September 11, 2009

Execution Chronicles is one year  old  and growing.  The film project  that   helped to launch the site is entering  post production while we  are  still continuing to shoot  . Our commitment was to accompany Mark Stroman till  the end  and we will honor it. We  are hoping to develop a sister site that will be more tightly focused on  immigration and its  relationship with Hate crime.   Most of us are  oblivious to what is happening on our  border with Mexico  or to   the growing anti  immigrant entiment around the country  but a quick read through our past stories will give you  a sense of the growing crisis. So at this jnuction for all of us  I   re read  my inital blog  which I wrote on the occasion of  the launching of this site.  I feel it is relevant today as it was a year ago .

September 11th 2008 The launch of this website is, for me, one more step in a life-long journey to understand violence and hate. Growing up the son of a Holocaust refugee in Israel, I learned from a young age to view the world through particular lenses. My father did not tell me horror stories when I was little – those came later – but he spoke of his family who had been killed as if they still were alive and with us. So real were they, that when I learned of their murders, I felt a great loss. Later, when I fought in some of Israel’s wars, I was introduced to violence firsthand. Given these experiences, I feel that every film I have made has been part of a personal investigation into the impact of violence and hate, two frighteningly powerful forces that have shaped my life and the lives of millions of others. Now I assume most people would understand this description of my work. That might change, however, after visiting this site. I can almost hear some of the reactions: How do you dare to place the victims and their tormentor on the same page? How can you allow a confessed murderer to have a blog to communicate his fear, rage and frustrations while the families of his victims struggle to reconstruct lives shattered by his crimes? Am I some wide-eyed liberal with a distorted sense of fairness? This is not the first time I have been subjected to such questions. During 1994 and ’95, I filmed in Bosnia and Serbia investigating the war crimes of a Serbian paramilitary group. It was a demanding period, during which I hung around with the most despicable human beings I have ever met, and tracked down their victims in refugee camps throughout Europe. The documentary, Yellow Wasps: Anatomy of a War Crime, participated in many human rights film festivals and aired on television networks around the world. During appearances I had to explain and defend myself against charges of giving voice to individuals whom the international community condemned as war criminals. Three yeas ago, I produced another film, The Junction, the story of the first Israeli soldier and the first Palestinian killed in the beginning days of the second “Indifida” at an obscure road junction in the Gaza strip. Critics wondered how could I place victims (Palestinians) and their occupiers (Israelis) on the same level, “drawing moral parallels between them.” Although all my films are different, they share the same focus and belief. I feel the complexities of hate crimes, personal violence or political violence gripping Bosnia or Israel can’t begin to be comprehended without trying to understand the participants and what drives them. How were the members of the Yellow Wasp recruited and what were they after? How did they commit such heinous crimes? Why did young Israelis volunteer to serve in a military unit to guard isolated Jewish settlements in a sea of Palestinian-Arab population — settlements, which by their very existence, generated violence and resentment? I have come to realize is that criminals are as human as we are. The majority of killers are not demented psychopaths, and if we hope to understand the inner forces that create hate crimes, we need to explore the criminal as much as his/her victims. It is this realization that guides this web site. At the trial of Mark Stroman, the prosecutor in asking the jury to sentence Stroman to death, referred to him as “cancer,” for which the only cure was amputation of the infected limb. This sentiment impressed Nadeem Akhtar, the brother of Duri Hasan whose husband was Stroman’s first victim. (Duri appears on Victims’ Voices this week) Nadeem, a devout Muslim who opposed the death penalty on religious grounds, was swayed by the prosecutor’s argument to believe Stroman’s punishment is right. “Cancer” is what Nazis called Jews in order to remove them from the human experience. In Nazi films, books, newspapers articles and endless speeches, Jews were labeled a disease that threatened the “volt” – the people. This prolonged propaganda campaign was essential to the success of the Final Solution in deporting and killing millions with minimal protest from the rest of the society. Prof. Rick Halperin of Southern Methodist University, who will be featured on this site in the coming weeks, actually made a study comparing the language the Nazis used against those the party wanted to eliminate with the language used by proponents of the death penalty. Now I know many might disagree, but on the level of the human experience, I do not see much difference between the prosecutor of Mark Stroman labeling him “cancer” or Stroman lumping poor Asian migrants as ” Arabs” and thus “responsible ” for the September 11 attacks. Both needed to reject the individuality of their victims as a first step in seeking their death. — Ilan Ziv

My bi-weekly blog anxiety

Every two weeks, before we change content on our site, I am seized with uncontrolled anxiety. Though I have millions of issues I could write about I am tormented by the question of whether they are appropriate for the Execution Chronicles. Can they deal directly with Hate Crimes or the Death Penalty? As I ponder, I delay writing, times passes, I miss the deadline and out of sheer guilt I finally succeed in writing a blog. I have tried many remedies: good sleep the night before, a glass of my favorite wine… nothing seems to work. This week, I just gave up and decided to write about what I care about and what transpired in the past two weeks when I was on vacation in Israel. You will have to decide if that story has any connection to Hate Crimes or to the Death Penalty.

One of the projects on which I am currently working is EXILE—an investigation into the myth of the exiling of the Jews by the Romans—a myth deeply etched in the collective Israeli and Jewish memory. As part of the research and development of the project, I visited and later filmed in the ruins of the ancient Jewish/Roman city of Sephoris, a city known around the world for its proximity to Nazareth, the place where Christians believed Jesus’ parents lived, and where Jesus was said to have begun his preaching in Galilee . Sephoris of Jesus’ time (1st century, AD) must have been a fascinating place. Though heavily Jewish, excavations found remnants of large early churches and Pagan temples. Sephoris was never swept in the Messianic religious fervor that finally led to the destruction of Jerusalem and the Jewish Temple. Rather than rebel, Sephoris signed a peace treaty with Rome. Not only did it avoid destruction, it flourished and has become an important Jewish cultural center where the most important Jewish theological books (Mishna and Talmud) were written and edited. The fact that such important Jewish theological books were written in a city full of large churches and Pagan temples is a testimony to the tolerant character of the city and its multi-ethnic nature. Sephoris was never destroyed though it seems that around the 5th century it was mysteriously abandoned. At some point in history, on the ruins of the city, a Palestinian village named Saffuriya emerged. This village of 5000, existed until it was destroyed by Israeli forces in 1948. Most of its inhabitants fled or where expelled. Since the film explores the myth of the Jewish exile, it also examines the possibility that if Jews were never exiled, it is possible that today’s Palestinians have some Jewish roots. Could some of Sephoris’ ancient citizens have been transformed over thousands of years of religious conversions into the villagers of Saffuriya?

I spent a day last week in Nazareth talking to leaders of the Saffuriya refugees in a community that, 60 years later, still keeps the memory of its village alive. “What do you remember your ancestors told you about the village and its possible Jewish roots?” I asked the community leaders. Between endless cups of coffee and glasses of cold water, people pondered and tried to remember. The majority agreed that they had been told by their elders, as children, that the villagers has always lived in the village throughout history, while conquering armies came and went. Looking at my face and realizing that maybe I was waiting for more, Abu Arab, one of the leading activists in the refugee community, proceeded to tell me a story his brother, a well known poet, used to tell:

Saffuriya, his brother used to tell visitors, has always been a mixed village of Christians and Muslims. For decades, the villagers fought over the village’s true identity. One day, the Muslim inhabitants of the village decided to resolve this endless debate once and for all. They dug for days near the village’s mosque and finally found, among the archeological ruins, a crescent. They paraded it through the village as the final proof of the village’s Muslim origins. Then they celebrated for an entire day and night. The humiliated Christian inhabitants of the village were devastated and at a loss over what to do next, until someone came up with the brilliant idea of digging near the village’s church. Sure enough, after few days of intense digging, they found a cross, which they happily paraded in the village—proof of the village’s Christian origins. “But where do you go from there?” continued the poet, examining the faces of his listeners. The two groups decided to meet. Many proposals were debated when the villagers assembled. The consensus seemed that further digging was required in order to reach a conclusive result. It was at that moment, when  the villagers were going to vote on what to do next, that an elderly man rose to his feet. “Until when we will continue to dig?” he asked emotionally, “Until when?” Suddenly, silence befell the large assembly. “Since then, the crescent and the cross have become symbols of our village,” the poet finished the tale.

Now, you have to decide what the connection of this story is to the Execution Chronicles.

THE NEXT GENERATION

This week, I participated as a mentor in the National Association of Latino Independent Producers (NALIP) Academy. This year, the Academy took place in Santa Fe. It was, as in past years, an exhilarating experience. There is nothing more exciting than trying to help young, emerging filmmakers, full of enthusiasm and creative excitement, to launch great, stimulating projects. This year’s selected projects ranged from a film by a grandmother from New Mexico, who used the making of empanadas by four generations in her family as a tool to explore their Latina identities, to the haunting story of an abused Colorado woman, Virginia Gonzales. Her husband kidnapped their three daughters despite a police restraining order and got into a shootout with the police in which he and all three girls were killed. The film follows Virginia and her transformation from a survivor of domestic violence to a passionate activist who is now challenging the United States at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an international tribunal under the Organization of American States.

On the first night of the conference, Juan Mandelbaum, a producer, filmmaker and mentor in this year’s Academy, screened his riveting and beautiful film, OUR DISAPPEARED. The film is about Juan’s personal journey to Argentina, his homeland, to find out what happened to college friends during the repressive military rule of the late 1970’s. For me, the most moving part of the film involved Juan’s interviews with the children of friends that had been murdered. The children were infants when their parents were kidnapped and killed. Miraculously, they survived. Ines, for example, was only a few months old when her mother, Mimi, (one of Juan’s colleagues at a progressive summer camp they ran for poor neighborhood kids,) took her to the zoo. When Mimi saw the approaching soldiers she left the baby on the grass and went directly to the soldiers knowing full well what was at stake: torture and death. This brave move, against all her instincts as a mother, saved her daughter. Ines was picked up and raised by strangers. After a long and amazing journey, today she is a passionate young lawyer in San Francisco. It was riveting to see young men and women who were saddled by fate with a horrible legacy, trying to articulate their understanding of what happened and its meaning to their lives. It was exhilarating to watch how they were empowered by those horrors, transforming tragedy into hope.

It was precisely during that scene in the film that my cell phone rang. Embarrassed and annoyed, I of course turned it off immediately.

After the screening I listened to my voice mail message. It was from Mark Stroman’s daughter, Cassandra! It was the first time that I heard Mark’s daughter since I began the project almost 5 years ago.

Interviewing Mark on Death Row, I learned how important Cassandra is for him and how badly he wanted to see her at least once before his death. On this site, Shawna, Cassandra’s mother, wrote:

I can understand the very mixed feelings that people have for Mark Stroman. I myself spent five years with him and we have a child together who is now 15 and has not seen him since she was three years old. She is also a victim in this tragedy. I myself have cried for the families left behind of the people he killed, but mostly have spent years trying to explain to our child this tragedy. Shawna left Texas, where “many people grow up taught to hate” and settled on the West Coast.

For the past 5 years, I have been trying to get in touch with Shawna and Cassandra, so you can imagine how emotional Cassandra’s call was for me. I am still haunted by the coincidence of the timing of her call. Still under the impact of the film, I heard on the other side of the line, a mature, confident, amazingly honest and perceptive young woman. Cassandra, now 16 years old, told me that her dream is to pursue documentary filmmaking. She even researched potential colleges in her state with film programs!

In the future, I hope Cassandra can contribute her thoughts, feelings and impressions to this site and make her first, tentative steps into filmmaking by contributing some of the ideas and images she will capture to the film. I, for one, am excited to be her mentor! I have no doubt that despite this horrible tragedy in her family she will be empowered by it as she forges her own life, injecting our lives with her hope and optimism.

THE JOURNEY

I was white trash,
just another junky that why they assigned me
a two-bit flunky

And I knew
At first glance
That I didn’t stand
Any kind of chance

That is part of a poem that Mark sent me almost 5 years ago.  It was soon after we began to correspondent and I interviewed him in Jail. I came upon this poem recently as I began to view the material I shot, as the film enters its post-production phase. It was while I was going through Mark letters, all carefully dated, that I noticed that almost 5 years have passed. “Death is in the air” Mark wrote in his last letter—“The sleeping giant has awakened.” He meant the recent movement on his case; the new judge that was recently assigned and the coming oral argument to be held in September.  He knows his appeal has almost no chance of success.  “In Texas,” Rick Halperin, an anti-death penalty activist and professor of History & Human Rights at Southern Methodist University, told me, “if you are given a death sentence, you are as good as dead. Only in very rare and isolated cases, mostly when there is DNA proof of innocence, can an inmate succeed in his appeals.” Mark confessed to his crimes from day one.

Change is in the air here too. As the long journey that I began five years ago is coming to yet one more station. A year ago, we began the Execution chronicles.org website as an attempt to start publicly to document the process I have been following in private. Mark began to write his weekly blogs. We began to focus on the many issues involving the death penalty and hate crimes. Our site has grown. What we originally conceived as focusing on Mark’s victims’ families has developed into regular coverage of hate crimes all over the world. It is out of this work that we began to document the rise of hate crime against Latinos and immigrants in this country. As our interests grew and developed, we began to feel that maybe the site was losing its focus and it has become difficult to do justice to all these issues under one roof.

As a result, we have decided to use our 1st year anniversary to refocus Execution Chronicles on Mark’s life on death row, his legal struggles to stay alive and the evolution of the film as it enters its post-production phase. We promised Mark to stay with him all the way till the end, filming around his execution, if and when it happens. Starting in September, we will post more and more scenes from the film as our editing progresses, as well as out-takes of material, that because of narrative constraints, have not found a suitable place in the film.

Simultaneously, we are committed to try to come up with a separate website dedicated to hate crimes.  We want to begin with a limited project focusing on immigration as it fuels right-wing rhetoric in this country. To this end, we have decided to launch our Border Project on ExecutionChronicles.org. Until September 11, we will dedicate that portion of Executionchronicles.org that dealt with hate crimes (In Depth, Close Up, News and in part, Resources) to our Border Project. In the months that follow, we hope to raise the funds to develop an entire website that will feature grassroots reporting from both sides of the border.

So a journey that began in August 2004, with the first exchanges I had with Mark and his victims’ families, continues! I hope you will stay with us!

Lockdown….again!

This blog of mine was going to be beautiful. I worked it all out. I was going to reflect on my filming visit last week to the excavations of Sephoris, an ancient Jewish, mixed city that flourished in the first centuries BCE (it was the Capital of Northern Israel because it did not adhere to the Jewish zealots who wanted it to join the futile rebellion against Rome. The cities that rebelled, like Jerusalem or Masada were destroyed and their inhabitants massacred. Instead, Sephoris signed a peace treaty with Rome and as a result, not only grew and expanded, but has also become a multi-cultural, tolerant city—Judaism’s most important spiritual center after the destruction of Jerusalem, and a home for early Christian groups and even Pagans. Pagan temples existed in Sephoris alongside churches and synagogues. I was going to reflect on the forgotten message of Sephoris, a city barely known outside academic circles or church-going crowds (it is only 10 minutes from Nazareth, by car) while Mesada, for example, has become a place visited by millions…a mere symbol.

As I drafted this meditative blog, I received Mark Stroman’s most recent blog. Since Mark is mailing his blogs (written by hand after his typewriter was taken away), they need first to be typed by his dedicated friend. The result is a short time delay.

After reading his blog, I have decided that some of my reflections can wait for another time. It is more urgent to publish this blog here, while in Mark’s regular space we keep publishing his blogs as they arrive (this week, for example, we publish his blog from June 22nd.)

The truth is that I am furious. We spent so much time on “Johnny Sacks meals” during a previous lockdown (in which Mark and other inmates lost so much weight) but obviously, we did not make a dent in the prison menu. Just a few months later and we are back fighting about the same thing. This peculiar diet, I do have to agree with Mark, is cruel and unusual punishment and as The New York  Times mentioned in a June 28th , 2009  editorial  it is also profitable.

Read below what Mark wrote and help us publicize it in the united States and abroad.

Death Blog

Texas Death Row

July 9, 2009  4:45am

Welcome to my nightmare,

Tales from a dead man

We are entering the fourth day of this lockdown and it’s for another yearly shakedown. The worst is yet to come folks. This is a place that smells of death, misery, sadness and it seems to only get worse as the days go by. We do have two executions set for the 16th and the 23rd of this month and what a helluva way to spend the final countdown on lockdown eating those dreadfull Johnny Sacks. Cruel and unusual punishment.

Each day you can look down the “run” and see dozens upon dozens of peanut butter ooz sandwiches, we can’t eat these things. This year you can’t even hold the bag without getting your hands greasy. This is wrong and here’s the menu for the last few days. You will notice from the blog I sent out  a few days ago, there had been prunes and raisins included, but that has come to a halt.

Meals fed on July 7th, Johnny Sacks:

3:36am  3 pancakes in a bag, cereal, raisins No drink

1:18pm  peanut butter ooz sandwich, fish mash sandwich, cereal No drink

4:25pm  peanut butter ooz sandwich, soy patty  No drink

Meals fed on July 8th, Johnny Sacks:

3:15am  3 pancakes in a bag, cereal  No drink

10:49am  burrito, raw potato, peanut butter ooz sandwich  No drink

4:24pm  2 corn dogs, peanut butter ooz sandwich  No drink

So you see, no fruits, no milks and trust me, these things I call peanut butter sandwiches are NOT the ones that come to mind or resemble any you have had in the past. NOT made by grandma. These are scattered all over the floors of every run on this pod. Wonder why?

Well folks, that’s about all for this session. I’ll close this out but will be back with more news of this lockdown.

True American

Mark Anthony Stroman

Living to Die ~ Dying to Live!

“GREEN CARD”

 

 

The week an immigrant family was brutally murdered in Arizona I got my new “green card” or Permanent Resident card. Though I have had permanent resident status since 01.09.84, I never bothered to apply for citizenship. Over the years, I tried to produce or even invent some rational explanations to questioning friends and family members. Recently, I just gave up, admitting that none of my explanations make any sense. There are obviously some deeper reasons that even I do not understand which somehow kept me a permanent resident for over 25 years, never applying for citizenship. I also realized that, apparently, there are millions like me. As I write these lines, I am holding the two cards in front of me. The old one, which is literally falling apart, shows an earnest young man of 34. It is called a RESIDENT ALIEN card, a title that always freaked out my two girls when they were young. Born and raised in NY, the idea that their dad was an “Alien” was unsettling. The new card is far more elegant, high tech, with different magnetic codes imbedded on the back and a picture of a bold, almost 59-year-old man on the front. By now I have been transformed from a “Resident Alien” to a “Permanent Resident”, a far more neutral title. I have lived in the United States for more years than I lived in my native country, Israel. Somehow, I seem to be more comfortable with a Permanent Resident status, while still traveling the world with an Israeli passport. There are several key differences between being a “permanent resident” and a citizen. For one I can not vote (though I am paying taxes) . The second big difference is that if convicted for a felony, I can be deported. I once did a film on the legal system in the Bronx, where one of the characters was indicted for possession of a few ounces of cocaine. He was sentenced to a long jail term but refused to plead guilty. If he had, he would have received a much lighter sentence but would have been deported after fulfilling his jail time. He decided to fight from jail to reverse his conviction rather than plead guilty and be deported. If deported, he would also have left behind a wife and three children and broken his family apart. I thought about all of that when reading about the Minutemen and the Arizona murders. Having been here for over 35 years, I was verbally attacked as an immigrant only once. “Go back to your country,” screamed some sound engineer on an outdoor stage being readied for a Rock Concert. Ironically, he was preparing the sound system for one of those worldwide, mega-media events raising money to fight World Hunger. The stage was set in front of the United Nations! I do not remember now what made this sound engineer lash out at me. Maybe I stepped on his cables or was bothering him with our huge video camera. I do remember that it was months after I got my “Resident Alien” card and since no one ever told me before (or ever since) to “go back to my country,” the incident stands out in my mind. I always knew that I have been privileged. I can only imagine the sense of terror and/or insecurity that non-white immigrants feel. Though hate crimes against immigrants are few and far between, every article I have read (some were published on this site) documents how the media and virulent, populist, political discourse prepare the ground for such attacks. The first Amendment protects freedom of speech in this country so any law designed to ban anti-immigrant rhetoric will be thrown out of court as unconstitutional. But a citizen boycott action rallying advertisers and sponsors for the immigrant’s cause can make this rhetoric economically very disadvantageous for a broadcaster or a media organization. However, if hate talk can be protected by freedom of speech, allowing a vigilante force like the Minutemen to “patrol” the border is entirely a different thing. In a society governed by laws, there is no place for any vigilante force. In a society of immigrants there is no place for any anti-immigrant vigilantes. I am sure the complex psychology of immigrants who live in and love this country for what it can offer is of no interest to Minutemen. Nor do they care about the subtleties between “Resident Alien” and “Permanent Resident”. If I lived near the US-Mexican border, my only protection would have been the color of my skin and this is unacceptable!

ELECTION REVISITED

Last week shooting in  mayhem  at the  United States  Holocaust  Memorial Museum  in Washington  and the growing concern about  “supremacists rage”  reminded me of several  blogs  I  wrote  and articles we published a year ago  during the Obama’s election campaign.  A lof of water  passed  under the bridge since than, but re -reading it I felt that  that the issues I sensed  than are as relevant today. Reading  Frank  Rich : “The Obama  Haters’ Silent Enablers”(http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/opinion/14rich.html) convinced me that going back to the election  campaign  will not be a nostalgic walk down memory lane but  looking again at the forces in our society  that ferment “rage” rather  than fight it.

This is   is what I wrote on  10/18/2008

More than a year ago, and before the primaries kicked off, Beliefnet.com, a Web site dedicated to “inspiration, spirituality, and faith,” interviewed John McCain. The presidential hopeful claimed that the Constitution of the United States established a “Christian Nation,” a statement that caught my attention. As an avowed secularist, I rarely think about my “Jewishness.” Reading that statement was one of the few moments I did. I was reminded of McCain’s statement several times, the first while on the road working on my current documentary, Jesus Politics: The Bible & The Ballot (www.jesuspoliticsthemovie.com). We were filming some Evangelical activists who supported Mike Huckabee. It was primary day in Florida and the group was saying a prayer before fanning out to the streets to wave banners, distribute leaflets, and urge passers by to vote. “This used to be a Christian Nation,” said the man leading the prayer. “It used to be that you could not run for office unless your were a Christian.” His wife referred to Obama as “a Muslim.” I again thought of McCain’s statement watching the Al Jazeera English news report we feature this week on www.Executionchronicles.org. “It is a Christian Nation, ” said one agitated woman. “Obama is a Muslim,” another one said, “he befriends terrorists.” A young Obama supporter holding a sign for the Democratic candidate on the side of a road as a convoy of cars inched toward a Sarah Palin rally, expressed fear that “they will hurt Obama.” Thus the connection was established: “A Christian Nation” versus “a Muslim” Obama “who befriends terrorists.” More than a year has passed between McCain’s interview and Palin’s rally in rural Ohio. For me, this extraordinary year is symptomatic not only of the threat in this country to Senator Obama, but also to the very fabric of our society. John McCain knows very well that the Constitution never established the nation as a Christian one. Even the reference to God (never to a specific religion) was hotly debated among the Founding Fathers. Yes the majority in America has always been Christian, but the Constitution and the letters and documents of the Founding Fathers went to great lengths to ensure that this nation does not endorse one religion over another…. I spent more than five weeks and 4000 miles on the road filming Jesus Politics. Among the many things I learned was that the majority of divisive religious issues we’ve come to associate with the Christian Right were not raised by devout believers, but by the manipulations of conservative political activists, who are neither necessarily religious nor devout. Throughout American history, political assassinations were attributed to “deranged”, ” lone individuals”. Rarely if ever the socio political nature of the act and its context is discussed.”

Frank Rich  in his column  on Sunday June 14th quotes  the comments  of  Shepard Smith  FOX TV Anchorman on the murder of Dr. George  Tiller  who performed late term abortion in his clinic  in Wichita  KS  until he was gunned down  May 31st.

“If you’re one who believes that abortion is murder, at what point do you go out and kill someone who’s performing abortions?” An answer, he said, was provided by Dr. George Tiller’s killer. He went on: “If you are one who believes these sorts of things about the president of the United States …” He left the rest of that chilling sentence unsaid.These are extraordinary words to hear on Fox. The network’s highest-rated star, Bill O’Reilly, had assailed Tiller, calling him “Tiller the baby killer” and likening him to the Nazis, on 29 of his shows before the doctor was murdered at his church in Kansas

In October last year reporter  Gini  Sikes  wrote   in an  In Depth article for us.:

It’s comforting to dismiss verbal expressions of violence as the ranting of a few fringe individuals. Sadly, however, the world knows it only takes one who believes the mainstream has validated his thinking to turn harmful words into deadly action. After the 1995 assassination of Israel Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at a peace rally in Tel Avi’s Kings of Israel Square, hundreds of articles and reports examined the incendiary atmosphere before the murder.

The road to Rabin’s assassination began as it usually does in the margins of society. Extreme right-wing groups condemned Rabin’s role in the Oslo Peace Accords with Yassar Arafat as a supreme betrayal, giving holy land to terrorists. Posters depicting Rabin as a Nazi, or effigies of him in SS uniform, appeared at rallies for “mainstream” politicians, among them Benjamin Nethanyu and Ariel Sharon, who ignored cries of “traitor!” Such charges seeped into the mainstream discussion and media. After Rabin’s death, journalists, government officials and others pondered whether they shared in the creation of an environment that allowed Rabin’s killer–who told the court Rabin wanted to “give our country to the Arabs” – to believe that his radical thinking was legitimized because it wasn’t condemned.

Words do matter and  until hate  talk or rationalization  of violence will not be eradicated from our political and social spheres the next  “lone gunner” will reappear. The question is not if but when .

An open letter to Texas’ officials

Since the cell phone ordeal in Polunsky Death Row Unit, Mark has been complaining that during the   repeated raids and searches of his cell, his legal documents have been tossed around. Some have even been taken away and damaged, rendering the whole legal file, consisting of hundreds of pages, useless.  This week, Mark exhausted the legal process available to him within prison to investigate the matter and return his legal files to him. I decided to write a letter to several Texas officials, US congressmen and senators, to appeal to them to look into the matter. As I have written several times before, I fear that continuously ignoring Mark pleas will result in a tragedy, as Mark has been growing more and more desperate with every letter. The letter below was posted on Friday to the following individuals. I consider it only a first step.

U.S. Congressman Kevin Brady
301 Cannon Building
Washington, DC 20515

cc. Senator Robert Nichols – Texas State Senator
Senator John Cornyn, U.S. Senate
Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Region 1, Director’s Office
Regional Director: Robert Treon
Assistant Regional Director: Doris Morris
Assistant Regional Director: Kevin Mayfield

Ref:  Mark Stroman Death Row inmate #999409

Dear Sir:

I am writing to you as a last resort. My name is Ilan Ziv. I am a NY-based filmmaker. In the past six months, I created and produced, with other colleagues, a website that focuses on the death penalty and hate crimes: www.executionchronicles.org.  If you visit the site, you will see its dual focus with our emphasis on reporting on hate crimes not only in the US, but internationally. The website is an outgrowth of a film project that focuses on Mark Stroman’s murders after September 11. As you can see from the site, we are committed to delve into the complexities of Hate crimes by focusing both on the perpetrators and their victims. Both the film and the website are co-produced with Maryknoll Media Productions, the  media arm of the  Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers. As part of the site, we gave Mark Stroman a space to publish a weekly blog. In his blogs, Mark tends not to focus on his case (Mark confessed to the murders during his trial.) but primarily on the deteriorating conditions in Polunsky Death Row Unit in Texas. Of particular concern for us are Mark’s repeated complaints and allegations that, as part of repeated searches of his cell, his legal documents have been destroyed, some taken away, and the rest have been rendered useless. As you realize, those documents are Mark’s only tool to pursue his constitutionally guaranteed appeal process. We encouraged Mark to pursue an investigation within the prison system to explore what has happened and demand the return of his legal papers or their replacement with new copies. Below, you can see the official answer he received. We even attempted to launch a fundraising appeal on the site to help Mark obtains the funds to photocopy his entire legal file—an estimated cost of around $800, which is much more than a Death Row inmate can afford. However, we soon realized that without an investigation, clear results and a guarantee that this will never happen again, we cannot in good faith ask people to donate money.
By law, Mark is entitled to have his legal papers with him. Denying him those papers is a violation of his constitutional rights to due process. It is for this reason that I appeal to you to look into the matter.
It seems to me that it would be easy to investigate Mark’s allegations and to guarantee him the safety of his legal documents. As Mark’s despair grows, we fear the worst.

I appreciate your urgent attention to this matter.

Sincerely Yours,

Ilan Ziv
Producer

p.s. Below is the official exchange between Mark and the prison authorities regarding the status of the investigation into his allegations.

Investigator’s Response

Grievance # 2009081808
Investigator ID I-1364
The response given by Region I

Kevin Mayfield

Your Step 2 grievance has been investigated by this office. Your allegations could not be sustained; however your complaint is noted. Administration will continue to monitor staff conduct to ensure professionalism and policy compliance.

No further investigation is warranted by this office.

Kevin Mayfield – R.I.

Mark’s Response

None of the issues I mentioned were addressed in Step One. My legal work and documents were destroyed and thrown out. Not only did Officers Coker and White tell the Investigator of this, they also saw the utter destruction of my cell. Sergeant Seales also said the same. So who has my legal work and documents? Why was this allowed to happen and why is this response given to me on Step One when Lieutenant Price was not even at the scene of the Regional shake down destruction? This is a cover-up and plot to destroy all of my legal work and chances to win my death sentence appeal.

A storm is brewing!

This is how Mark described the situation in the Polunsky Death Unit. I labeled his last three blogs under the same title. We usually do not publish three blogs at the same time but we felt the growing urgency to attract attention to the deteriorating situation in the unit. One does not need to be an expert sociologist to understand the destructive potential of the fires currently being fanned inside Polunsky.

“It is serious!” wrote Mark’s friend, who was banned from visiting him. (It is very easy for the Warden to ban relatives and friends of prisoners from entering the facility. No one will dispute the Warden’s reasoning. Although there is technically a possibility of appeal, it rarely helps.

“…Matters are getting very tense,” Mark’s friend wrote. “I’m extremely worried about him. Another friend of mine was banned from visiting Polunsky. They have banned so many people lately and it’s fueling the fire!

Since working on the project, I have read many books on the death penalty, watched films on the subject and visited countless web sites. But until I started to read Mark’s blogs I had not realized that while we debate the pros and cons of the Death Penalty, we rarely discuss the many years one spends awaiting his/her execution. It is this void that Mark ’s blogs so powerfully fill; the senseless petty harassments by the guards, the food and all the other deprivations. All these details put together paint a very damning picture of the conditions inside Polanski Death unit. After the “drama” of the multiple week lockdown with its diet of “Johnny sacks” now I read Mark’s recent blogs with growing apprehension. It seems that a storm is indeed brewing. The result will undoubtedly be more violence and repression.

But what to do? Reading Mark’s blog from the comfort of my studio only re-enforces my sense of frustration and impotence. I know that violence is never the answer and will lead to even more violence but what can I suggest to Mark, who has no money to launch a legal challenge to the system. No pro bono lawyers will take on the Texas Department of Justice when they are trying to save the lives of other prisoners currently incarcerated in the system. As I learned, the impact of public pressure is small.  Many in Texas send us quite violent emails. They think death row inmates deserve this kind of treatment. And beyond Texas, the issue is being perceived as a local one.

So what to do? Mark, himself, asked for “feedback and ideas” and I feel frustrated that I cannot give him any. But I do know that without challenging the Criminal Justice System in Texas we will have a storm on our hands, a storm that will reap only pain and suffering and probably sow further violence. It is a very depressing scenario for those on death row, most of who will probably be executed in the coming years.

In our news section, we published the address of the Texas Criminal Justice System Ombudsmen. It is the first address for letters questioning what is going in Polanski. Yet I have little hope of the State of Texas correcting its wrong-doing. The pressure has to be applied on the federal level and even with international Human rights organizations that must establish an independent commission to look into this specific prison and its death ward, as well as other prisons in Texas. We will publish any ideas for action that visitors to the site will propose.

A storm is brewing and I fear for the worst.

Barack Hussein Obama

The past week or so was full of contrasting images. It began with an email I received from Anya Cordell, an activist, and since September 11, a relentless fighter against bigotry and racism. I met Anya while filming in Texas with some of Mark’s victims. Anya has been involved in post 9/11 work with several hate crime victims (to read more about Anya’s work read our Close Up Anya sent me the following Letter to the Editor, which she recently found in Newsweek:

A Better Life, but No Assimilation

I still cannot understand why Muslims flee their native lands seeking a better life in Britain or any other Western nation, only to want to turn these countries into clones of the failed states they just left (“Jihad Chic Comes to London,” March 23). The only rational explanation is that instead of assimilating into their adoptive homes, these radicalized Muslims simply want to spread their fundamentalist brand of Islam and transform Europe into Eurabia. Shame on the politically correct politicians, appeasers and journalists who sit idly by and allow these radical Muslims to do what the Nazis ultimately could not: bring the West to its knees.

Kelly Van Rijn
Washington Township, N.J.

I received this email on my blackberry while traveling in the high Andes of Peru, a region populated by indigenous, mainly Quechua-speaking people, long subjugated and discriminated against by the descendants of the Spanish  conquerors of Peru.

A few days later, Anya sent me the recent study by FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting),  Smearcasting: How Islamophobes Spread Fear, Bigotry and Misinformation. In her email, Anya quoted chilling segments from the report:

CNN commentator:  “I’m telling you, with God as my witness…human beings are not strong enough, unfortunately, to restrain themselves from putting up razor wire and putting you [Muslims] on one side of it…When people become hungry…they will put razor wire up and just based on the way you look or just based on your religion, they will round you up. Is that wrong? Oh my gosh, it is Nazi, World War II wrong, but society has proved it time and time again: It will happen…In 10 years, Muslims and Arabs will be looking through a razor wire fence at the West.”

Third most popular political talk radio show host:  “They say, “Oh, there’s a billion of them [Muslims]”. I said, “So kill 100 million of them, then there’ll be 900 million of them.””

Best selling author:  “If you can’t outbreed the enemy, cull ‘em.”

Fox news host:  “The U.S. should bomb the Afghan infrastructure to rubble…taking out their ability to exist day to day will not be hard…If they don’t rise up against this criminal government, they starve, period.”

“These claims,” Anya concluded her email “though outlandish, are then given credence by being repeated, in mainstream outlets. It’s worth remembering that those who put forward the arguments found in the FAIR report often stand to profit greatly from book sales, consulting and lecture fees—for their views—often, the more outrageous and fear-inducing, the more profitable and popular. The climate becomes saturated with an atmosphere of suspicion that is increasingly accepted, and increasingly difficult to effectively counter.”

It is against this background that I came back home and found myself riveted by President Obama’s public speeches in Turkey.

Introduced as Barack Hussein Obama, the President went on to say in the Turkish Parliament:

“…I also want to be clear that America’s relationship with the Muslim community, the Muslim world, cannot, and will not, just be based upon opposition to terrorism. We seek broader engagement based on mutual interest and mutual respect. …We will convey our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith, which has done so much over the centuries to shape the world — including in my own country. The United States has been enriched by Muslim Americans.  Many other Americans have Muslims in their families or have lived in a Muslim-majority country — I know, because I am one of them.”

Obama also visited the mausoleum for the founder of the modern, secular Turkish Republic, Kamal Ataturk, held a “town hall” meeting with Turkish young people, and visited Turkey’s largest Muslim shrines. Cynics will dismiss his speech as just smart political oratory; Obama’s attempt to reach the Muslim world. But I believe that his speech was also aimed at a domestic audience here at home and that is where, in my opinion, its real importance lies.

Words do matter and symbolic acts go far. It was Turkey’s Prime Minister who commented on the meaning of Obama’s name, as a person who straddles several cultures. It was barely 6 months ago when we wrote a series of articles on the attacks against Barack Obama’s middle name, and his     “Muslim” background

“I say this,” President Obama continued his speech, “as the president of a country that not very long ago made it hard for somebody who looks like me to vote, much less be president of the United States. But it is precisely that capacity to change that enriches our countries.” This message was not aimed only at the Turkish people but to us here at home. It is the kind of message that tries to combat the racist, bigoted voices Anya quotes in her email and FAIR covers in their report.

Words do matter. Just ask Mark Stroman, who claims his rage was triggered, in part, by the non-stop coverage of  the September 11 terror attack.

Maybe, just maybe, if an American president could have gone on television on September 12th to deliver such a clear message as President Obama delivered in Turkey, the lives of Vasudev Patel and Waqar Hasan, two of Mark’s victims, could have been saved….maybe.