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Law and Disorder is a weekly independent civil liberties radio program airing on more than 100 stations across the United States and podcasting on the web. Law and Disorder provides timely legal perspectives on issues concerning civil liberties, privacy, right to dissent and practices of torture exercised by the US government and private corporations.
Law and Disorder April 22, 2024
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It Was Genocide: Armenian Survivor Stories
Around the world, April 24 marks the observance of the Armenian Genocide. On that day in 1915 the Interior Minister of the Ottoman Empire ordered the arrest and hangings of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. It was the beginning of a systematic and well-documented plan to eliminate the Armenians, who were Christian, and who had been under Ottoman rule and treated as second class citizens since the 15th century.
The unspeakable and gruesome nature of the killings—beheadings of groups of babies, dismemberments, mass burnings, mass drownings, use of toxic gas, lethal injections of morphine or injections with the blood of typhoid fever patients—render oral histories particularly difficult for survivors of the victims.
Why did this happen? Despite being deemed inferior to Turkish Muslims, the Armenian community had attained a prestigious position in the Ottoman Empire and the central authorities there grew apprehensive of their power and longing for a homeland. The concerted plan of deportation and extermination was effected, in large part, because World War I demanded the involvement and concern of potential allied countries. As the writer Grigoris Balakian wrote, the war provided the Turkish government “their sole opportunity, one unprecedented” to exploit the chaos of war in order to carry out their extermination plan.
As Armenians escaped to several countries, including the United States, a number came to New Britain, Connecticut in 1892 to work in the factories of what was then known as the hardware capital of the world. By 1940 nearly 3,000 Armenians lived there in a tight-knit community.
Pope Frances calls it a duty not to forget “the senseless slaughter” of an estimated one and a half million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks from 1915 to 1923. “Concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it,” the Pope said just two weeks before the 100th anniversary of the systematic implementation of a plan to exterminate the Armenian race.
Special thanks to Jennie Garabedian, Arthur Sheverdian, Ruth Swisher, Harry Mazadoorian, and Roxie Maljanian. Produced and written by Heidi Boghosian and Geoff Brady.
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Law and Disorder April 15, 2024
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Deluge: Gaza and Israel from Crisis to Cataclysm
In the last six months of the war by Israel against the Palestinian population of Gaza, a truth has become quite clear: The war is not one of self-defense. And moreover, the October 7 attack by Hamas in southern Israel is being used by the Netanyahu government as a pretext for ethnically cleansing the 2.2 million Palestinians who live there, and get them out of the Gaza Strip.
Israel, like America, is a colonial settlers state. It was built on top of an indigenous population whose removal was necessary to establish the new state of Israel. The Palestinians, who were the majority, never got their own state. Three quarters of 1 million of them were driven out, many ended up as refugees in the Gaza Strip.
The Palestinians in Gaza are now being systematically slaughtered by Israel and United States, which is a full partner in the whole operation, supplying weapons, money, and diplomatic cover.
The Israeli military is the fourth most powerful military in the world. Most of the native population has been driven into a tiny corner in the southern village of Rafa where Israel and America plan an imminent invasion. This, despite the story, spun by the Biden administration, they are trying to “moderate“ Israel. This is perception management. Israel is using starvation as a weapon. The Palestinian people are plagued by famine and disease. Israel is allowing food in at an inadequate trickle.
The United States ended its funding of the main United Nations support organization even as it continues, contrary to American law, to ship weapons to Israel, including 2000 pound bombs, 500 pound bombs, and jet fighters to deliver them.
Israel and the United States have crippled the United Nations and undermined international law. The International Court of Justice , the highest court in the world,ruled that Israel was “plausibly committing” a genocide. This ruling has been ignored by Israel and the United States.
Guest – OR Books associate editor Jamie Stern Weiner author of the recently published book Deluge: Gaza and Israel from Crisis to Cataclysm. His previous books include Moment of Truth: Tackling Israel-Palestine’s Toughest Questions and Antisemitism and the Labour Party.
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Pro-Palestine Protestors Target of Covert Israel Campaign
Well, the cat is now definitely “out of the bag”. What many of us have long suspected, our guest today has now documented. It is that the Israeli government created a task force to plan and carry out a covert campaign to disrupt and punish pro-Palestinian protesters on the college and university campuses of the United States. And the plan is in full operation. It was first reported in the Israeli website Ynetnews, one of the largest and greatly respected media outlets in Israel.
So far, the western media has largely ignored this shocking news. The task force is chaired by Foreign Minister Eli Cohen and led by various senior government officials. The task force has been in operation for some years and has already achieved some success in its efforts to stifle the growing anti-Israeli, pro-Palestinian movement in the United States.
Guest – Professor William Robinson is the Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Global and International Studies, and Latin American and Iberian Studies. He is also a member of the Affiliated Faculty, Chicana and Chicano Studies, all at the University of California, at Santa Barbara. Prof. Robinson’s most recent books are: The Global Police State, the book Global Civil War, and the book Can Global Capitalism Endure? And in 2017 he and Maryam Griffin together published: We Will Not Be Silenced: The Academic Repression of Israel’s Critics.
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Law and Disorder April 8, 2024
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Sexting Among Teens, A Felony
Because teenagers spend a good deal of their time online and on social media platforms, awareness has risen about related risks such as cyberbullying, shaming, and online predation. But then there’s sexting, the sharing between teens of explicit images. A study in the Journal of American Medical Association revealed that sexting is common among adolescents, with at least 1 in 4 teens receiving explicit texts and emails.
What we don’t hear much about are the legal consequences of such communications. In half of the states in this country, criminal laws classify the act of “sexting” among minors as a felony. New York, California, New Jersey, and Michigan are among those states. Their laws consider the exchange, possession, distribution, or production of explicit images of minors through sexting as felony offenses under certain circumstances. The specific criteria and penalties vary from state to state.
Teenagers who engage in sexting rarely realize the consequences of their actions. Since teens are minors, sharing nude or explicit or suggestive photos of themselves or their friends is considered child pornography. That means that possessing or sending the photos may amount to criminal possession or distribution of child pornography. If convicted for one of these offenses, young people may face severe penalties and life-long consequences.
Guest – Attorney Andy Stengel is a criminal defense attorney and former prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office who has also worked in the executive and legislative branches of New York State government and for the Brennan Center for Justice.
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No Business With Genocide
April is Earth Month, a time to think twice about our relationship with — and responsibility to — our planet and the ecosystem we rely on, and of course, our fellow living beings. With technology and social media, we have unprecedented access to information and images from all over the world. But witnessing natural disasters, wars and other untold suffering can be debilitating. Thankfully, there are people like today’s guest, to remind us that we, individually and collectively, have so much power to change the course of history and create a healthier world for future generations.
Guest – Simon Billenness, an advocate for environmental sustainability, human rights, corporate governance, and social justice. Described by the New York Times as “a super-specialist” in human rights advocacy, Simon has, for more than two decades, advised investors, non-profits, universities, communities, and unions in holding corporations accountable. He is currently the Executive Director of the International Campaign for the Rohingya and for the coalition-led campaign, No Business With Genocide. He also serves on the Business and Human Rights Co-group of Amnesty International USA.
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