine bias may exist among students on our nation’s campuses of higher learning, these students’ grownups know what’s best…and that means unwavering support for Israel and the supportive role played by the U.S. in that war. And it means trying to silence criticism of Israel and bold support for Palestine. Shout our certain slogans, such as “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, or “down with Zionism, down with Israeli apartheid”, or “Israel, Israel you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide”, and the censors won’t be long in attacking you, or simply silencing you.

Aside for my grief and anger over what is happening to the Palestinian people in this war, there are a couple of other aspects of all of this that have me particularly disturbed, have me angry and greatly worried. One is the simplistic, quick to condemn, efforts to shut down the actions and slogans of the pro-Palestinian demonstrators. The other is how reminiscent this is of how the ruling elite in this country went after the leadership, and rank-and-filers, in the anti-Vietnam war movement of the 60’s and early 70’s. Then, the charges were that the slogans and the demonstrations were “anti-American” and, in fact, down right “communistic.” I, along with a handful of other anti-Vietnam War leaders, was then called before the new House Un-American Activities Committee, to testify about the supposed, and I quote, “Soviet money and leadership that was supporting U.S. antiwar groups and coalitions.”

Are today’s pro-Palestinian leaders now to be called to account and asked by the authorities, “are you now or have you ever been, an anti-Zionist”? “Are you getting money from the Islamists?” Yes, the growing danger to free speech in our country, and the right to defend those who the government may disfavor, or claim to be the enemies of our people, is to be greatly feared. It often grows slowly, at first, like some cancerous viruses, but once it gathers strength…well, remember our history.

Guest – Stephen Rohde is a noted constitutional scholar, retired civil rights lawyer and activist. He is the past Chair of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California; the founder and current chair of Interfaith communities United for Justice and Peace; the author of Freedom of Assembly and American Words of Freedom. Steve Rohde is also a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times Review of Books, TruthDig, and a leader in the national campaign to free imprisoned investigative reporter, Julian Assange.

Hosted by attorneys Michael Smith, Maria Hall and Jim Lafferty

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Law and Disorder December 4, 2023

Chris Hedges Returns From Gaza

Israel is a long time strategic ally of United States in the Middle East If you look at a map of the area Israel is shaped like an aircraft carrier: that’s its use to the USA.

Israel is given $3.8 billion a year of taxpayer dollars to use to purchase American military weapons. It has just been granted a multi billion dollar military aid package to facilitate its war efforts. The 2000 pound bombs being used to destroy the tiny Gaza Strip making it into a parking lot are made in the USA, so are Israel’s tanks, planes, armored personnel carriers, bullets, grenades and artillery shells.

On October 7, several hundred young Palestinians of the resistance movement Hamas broke through the fence of besieged Gaza killing Israelis and taking hostages. This was illegal and inhumane, but understandable given Israel’s historical blocking of a peaceful solution. The Netanyahu government used the attack and hostage taking as a pretext and an excuse to begin a genocidal war against the 2.3 million people in Gaza. Their slogan was “finish the Nakba,” the catastrophe Israel inflicted on Palestinians on 1948.

Through the use of murder and terror they then drove out 750,000 Palestinians and destroyed 531 of their villages. The Zionist took 78% of their land. Now they want the rest. They hope to level Gaza and drive the Palestinians across the border into Egypt. The USA is facilitating this process and is complicit in the genocidal war. There may be a paradigm shift in the 100 year war on the Palestinians.

We also hear a letter to the children of Gaza written by Chris Hedges, read by Eunice Wong, a member of SAG-AFTRA and Actors’ Equity Association: www.eunicewong.actor

Guest – Chris Hedges, an Arabic speaking former middle east bureau chief at the New York Times. Chris Hedges has just returned from Doha broadcasting on the crisis in Gaza for Al Jazeera as well as being in Egypt where he covered the war. Hedges spent 20 years as a war correspondent and reported on the past two Palestinian “intifadas”, or uprisings. He is a graduate of the Harvard Divinity school and the author of 14 books. Many people consider him not only a journalist, but a moral philosopher. His work can be found on chrishedges.substack.com

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Lawyers You’ll Like: Attorney Bill Goodman –  In Remembrance

William (Bill) Goodman died in his home in Detroit on November 16, 2023. He was 83 years old. Bill was the son of Ernie Goodman, who was one of the founding members of the National Lawyers Guild and a partner in the first racially, integrated law firm in the United States

Bill was a past national president of the NLG, one of the founding officers of the NLG National Police Accountability Project, the former Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and a founding board member of the Sugar Law Center for Economic and Social Justice,

He worked until his death and was a partner in the Detroit civil rights firm, Goodman, Hurwitz and James where he fought for the rights of victims of government and corporate abuse. Bill was also an Adjunct Professor of Law at Wayne State Law School, where he taught Constitutional litigation.

Bill has successfully litigated numerous police and government misconduct cases as well as other high-profile cases on behalf of prisoners, toxic tort victims, the wrongfully convicted and victims of racism, always in the pursuit of constitutional, social and economic justice.

Host Attorney Julie Hurwitz: Bill was my law partner in Goodman Hurwitz & James and a former long-term partner in life – we knew each other a long time! In this interview, which we did last year, we will discuss two cases that we brought to confront the unconstitutional and inhumane conduct of individual police officers, but more importantly, the historically unconstitutional and inhumane ways in which police departments institutionally tolerate, promote and reward such behavior by their officers.

Hosted by attorneys Michael Smith, Marjorie Cohn and Julie Hurwitz

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Law and Disorder November 27, 2023

CCR Files Suit: Palestine v Biden

Since the illegal October 7 attacks by Hamas that killed 1,200 people in Israel, the Israeli occupying forces have mounted a massive military assault on the Palestinian people. As of November 21, more than 14,128 Palestinians have been killed, including more than 5,600 children and over 3,550 women; at least 30,000 have been injured; and about 1.7 million out of 2.2 million people in Gaza have been displaced. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world have mounted mass protests against Israel’s war on the Palestinians in Gaza.

On November 13, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) filed suit on behalf of Palestinians against President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin for failure to prevent genocide and complicity in genocide.

Guest – Maria LaHood is Deputy Legal Director at CCR, with expertise in constitutional rights and international human rights. Maria works closely with Palestine Legal to support students and others whose speech is being suppressed for their Palestine advocacy around the country. She graduated from the University of Michigan Law School and was named a 2010 Public Justice Trial Lawyer of the Year Finalist. Maria and other lawyers from CCR wrote the complaint filed in federal court.

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Remembering Professor Holly Maguigan

Holly Maguigan, noted professor and attorney who was a pioneer of the battered woman defense, has died. Holly was Professor of Clinical Law at the New York University School of Law, where she ran the Criminal Justice Clinic: Focus on Domestic Violence and Evidence. She practiced law in Philadelphia in the 1970s and ‘80s, both as a public defender and in private practice, specializing in the defense of victims of domestic violence who assaulted or killed their abusers and then faced criminal prosecution. Judges and juries were largely unsympathetic to women who stayed with their abusive partners even though many were emotionally and psychologically unable to leave those relationships. Traditional self-defense principles require that the abused person have a reasonable belief that she is about to suffer imminent death or great bodily injury. But some people kill their abusers preemptively, before the next attack can occur.

Sue Osthoff, a founder of the Philadelphia-based National Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered Women, who worked with Holly for decades, said, “I do believe many, many victims of battering would not have done as well as they did” without Holly’s work. Many defendants were acquitted, and several others were not charged at all.

Holly once wrote that criminal defense attorneys must “explain the impact of intimate violence without appearing to pathologize battered women and deny their reason and capacity.” Holly was a member of the Family Violence Prevention Fund’s National Advisory Committee on Cultural Considerations in Domestic Violence cases and she was a co-president of the Society of American Law Teachers.

Professor Holly Maguigan:

  • I was doing medieval history and I was at Berkeley. It was 1967 and Oakland stopped the draft.
  • I got very interested in the anti-war politics.
  • I hated lawyers. I really hated lawyers. They were boring. They talked about themselves all the time. They only had stories about their cases and how great they were and they would never post bail when people got arrested.
  • The University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia is where I stayed for 17 years.
  • First I started out as a public defender. I loved being a public defender, it was the beginning and end of everything I hoped it would be.
  • That’s where I met David Rudovsky and David Kairys. They were then defenders while I was a student.
  • After they went out on their own, they kept inviting me to join them. I kept putting it off because I loved being a defender so much.
  • In Philadelphia there was much more actual litigation, not just motion litigation there’s a lot of that here in New York City but actual trials.
  • You had a sense, there was an analysis that people were doing life on the installment plan and you needed to do what you could to kick them loose any particular time.
  • It was a community in its own odd way and I found it difficult to leave it.
  • I was doing major felonies within a couple of years.
  • David Kairys was very focused on constitutional litigation and government misconduct. He did the Camden 28 which was a big draft resistance case.
  • My interest was more into criminal defense.
  • Grand juries (all over the country) convened to investigate the alleged transportation of Patty Hearst by the SLA from California where she had been captured.
  • He was a killer. (Frank Rizzo) There was no question. More people died in police actions before or since.
  • I don’t mean to suggest that all the police started out as homocidal. This was a situation which from the top down came the message if you’re a good cop then you’re going to take people out however you think you need to.
  • I knew about race and class bias in the court room as much as a white woman who was middle class could know.
  • I was just blown away by what happens when you add hatred of women to hatred of black people and hatred of poor people.
  • Judges would go by me in the hall and say Maguigan, ahem, you didn’t give me anything this Christmas, not even one lousy bottle, you’re not getting any assignments.
  • Judges would do things, like open the drawer in their chambers, and there would be wads of bills, and they’d let you know.
  • I developed a specialty on women who kill men.
  • In the early eighties a group in Philadelphia called Women Against Abuse began working and they did advocacy for battered women accused of crime and meant a huge difference.
  • The battered women cases I was working on were quite consuming because people then didn’t know very much in how to try these cases.
  • The judges expected you to plead insanity or guilty. Reasonable doubt was a consideration at sentencing not at trial.
  • There were cases that did require teams. There was no question.
  • I wanted to be in court. I wanted to be in the presence of that conflict between the authorities and regular people.
  • I went to NYU where I taught in the criminal defense clinic for many years.
  • To see students react to the great stories their clients have is just amazing.
  • SALT (Society of American Law Teachers) is about who gets into law school, what they learn and who teaches them. It’s about access to justice. It’s about relating to law school as a place where you train people to do social justice.  SALT’s focus is on students and teaching.
  • Holly Maguigan to be honored by Society of American Law Teachers.

Guest – Professor Holly Maguigan teaches a criminal defense clinic and one in comparative criminal justice as well as a seminar in global public service lawyering and a course in evidence. She is an expert on the criminal trials of battered women. Her research and teaching are interdisciplinary. Of particular importance in her litigation and scholarship are the obstacles to fair trials experienced by people accused of crimes who are not part of the dominant culture. Professor Maguigan is a member of the Family Violence Prevention Fund’s National Advisory Committee on Cultural Considerations in Domestic Violence cases. She serves on the boards of directors of the National Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered Women and the William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice. She is a past co-president of the Society of American Law Teachers, the largest membership organization of law professors in the U.S.

Hosted by attorneys Michael Ratner, Michael Smith, Heidi Boghosian and Marjorie Cohn

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Law and Disorder November 20, 2023

Jewish Voice For Peace Leads US Ceasefire Protests

In 1948, 750 thousand Palestinians were terrorized, murdered and driven out of their homeland in Palestine where they had lived for thousands of years. Many fled to Gaza at the southern end of what is now Israel.

Gaza is tiny strip of land along the Mediterranean and is one of the most densely populated areas in the world. More than 500 of their villages were destroyed and the remaining Palestinians were left to live in 22% of historic Palestine. The process of murder, terror, and displacement is going on again. 1.5 million Palestinians, many of them descendants of the refugees from 1948, have been driven out of northern Gaza. Their homes have been bombed and destroyed, their hospitals, schools, mosques, and churches have been bombed. To date, 11 thousand have been killed, almost half are children.

Israel has cut off clean water, medicine, electricity, fuel and food and ordered Palestinians to get out or be killed. Israeli ground troops are going door to door mopping up those who have not fled.

This genocidal operation has the full support of the American establishment and the corporate media. Israel is a strategic military ally of the United States and gets support from the military industrial complex and right wing Republican oriented American Jews.

But this time there is a push back. Thousands of young American Jews have not been taken in by the propaganda and identify with the new organization Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP)

JVP has organized thousands of people in spectacular demonstrations that have shut down Grand Central Station in New York, blocked entrances to Congress, sat in on the Capital rotunda, and amassed at the Statue of Liberty. These have been some of the largest acts of civil disobedience since the Iraq war, and the largest demonstrations of Jewish people in solidarity with the struggle for Palestine freedom ever.

Guest – Elena Stein, Director of Strategy for Jewish Voice For Peace. She lives in New York.

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What Will It Take To End The War In Gaza?

Israel’s war in Gaza, which has already created a humanitarian disaster of epic proportions, now threatens to spread even more death and destruction as Israel’s military force, the IDF, has now occupied the last hospital in Gaza still barely functioning, as it attempts to operate without electricity or medical supplies. And this at a time when Israel’s IDF forces claim to control all of northern Gaza and Gaza City. Notably, the Israel forces occupying the hospital, despite its earlier claims to the contrary, has failed to produce any proof that the hospital was being used by the forces of Hamas for military purposes.

Of course, for some weeks now, many world leaders and United Nations officials have declared that what Israel is doing in Gaza amounts to genocide. And so far, even efforts at achieving any meaningful pause in the fighting, let alone a real ceasefire, remains beyond reach, still being opposed by Israel and the Biden Administration.

Meanwhile, no one is prepared to predict an end to the slaughter in Gaza, as the civilian death toll continues to grow, and as Gaza’s infrastructure continues to disappear. And so, the protests over the war, the accusations of war crimes and crimes against humanity on the part of Israel continue to grow, as well. Indeed, in the last week there have been huge anti-Israel protests, including a massive one organized by the orthodox Jewish community in the United States. Meanwhile, the Biden Administration is coming under more and more attacks from members of its own Administration. Already more than 400 high level and mid-level government officials in the Biden Administration have sent Biden letters protesting his refusal to ask Israel to declare a ceasefire, and many of them have resigned in protest.

Guest – Attorney Ameena Qazi the Co-Executive Director of the Peace and Justice Law Center in Los Angeles. She formerly served as the Deputy Executive Director and Staff Attorney for the Greater Los Angeles Area Chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (or “C.A.I.R.”), the largest American Muslim civil rights and advocacy group; and Ms. Qazi is also a former Executive Director of the Los Angeles Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. US Campaign For Palestinian Rights

Hosted by Attorneys Michael Smith and Jim Lafferty

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