RUTHFULLY YOURS

A pro-LGBT and feminist Muslim organization says it was expelled from tabling at the annual Islamic Society of North America convention earlier this month where self-proclaimed LGBT ally Linda Sarsour headlined as a keynote speaker.https://spectator.org/pro-lgbt-muslim-group-says-it-was-kicked-out-of-muslim-conference-where-linda-sarsour-spoke/

“We’re really sick and tired of the hypocrisy of them (ISNA) claiming to be LGBT allies,” said Ani Zonneveld, founder and president of Muslims for Progressive Values, a faith-based human rights organization founded in 2007. “They’re only an ally when the camera is on.”

ISNA is the largest Muslim organization in North America and acts as an umbrella organization for numerous other Islamic groups and affiliated mosques. The organization was established in 1981 by the Muslim Student Association, and its founding members had connections with Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and the Jamaat-i Islami, according to academic scholars on Islamism in America.

In 2015, President Barack Obama recorded a video message for the group’s convention, which annually draws tens of thousands of attendees. Women’s March board member Linda Sarsour spoke at the 54th ISNA convention held on June 30–July 3 in Chicago this year.

MPV partnered with the Human Rights Campaign to operate a tabling booth. There, MPV says their pamphlets advocating LGBT and women’s equality within Islam first drew the ire of an ultra-orthodox attendee. Soon after, they were asked to close shop and leave the venue by ISNA staff.

According to Frank Parmir, a convert to Islam and organizer with MPV-Columbus who staffed the booth with Michael Toumayan, HRC’s religion and faith program manager, a man in “Salafi garb” lectured them on homosexuality and sin. “To be a ‘real Muslim,’ one must assert that homosexuality is a sin,” Parmir recalled the man saying.

Parmir said within an hour after that encounter, a group of men in suits accosted them at the booth. Parmir identified one of the suited men as ISNA Conventions, Conferences, and Special Projects Director, Basharat Saleem. “He wasn’t sure that they could allow us to stay because of some of the literature and some of the positions we were advocating,” Parmir said. “They would have to think about it and get back to us.”

Saleem and ISNA did not respond to a request for comment.

Soon after, Parmir said another man “asked” MPV and HRC to vacate the premises. Parmir described the request as a veiled demand. Before leaving, Parmir and Toumayan met with Saleem and ISNA board director Farhan Syed to negotiate. Other men, including security, were also present, according to Parmir. “It finally became clear that HRC was not the problem,” Parmir said. “They were okay with HRC’s advocacy for gay rights. They were not okay with MPV’s advocacy that gays should find unrepentant inclusion with the Muslim community and that women should be given equality.”

Parmir said the men found MPV’s literature “stressful” and “upsetting” for convention attendees. According to Parmir, Syed attempted to be sensitive, citing his homosexual friends who “come to dinner,” but added the caveat that “they’re not Muslim.”

Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods, the grocer that brought pricey organic food to the masses, comes during a time of turmoil in the organic industry: The Department of Agriculture is continuing to investigate the importation of millions of pounds of phony organic grains. The move is in response to a lengthy Washington Post exposé published in May that tracked shipments of corn and soybeans from Turkey, Romania, and Ukraine that were labeled “organic” but were not (I wrote about it here).

The Post reported that the fraudulent imports were “large enough to constitute a meaningful proportion of the U.S. supply of those commodities,” a troubling development that should raise serious questions about the veracity of the organic label, since these grains are mostly being used as livestock feed to meet National Organic Program’s (NOP) standards. Organic meat and dairy products must be sourced from animals fed only organic grains; this has led to an enormous surge in imports over the past few years, since nearly all the corn and soybeans grown here are from genetically modified seeds, verboten in organic production. Organic soybean imports have jumped sixfold from 2011, and organic corn imports have quadrupled since 2013; Turkey is now the largest exporter of both crops to the U.S.

A USDA spokeswoman confirmed to me that an investigation is ongoing and said the agency has already revoked the license of one Turkish handler. (Organic verification is done by an outside party, not by the USDA directly; 82 certifiers oversee 31,000 organic farms and businesses in 111 countries and the U.S.) The spokeswoman also said the agency is “currently investigating other evidence related to shipments of soybeans and corn. These investigations will continue in the coming weeks, and NOP will issue additional notices and notifications if there is clear evidence of violations.” The USDA cannot suspend imports from these countries as the investigation proceeds, but it has notified importers about the fraudulent grains.

But this problem extends far beyond a few shady international grain dealers. Organic companies have used these non-organic grains in their products and either knowingly or unwittingly sold those goods as certified organic. The Organic Foods Production Act does not authorize recalls of organic products, but the USDA can revoke a company’s organic certification and levy a fine of up to $11,000 per violation. It will be interesting to see if the USDA penalizes any domestic producers for knowingly using phony grains.

While the Post exposed only three shipments of fake grains, it’s safe to assume this has been going on for some time, with perhaps a wink and a nod from folks throughout the organic supply chain. No one questioned how Turkey suddenly became our leading supplier of organic corn and soybeans when those imports were nonexistent just a few years ago? This is more than someone just being asleep at the switch; this is selective ignorance on a large scale.

All of this finally prompted the nation’s largest organic lobbying group, the Organic Trade Association (OTA), to take action. Last month, the group formed a Global Organic Supply Chain Integrity Task Force to “develop a best practices guide to use in managing and verifying global organic supply chain integrity to help brands and traders manage and mitigate the risk and occurrence of organic fraud.” This might be long overdue, since organic-goods imports are skyrocketing. According to OTA estimates, organic-corn imports more than quadrupled between 2013 and 2016, while organic-soybean imports more than doubled.

OTA spokeswoman Maggie McNeil told me that the group’s “top priority is to protect the integrity of organic. We support strong and robust oversight and enforcement of organic certification practices and standards both inside and outside of the U.S.” The group will ask for more money in the 2018 farm bill, including a 10 percent annual increase in the NOP’s budget and $5 million to upgrade technology systems for international trade-tracking systems and data collection.

But until the USDA concludes its investigation and all responsible parties are held accountable for this massive fraud in our food supply, no additional tax money should go to fund the NOP. Indeed, Congress should reconsider whether the NOP, which is designed as a marketing program, should be under the federal government’s purview at all. Meghan Cline, a spokeswoman for the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee, told me that the committee “will be taking a close look at the NOP as part of the upcoming Farm Bill reauthorization process.”

‘Collusion is not a crime.”

“Are you kidding? It could be a campaign-finance-law violation. After all, opposition research is a ‘thing of value.’ There could be a conspiracy to defraud the United States by impeding the legitimate functions of the Federal Election Commission. Plus, Trump said his campaign had nothing to do with Russia. He lied to the public.”

“Lying to the public is not a crime.”

This is the sort of banter that went on all day Tuesday, following revelation of the devastating e-mail exchange between Donald Trump Jr. and Rob Goldstone. Plainly, both sides of the political aisle are badly misinformed about the Constitution’s take on executive misconduct. When the president’s behavior is at issue, it is the Constitution, not the criminal law, that is paramount.

On the Right and in Republican circles, there are staunch Trump supporters, as well as reluctant ones (including moi) who voted for Trump reasoning that the only practical alternative was Hillary (not an alternative). The former are all in, seemingly no matter what Trump does; the latter support him when he pushes conservative policies but are not invested in him, politically or personally. Trump-Russia brings the divide into sharp relief.

The tepid-on-Trump camp is aghast at revelations of the extent and nature of the Trump clan’s ties to a murderous anti-American regime — and, speaking only for myself, humbled by analysts who were more troubled by the circumstantial evidence in the absence of smoking guns. Trump fans, to the contrary, are doing the full Clinton: doubling down on the absurd insistence that Trump-Russia is a big ol’ “nothingburger.”

“Look at the U.S. penal code,” they scoff, defying outraged Americans to identify a single criminal-law violation that has been established. There is no crime, they maintain, in colluding with the Russian government to collect and broadcast damaging information about an opposition American candidate.

On the Left, meanwhile, are the legal beagles. They are busily squirreling through the law books and straining their creative brains to come up with an offense — some novel prosecution theory under which the Trump-Russia facts can be pigeonholed into a campaign-law violation, a computer-fraud crime, or maybe even misprision of a felony (i.e., a failure to report one).

One side is mulishly determined not to see outrageous misconduct. The other side is inadvertently trivializing it.

But the question is not whether collusion is a crime. It is whether collusion is a high crime or misdemeanor.

When I wrote Faithless Execution, my 2014 book about impeachment, I well understood that there was no prospect of impeaching President Obama. Indeed, I argued in the book that it would be not merely foolish but counterproductive to commence impeachment proceedings against a president as to whom there was no political prospect of removal from office. A failed impeachment effort would be like a license to mutilate. It would tell the president who escaped the noose that he was invulnerable — it would actually encourage more misconduct.

But there was still, I believed, a need for such a book. The wayward public debate after disclosure of the Trump Jr. e-mails proves the point. Not enough of us who are informing the public are informed ourselves about how our constitutional system is supposed to work.

Nothing caused the Framers greater anxiety than the new office they were creating, the presidency of the United States. They were rightly convinced of the need in a dangerous world for an energetic executive able to act swiftly and decisively in times of crisis. But, being close students of human nature, they were equally worried that the enormous powers attendant to the office could be abused, that they could fall into the hands of an unfit incumbent, or that they could come under the influence of foreign powers.

They thus gave Congress a dispositive check: the power of impeachment and removal. Impeachment, not criminal prosecution, is our Constitution’s response to egregious executive malfeasance.

Thus, the critical part: The standard for impeachment, the commission of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” is not concerned with criminal offenses found in the penal statute books and suitable for courtroom prosecution. It relates instead to the president’s high fiduciary duty to the American people and allegiance to our system of government.

Alexander Hamilton put it best in Federalist No. 65. Impeachable offenses are those

Which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or in other words from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated political, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.

The bickering over collusion “crimes” misses the point. If an unfit person holds the presidency, the danger to our society is that he will abuse the power that he wields. The imperative is to remove him from office. Whether, in addition to that, his misconduct also happens to violate penal statutes and be ripe for criminal prosecution is a side issue. It is a subordinate legal question, whereas fitness for the presidency is a core political issue. That is why it is rightly observed that impeachment is a political remedy, not a legal one.