Rania Khalek Dispatches from the Underclass
/ July 27, 2015 / 1 Comment

Israel threw stun grenade at 11-year-old — Human Rights Watch

Crossposted from The Electronic Intifada

A new report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) accuses Israeli forces of subjecting detained Palestinian children to chokeholds, beatings, strip-searches and forced confessions.

The report comes in the wake of a new law approved by Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, allowing stiffer sentences for stone-throwing. Accusations of stone-throwing are routinely used by Israeli forces as a pretext to arrest, torture, jail and even kill Palestinians without consequence.

Employing the stone-throwing allegation, Israeli forces “have choked children, thrown stun grenades at them, beaten them in custody, threatened and interrogated them without the presence of parents or lawyers, and failed to let their parents know their whereabouts,” according to HRW.

HRW documented and corroborated the experiences of four boys from East Jerusalem, aged 11, 12, and 15, as well as a 14-year-old girl and 15-year-old boy from other parts of the occupied West Bank.  Read More

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/ July 27, 2015 / 1 Comment

ADL honor for St. Louis police ahead of Ferguson anniversary sparks outrage

Crossposted from The Electronic Intifada 

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is honoring the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department (SLMPD) on 31 July, just days ahead of the first anniversary of the police killing of unarmed Black teenager Michael Brown in the St. Louis-area municipality of Ferguson, Missouri.

The purpose of the event, according to an announcement on the ADL’s website, is to celebrate 10 years since the launch of the organization’s Holocaust education program, called “Law Enforcement and Society: Lessons of the Holocaust” (LEAS).

Designed by the ADL and the Holocaust Museum, LEAS is described as “an innovative training that increases law enforcement’s understanding of their role as protectors of the American people and the Constitution.”

“By examining the Holocaust, police learn about the dangers that anti-Semitism, bigotry and bias pose to all,” according to the ADL, which boasts of having trained more than 90,000 police officers in LEAS.

The program has also been introduced to US military personnel with plans to expand its reach.

SLMPD is slated to receive special recognition for being the first law enforcement agency to participate in LEAS when it was piloted in 2004.

The program was created at the behest of former DC Metropolitan police chief and current Philadelphia top cop Charles Ramsey, whose career has been punctuated by violent crackdowns on protests and the expansion of racially discriminatory practices.

Learning about law enforcement’s role in perpetuating the Nazi Holocaust appears to have had little impact on the SLMPD, which participated in the heavily militarized crackdown against Ferguson protesters after Michael Brown’s death and continued to violently crushdemonstrations across St. Louis in the months that followed.

Cut ties with white supremacy

The ADL’s mission at its founding a century ago was to defend Jews against then rampant discrimination. In recent decades, the group’s main preoccupation has been to ferociously pursue critics of Israel and defenders of Palestinian rights.

Notoriously, the ADL spied on both Palestine solidarity and anti-apartheid activists in the 1980s.

In response to the ADL’s event honoring the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, the St. Louis chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace (STL-JVP) issued a statement beseeching “all who oppose white supremacy to cut ties with the Anti-Defamation League.”

STL-JVP said it was particularly egregious to honor “a police force whose racist shooting spree targeting Black youth continues, most recently in the shooting of 16-year-old Brandon Claxton in the face last weekend even as witnesses say he posed no threat.”

“We are disgusted by the ADL’s grotesque invocation of the Nazi Holocaust – in which countless members of our families perished – both as a tool to give the ADL and St. Louis police cover as protectors of civil rights, and to frame racism in the US solely within the context of anti-Semitism,” the statement continued.

“We have cringed as the ADL positions itself locally as a champion of racial profiling legislation while sending US police – including former St. Louis County Police Chief Tim Fitch – to train on population control in Israel, an apartheid police state with more than 60 years of sophisticated expertise in racial profiling, mass incarceration, settler colonialism, and ethnic cleansing targeting the non-Jewish indigenous Palestinian people,” STL-JVP added.

The group takes to task mainstream Jewish organizations in St. Louis including the ADL, the Jewish Community Relations Council and the Jewish Federation whose leaders “speak the language of justice” but “are overtly racist toward Palestinians.”

“Zionism – itself a form of white supremacy that oppresses Palestinians, Jews of color, and other marginalized groups – has no place in any antiracist movement,” STL-JVP states.

The statement concludes by imploring “St. Louis Jewish leaders and organizations, especially those who have been active in Ferguson, to stop playing both sides – chanting ‘Black Lives Matter’ in the streets while working closely with racist Jewish organizations.”

Meanwhile, STL-JVP is organizing a protest outside the ADL’s police celebration and has invited broad participation.

ADL stands by police

Despite the criticism, Karen Aroesty, ADL regional director in St. Louis, is refusing to cancel the event.

“We are validating a 10-year partnership that is not simply about the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, but about more than 50 other departments in the region who have participated in this program in the last decade,” Aroesty told this reporter by telephone.

While she acknowledged bias exists in policing, Aroesty said she believes the ADL’s event is warranted and that activists who are upset by police violence need to engage more.

“Those folks who are impacted by policing, they also need to understand that they have value in that learning process and simply being angry is not going to get the job done,” Aroesty said. “And I do think there are police departments that are kind of frustrated because they feel as if it’s all being put on them to change drastically but there’s certain things that they cannot change.”

When it was suggested that police are not being held accountable for killing citizens across the country, Aroesty said it is police who are being shot in the streets.

“I wonder what happens to our trust in democracy when people feel that they can just indiscriminately shoot police officers,” she said. “What does it do to the community’s sense of stability?” Aroesty asked, referencing the ambush shooting of an officer in St. Louis on 14 July, for which she implied the community bore responsibility.

There’s no doubt that police face threats on the job, but the statistics do not compare to the often racially charged police violence against citizens they are supposedly tasked with protecting.

Of the 67 US police officers that have died “in the line of duty” so far this year, 22 were killed by gunfire or assault, according to the Officer Down Memorial Page. The rest died from previous illnesses, car crashes, heart attacks or various accidents.

In the same time period, police have killed more than 630 people – nearly ten times as many – with more than 80 deaths in July alone.

And while those who harm police officers are likely to be arrested, charged and convicted, police officers who kill are almost never held accountable.

Nonetheless, Aroesty denied that police impunity is widespread.

“I feel confidant that police officers who are in fact acting beyond the scope and abusing their discretion, that they are in fact being held accountable,” she said. “It is very very complex.”

Anti-Palestinian

Back in March, after the Jewish Community Relations Council pressured the Missouri History Museum to cancel a panel discussion on Ferguson, Palestine and the kidnapping and killing of students from Ayotzinapa College in Mexico, Aroesty applauded the censorship and encouraged the museum to contact SLMPD for assistance in quelling protests the cancellation provoked.

The ADL has repeatedly condemned solidarity between Black Americans and Palestinians, characterizing it as offensive and rooted in hostility toward Israel. It became so incensed, it compiled a blacklist of people and organizations that dared to compare state violence against Black Americans to Israeli violence against Palestinians, accusing Palestine solidarity activists of “trying to rouse support for an anti-Israel agenda by attracting like-minded activists.”

The main connection activists recognize from St. Louis to Palestine is the training relationship between US law enforcement agencies and Israel.

“That’s hogwash!” Aroesty interjected before this reporter could finish asking a question about the fact that senior commanders from numerous US police departments routinely travel to Israel to “learn” from state security and occupation forces. Many of these junkets are organized by the ADL.

“Sure, the Israelis have, because of their security issues, a unique capacity for training police chiefs from around the country who have been going [to Israel],” Aroesty conceded. “And a number of different agencies, not just ADL, sponsor training programs.”

Under the cover of “counterterrorism training” senior commanders from nearly every major US law enforcement agency have traveled to Israel, including the St. Louis County and St. Louis Metropolitan police departments.

In 2011, then St. Louis County Police Department chief Timothy Fitch attended the ADL’s National Counter-Terrorism Seminar, an annual week-long Israeli training camp where US law enforcement executives “study first hand Israel’s tactics and strategies” directly from “senior commanders in the Israel National Police, experts from Israel’s intelligence and security services and the Israel Defense Forces,” according to the ADL’s own website.

While Aroesty acknowledged Fitch’s participation, she rejected as “factually incorrect” any suggestion that the training had any impact on the behavior of St. Louis police in the weeks following Michael Brown’s death.

But on its website, the ADL boasts of sending more than 175 senior US law enforcement officials from 100 different agencies to the seminar since 2004, proudly stating that they are “taking the lessons they learned in Israel back to the United States.”

Still, Areosty insisted that the training junkets “had nothing to do with any of the police tactics or the optics that were experienced in the couple of weeks after Michael Brown was shot.”

She insisted that any criticism of the training programs and ADL’s role in them “was about the ideological goals of the anti-Israel movement” which was intent on using “whatever they could to make their point … whether they were factual or not.”

The protests the ADL’s event is sparking suggest that it getting harder for the pro-Israel group to pose as both a champion of civil rights in the US while defending the police forces that routinely trample those rights with impunity.

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/ July 27, 2015 / 2 Comments

In Support of Rania Khalek and Debate on Issues of Justice and Equality.

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/ July 22, 2015 / 2 Comments

Podcast: Right-Wing Attacks on Outspoken Muslims and Anti-Muslim Racism in the UK

Telegraph writer Andrew Gilligan has a history of right-wing attacks against radical Muslims in the United Kingdom and smear them in his reporting. Gilligan’s latest attack was against Abdullah al-Andalusi, an Islamic lecturer and writer.

Al-Andalusi was the target of Gilligan’s slimy attack because he has worked for the public sector in the UK. Gilligan questioned whether Muslims should be permitted to work civil service jobs and tried to gin up additional fear by shamefully distorting al-Andalusi’s previous writing to make him seem like an Islamic State sympathizer. He is this week’s guest on the “Unauthorized Disclosure” podcast.

Astonishingly, despite the fact that al-Andalusi has a public persona and six years of lectures, writings, and television appearances, Gilligan still managed to cut-and-paste sentences from an article denouncing the Islamic State in order to argue al-Andalusi supported the Islamic State.

Al-Andalusi had crossed the line in the eyes of reactionaries in the British press when he compared ISIS practices to previous atrocities committed by British or US armies in the Middle East. However, as he points out, he is not the first person to put forward this analysis condemning any entity, including Western governments, which commit crimes against humanity.

He explains during the interview how he is cast as some kind of terrorist sympathizer because he is Muslim, even though others like writer/lecturer Noam Chomsky have also made similar arguments.

“That kind of discrimination is the epitome of the kind of unequal treatment and consideration Muslims are given vis-à-vis non-Muslim citizens,” in the United Kingdom, al-Andalusi adds. He goes on to address programs, such as PREVENT, and other tactics by the British government to address Islamic extremism and describes how these policies fuel and are reinforced by anti-Muslim racism.

During the discussion portion, hosts Rania Khalek and Kevin Gosztola discuss the Chattanooga shooting, Saudi Arabia rounding up over 400 people suspected of involvement in Islamic State plots, the Iran nuclear deal, Obama’s NAACP speech, and Sandra Bland.

The podcast is available on iTunes for download. For a link (and also to download the episode), go here. Click on “go here” and a page will load with the audio file of the podcast. The file will automatically start playing so you can listen to the episode.

Please follow the show on Twitter at @UnauthorizedDis.

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/ July 22, 2015 / 1 Comment

Israelis share photos of children demanding death to “terrorists”

Photos of Israeli children posted to Facebook holding signs calling for the death penalty against “terrorists” (faces obscured by The Electronic Intifada).

Crossposted from The Electronic Intifada

A Facebook campaign demanding the execution of “terrorists” went viral in Israel last weekend, with Israelis posting photos of themselves, their children and their pets holding signs demanding the death penalty.

The campaign was launched by Sharon Gal, a former journalist and first-term lawmaker from the far right Yisrael Beiteinu party.

Gal recently sponsored legislation that would have made it easier for judges to sentence ”convicted murderer[s] motivated by nationalism” to death both inside Israel and the occupied West Bank.

Though Israel already has a death penalty option on the books, a death sentence hasn’t been carried out since the hanging of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in 1962. The true purpose of the bill was not the death penalty, it was racist incitement catering to the right-wing chauvinism surging through the Israeli Jewish public after reaching its peak during last summer’s brutal assault on Gaza.

Indeed, the bill is the partial fulfillment of one of many fanatical campaign promises by Yisrael Beiteinu chair Avigdor Lieberman, who rallied his right-wing base during election season by calling for the execution of Palestinian prisoners and the beheading of Palestinians disloyal to the state of Israel.

Bezalel Smotrich, a freshman lawmaker from the ultra-nationalist Habeyit Hayehudi (Jewish Home) party and a deputy speaker in the Knesset, attempted to outdo Gal by offering to personally carry out the executions during an appearance on Israel’s Knesset Channel.

“Death to terrorists”

On 8 July, in the lead up to the death penalty bill vote that was ultimately shelved by Netanyahu at the last minute, Gal initiated a Facebook campaign calling on Israelis to pressure the government to support the bill by sharing photos of themselves on social media holding signs that read ”I too am in favor of the death penalty for terrorists.”

“Terrorist” is a loose term in the Israeli lexicon that is interchangeable with “Arab” and applies exclusively to Palestinians. In effect, “death to terrorists” amounts to a thinly veiled version of the far more common Israeli slogan “death to Arabs.”

The response to Gal’s Facebook post was overwhelming, garnering nearly 24,000 likes and more than 1,500 replies, with all but a handful of people pledging their support.

While the unsettling incitement to violence from Israeli politicians is nothing new, this latest campaign highlighted a disturbing trend. Israelis posted photos not just of themselves but also small children agitating for executions. This comes in the aftermath of the Jerusalem Day march in April, when The Electronic Intifada documented the participation of children in “death to the Arabs” marches, suggesting an alarming pattern of ever younger children being steeped in Israel’s culture of supremacist violence.

A commenter named Efrat Trister responded to Gal’s Facebook post with a photo of two little girls clutching the pro-death penalty message. Trister added ”They may be small but they are also smart.”

 “My 12-year-old niece also joins the campaign, representing the children,” wrote another commenter who shared a photo of a smiling girl posing with the sign.

Gal jubilantly responded, “More power to you and your niece. You have no idea how much this affects the ministers, who will decide on Sunday whether or not to give their support. We’ve got to continue this until Sunday — more and more Israelis — the more photos the better, here and around the Internet.”

Shira Pahima posted a photo of a happy little girl and a man, possibly her father, holding the same sign, which reads, “Stop tying up the soldiers’ hands, if someone sets out to kill you — kill him first, long live the Jewish state of Israel, all respect to the IDF [Israeli army].”

Obviously these children cannot be held responsible for the views they are advertising, which is why The Electronic Intifada has chosen to pixelate their faces in all these photos (the originals were posted to Facebook without any such protection). Many of the children are too small to even read the messages they are holding. This does however reflect how the violent extremism coursing through Israeli society travels from the top down, incited by government officials like Sharon Gal and Bezalel Smotrich.

It also speaks to the normalization of Jewish extremism within Israel, which has become so casual and accepted that parents see no problem with posting photos of their children championing execution.

Israelis similarly staged photos of their pets holding pro-death penalty signs:

Selection of photos posted to Facebook by Israelis of their pets with messages demanding the death penalty for ”terrorists.”

Israelis are not ashamed to publicize their racism and bloodlust.

A man by the name Oren Shtinberg was elated to see his photo featured on Israeli television.

“I’m honored to have had my photo appear today on Oded Ben Ami’s six o’clock news show. I’m crossing my fingers that this law will pass and be implemented without delay!!!” wrote Shtinberg in a Facebook post. Gal replied, “More power to you, Oren. Every photo brings us closer to the goal. The ministers in the committee will not be able to ignore 87 percent of support among the nation of Israel on Sunday.”

A commenter by the name of Lana Letichevski seemed to view the scourge of police murders of US citizens as a source of inspiration, saying: ”This has got to be put into place. It’s not possible that in the US cops can shoot terrorists and here they can’t!!! Instead, they’re sent for a 5-star prison to study for a degree!!”

Oz Maoz added, “I’m also for the death penalty for terrorists and stone-throwers!!!”

Shlomi Eliyahu remarked, “I hope it passes, they [Palestinians] should start to think twice before they pick up a rock even if it’s to play hopscotch.”

Udishiri Ohayon, who identified as a US military veteran, said, “I too, as a former US soldier and a proud Israeli definitely death to terrorists, founders and supporters of terror. Add in various stone throwers, suicide-committers, and firebomb throwers. No excuse, no pity. I’m in!”

The conflation of throwing of rocks at Israeli soldiers with terrorism is a common view among Israelis. Some have even agitated for executing stone throwers on sight, even if they are children.

A commenter by the name Moshe Shecheter posted a photo of a gun with magazine clips full of ammo surrounding the message, “Bibi, unchain our hands.”

Israelis often complain that occupying soldiers are unfairly restrained when dealing with Palestinians, despite reality being the complete opposite.

A commenter named Vered Ben Shitrit shared a photo of herself holding the pro-death penalty sign while wearing her military uniform.

Nir Balinco shared an image of the US flag with the comment, “All of us also want a death penalty for terrorists!!!! Including their family!!!”

While there was little pushback against Gal’s incitement campaign, the few who publicly opposed it were deluged with vitriolic threats. Social justice and human rights blogger Yossi Gurvitz was one of them.

Appalled by Gal’s Facebook campaign, Gurvitz replied with a photo of himself holding a sign that reads:

I also support the death penalty FOR SHARON GAL after a short but fair trial.

(Based on the precedent of JULIUS STREICHER at Nuremberg, who was executed for racist incitement, which was found to be a crime against humanity.)

(Google that, Gal. And try to think of better last words than his. You’re both “journalists.”)

Gurvitz was instantly deluged with an unprecedented volume of threats, some of which he posted to Twitter.

“I wish everyone here painful death, you are haters of Israel, sharmutas [Arabic for whore] of Arabs, you are not Jews, you’re rabble,” cried one angry commenter. ”People like you should be stoned in the city square, you garbage can,” added another. “Sometimes I wonder why Hitler only did half the job,” another remarked.

“I wanted to remind people that incitement to racism may become, if people act on it, a crime against humanity, and that people have been punished for it,” Gurvitz told me over email. “I expected some hatred in return — I’m rather used to it — but I was frankly surprised by the volume of it,” he continued. “I received more death threats and rape threats in the last two days than I received in the last two years.”

Racist incitement

Gurvitz attributed the lack of opposition to the incitement campaign to a weak Israeli left.

“There was some push-back, aged leftists expressing their shock and dismay (which is a specialty of the species), but hardly any coherent action against it. The signs themselves are of course legal, but the Israeli left has little power in it to actually oppose it,” he wrote.

Meanwhile, the ritualistic incitement to violence by Israelis on social media, encouraged by top government officials, has proven deadly for Palestinians.

A new report by a group called the Coalition Against Racism finds that a sharp rise in anti-Arab attacks since 2013 coincided with racist incitement by Israeli elected officials and decision makers.

Netanyahu’s incitement to revenge for the killing of three Israeli teens last year led to the burning alive of Muhammad Abu Khudair by Jewish extremists who met at a right-wing “death to the Arabs” rally the day before that may have been organized online.

Emboldened by an Israeli public and its leaders cheering for executions, trigger-happy Israeli soldiers will more than likely crank up the violence. As for the vigilantes, there’s no predicting who or where they will target next, but when they do, they will not have acted alone.

With translation from Hebrew by Dena Shunra.

 

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/ July 12, 2015 / Leave a comment

Podcast: The Threat of Unspecified Terrorism Attacks by People Who Shall Not Be Named is Very Real

There were no Islamic State-inspired terrorism attacks on or around the Fourth of July in the United States, but CNN and other major US media organizations expended much energy spreading fear far and wide so Americans would be on edge throughout the holiday weekend. And, when nothing happened, FBI Director James Comey fabricated claims that terrorism suspects arrested in June were at one point prepared to attack on July 4.

At least ten individuals were said to have been arrested with Islamic State ties. These were the people, who the FBI allegedly stopped from attacking Americans on Independence Day, and that justified all the hysteria in the media around potential terrorism. However, the government’s own complaints against them contain no allegations that any of their planned acts were being timed to coincide with the holiday.

Officially, the FBI would not back up its claims with specifics. “We are not providing any information beyond what you’re seeing in media reports. There was no information provided on specific individual[s] or what they hoped to do,” an FBI spokesperson replied to a request for evidence.

On the “Unauthorized Disclosure” podcast this week, Adam Johnson (@adamjohnsonNYC), associate editor at AlterNet.org and contributing writer to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), joins the show. Johnson has been aggressively questioning and exposing all aspects of the bogus terror warnings hyped by the government and media recently. He details what drives media outlets like CNN to hype terror warnings that cannot be backed up by specific threats and talks about the FBI being at least zero for forty when it comes to issuing terror warnings that resulted in attacks.

During the discussion part of the episode, the show’s hosts, Rania Khalek and Kevin Gosztola, cover a federal judge’s order to prepare the release of videos of a former Guantanamo prisoner being force-fed, a major review showing American Psychological Association officials protected national security psychologists involved in US torture, the one-year anniversary of Israel’s Operation Protective Edge, US strikes which killed over 100 people in Afghanistan, and Lindsey Graham saying peace activists make the world dangerous as he bellowed about bombing Iran.

The podcast is available on iTunes for download. For a link (and also to download the episode), go here. Click on “go here” and a page will load with the audio file of the podcast. The file will automatically start playing so you can listen to the episode. And please follow the show on Twitter at @UnauthorizedDis.

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/ June 26, 2015 / 2 Comments

Expert: Obama ignored surge of rightwing extremism that inspired Charleston killer

Crossposted from The Electronic Intifada

As lead author of a suppressed 2009 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report on the rising threat of rightwing extremism, Daryl Johnson was not the least bit surprised by last week’s terrorist attack on the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

On the evening of 17 June, white supremacist Dylann Roof entered the Charleston, South Carolina, church and shot dead nine African Americans after they had welcomed him into their Bible study.

“Here we go again. That was my first thought. It reminded me of the Sikh temple shooting,” Johnson told The Electronic Intifada, referring to the August 2012 attack by a neo-Nazi in Wisconsin that killed six people.

Johnson, who spent 15 of his 24-year career in government studying rightwing extremism, made headlines in 2011 when he accused DHS of gutting his unit due to a conservative uproar against the 2009 report.

Since then, Johnson says the US government has continued to ignore the growing danger posed by homegrown rightwing extremism while focusing obsessively on Islamic “jihadists.”

DHS has a total of three people analyzing non-Islamic domestic extremism, down from eight prior to the release of Johnson’s report in 2009.

In stark contrast, up to 100 analysts are employed by DHS to evaluate homegrown Islamic extremism, Johnson said. DHS did not return The Electronic Intifada’s request for comment.

This lopsided balance is reflected across federal agencies, according to Johnson, who keeps in touch with sources within DHS who tell him nothing has changed since he left.

“If you look at the government as a whole, there are thousands of counterterrorism analysts looking at al-Qaida and its affiliates versus dozens on domestic non-Islamic extremism,” Johnson said, noting that a vast majority of rightwing extremism analysts operate under the auspices of the FBI.

Johnson added that most federal law enforcement agencies, including the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, the US Marshal Service and the presidential protection agency the Secret Service, have no full-time analysts monitoring rightwing extremism.

White supremacist “lone wolves”

Johnson’s prophetic 2009 report predicted that the election of America’s first Black president coupled with an ailing economy would spark a resurgence in rightwing extremism, with “white supremacist lone wolves” posing “the most significant domestic terrorist threat because of their low profile and autonomy – separate from any formalized group – which hampers warning efforts.”

Johnson’s report also drew attention to the danger of extremists recruiting military veterans.

Though intended exclusively for law enforcement, the report was leaked immediately after publication, generating a firestorm on the right.

Whipped into a frenzy, conservative media outlets and Republican lawmakers mischaracterized the report as an Obama administration conspiracy to smear all conservatives as potentially violent extremists.

In a stunning display of political cowardice, the Obama administration caved in to the pressure.

Within days of the leak, newly appointed DHS secretary Janet Napolitano apologized for the report and Johnson’s DHS unit was slowly disbanded over the following year, leaving behind just one analyst to assess all non-Islamic extremist threats for DHS.

Six years later, Johnson’s prescient warnings have been tragically vindicated again and again.

In 2012, US army veteran and neo-Nazi skinhead Wade Michael Page stormed into a Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, and fatally gunned down six worshippers.

Last year, Frazier Glenn Miller, the former “grand dragon” of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and a longtime anti-Semite, killed three people outside a Jewish community center in Overland Park, Kansas.

Two months later, anti-government extremists Jerad and Amanda Miller killed three people in Las Vegas.

The married couple shot two police officers execution style and then draped their bodies in a Revolutionary War era flag bearing the slogan “Don’t tread on me.”

These are just a handful of the better-known instances of rightwing terrorism in recent years.

Lethal terror

The New America Foundation, a liberal think tank close to the Obama administration, has documented that 48 Americans have been killed by rightwing extremists in the US compared to 26 by so-called jihadists since the 11 September 2001.

Yet US law enforcement agencies seem more invested in entrapping Muslims in manufactured plots, harassing Palestine solidarity activists and monitoring Black Lives Matter protesters than tackling the rising tide of deadly rightwing extremism.

Dangerous denial

Meanwhile, Republican leaders predictably contorted reality to avoid labeling Dylann Roof’s violence an act of terrorism, or even racism for that matter.

US government officials are similarly reluctant to identify ideologically inspired violence committed by non-Muslims as terrorism.

Speaking at a press conference three days after the Charleston attack, FBI director James Comey told reporters that Dylann Roof’s racially motivated massacre was not terrorism because it was not a “political act.”

But Roof has been clear that his motive was to ignite a race war. One of his victims was South Carolina State Senator Clementa Pinckney, whose presence Roof reportedly requested when he entered the church.

If assassinating a Black elected official and murdering Black worshippers to start a race war isn’t enough to prove Roof’s violence was political, then perhaps his own admission is.

Roof reportedly let one churchgoer live precisely so she could inform the world what he did and why.

More evidence of Roof’s ideological motives can be found in the trove of photos he posted to his website.

The images show him embracing the Confederate flag, a notorious white nationalist symbol.

Roof is also pictured sporting a coat adorned with the flags of white minority ruled South Africa and Rhodesia, highlighting the convergence of white nationalism globally.

In case his motive still wasn’t clear, Roof posted a 2,500-word anti-Black manifesto on his website laying out his racist ideology.

Even President Obama failed to label the attack an act of terrorism, focusing instead on the issue of gun violence.

“Government officials are reluctant to call it terrorism because of the political ramifications,” former DHS analyst Johnson said. “If you’re justifying money and resources for a war on terror, then you are going to talk about al-Qaida, which comes at the expense of other forms of terrorism that might be less sensational.”

“The general public is inundated with media and government scrutiny of al-Qaida and its affiliates. It’s ingrained in the American public mind to think of terrorism as a foreign threat from people with dark skin,” he said.

“The ongoing danger is that by not labeling it terrorism it’s being perceived as something else,” Johnson added. “If you label the Charleston shooting as a hate crime, people think of it as a local issue. If you label it terrorism, it’s a national issue.”

Lopsided countermeasures

Though Johnson concedes that it is difficult to thwart lone wolf attacks, he believes there are preventive measures the US government has failed to implement. Chief among them is “counter-messaging.”

“Educating the public on these issues and that these movements are dangerous is vital,” Johnson said. He noted that “today’s white supremacist and white nationalist is an Internet junkie.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which monitors rightwing groups, found that nearly 100 people have been murdered since 2009 by registered users of the world’s largest online hate forum Stormfront.

Stormfront users have included Wade Michael Page and mass killer Anders Behring Breivik, who murdered 77 people in Norway in 2011 supposedly to halt the “Islamization” of Europe.

Charleston killer Dylann Roof was a regular commenter at another neo-Nazi website.

He also wrote in his manifesto that he was influenced by the white supremacist group the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), following the killing in Florida of unarmed Black teenager Trayvon Martin by vigilante George Zimmerman.

The leader of the CCC, which grew out of the White Citizens Councils opposed to desegregation in the South, has donated tens of thousands of dollars to Republican elected officials in recent years.

While the White House has launched several campaigns to counter Islamic State, or ISIS, propaganda directed at impressionable youth, no such measures exist to counter rightwing extremism of the kind that apparently mobilized Roof and others to kill.

The Obama administration’s skewed approach was on display in February when it convened a White House summit on countering violent extremism that focused almost exclusively on Islamic fundamentalism.

It is impossible to know whether the Charleston massacre could have been prevented had federal authorities invested more resources in countering rightwing terrorism.

But denying that the problem exists and doing nothing only makes the next attack more likely.

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/ June 21, 2015 / 1 Comment

Podcast: The Dominican Republic’s Plan to Racially Cleanse the Country of Black Haitians

The Dominican Republic is set to purge its country of hundreds of thousands of black Haitian migrants or black Dominicans of Haitian descent. The government has stripped anyone born in Haiti after 1929 of their citizenship and rendered this entire population stateless. Numerous Haitians have fled or are hiding as they wait to see what the immigration agency will do next.

Army General Ruben Paulino, who leads the immigration agency, said his agency would conduct patrols of neighborhoods with “large numbers of migrants” after June 18. Any “non-citizens,” who were unregistered, would be “repatriated.” The individuals would be loaded on buses, trucks, or ambulances—and then expelled from the country.

On the “Unauthorized Disclosure” podcast this week, Dr. Jemima Pierre, a professor at UCLA of African Diaspora Studies & an editor for Black Agenda Report, joins the show to talk about the Dominican Republic. She describes the history of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, as well as the United States’ role since the US once occupied the island where Haiti and the Dominican Republic are located. She details the anti-black racism that has deep roots in the Dominican Republic.

During the discussion part of the show, the show’s hosts talk about Dylann Roof’s manifesto and share thoughts on the political and media reaction to the church massacre in Charleston. They also talk about a Louisville FOP president and his vitriolic open letter directed toward Black Lives Matter activists. And the show wraps with some quick thoughts about a court ordering US officials to intercept a Guatemalan mother and her child, who were deported, and return them to the United States.

The podcast is available on iTunes for download. For a link (and also to download the episode), go here. Click on “go here” and a page will load with the audio file of the podcast. The file will automatically start playing so you can listen to the episode. And please follow the show on Twitter at @UnauthorizedDis.

Below is a partial transcript of the interview.
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/ June 17, 2015 / 3 Comments

Why has Israel embraced al-Qaida’s branch in Syria?

Crossposted from The Electronic Intifada

During his 2014 address to the UN General Assembly, Benjamin Netanyahu declared that “fighting militant Islam is indivisible.”

The Israeli prime minister’s crude attempts to conflate ISIS with Hamas should not be allowed to conceal an important truth: Israel aids the forces of “militant Islam” when it is considered opportune to do so.

The most egregious example of such aid in recent times has been Israel’s support for Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaida’s franchise in Syria, as witnessed by UN peacekeeping forces stationed in the occupied Golan Heights.

Israel’s collusion with al-Qaida has been virtually ignored by the American media, with a few exceptions. For example, The Wall Street Journal reported in March that Israel has been treating wounded al-Nusra fighters and then sending them back into the Golan to battle Hizballah and the Syrian army.

Other media outlets have danced around the issue.

The Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, a frequent conduit for information from official sources, mentioned, in passing, last month that “Jordan and Israel have developed secret contacts with members of the Jabhat al-Nusra group along their borders.” But he failed to elaborate.

In a video report released by Vice News in December — in which Israeli soldiers are shown transferring wounded Syrian opposition fighters to an Israeli hospital — the narrator acknowledges that the fighters could be affiliated with al-Nusra.

Israeli media has been slightly more open about Israel’s embrace of al-Qaida. The news website Ynet has posted footage of Israeli army medics treating wounded Syrian opposition fighters, noting, “It is likely that most if not all of these nationals are rebels from the rival jihadist Islamic State and al-Nusra Front groups.”

This raises questions about the legality of sending members of one of the world’s most notorious and active armed extremist groups back into battle, especially since this particular group has been the primary target of a global war for more than a decade led by Israel’s greatest benefactor, the United States. (To be fair, though, the US is no stranger to backing al-Qaida and ISIS to undermine its adversaries.)

A US Defense Department spokesperson declined to comment for The Electronic Intifada about Israel’s apparent alliance with al-Qaida. The US State Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Material aid

As Israel’s neighbors absorbed millions of displaced Syrians fleeing a war that, according to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has killed more than 220,000 people, the Israeli government has painted its medical care for those wounded in Syria as altruistic. But only a third of the 1,500 treated by Israel have been women and children, according to the March report in The Wall Street Journal.

The rest have been fighters who Israeli officials admit are not screened and likely belong to al-Nusra.

Once it became undeniable, Israel confessed it was treating fighters, but claimed that they were moderates.

But after al-Nusra captured and ejected UN peacekeepers in the Golan Heights last August, there was no longer any doubt that al-Nusra was the dominant force among opposition fighters in the area.

Since then, Ynet has resorted to whitewashing al-Nusra’s connections to al-Qaida. Citing unnamed Israeli officials, the publication claims that al-Nusra’s members are “simply local residents who joined the organization to benefit from the logistical and financial support it offers them.”

Retired Brigadier General Michael Herzog, a former chief of staff for Israel’s defense minister, told The Wall Street Journal that “Nusra is a unique version of al-Qaida. They manage to cooperate with non-Islamist and non-jihadi organizations in one coalition … They are totally focused on the war in Syria and aren’t focused on us. But when Hizballah and Iran and others are pushing south, they are very much focused on us.”

Israeli soldiers have also been seen providing Syrian opposition fighters dominated by al-Nusra with material aid.

Dozens of interactions between Israel and opposition fighters, as far back as 2012, have been documented by the UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF), the peacekeeping mission responsible for monitoring the 1974 ceasefire line between Israeli and Syrian forces in the Golan Heights.

The UN has good reason to observe these interactions closely.

In August last year, al-Nusra detained 43 UN peacekeepers and seized their equipment, prompting the UN to evacuate many of its soldiers to the Israeli-occupied side of the ceasefire line.

Quarterly UNDOF reports since the pullback reveal an ongoing pattern of Israeli coordination with those armed groups.

According to the December 2014 report, UNDOF observed two Israeli soldiers “opening the technical fence gate and letting two individuals pass from the [Syrian] to the [Israeli] side” on 27 October. Unlike most fighters seen entering the Israeli side, these individuals were not wounded and the purpose of their visit remains a mystery.

UNDOF “sporadically observed armed members of the opposition interacting” with the Israeli military across the ceasefire line, the report states.

The next UNDOF report, released in March, notes that UN forces witnessed Israeli soldiers delivering material aid to armed Syrian opposition groups.

“During the evening of 20 January, in the area north of observation post 54, UNDOF observed two trucks crossing from the [Syrian] side to the [Israeli] side, where they were received by IDF [Israeli military] personnel,” the report states. “The trucks were loaded with sacks before returning to the [Syrian] side.”

The coordination between Israel and armed opposition groups continued into May, according to the June UNDOF report.

Israel appears determined to keep the nature of these interactions as low key as possible, something Sidqi Maqt, a Druze resident of the Golan Heights, understands better than most.

In February, Maqt was arrested by Israeli intelligence for posting photos and videos to his Facebook page of Israeli army interactions with armed opposition groups. Maqt paid particular attention to documenting encounters he believed demonstrated the Israeli army’s alliance with al-Nusra.

Released in 2012 after serving 37 years in prison for engaging in armed resistance against Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights, Maqt is once again behind bars. He has been charged with “espionage, assisting an enemy during wartime and contact with a foreign agent,” according to Al Jazeera.

On top of providing al-Nusra with material aid and punishing those who expose it, Israel has launched airstrikes almost exclusively against forces fighting al-Nusra.

On 18 January, for example, an Israeli air strike on a convoy near Quneitra killed six members of Hizballah and a general in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

Days later, rockets landed in the Golan Heights, according to UNDOF. The Israeli army retaliated by shelling a location it said was the source of the fire.

A Syrian army official, however, told the UN that “terrorists” had fired the rockets and that the Syrian army planned to target their positions. The UN relayed this message to the Israeli army, which responded with airstrikes against two Syrian army artillery positions.

Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, has said that some in Syria joke, “How can you say that al-Qaida doesn’t have an air force? They have the Israeli air force.”

While Assad’s policies, including the bombardments that have devastated cities and towns forcing millions to flee their homes, have contributed to the chaos and vacuum that has enabled extremist groups to flourish in some areas, Israel’s actions on behalf of those groups grant credence to his claim.

Cheering on ISIS

Amos Yadlin, a retired Israeli general, has offered a candid explanation for Israel’s partnership with al-Nusra.

“There is no doubt that Hizballah and Iran are the major threat to Israel, much more than the radical Sunni Islamists, who are also an enemy,” he told The Wall Street Journal. “Those Sunni elements who control some two-thirds to 90 percent of the border on the Golan aren’t attacking Israel. This gives you some basis to think that they understand who is their real enemy — maybe it isn’t Israel,” he reasoned.

Hizballah, which is aligned with Bashar al-Assad’s regime, has been fighting al-Nusra in the Golan Heights with Iranian support. Given Hizballah’s growing capacity and proven willingness to defend against Israeli aggression, Israel appears to favor al-Qaida on its northern front and to view the destruction of Syria as an opportunity to incapacitate Hizballah in southern Lebanon by draining its resources in Syria.

This does not mean Israel wants Assad to fall. On the contrary, Israel prefers a region fractured into small sectarian enclaves that are too busy fighting one another to unite against it. It is for this reason that Yair Golan, the Israeli army’s deputy chief of staff, recently celebrated the conditions on Israel’s northern border as “better than ever.”

The Jerusalem Post’s security correspondent, Yossi Melman, has echoed Golan, depicting Syria’s descent into chaos and fragmentation as a strategic boost for Israel.

Gilad Sharon, son of late Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, has gone even further by arguing that an ISIS takeover in Syria would offer an opening for Israel to acquire the Golan Heights permanently.

In the event of an ISIS takeover, Sharon wrote last month, “There would be no international pressure for Israel to give back the Golan Heights either — and that’s a very good thing. The Golan will remain an important part of Israel forever.” He added that Israel could rely on the West’s so-called anti-ISIS coalition to defeat a victorious ISIS next door, allowing Israel to bask in its newly annexed territory without lifting a finger.

Israel would not necessarily “welcome the presence of the Islamic State lunatics on our border,” Sharon wrote, “but it’s certainly no worse, and may even be better, than the presence there of Hizballah, which is the Lebanese proxy of the Iranian regime.”

Naftali Bennett, Israeli education minister and leader of the ultra-nationalist party Habeyit Hayehudi (Jewish Home), appears to be following Sharon’s advice.

Speaking at the Herzliya conference, a key event in Israel’s political calendar, this month, Bennett called on Israel to invoke the threat of ISIS expansion to compel governments around the world to legitimize its annexation of the Golan Heights.

“Who do they want us to give the Golan to? To Assad? Today, it’s clear that if we listened to the world we would give up the Golan and ISIS would be swimming in the Sea of Galilee. Enough with the hypocrisy,” said Bennett, agitating for expanding the number of Israeli settlers in the Golan from 20,000 to 100,000 in the next five years.

Support for al-Qaida in Syria, then, serves at least two purposes from Israel’s perspective: sapping the strength of the foe it fears most — Hizballah — and solidifying its occupation of the Golan Heights.

In addition to sowing chaos and bloodshed, Israel’s machiavellian schemes — as its decades of meddling in Lebanon show — have a poor record of achieving their goals.

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/ June 17, 2015 / Leave a comment

Will Israel’s “whiff from hell” weapon be used to crush US protests?

Crossposted from The Electronic Intifada

US police departments are interested in procuring the foul-smelling skunk water that Israeli forces routinely use on Palestinians, according to The Economist.

The Economist, which refers to skunk water as “a whiff from hell,” reports that the weapon “has attracted the interest of law-enforcement agencies in America which, after riots in Ferguson and Baltimore, crave better ways to scatter rioters without killing or injuring them.”

Developed by Odortec, an Israeli company that specializes in scent-based weapons for law enforcement, in collaboration with the Israeli police, skunk water emits a stench that has been described as a cross between a rotting animal corpse, raw sewage and human excrement. The smell is so strong that Israeli police refuse to store the substance inside their stations.

Released at high pressure from a water cannon attached to the top of a military truck, the skunk odor sticks to walls, clothing, hair and skin for days and is impossible to wash away. Ramallah-based activist and writer Mariam Barghouti once told The Electronic Intifada’s Patrick Strickland that “the water lingers on your skin to a point when you want to rip your skin off.”

First used by Israeli border police officers in 2008, skunk water has become a fixture in villages that engage in weekly demonstrations against the Israeli wall in the occupied West Bank. It’s also frequently deployed against Palestinian neighborhoods in occupied East Jerusalem, where there is a concerted effort by the Israeli government to remove and replace Palestinian residents with Jewish settlers.

While Odortec insists skunk spray is non-toxic and even drinkable, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) warns that it “can cause pain and redness if it comes into contact with eyes, irritation if it comes into contact with skin and if swallowed can cause abdominal pain requiring medical treatment.”

Environmental terrorism

Israeli police have argued that skunk water is strictly used for crowd dispersal, but this claim is easily refuted.

Israeli forces regularly douse entire Palestinians neighborhoods in skunk water, deliberately spraying it into private homes, businesses and schools in what the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem calls “a collective punitive measure” against Palestinian villages that engage in protest against Israel’s colonial violence.

Just last month, Israeli forces were photographed chasing five-year-old Muhammad Riyad with a skunk truck at a demonstration in the West Bank town of Kafr Qaddum. The photos show Muhammad running and tripping over a pile of rocks, which sends his tiny body plunging face first into the ground, as he’s drenched in skunk water.

No Palestinian is safe from the skunk truck, not children, not their homes, not even the dead.

In 2012, Israeli forces showered a funeral procession in Hebron with skunk water, soaking mourners and the body of the deceased.

The substance is being marketed as a safe alternative to more lethal means of crowd dispersal. But since its introduction into the Israeli arsenal, Israeli forces have continued to indiscriminately injure and kill Palestinian protesters and non-protesters alike with the traditional assortment of tear gas, rubber-coated steel bullets, sponge-tipped bullets and live fire.

If anything, skunk water has added a new humiliating dimension to the terror Israel inflicts on Palestinians. After all, what better way to strip the subjugated and colonized of their dignity than to poison them and their surroundings with a feces-like stench so intolerable it makes someone want to rip off his or her own skin?

Exporting repression

It’s no accident that Odortec was founded by a management team at the Israeli company Flybuster, a firm that develops scent-based chemicals to repel and kill insects. Odortec simply applied Flybuster’s pesticide logic to Palestinians, who Israeli leaders have long viewed as subhuman contaminants comparable to insects.

And like most Israeli weapons, skunk water is advertised as having been “field-tested,” which almost always means that Palestinians were used as human test subjects during the development process.

According to Odortec’s website, “skunk has been field-tested and proven to disperse even the most determined of violent protests” effectively “breaking adversarial resistance.”

While Gaza serves as a playground for larger weapons, the West Bank is Israel’s preferred laboratory for testing and refining crowd control technology.

David Ben Harosh, head of the Israeli police’s department for technological development  — which partnered with Odortec to develop skunk water — stated in 2008 that skunk water was tested in “monitored exercises” in the Palestinian villages of Bilin and Nilin, which he referred to as an “experiment.”

“After each spraying an observation of the area was conducted, to check if there were casualties, to see how the demonstrators reacted,” Ben Harosh stated.

So far there has been no reported use of skunk spray outside of Palestine. But Israeli police and Odortec have been marketing the product to law enforcement agencies around the globe since its inception.

As the BBC reported in 2008, “The Israeli police force has high hopes of turning skunk into a commercial venture and selling it to law-enforcement agencies overseas.”

The Economist states, “A report this week that skunk is now being sold to American local police departments was initially confirmed by a Maryland-based company claiming to be the vendor, but then swiftly retracted. The company’s website, which offered the stuff in various-sized canisters, has since gone offline.”

Though The Economist does not identify the company, it is likely Mistral Security, a subsidiary of Mistral Group, a US company based in Bethesda, Maryland, that deals in the production and sale of military and law enforcement equipment.

The only crowd control weapon Mistral Security currently markets to US law enforcement is skunk spray, which is featured on its website in a variety of delivery systems, including canisters, grenades and bulk containers for water cannons. Mistral’s product brochure advertises skunk as ideal for controlling crowds and individuals at “border crossings, correctional facilities, demonstrations and sit-ins.”

Mistral did not to respond to inquiries about which police agencies have expressed interest in purchasing skunk water. Neither did Odortec.

However, US police departments taking repression cues from Israel is not a new phenomenon.

Under the cover of counterterrorism training, senior commanders from nearly every major American police department, including Baltimore and St. Louis, have traveled to Israel for lessons in occupation enforcement. Such trips provide Israeli companies like Odortec with the opportunity to market their technology directly to US law enforcement executives.

With the Black Lives Matter uprising challenging and exposing America’s corrupt and racist system of policing, it makes sense that US police would look to their Israeli counterparts for “field-tested” methods in breaking resistance. In this instance, the weapon in question is as rotten as it smells.

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