GUEST BLOG: Lois Griffiths – I Can’t Breath

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The poor man. George Floyd brutally assaulted by an American policeman, earlier this year. This shocking story galvanised the world to protest  the brutality of militarized American police especially against African-Americans. Let’s hope it caused white Americans to realise that their own society needed transforming.

 

 Just a minute!! THAT’S NOT  George Floyd ! 

Those are Israeli police and the elderly man in the photograph,  is Khairi Hanoun, a Palestinian farmer. Walking with a cane, carring a Palestinian flag,  he was protesting the further expansion  of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land.

Oh well. That’s what happens over there. We expect the Israelis to be violent. They always have been. After all, “Israel has to defend itself’, a mantra we’ve been hearing for decades: defend itself from Palestinian farmers, fishermen, men, women and children, from grandmothers, little brothers and baby sisters.  

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But why are American police these days so militarized: wearing military combat uniform, using tear gas, physically assaulting people? 

 Something happened after 9/11. It was decided that the whole kaupapa for  law enforcing  needed to be transformed from community policing to militarized policing.

Not that police weren’t already heavy-handed in their dealing with the public,  especially   African-Americans . 

Police departments needed to be trained to regard the public as the enemy, an  enemy to be handled violently.

American officials were faced with a problem: how to indoctrinate police departments to accept, and even approve, of  this new direction.

 

Go to the experts! 

Israel has a thriving industry, exporting its tried and proven techniques of subjugation. 

Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), an American human rights NGO has published a carefully researched eye-opening, document, Deadly Exchange, explaining how American enforcement officials are trained by Israelis. Please visit their website. You can download the document for free. It’s an important insight  into trying to understand what America is like today.

Visit jewishvoiceforpeace.org to download Deadly Exchange 

I assume New Zealand police aren’t trained by the  Israelis. Let’s hope not. 

 

Lois Griffiths is a Human Rights Activist 

33 COMMENTS

      • Yeah… anyone criticising Israel is an antisemite, right? You people really need to wheel out a new cliche because that one’s hilariously stale. “Stop burning olive groves and letting settlers assault civilians!” “Silence, you dreadful antisemite!” It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad. Fortunately, a lot of Israelis see this for what it is and are calling it out, including former soldiers in the IDF.

        • Is Haaretz an “antisemitic” news outlet? Haaretz have an incisive article into the way that ‘investigations’ are carried out when innocent Palestinians are killed by the Israeli military.

          What happens with IDF Investigations into deaths of innocent Palestinians

          Intro:
          Almost every time Israeli soldiers kill a Palestinian in the territories, the army announces the opening of an investigation by the Military Police. But a look back at incidents reported here over the past year reveals that such inquiries rarely conclude – if they ever began.

          Excerpt:
          “The law enforcement units of the Israel Defense Forces and the Israel Police have always accepted killing, murder, unwarranted shooting and abuse with far greater understanding, if not complete disregard, than they do looting.”

      • Hollow the old “antisemite” trick doesn’t fool anyone.

        Israel was illegally set up after clandestine discussion leading to the Balfour Agreement to bring the USA into a stalled war on the verge of a cease fire. The purpose of a tiny group of Zionist was to negotiate Britain to give up a part of conquered land to let the Zionist flood Zionists and jews into an area populated by 92% Muslims and some Christian. Little or insignificant Jewish presence was there around the beginning of WWI but it was recognised that Jerusalem was a religiously significant site for at least three religions the major one being Muslim.
        After conquest Zionist tried to flood immigrants into the area and violently displace the British administration while killing Muslims and destroying hundreds of their villages. All that is well documented.

        But the source of the ongoing disaster lies in the corruption surrounding the “Balfour Agreement”

        https://parstoday.com/en/radio/world-i67085-who_wrote_the_balfour_declaration_and_why_the_world_war_i_connection
        Notice the “Antisemitic” jibe was used then towards anything that did not agree with the corrupt Zionists wants.
        Whats new.

  1. Excellent further reading, as well as the Deadly Exchange report, is the very informative mondoweiss.net article by Israeli (American born) anthropologist Jeff Halper ,
    Israelizing the American Police, Palestinizing the American Public 
    He writes, ” The Israeli police is far from being merely a civilian agency charged with maintaining law and order. It is a paramilitary organization, operating under the Ministry of Internal Security, which is integrated into the wider military and security agencies under a regime of “permanent emergency.” Israel views the majority of the country’s population, the Palestinian citizens of Israel and the non-citizens of the Occupied Territory, plus other segments of Israeli society from African asylum seekers to “pro-Arab” progressives and Leftists, as “the enemy.” The major stance of the Israel police is thus not primarily a civilian task – protecting society as a whole – but one of counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism. 

      • If you don’t show unquestioning support, you’re a horrible Nazi. That’s basically the gist of their ongoing ‘argument’, and I use that term in its loosest possible context. Apparently, being one of history’s most persecuted peoples gives you carte blanche to perpetrate atrocities of your own, and anyone saying otherwise will be smeared, vilified and accused of antisemitism. It’s just how the Israeli government rolls these days. International law? Pffftt. Who cares about that bollocks?

  2. 68 year old Khairy Hanoun was protesting the confiscation of his land when he was so savagely attacked on 1st September. Not shown in the photo above, the guns trained on those trying to record what was happening.

    The land from Hanoun’s village of Shufa, on the Northern West Bank, is being taken to build an industrial zone. Here is what Hanoun said:

    “The [Israeli occupation’s] bulldozers came two weeks ago and started bulldozing the land and making roads for the industrial zone. People were prevented from being on their land. Of course, the inhabitants started to demonstrate in order to prevent this terrible Israeli project. On Tuesday we had four demonstrations in the area. The IOF [Israeli Occupation Forces] prevented us from reaching the land. They used sound bombs and tear gas on people.”

    After the demonstration had finished, the Israeli soldiers followed some teenagers, so Khairy and some activists tried to talk to the soldiers to tell them not to shoot at the kids.

    “You can see from the video what happened.”
    Video of the attack

    Using the knee to neck tactic

  3. Turns out the islamist group behind the gruesome and barbaric beheading of the history teacher in France are Hamas supporters. Quelle surprise. Nice company you people keep. Of, course, you’d support anything and anyone who’s anti-Jewish. Your delusional obsessions with the one tiny Jewish state in the world to the exemption of all others is nothing short of repulsive. Half a million dead next door in Syria, 20,000 of them children, murdered by their own government and not a peep from one of you. Says it all.

    • Oh, are we playing the “our atrocity is slightly less appalling than the atrocity happening a few countries over, so stop condemning us for perpetrating atrocities” game? Good to know. Disapproval of the actions of the Israeli government does not equal tacit approval of the actions of Hamas or any other extremist group… but then you know that. You’re just being disingenuous. Your “Jewishness” is not the issue, but you know that too. Keep playing the victim. It’s not incredibly transparent or anything.

        • This is NZ Gaby. Criminal actions like the one you are suggesting are not tolerated and punished here. Your hate speech is not acceptable here or in most civilized societies.

          Threatened violence against women is particularly despicable and cowardly.

          Try an anger management course to curb your problem which is now out in the open.

    • Is that the definition where any criticisms of Israel or a jew or of a jew’s idea, is so called “antisemitism”.
      Many know it as hypocrisy.

      But Ah the chosen ones, oblivious to all other lesser creatures they steal land and life from.
      Mowing the lawns?
      More like grasping at straws in desperation devoid of human warmth and kindness.

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