Hassam

Hi.

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

To be clear about what this depicts: An immigration officer threw a woman onto the ground. Alex Pretti, a registered nurse on scene as a legal observer, is filming and goes to help the woman up. He is then pepper sprayed and thrown to the ground for no discernible reason. Many officer surround and assault him; one removes his firearm, which police say appears to have been legally registered. They then execute him with a hail of bullets.

They are, objectively speaking, both cowards and criminals, while Pretti is what we teach people an American ought to be.

[susan abulhawa | سوزان ابو الهوى @susanabulhawa]

a whistle-blower revealed that Israel paid for a multi-million dollar study to assess the best way to rehabilitate their tarnished image in the west. the study's main conclusion was that their reputation could not overcome genocide, but there was a viable path forward by promoting Islamophobia as a distraction. the study was clear that promulgating suspicion and hatred of Muslims was the only way to alleviate the damage to Israel's reputation.

that is the context of this post and every post like it.

[jasper nathaniel @infinite_jaz]

If you assume, purely for argument’s sake, that this 15-year-old child threw a rock at a car, and you think that justifies 9+ months of imprisonment, beatings, starvation, and no access to his parents, you’re a broken person.

[Hassam @HassamC]

@snorlax_uw Hi 👋 Snorlax

[Hassam @HassamC]

@LordOfDiscounts Glad you’re okay!

[Hassam @HassamC]

@NVIDIAGeForce #RTXON

[Hassam @HassamC]

@LakersNation Wtf are these refs??

[Hassam @HassamC]

@LakersNation Len is the worst player I’ve ever seen in the NBA

[Hassam @HassamC]

@SenSchumer Resign you are 🗑️

[Hassam @HassamC]

@PTIofficial I am so tired of seeing this same tweet every day. Your party has done nothing but the opposite of getting IK releases. Is there any plan besides tweeting away?

[Hassam @HassamC]

@LakersNation What are these refs???

[Max Blumenthal @MaxBlumenthal]

Why was I questioned by the Feds?

As I approached the customs line at Dulles International Airport early on the morning of February 24, a man called out to me, “Mr. Blumenthal?” He identified himself as an officer with Customs and Border Protection, and led me into a cavernous secondary screening room, where he treated me to a strange and disconcerting questioning session. I had just returned from a leisurely trip to Nicaragua with my family during which I participated in no political activities. But the agent’s line of questioning suggested federal authorities had little interest in my visit to Nicaragua, a country that happens to be controlled by a socialist-oriented government on Washington’s hit list.

As my family and I followed the agent down a long hallway, he turned to me and said, “I caught your latest appearance on Judge Napolito [sic].” He was referring to Andrew Napolitano, a former Fox News host and jurist who hosts a daily livestream featuring former military and intelligence officials as well as journalists like me who dissent from official national security narratives. Nearly all of my appearances on Napolitano’s program, Judging Freedom, have focused on Israel’s blood-soaked wars in Gaza, Lebanon and beyond throughout the past 16 months. When I asked the agent how he liked my interview with the Judge, he shrugged and declined to volunteer an opinion. Was he simply trying to warm me up for our own question and answer session, or darkly signaling to me that Big Brother was watching? “This is just a friendly exchange,” he insisted as we entered the cavernous secondary screening room. “You’re not a target or anything.”

Standing across from me at a metal desk, the agent asked me to fill out a questionnaire with my personal info and details of my trip. As soon as I completed the form, he flipped it over and displayed a hand-written list containing several names. “Do you know any of these people?” he asked.

Two of those listed were Anglo names: Nicole Smith and Susan Benjamin. The other three were extremely common Muslims names. Because the agent would not allow me to photograph the list, I was only able to commit one to memory: Muhammad Khan. I could not recall any people I knew with those names. And the only Nicole Smith I could think of was the late model who died under strange circumstances at age 39. I therefore told the agent the names were unfamiliar to me.

To be sure, I would not have assisted the officer even if I had a personal connection with one of the names on the list. I’ve learned from activists and journalists who’ve experienced similar probing that federal agents often deploy inane or disingenuous questions to get their subject talking, then attempt to manipulate or entrap them so they can implicate them in a crime. In fact, the US Supreme Court has ruled that police are allowed to lie to elicit confessions from suspects. If government agents want to subject American citizens like me to extended questioning, they must follow constitutional procedures and allow us to have a lawyer present.

After spending several minutes inside a small office, the agent returned to inform us we were free to go. As we exited the screening room and headed toward the baggage claim area, an airport worker from West Africa pulled up to me on a ride-on floor scrubber, shook my hand and asked for a selfie. Like the federal agent, he was apparently aware of my journalistic output, but viewed it in a much more favorable light.

While waiting for our luggage, my wife, Anya Parampil, had a disturbing realization. She had been googling the names on the list the officer presented to me and discovered that Susan Benjamin was the birth name of our friend, Medea Benjamin, cofounder of Code Pink and one of the most widely recognized antiwar activists on the planet.

The following day, I informed Medea about my encounter at Dulles and asked if she had experienced anything similar. She told me there was a period when she was harassed by federal authorities each time she traveled out of the country. The FBI once dispatched an officer to meet her at an airport upon her return from a foreign trip, and called her on several occasions in an unsuccessful attempt to solicit a “meeting.” She said the harassment stopped after she filed a series of complaints, but my experience has led her to believe it will begin again.

While I was allowed to return to my country after a fairly brief question-and-answer session with a polite federal officer, the interaction felt like an act of political harassment, and seemed to signal an escalation against journalists and activists who’ve expressed antiwar, anti-Zionist views. I can only speculate on what the Feds’ ultimate objective was, however, I know of several antiwar activists who have had FBI agents appear at their doors over the past several months asking questions about Iran and individuals with Muslim or Arab names. Just down the road from Dulles, the FBI raided the home of a Palestinian American family whose daughter is a Palestine solidarity activist at George Mason University.

Within the broader realm of Five Eyes, in European vassal states without the same free speech protections Americans enjoy, journalists like Ali Abunimah, Asa Winstanley, and Richard Medhurst have been subjected to police raids, imprisonment, and even criminal prosecution for the opinions they’ve expressed on Israel-Palestine. My colleague at The Grayzone, Kit Klarenberg, was detained by British counter-terror cops and grilled for hours about his journalism on London’s machinations in Ukraine and beyond. Another one of our contributors, Jeremy Loffredo, spent several days in an Israeli prison and was ordered to self-deport after authorities falsely accused him of “assisting an enemy during wartime” for his journalism inside the country’s occupied frontiers. In Canada, activist Yves Engler was just released from five days in jail after a fanatical Zionist activist, Dahlia Kurtz, accused him of “hate speech” for branding her a “fascist.” Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu travels freely from Berlin to Washington DC despite an ICC warrant for his arrest for authorizing ghastly war crimes in the besieged Gaza Strip.

My experience at Dulles International Airport paled in comparison to what a growing number of journalists and activists have endured in NATO states under Zionist management. Nonetheless, it is important to document encounters like these, and to prepare for future interactions that might not be as “friendly.”

[Hassam @HassamC]

@AdamMancini4 Seems if we reclaim the gap, back to ATH’s?

[Hassam @HassamC]

@snorlax_uw And I thought I did good selling in the mid 80s 😭

[Hassam @HassamC]

@LakersNation Trade everyone. What a joke this is lol I cant with this anymore

[Hassam @HassamC]

@LakersNation What a pathetic effort

[Hassam @HassamC]

@LakersNation That was a horrible shot by reaves with so much time left on the shot clock

[Hassam @HassamC]

@AllahGreatQuran Wa ʿalaykumu s-salam

[Hassam @HassamC]

@PTIofficial Instead of tweeting the same pictures and videos that are old. How about you tell the people who ordered the protest to stop? These calls to protest have become a joke due to traitor leadership. People died and leadership ran away like usual. Now IK will die in jail due to this.

[Hassam @HassamC]

@PTIofficial @ShakirAbbasi22 @PTIofficial @sherafzalmarwat @MuradSaeedPTI

[Hassam @HassamC]

@PTIofficial @ShakirAbbasi22 Who called off the protest? IK said no to anyone calling off the last call. It was called the “last call” for that reason only. All these people who came to Islamabad, the people who are now dead, who will answer for them? Who is there for them? PTI leadership needs to answer now