IPT
Exclusive: Linda Sarsour's Blood Libel
IPT News
September 25, 2018
|
|
|
|
Share:  
|
  Be the
first of your friends to like this.
 When police officers
in America shoot unarmed black people, Jewish hands lurk in the background.
So says Linda Sarsour, perhaps the most visible Muslim political
advocate in the United States – a co-chair of the national Women's March
and a campaign surrogate for politicians including Bernie
Sanders and Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez.
A program
sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) that takes American police
officials to Israel for a week-long seminar is fueling police brutality,
Sarsour said earlier this month at the Islamic Society of North America
(ISNA)'s annual convention.
The ADL, she said in response to a question, "has been a purveyor
of Islamophobia against our community" but still enjoys a positive
reputation.
ADL officials "positioned themselves as somehow being part of the
progressive movement," she said. "But what they do is, I'll give
you an example of something that they do, if you are part of a criminal
justice reform movement, if you believe in the idea of ending police
brutality and the misconduct of law enforcement officers across the
country, then you do not support an organization that takes police officers
from America, funds their trips, takes them to Israel so they can be
trained by the Israeli police and military, and then they come back here
and do what? Stop and frisk, killing unarmed black people across the
country."
"That's so horrific," said Nisi Jacobs, a co-founder of the Women's March for
All, a group that broke away from the national Women's March because of
anti-Semitism
concerns about Sarsour and national co-Chair Tamika Mallory. Among its
activities, Women's March for All has a petition calling on Sarsour and Mallory to be
replaced.
"It's not only anti-Semitic, it's bullshit," Jacobs said.
"She's lying to a bunch of gullible, hurt people. She's like a
horrible guru that just lies because she has her own agenda."
In softer language, Austin, Texas Assistant Police Chief Chris McIlvain
said his experience on the 2015 ADL-sponsored seminar in Israel was
"not even remotely" close to what Sarsour described.
There was no tactical training and no discussion of forceful or coercive
techniques, he said. Police departments must maintain "a state of
readiness" for all kinds of threats, from mass shootings to terrorist
attacks. Israel has experience with these challenges that can be helpful to
police departments here.
"The ADL is a good partner of law enforcement combating hate crimes
of all types," McIlvain said. "The idea is not to divert hate
from one group to another, it's to eliminate it."
 Sarsour didn't offer
any information to substantiate her claim. She already has drawn
accusations of anti-Semitism for her refusal to condemn Nation of Islam leader Louis
Farrakhan's Jew-hating sermons and for her opposition – not just to Israeli
policies – but to the very principle the led to the country's 1948
independence. "Nothing is creepier than Zionism," she famously wrote
on Twitter. Zionists who failed to meet her threshold for sufficient
support for Palestinians could not be feminists, she said.
"I am an unapologetic pro-BDS, one-state solution supporting
resistance supporter here in the U.S., she told her ISNA audience Sept. 2.
BDS is the campaign to coerce corporations and universities into
boycotting or divesting their investments in Israel. It is seen as anti-Semitic for demonizing and singling out
the world's only Jewish state and trying to isolate it economically,
academically and in the arts. Many of its advocates ultimately seek
Israel's elimination. A one-state solution that Sarsour advocates would
accomplish just that, upending Israeli demographics and ultimately ending
its status as a Jewish homeland.
To garner more support for that goal, Palestinian advocates have turned
to "intersectional" politics, an alliance of aggrieved interest
groups. Courting African Americans has been a staple of that intersectional
effort, with Palestinian supporters arguing that any injustices against
African Americans at the hands of law enforcement are somehow akin to
Palestinians fighting Israel. Liberation for both black people and
Palestinians is "bound up," Sarsour said during
the 2015 Million Man March organized by Louis Farrakhan.
Attacking the ADL program offers a way for activists like Sarsour to
build intersectional alliances by linking Israel to
"militarizing" American police, holding the ADL and Israel
somehow responsible for police abuses in the United States. Sarsour took it
a step further. If not for Israeli training made possible by the country's
best-known Jewish
organization, police wouldn't be shooting unarmed black people.
It is a talking point pushed in 2016 by two officials at the Council on
American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
Dawud Walid, head of CAIR's Michigan chapter, brought
it up at an American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) convention outside
Chicago:
"The same tear gas that is used in Al Quds [Jerusalem] to
tear gas Palestinians is the same tear gas and the same tear gas company
that tear gassed African-Americans in Ferguson. The exact same company. The
same militarized police forces that shoot unarmed black people and do this
crowd control like what happened in Ferguson – where do the police chiefs,
these people, get trained at? In Israel. We, brothers and sisters in Islam,
be we black ... or lighter skinned, ... we have a common concern, we have a
common struggle."
Four months earlier, Laila Abdelaziz – then the CAIR-Florida government
affairs director – told a Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) audience that
police in Ferguson, Mo., where the controversial shooting death of Michael
Brown sparked the Black Lives Matter movement, were "trained directly
by Israeli Defense Forces."
That sounds like a claim that Ferguson street cops received hands-on
training that made them more prone to shoot. In fact, Ferguson's
then-Police Chief Tim Fitch attended
the ADL program three years before Brown's death. No investigation has
connected Fitch's experience to the Brown shooting. Investigations did
contradict much of the original narrative about the shooting, including video and blood evidence which showed Brown fought with
police officer Darren Wilson for control of Wilson's gun. Brown's autopsy, the Washington Post reported,
found that he "may not have had his hands raised when he was fatally
shot, as has been the contention of protesters who have demanded Wilson's
arrest."
A Justice Department Civil Rights Division investigation in 2015 found that an "emphasis on revenue
generation" and racial bias led Ferguson police to routinely violate
the 1st, 4th and 14th amendments "in
stopping people without reasonable suspicion, arresting them without
probable cause, and using unreasonable force." Many of the abuses date
back to 2007. Neither Israel nor the ADL are mentioned in the 105-page
report.
A year later after the investigation ended, Abdelaziz and Walid still
cast Israel as complicit in Brown's death.
"When I am working in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter
movement, we now have a space to share stories and talk about how
Palestinians have been powerless victims to military brutality and a lack
of justice and accountability for far too long as well. There's a
recognition when you say Black Lives Matter in the United States you are
also saying that Palestinian lives matter," Abdelaziz said, echoing
Sarsour's Million Man March speech. "You are saying that the same
forces that are oppressing Palestinians unjustly in Israel-Palestine are
the same forces and the same evils that are extra-judicially murdering black
men in the United States."
Despite years of rhetoric, no one has tied a police officer involved in
a questionable shooting to the ADL's Israel seminar. The program began in 2003 and more than 200 police officials have
participated.
The ADL declined to comment for this story. But in 2015, Deputy National
Director Kenneth Jacobson dismissed the argument as "[t]he latest strategy
being used by those who make a career of assaulting the good name of the
state of Israel," adding that there is "no rational connection
between the challenge of racism in America and the situation facing the
Palestinians." Palestinians, he noted, have repeatedly rejected peace
offers to create a state – one that agrees to exist peacefully alongside
Israel.
Taking that reasoning a step further, there is no African-American
movement that controls territory and pursues an obsessive campaign to
annihilate the United States like Hamas in Gaza. Even the Palestinian
Authority incites violence against Israeli civilians and rewards people who succeed in murdering them.
The baseless claims against the ADL program and similar Israeli training
are echoed by the anti-Israel group Jewish Voice for Peace. It set up a
website, Deadly
Exchange, devoted to smearing American police training involving
Israelis, including the ADL's counter-terrorism seminar.
"In these programs," Deadly Exchange's home page says, "'worst practices' are
shared to promote and extend discriminatory and repressive policing
practices that already exist in both countries, including extrajudicial
executions, shoot-to-kill policies, police murders, racial profiling,
massive spying and surveillance, deportation and detention, and attacks on
human rights defenders."
Again, that's "not even remotely" close to what McIlvain said
he experienced. While Deadly Exchange cites alleged policies and tactics it
finds objectionable, it offers no example of an American being harmed as a
result.
The JVP campaign has enjoyed at least one success despite that lack of
evidence, with Durham, N.C.'s city council voting in April to prohibit any city police official
from participating in any Israeli training program. No Durham official had,
and officials said they had no plans to do so.
Related Topics: Dawud
Walid, The
Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Linda
Sarsour, anti-Semitism,
ISNA
convention, police
shootings, Anti-Defamation
League, IDF,
police
training, Nisi
Jacobs, Women's
March for All, Chris
McIlvain, BDS,
intersectionalism,
Jewish
Voice for Peace, AMP,
Laila
Abelaziz
|
Print
Send
RSS
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment