Al Akhbar: Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah: The Resistance in Gaza is on quest for tangible victory:
“When a human being is given two choices, either surrender or fight, there is no choice between fighting and humiliation. The culture of the Resistance and the choice of the Resistance grew among the Palestinian people because they have no other option. They tried [with] the negotiations and they waited long enough for the regional and international situations to change. In relation to Egypt, a golden opportunity presented itself for Gaza and the whole Palestinian cause but it was soon lost. For the people living in Gaza, what choices do they have? Either resist or surrender to Israeli conditions or throw themselves in the sea or immigrate and join the refugee camps. I think after all these experiences, the Palestinians have no choice but the one they have chosen today. There is no choice here, in the sense that if a human being cares about his dignity, survival and existence, he resorts to this choice.
…Gaza’s problem is that it is caught between a problem of confidence with Israel on one hand – a fundamental and substantial problem – and between two axes on the other, the Qatari-Turkish axis and the Egyptian-Saudi-Emirati axis.
… First of all, Israel is an illegitimate entity and it is a threat to the region. It is a constant threat to the whole region. … All the strife, sensitivities, disputes and struggles should not eradicate the culture that says Israel is a cancer, an absolute evil and a danger to the peoples and governments of this region and to their dignity and holy sites. Therefore, the ultimate goal should be to remove it.”
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The victims of Gaza: A list of Palestinians killed in Israel’s ongoing assault:
“The Gaza health ministry has confirmed the deaths of at least 1,951 Palestinians in the besieged strip since Israel began its relentless assault on July 8. Among those killed, at least 467 were aged 18 or younger.
More than 70 families have been “massacred” in Gaza in the past 33 days.
According to sources in Gaza’s health ministry, 80 percent of the people killed by Israeli forces in Gaza were civilians.
The youngest victim has been Mustafa Wael al-Ghoul, only 24 days old, who was killed alongside 8 of his family members in Rafah. The next four youngest victims have been two-month old Rizk Abu Taha, four-month-old Mohammed Anas, five-month old Fares Jomaa al-Mahmoum and 8-month-old Sama Nael al-Barawi.
The oldest victim, Mohammed Mazen Faraj Daher, who died on July 31, was 99 years old.”
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Israeli settler runs over, kills Palestinian man in West Bank:
“A Palestinian man was killed on Thursday after being knocked down by an Israeli settler car near an illegal settlement in the central West Bank, Ma’an news agency reported.
Palestinian security sources told Ma’an that Mohammed Abdel Karim Mohammed Abu Isleim, 23, was hit while trying to cross a street near the settlement of Barkan in Salfit.
Israeli police officers and ambulances arrived at the scene and tried to save the victim, but he was pronounced dead.
Palestinian Authority police are investigating the incident to determine whether the settler deliberately hit the victim.
On August 7, a settler ran over and injured an 8-year old Palestinian girl with their car in the southern West Bank. Residents said they believed the driver had deliberately hurt the girl.”
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The militarization of police agencies from Ferguson to the Middle East:
“The targeting of Black communities by law enforcement is historic and ubiquitous; it has long colored every aspect of life for even those indirectly impacted by police actions – when systematic racism meets a militarized police force the outcome is continued dehumanization of Black bodies, societal acceptance of black deaths at the hands of the police and a disastrous escalation, oftentimes with public approval, of violent tactics against the Black people and communities of color. Modern US police departments share a colonial history that gives context to police violence of today – recognizing this framework is essential when examining how police brutality has developed historically. From constables in the 1600s who made up a sort of “neighborhood watch,” wherein they would capture slaves and prevent them from organizing for payment, the slave patrols of the early 1700s, the brazen appointment of police officers by way of their political affiliations in the 1880’s and stop-and-frisk, adopted from English common law, we learn that not only is violence an inherent part of the institution itself but it is a necessary component which allows for the state to control its citizens, and it has emerged and developed in the most destructive of ways. Police officers are trained to use force and are given the most lethal of weapons in order for them to do so and, according to data presented in the June 2014 report by the ACLU, this violence is overwhelmingly directed towards people of color. “Sixty-one percent of all the people impacted by SWAT raids in drug cases were minorities” and a majority are Black:
“[W]hen the data was examined by agency (and with local population taken into consideration), racial disparities in SWAT deployments were extreme. As shown in the table and graph below, in every agency, Blacks were disproportionately more likely to be impacted by a SWAT raid than whites, sometimes substantially so. For example, in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Blacks were nearly 24 times more likely to be impacted by a SWAT raid than whites were, and in Huntington, West Virginia, Blacks were 37 times more likely. Further, in Ogden, Utah, Blacks were 40 times more likely to be impacted by a SWAT raid than whites were.”
Despite this, the focus on the actions of individual officers, while warranted, should not overwhelm the discourse – the data presented by the ACLU is not only an indictment of police officers alone but of the police institution itself. Police agencies have created an environment which not only employs violence against minorities but encourages violence against them.
Present-day US law enforcement as an institution has cooperated with a long list of state agencies which are integral components of the larger machinery of government as well as international police forces. The joint training between the United States and Israel is one such example. In May 2010, 50 retired US admirals and generals vigorously argued that Israel is a security asset in a letter to President Obama, that “American police and law enforcement officials have reaped the benefit of close cooperation with Israeli professionals in the areas of domestic counter-terrorism practices and first response to terrorist attacks,” they wrote in part. In 2010, the Anti-Defamation League publicized that it had sponsored 15 senior law enforcement officials – including from the FBI, NYPD and Boston Police – to take part in an intensive “counter-terrorism training mission” in Israel so that they could share “information, strategies and tactics,” then again in 2011 and 2013. This program, which was first established in 2003, has sent over 115 state, federal and local law enforcement executives to Israel. In 2013, members of a US bomb squad from Arizona, including a US deputy, traveled to Israel for training which included “going to a West Bank outpost with the Israeli National Police bomb squad… learning about port inspections as they relate to counter explosives and counter IED operations.”
One of the reasons for this training? “To improve techniques and tactics they use along the US-Mexico border.”
The ADL is not the only organization boasting of this militarized US-Israel partnership. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has an entire publication dedicated to this “strategic partnership,” noting that “Israel has worked with multiple American agencies, including the FBI, NYPD, LAPD, and the Washington, D.C. Police Department.” According to the pamphlet not only have the U.S. Capitol Police undergone training in “Israeli counterterrorism techniques” but the partnership between these two colonial entities is far reaching, even beyond the scope of traditional law enforcement, with FEMA and the National Guard “often [traveling] to Israel to participate in Israeli homeland security drills.” The United States is not only learning from the brutality of the Israeli occupation forces but sharing their knowledge with other nations. The Middle Eastern Law Enforcement Training Center, which is co-sponsored by the FBI and the U.A.E. at the Dubai Police Academy, where FBI agents offer special training courses that “[involve] many aspects of law enforcement, including ways to combat white-collar crime, violent crime, forensics and counter-terrorism.” The United States also conducts military exchange programs in places like Egypt where US forces and Egyptian forces take part in joint military exercises, and offers FBI training to Egypt’s secret police who “routinely tortured detainees and suppressed political opposition” according to victim testimony.
Police institutions, which continue to work and expand under the guise of law while merging with the most prominent characters behind war-making, including the arms industry, lobbyists, and politicians, demand that communities, most often those of color, surrender what little autonomy they have so that they may receive “protection.” That they are ever permitted to collect on this guardianship is of no consequence because these institutions define protection and determine, for everyone, what is a most satisfactory response to any and all actions on the part of the community members.
Black men and women have long fought, with their blood, for the decentralization and democratization of the police and the right of their communities to determine their future without threat of police brutality – the Black Panther’s Ten Point Program, written in 1966, is a clear-cut example. “We Want An Immediate End To Police Brutality And Murder Of Black People,” the program reads in part. “We believe we can end police brutality in our Black community by organizing Black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our Black community from racist police oppression and brutality.” An article in the Palm Beach Post, published in 1969, reads “Decentralized Police Sought By Black Panthers”:
“Six intense Black Panthers have come in out of the West as advance men for a national conference which will drumbeat a simplistic theme – decentralize the police systems of big cities, place the cops under neighborhood control and give each community its own police commissioner.”
US police forces uphold white supremacy with their racist implementation of violence, where in places like Ogden, Utah, Black people “were 40 times more likely to be impacted by a SWAT raid than whites were,” according to the ACLU. These forces work towards the preservation of capitalism, and the police, as an institution, use elitism, violence and authoritarianism in order to preserve the state.
Decentralization is not only possible but proving to be a necessary process in order to dismantle the structuralized and militarized brutality that communities of color face at the hands of racist paramilitary police forces. The police have proven that they are not accountable to the communities they allegedly “serve and protect,” and so in order to implement restorative justice the institution itself should be dismantled and replaced with an organization that is transparent, represents the diversity of these communities and which, most importantly, is limited in regards to the scope of the organization’s power.”
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Eric Draitser’s 2012: America’s war on black and brown youth:
“Gray’s murder illustrates the shameful and often ignored fundamental point that young men of color are the prime targets of the police, whether they are suspected of a crime or not. Essentially, Kimani Gray has become, like Trayvon Martin before him, a symbol of the systematic victimization and oppression of black and brown youth in America.
Kimani Gray’s murder, like those of Sean Bell, Ramarley Graham and hundreds of others, provides a glimpse into how racist attitudes have been transformed into crime fighting “tools”, while antiquated notions such as “equal protection under the law” and “innocent until proven guilty” have fallen by the wayside. In fact, the Constitution itself, to whatever extent it still exists, seems to now only apply to those fortunate enough to have been born white and affluent. For those unlucky enough to have been born into low income communities of color, there are no inalienable rights aside from the right to be a constant target.
Nothing better illustrates the institutionalization of racism more than New York’s notorious “Stop and Frisk” program which allows police officers to stop and search anyone under the guise of “reasonable suspicion”. Though proponents of the program refer to it simply as a crime fighting tool, extensive research conducted on Stop-and-Frisk suggests that it is, in fact, specifically aimed at young people of color. A 2012 report from the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) showed that “more than 87% of those stopped [under the program] in 2011 were black or Latino.”
Although the overall statistics themselves are shocking, they do not effectively illustrate what is perhaps one of the most important effects of the program: the hate and mistrust that it breeds in targeted communities. As NYCLU Associate Legal Director Christopher Dunn stated: “Our analysis demonstrates the alarming extent to which the NYPD is targeting innocent black and brown New Yorkers…in nearly every police precinct – black and white, high crime and low crime – black and Latino New Yorkers are stopped and frisked at a far greater rate than whites…the abuse of stop-and-frisk is making communities of color across New York City fear the force that is supposed to protect them. Essentially, the Stop-and-Frisk program allows the NYPD to stop anyone, anytime, for any reason without any probable cause other than “suspicious movements” – an entirely subjective term that allows police to act on their own racist attitudes rather than evidence. As renowned scholar and activist Cornell West correctly pointed out, “[Stop and Frisk] is an extension of slavery.” This wasn’t mere hyperbole. The program’s direct targeting of young people of color is a direct parallel to the legacy of slavery and the racist institution known as ‘Jim Crow’, which sought to oppress and suppress the black population through overt and institutional racism alike.
One of the most potent means of control, and the logical conclusion of the process begun by Stop and Frisk, is imprisonment. In fact, when it comes to discussing this issue as it pertains to African-Americans and Latinos, the more correct term would be mass incarceration. Recent studies have shown that one in fifteen black males over the age of 18 is incarcerated, with one in three due to be imprisoned at some point in his life. The impact of this cannot be understated as communities of color struggle with the imprisonment of their fathers and sons, while young children are forced to grow up in homes where one or both parents is in a prison cell, and walk the streets knowing that an awkward glance or sudden movement might get one stopped and, ultimately, imprisoned, for little more than being black or brown.
However, it is the impact on young people, best known as the “School-to-Prison Pipeline”, that is perhaps most troubling. Youths of color wind up in prison, often for little more than minor infractions, and are never able to recover from the stigma and lasting effects of incarceration. Forget finding a job – you’re a convicted felon! Forget casting your vote on Election Day – you’re a convicted felon! Forget pursuing higher education – you’re a convicted felon! In other words, young black and Latino men and women are systematically oppressed and made invisible by being deprived of the opportunities their white peers enjoy without so much as a second thought. Nothing could be more unfair. Nothing could be more unjust. Nothing could be more American.”
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Fascinating James Corbett podcast. The bit about Zionism starts around 28:30 [AUDIO]
“Author and researcher James Perloff joins us once again, this time to discuss his most recent book, “Truth Is A Lonely Warrior.” We discuss a range of subjects covered by the book, from false flag events and pretexts for war to the depopulation agenda, Zionism, the Rockefeller-funded ecumenical movement, the culture creation industry and more. We also engage in a discussion on differences in political ideology and the solution to the global government agenda.”
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Around the World in 80 Minutes on Revelations Radio News [AUDIO]:
Important interview with James Corbett, which talks about Syria, Iraq, ISIS, Libya…Check the original link for show notes/links. Filed under: international solidarity, Occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, Zionists wars on Gaza