Mohammad Mahjoub's First Speech

Friday evening , March 16, Mohammad Mahjoub spoke to an audience for the first time in 12 years at the No One Is Illegal film night Whose Borders? at the Palmerston Library, 560 Palmerston, near Bloor and Bathurst. He spoke at the end of two films, the first, "Kanawayandan D'aaki - Protecting Our Land" (Praxis Pictures, 12 mins) a short one about the KI's with beautiful photos from their traditional lands (KI is a campaign of NOII) and the longer film "Enemy Alien" (dir. Konrad Aderer, 81 mins) http://cinespect.com/?p=1979- about a Palestinian-American activist Farouk Abdel-Muhti http://rwor.org/a/1257/farouk.htm who was incarcerated after 911 along with thousands of other Muslim and south Asian people. It is the story of his 2 years in many prisons including long terms in solitary confinement, as friends tried to get him out - with protests and legal measures. He had health problems that were not allowed to be dealt with and he died 3 months after his release. One lawyer said that the two year incarceration was a deliberate death sentence. Film-maker Konrad Aderer is the grandson of Japanese-Americans who were interned during WW2 just for being of Japanese ancestry and Konrad's persistence at making this film came largely from his sense of injustice at how immigrant peoples have been badly treated in the U.S. There were a lot of parallels to Mahjoub's case.

Mohammad spoke powerfully and passionately for about ten minutes. He talked about the similarity of the injustice of his case to that of Farouk Abdel-Muhti, and encouraged the audience of about fifty people to fight for justice for those who don't have it and to expect strong resistance from governments for doing so.

Mohammad also told some of us afterward that this was the first time in 12 years he had ever been out of prison or his apartment at 10 pm. I needed to be there to accompany him home because his curfew is still 8 pm, but won't be after March 20 when the new conditions begin - with no curfew!

Noah Bingham, one of the film-makers of the planned documentary "Secret Trial Five" http://secrettrial5.com/ was there and did some filming of Mohammad's speech.

Mohammad's new conditions begin on March 20 and his birthday is March 21.