Zohran Mamdani eyeing lawyer who defended al Qaeda terrorist for top City Hall job: source

Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has tapped a controversial lawyer who defended an al Qaeda terrorist and a radical anti-Israel campus leader at Columbia for a “high-ranking” position at City Hall, The Post has learned.

Ramzi Kassem, who is also a law professor at City University of New York and a member of Mamdani’s transition team for legal affairs, is the top candidate for Chief Counsel, the most important advisory role in the mayor’s office, according to a source close to the transition team.

Kassem, 47, was one of the attorneys who defended Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian-born leader of the pro-Palestinian encampment at Columbia who was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and earmarked for deportation. However, after 104 days in a detention camp judges ruled he should be released.

In addition to Khalil, Kassem helped to defend terrorist Ahmed al-Darbi, an al Qaeda member who was convicted in 2017 of bombing a French oil tanker, the Limburg, off the coast of Yemen in 2002.

“Kassem’s appointment to corp counsel wouldn’t sit well with the Jewish community,” said Ken Frydman, a Democratic political operative.

“Everyone’s entitled to legal representation…even Mahmoud Khalil. But that doesn’t mean Ramzi Kassem had to represent him,” he added to The Post.

Kassem, who was born in Syria, was also engaged in anti-Israel protests at Columbia, where he attended law school on a fellowship funded by members of leftwing activists the Soros family, records show.

In 1999, he wrote a letter to the editor of the Columbia Spectator newspaper criticizing the naming of a sandwich as an “Israeli wrap” because it was offensive to Muslims and Arabs, he said.

https://keywiki.org/Ramzi_Kassem

Ramzi Kassem
Jump to navigationJump to search

Ramzi Kassem
Ramzi Kassem is a Professor of Law and Founding Director of CLEAR at the City University of New York on leave to serve as Senior Policy Advisor for Immigration at the White House under Joe Biden.

Contents
1 Bio
2 Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility
3 Bio
4 Left Forum 2011
5 References

Bio

From the City University of New York:[1]

Ramzi Kassem is a Professor of Law and Founding Director of CLEAR at the City University of New York. His writing, teaching, and clinical legal practice all aim to contest the expressions and excesses of the sprawling U.S. security state, both domestically and abroad.

In support of clients, communities, and social movements, Professor Kassem and his students have litigated civil rights, constitutional, criminal, immigration, national security, wartime detention, and war crime cases at all levels of the federal judiciary, before military commissions and international tribunals, and in various administrative proceedings.

Professor Kassem argued Tanzin v. Tanvir before the U.S. Supreme Court, a landmark civil rights case challenging the federal government’s abuse of watchlists, resulting in a unanimous decision for the clinic’s clients. In Raza v. City of New York, another groundbreaking litigation challenging secret police surveillance, Professor Kassem helped negotiate an historic settlement restricting surveillance of constitutionally protected religious and political activity.
Professor Kassem and his students have also defended fifteen prisoners of various nationalities incarcerated without fair process at Guantánamo Bay, Bagram Air Base, and other secret or disclosed U.S. facilities worldwide. Their advocacy at all levels of the federal judiciary, in military tribunals, before administrative and international bodies, and in the media has established important law-of-war precedent and resulted in the liberation of eleven clients so far. This includes the only prisoner released from Guantánamo during the Trump administration, for whom Professor Kassem was lead defense counsel before a Military Commission on charges of war crimes in United States v. Ahmed al-Darbi. In this larger context, Professor Kassem negotiated client repatriations or resettlements in Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, the United Kingdom, Uruguay, and Yemen.

Domestically, Professor Kassem has appeared as defense counsel or advised defense teams in federal terrorism cases, including United States v. Uzair Paracha, which resulted in the exoneration and repatriation to Pakistan of his client after seventeen years of incarceration. Professor Kassem and his students have also defended numerous immigrants and asylum-seekers in immigration court, before the Board of Immigration Appeals, and in federal courts.

Professor Kassem was part of a three-member delegation of international legal experts invited by the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) to assess the state of emergency in France. He was tasked by the Public Interest Law Network (PILnet) to lead a feasibility study on clinical legal education in Tunisia. He has lectured broadly overseas, including in France, Germany, Italy, Lebanon, Mexico, Morocco, Poland, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom. In connection with his cases, Professor Kassem has also conducted fact-finding missions in Afghanistan, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, and Yemen.

Since 2009, Professor Kassem has served as the founding director of CLEAR, an award-winning clinic at CUNY School of Law. For over a decade, he also directed or co-directed the law school’s Immigrant & Non-Citizen Rights Clinic. Before joining the CUNY faculty, Professor Kassem taught law at Yale and Fordham.

In addition to law review articles and contributed book chapters, Professor Kassem’s writing has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, The Guardian and other outlets. He is also frequently interviewed and quoted in these major news outlets and beyond.

Professor Kassem is a proud immigrant, an incorrigible New Yorker, and a Paul & Daisy Soros New American Fellow. He is a graduate of Columbia College and holds law degrees from Columbia Law School, where he was a Senior Editor for the Columbia Law Review, and from the Sorbonne.

In 2020, Professor Kassem was named to the inaugural class of (Marguerite Casey Foundation’s) Freedom Scholars selected nationwide in recognition of their work towards social, racial, and economic justice.

Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility
The Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility (CLEAR) project’s mandate is to support Muslim and all other client, communities, and movements in the New York City area and beyond that are targeted by local, state, or federal government agencies under the guise of national security and counterterrorism.

Bio

From the Washington Free Beacon in an article by Adam Credo titled “White House Hires Anti-Israel Professor From University Engulfed in Anti-Semitism Controversy”:[2]

“The White House’s newest hire is a City University of New York (CUNY) professor who has accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and “systematic genocide,” a move that is raising alarms among the many people who are already concerned about the Biden administration’s failure to combat anti-Semitism on America’s college campuses.

Ramzi Kassem, a professor at CUNY’s law school, was tapped to serve as a senior policy adviser for immigration in the White House’s Domestic Policy Council. Kassem is a vocal Israel critic who spent a portion of his time as an undergrad at Columbia University writing scathing criticisms of the Jewish state, a Washington Free Beacon review found. Kassem, who helped defend terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay, charged the Jewish state with genocide and decried “unconditional” support for Israel.

Kassem’s hiring comes as the Biden administration fights the perception it is feeding Israel’s opponents. A closely watched White House plan on combating anti-Semitism, for instance, was recently watered down by anti-Israel activists. The State Department admitted on Monday that it is boycotting research partnerships with certain Israeli organizations.

CUNY announced that Kassem “will work to support the Biden-Harris agenda across a range of immigration issues” using his expertise as “a national leader on progressive immigration reform.” Kassem enters the White House after working for more than a decade at CUNY, which has repeatedly found itself in hot water for promoting anti-Semitic hate speech and, in some cases, subjecting Jewish students to “severe and persistent anti-Semitic harassment.” CUNY’s law school, in particular, promotes anti-Semitic boycotts against Israel and recently featured a graduation speaker who accused Israel of sending “lynch mobs” after Palestinians.

Kassem’s past writings strike a similar note. In an April 1998 article, the White House adviser claimed there is “sufficient evidence” implicating Israel in a “systematic genocide” against the Palestinians. The Jewish state’s behavior, Kassem wrote in the Columbia Spectator, is “a clear-cut case of ethnic cleansing.” In another April 1998 article, titled “Zionism Impedes Middle Eastern Peace,” Kassem claimed European Jews came to the Middle East “with the intention of conquering the land.” A two-state solution between the parties “is not viable, nor is it desirable,” he insisted.

Kassem also maintained that peace will only be achieved if Israel affords Palestinians the “right of return,” a long dormant policy proposal that would erase Israel’s Jewish majority.

“It doesn’t make sense that Jewish Americans living in Brooklyn have more rights to the land than Palestinians who live in Lebanon and can’t return to their historical land,” Kassem was quoted as saying in a November 2000 Spectator interview.

In a separate piece authored in October 2000, Kassem claimed that Israel has no business defending Jews from terror attacks in Nablus, a Palestinian city where militants frequently clash with Israeli security forces.

“The fact that Israel has no internationally recognized right to be there in the first place is conveniently omitted, and never mind that the citizens in question happen to be illegal settlers armed to the teeth by the Israeli military and heavily subsidized by their government,” Kassem wrote in that Spectator article, which includes several other bylines.

Kassem also decried “unconditional” U.S. support for Israel, saying in the November 2000 interview with the Spectator that “the power of the America Israel Public Affairs Committee and other lobbying groups has allowed Israeli ‘ethnocracy’ to flourish.”

Kassem’s role at the White House is generating scrutiny among pro-Israel advocates already upset by the Biden administration’s efforts to undermine the current Israeli government.

“The peril lies in the White House’s choice to enlist an individual who has espoused profoundly offensive and injurious rhetoric concerning Israel and Jews,” Hen Mazzig, a senior fellow at the Tel Aviv Institute, which combats anti-Semitism, told the Free Beacon. “History has shown us that individuals harboring anti-Israel notions may attempt a performative transformation upon assuming public office, yet their stand remains the same within.”

“Were any other marginalized community at stake,” Mazzig said, “unequivocal consensus would swiftly denounce the wisdom of appointing such a person with employment.”
Kassem also took issue with Columbia University’s 1999 decision to call one of its sandwiches an “Israeli wrap,” writing in a letter to the editor of the Spectator that the term is offensive to Muslims and Arabs.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and recently appointed chairman of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, said that Kassem should commit to upholding the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s widely recognized standard definition of anti-Semitism.
“There is only one question I would ask Ramzi Kassem: ‘As a senior policy White House adviser do you endorse and will you apply the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism?’” Cooper told the Free Beacon.

In addition to his anti-Israel advocacy, Kassem has sought to downplay the impact of the 9/11 terror attacks, writing in September 2001 article that the attackers were not evil.
“The perpetrators were probably not driven to their actions by some intrinsic evil or inherent hatred of the good United States. These acts of violence were gratuitous only in the sense that they wantonly and indiscriminately targeted innocent civilians,” Kassem wrote. “The resentment these terrorists felt towards the United States was rooted in political realities shaped by our country’s policies.”

As a law professor and CUNY employee, Kassem has helped free several accused terrorists from prison, according to his online profile. He is also the founding director of CUNY’s CLEAR program, a legal advocacy group that helps Muslims and other communities pursue allegations of unjust surveillance by local authorities.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment. An request for comment sent to Kassem’s CUNY email address returned an auto-response saying he is on leave.

Left Forum 2011

Ramzi Kassem was a speaker on a panel titled “Facing the New MacCarthyism: Organizing to Fight the Islamophobic Right” at the 2011 Left Forum:[3]

Asim Rehman, Muslim Bar Association of New York
Faiza Ali, former Community Organizer, CAIR NY
Ramzi Kassem, CLEAR law clinic, CUNY
Thomas Cincotta, Public Eye
References
Ramzi Kassem (accessed on June 27, 2023)
White House Hires Anti-Israel Professor From University Engulfed in Anti-Semitism Controversy (accessed on June 27, 2023)
[1] (accessed on March 8, 2011)

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.