the ultimate police state - ‘security’ is one of their top exports
I hate the taste of low effort propaganda in the morning.
thanks for the engagement =]
In recent years, Georgia has experienced troubling trends in fatal police shootings. As this has unfolded, the state continues to pursue a “police exchange” program with the state of Israel.
In recent years, Georgia has experienced troubling trends in fatal police shootings.
These incidents nearly doubled in the state, up 77 percent between 2017 to 2018. By May 2018, Georgia was already reportedly experiencing a more rapid rise in officer-involved shootings than the rest of the country. According to an investigation of deadly police shootings in Georgia, in the six years after 2010, 184 people were shot and killed by police; almost half of them unarmed or shot in the back.
In 2019, Georgia has already recorded twenty-two fatal police shootings, The Washington Post reports.
As this has unfolded, Georgia continues to pursue a “police exchange” program with the state of Israel. Run through Georgia State University, the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange arranges for American law enforcement officials, corporate security executives, and police officers to engage in trainings, briefings, and seminars with governments including that of China, Colombia, Egypt, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and the original and primary focus of the program, Israel.
For twenty-seven years, police departments in Georgia have received grants from the U.S. Department of Justice that subsidize these trainings. Since the program’s inception in 1992, it has trained at least 1,700 participants, including officers from the Atlanta Police Department.
Law enforcement from other U.S. states have participated in the program, including those from Tennessee, Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Floria, Georgia, Indiana, North Carolina, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Nevada, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Wahsington, D.C., and West Virginia.
Open records requests have forced program leaders to reveal some of its content topics, including border policing, community policing, and urban policing.
Activists in Georgia are pushing for an end to Atlanta’s police exchange program. Seventy local organizations and leaders—including our organizations, Jewish Voice for Peace-Atlanta and Project South—are demanding that Atlanta get out of these deadly police exchanges.
Among other objections, activists point to Israel’s clear record of human rights abuses and state violence toward Palestinians, Jews of color, and African refugees. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 2018 brought a 69 percent increase over the previous year in Israeli settler violence toward Palestinians, and a rise in Palestinian deaths and injuries in Gaza. In the year since 2018 Great March of Return demonstrations began, more than 190 Palestinians were killed and 28,000 were injured by Israeli Forces.
Regardless of how the Israeli government coalition is shaped after its recent elections, its two largest parties show no indication of ending the fifty-two year Israeli military occupation of Palestine, nor its militarized tactics to control the Palestinian population.
This systematic repression of Palestinians by Israel warrants the U.S. public’s refusal to accept such training programs for their police departments. Racism and violence are endemic problems to police departments around the country, and the influence of Israeli military police trainings only threatens to exacerbates the problem.
Two examples of police violence in Atlanta bring this home. In 2006, one elderly Atlanta resident, Kathryn Johnston, was mistaken for a cocaine dealer and killed by SWAT team conducting a “No Knock” drug raid. In January 2019, twenty-one-year-old Jimmy Atchison was fatally shot in the face by Atlanta police—even though the robbery he was accused of may have never taken place.
In April 2018, the Durham, North Carolina city council voted unanimously to pass a policy barring Durham’s participation in militarized police exchange trainings with Israel and other foreign countries.
The initial petition, created by a coalition of ten Durham organizations states that “the Israeli Defense Forces and the Israel Police have a long history of violence and harm against Palestinian people and Jews of color.” One coalition member said, “training [with Israel] makes it worse in terms of racial profiling and use of force in crowd control.”
The victory in Durham highlights a national movement that seeks to disband military and police training exchanges with Israel.
In December 2018, grassroots organizing efforts succeeded in forcing the Vermont State Police and the Northampton, Massachusetts police chief to pull out of a police exchange program managed by the Anti-Defamation League.
Clearly, many in Atlanta feel it must do the same.
“As long as these programs exist,” says Dawn O’Neal of Us Protecting Us, formerly Black Lives Matter Atlanta, in an email, “as long as police are sent into war zones to train, there will continue to be Tamir Rices and Trayvon Martins. There will continue to be Kathryn Johnstons.”
How to even start, everything isn’t about the USA.
What do you want to convey here? I mean why not take a smart, intelligent stake on some logic you think seems to be right instead of mixing some random meme stuff together?
Feels like Kremlin bait posting so please prove me you have an opinion more than A bad, B good or something.
Since the early 90s, hundreds of law enforcement officers, including police officers and agents from the FBI, CIA, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), have either been sent to Israel through police exchanges, or attended summits within the US that were sponsored by Israeli lobby organisations.
Police forces from Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, Arizona, Connecticut, New York, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Georgia, Washington state and others have participated in the training, including one that took place in Minneapolis, the city where Floyd was killed.
Leading human rights groups have denounced the exchange programmes, warning that Israeli police standards and tactics only serve to exacerbate racial profiling and police brutality in the US.
“With a long record of human rights violations, Israeli security forces are an incredibly problematic training partner,” Patrick Wilcken, Amnesty International USA’s researcher for arms control, security and human rights told MEE.
Micky Rosenfeld, an Israeli police spokesperson, rejected criticisms of the training scheme, telling MEE that the police exchanges in Israel provide American forces with valuable information on how to “prevent and respond” to attacks.
“The learning and sharing has saved many lives both in Israel and overseas throughout the years,” Rosenfeld said.
“The organisations that are calling out, specifically in the US, against law enforcement learning and sharing are weakening the nation’s preparedness to respond to terror attacks, hate crimes and extremists who break the law.”
Guilt by association is weak. Association through multiple steps even more so.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2018/3/29/black-lives-do-not-matter-in-israel/
On March 17, one of Israel’s two chief rabbis, Yitzhak Yosef, called black people “monkeys” and the Hebrew equivalent of the N-word in his weekly sermon.
It is highly unlikely that Yosef will face any real repercussions for his racist comments. He was not demoted after saying in a similar sermon exactly two years ago that all non-Jews – Africans, Arabs, or otherwise – could only live in Israel if they agree to serve the country’s Jewish population.
It’s unclear if Yosef’s recent comments were directly connected to the Israeli government’s impending expulsion of approximately 40,000 African refugees, mainly Christians and Muslims from Eritrea and Sudan.
The government has already coerced more than a third of the African refugee community in Israel, over 20,000 souls, to return to Africa. Israeli journalists have revealed in recent months that the government’s promises to secure status for them in Rwanda or Uganda were only a ruse, devised to deport them back into a stateless existence– with their ostensible acquiescence.
To be fair, racist comments from state-paid rabbis aren’t exactly a rarity in Israel. Israel’s other chief rabbi, Yisrael Lau, used the N-word to describe Black athletes on his very first day in office in July 2013.
But another anti-African comment made last week, by Israel’s most powerful politician, was almost certainly timed to coincide with the government’s efforts to ethnically cleanse the country of the refugees.
On March 19, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a public speech that the arrival of non-Jewish African refugees was “much worse” for Israel than “severe attacks by Sinai terrorists”.
Netanyahu’s comments come as citizens across the country have been publicly expressing reservations to his expulsion plan. Since the start of the calendar year, Israelis from all walks of life have registered their adamant opposition to the planned deportations, scheduled to begin on April 1: doctors and artists, professors and pilots, students and survivors of the Holocaust. On Saturday night, a pro-refugee protest in Tel Aviv drew over 20,000 thousand people opposed to the expulsion.
But Netanyahu need not worry about amassing support for the deportation plan. True, a recent poll proved that the majority of the Israelis that live in proximity to the African refugees – in the Greater Tel Aviv area generally, and in the slums of South Tel Aviv specifically – oppose the expulsions. But outside of that liberal bubble, Netanyahu has easily secured support for his plan.
It is highly unlikely that Yosef will face any real repercussions for his racist comments. He was not demoted after saying in a similar sermon exactly two years ago that all non-Jews – Africans, Arabs, or otherwise – could only live in Israel if they agree to serve the country’s Jewish population.
It’s unclear if Yosef’s recent comments were directly connected to the Israeli government’s impending expulsion of approximately 40,000 African refugees, mainly Christians and Muslims from Eritrea and Sudan.
The government has already coerced more than a third of the African refugee community in Israel, over 20,000 souls, to return to Africa. Israeli journalists have revealed in recent months that the government’s promises to secure status for them in Rwanda or Uganda were only a ruse, devised to deport them back into a stateless existence– with their ostensible acquiescence.
To be fair, racist comments from state-paid rabbis aren’t exactly a rarity in Israel. Israel’s other chief rabbi, Yisrael Lau, used the N-word to describe Black athletes on his very first day in office in July 2013.
But another anti-African comment made last week, by Israel’s most powerful politician, was almost certainly timed to coincide with the government’s efforts to ethnically cleanse the country of the refugees.
On March 19, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a public speech that the arrival of non-Jewish African refugees was “much worse” for Israel than “severe attacks by Sinai terrorists”.
Netanyahu’s comments come as citizens across the country have been publicly expressing reservations to his expulsion plan. Since the start of the calendar year, Israelis from all walks of life have registered their adamant opposition to the planned deportations, scheduled to begin on April 1: doctors and artists, professors and pilots, students and survivors of the Holocaust. On Saturday night, a pro-refugee protest in Tel Aviv drew over 20,000 thousand people opposed to the expulsion.
But Netanyahu need not worry about amassing support for the deportation plan. True, a recent poll proved that the majority of the Israelis that live in proximity to the African refugees – in the Greater Tel Aviv area generally, and in the slums of South Tel Aviv specifically – oppose the expulsions. But outside of that liberal bubble, Netanyahu has easily secured support for his plan. Sign up for Al Jazeera
OP leaving 17 essays in the comments. I can’t be arsed to read any of this…
Wow this is the first time I’ve ever seen someone bitch about an OP being TOO active in their own thread.
Thanks for your lack of time =]
Palestine was greedy and fucked themselves up
Israel just wanted a state not all of Palestine
Now imagine the israelies come to your home and claim part of it. After you rightfully defend yourself they start to claim more of yours because not giving your home up makes you greedy? That doesn’t make senese
israel didn’t even attack. also imagine you’re israel getting kicked out of you’re home and alot of time later you buy a part of you’re home back
you’re anology is stupid
also
tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie tankie
Abraham was from Mesopotamia not from the holy land. How is it the home of the jewish people?
???
You mean Hamas. Hamas fucked themselves up. And Israel killing anybody but Hamas is a travesty. Yet they do it so often that all of the focus is on what Israel ia doing wrong rather than Hamas.
i was talking about 1949 in my comment
Palestinians :“please don’t steal our land”
Random lemmy user : “you greedy fucks”
💀nah bruh you really badly want to get in arguments imma just block you to stop you’re dopamine stream
i dont even know who you are
There are so many people who love cops and hate Israel, I don’t know what you’re talking about OP.
Personally I’m on team acab but I think israel has a right to go after hamas since they did a terrorism. That doesn’t mean they should kill innocent people; but on the other hand, look at how many German civilians were bombed to death in world war 2; it’s how war works.
A country’s responsibility is to their own people first, almost always at the expense of foreign people. In the case of Israel, it may be that their security is won at the expense of the Palestinians from whom they stole their land. So they are acting in the interest of Israelis.
But cops are different, they attack their own countrymen and enforce a power dynamic within the country that is bad for the country’s own citizens; specifically protecting the interest of capital. They are enemies of the state within the state. Different thing.
