The U.S. government has successfully prosecuted an American of Paksitani descent for offering Hezbollah’s al-Manar television channel as part of a broader satellite cable package.

Javed Iqbal has lived in the United States for 20 years and is a father of five with a son child on the way. He does not have nor have ever had any involvement with any Islamic fundamentalists groups, and federal prosecutors do not accuse him of any such associations or of harboring malignant views of the United States.

Iqbal’s sole “crime” was that he offered al-Maner as one channel in a satellite package, a package that also included porn. For that he has been sentence to 6 years in prison [prosecutors originally wanted 15, but agreed to a plea] and will most likely face deportation once he has served his time.

How can any decent person not see this is the bigoted injustice that it is?

The low-life federal prosecutor Eric Snyder called Iqbal “Hezbollah’s man in New York City. He did all this to bring the Hezbollah operations to our shores, to allow Hezbollah to have their operations here in New York City. That’s a very dangerous thing.”

This is non-sense. Iqbal can’t even understand Arabic and even if he was a fundamentalist Muslim who wanted to disseminate propaganda, a Sunni radical from Pakistan would have nothing to do with a Shia fundamentalist party. He was not their man in New York in any significant sense. He did not and does not share their views, if they sought him out as someone to deliver a channel it was simply a business transaction on his part.

It is clear what is going on here. Federal prosecutors, who have closed little cases and are eager for a victory in the “war on terror”, have gone after an easy target. Is this man really a threat to national security? Is he really “dangerous”?

How is offering a channel dangerous to New York? And if al-Manar is objectionable, then the government can just tell Iqbal he can’t carry the network [the United States has since banned it]. Putting him in jail for 6 years is beyond the pale and a reflection of the dogmatic and hateful approach the Justice Department has adopted since 9/11.

This is a sad day for America when a citizens of twenty years and a father of soon-to-be six children is locked up for years and then most likely deported because federal prosecutors care more about a badge on their suits than about American notions of justice.

And, for the record, anyone in American can watch Hezbollah’s al-Manar over the Internet as the channel is always streaming live. Is the U.S. government going to put the people who watch it online in jail too?