Live, from New York

Charles has an excerpt from this article in The Jewish Week about Stanley Cohen's latest job -- defending a guy named Mazen Assi who's charged with throwing a few Molotov cocktails through the window of a synagogue in Riverdale.

Here are a few more snippets:

. . . Cohen, has wild salt-and-pepper hair that piles high on his head — not unlike Cosmo Kramer of “Seinfeld” fame — before it cascades down into a long ponytail like a Davy Crockett coonskin cap. In two-tone shoes, he walks across the courthouse floor and reminds the jury that Assi was “never far from Palestine, never far from his tradition.” He “socializes in the Palestinian Muslim community.” Oh, he threw the dud Molotov cocktails, all right, says Cohen, and that was wrong, but he was “fixated” for days by the death of Muhammad Dura, the 12-year-old Palestinian boy famously shot in his father’s arms in September 2000. The photo and video whipped up a frenzy around the world.

Who wasn’t fixated, asks Cohen? He says even one of the New York City cops on this case thought the Dura killing “horrific.”

In case the jury didn’t remember — and Judge Stephen Barrett refused to let the jury see footage of the shooting — Cohen told the jury that Dura’s father “screamed in anguish, trying to shield his son’s limp body against the weapons of the Israeli Defense Forces.”

Now, never mind that even the Jordan Times just last week ran a story that said young Dura was shot in a crossfire between Palestinians and Israelis, meaning the fatal bullet was of indeterminate origin. What matters is that Assi blames Israel.

What, Cohen asked the jury, actually was the crime here? All that happened was “a broken window. No one went to the hospital. No one was physically injured. The synagogue wasn’t engulfed in flames. But it is a big deal to the system. ... The message from the politicians, the message from the brass, was ‘solve this case. It doesn’t matter—solve this case ... bring some people in,’ and then work backwards and prove the evidence against those you bring in.”

Imagine, said Cohen, the police used aerial photography “for a broken window.” The FBI was called in, “maybe the CIA, who knows?”

It’s not about Jews, it’s about Israel. “The prosecutors keep wanting you to think this had something to do with Jews,” Cohen told the jury. “How many times did we hear from witnesses, ‘Yom Kippur, Yom Kippur, the High Holidays, the High Holidays’ ... how many times ‘yahrtzeit ceremonies’? How many times, ‘little memorial plaques for the dead’? Was it necessary? We know it’s a synagogue.... plaques for the dead? From 1932? What does that have to do with this case?”

Cohen’s right, the Bronx district attorney wants the jury to think that a bomb thrown at a shul has something to do with Jews. And why do the 1930s keep coming up? Those plaques for the dead keep following us around.