“The racist and brutal tactics used by Israeli military and US cops are purposefully one and the same,” the Democratic Socialists of America outrageously tweeted on May 26 at the start of the current global Black Lives Matter (BLM) upheaval. This exemplifies on social media the previously-analyzed blood libel that Israeli training encourages American police abuse, yet another canard of an anti-Western Islamist-Leftist alliance that demonizes America and whitewashes Islam.
The aftermath of the May 25 Minneapolis police killing of the black man George Floyd has demonstrated the disturbing prevalence of anti-Israel smears linked to American racial tensions. Numerous prominent individuals have falsely claimed on Twitter and other social media that Israel is complicit in the deaths of Floyd and other minorities in police custody. These statements indicate worrying inroads into respectable opinion by radical groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), which has promoted its fallacious Deadly Exchange campaign since 2017.
For example, in the days following Floyd’s death prominent Los Angeles real estate developer Mohamed Hadid posted on Instagram a cartoon that linked it with the Israeli military. Of Palestinian descent, he is the father of supermodels Bella and Gigi Hadid. Public anger prompted his retraction and apology.
In the United Kingdom, Labour Member of Parliament Rebecca Long-Bailey experienced an even stronger rebuke for praising in a tweet the actress Maxine Peake for an Independent interview. Therein she said that the “tactics used by the police in America, kneeling on George Floyd’s neck, that was learnt from seminars with Israeli secret services.” Labour Party leader Keir Starmer dismissed Long-Bailey as shadow education secretary after she rejected apology demands from the Board of Deputies of British Jews.
Unfortunately, no such apologies have come from several leaders of Washington, DC, think tanks. The Israel-hating Jerusalem Fund posted on its website a screed written by Jerusalem Fund Executive Director Mohamed Mohamed. “Israel has honed its skills in subjugation and torture,” he wrote, “and sadly, the US has gladly imported its ruthless methods.”
Arab-American Institute Director James Zogby, a Bernie Sanders presidential campaign supporter and longtime Democratic Party leader, also spewed vitriol against Israel after Floyd’s death. “Too many US police departments take training trips to Israel (supported by @ADL [Anti-Defamation League] & others,” he condemned in a tweet; “Is it any wonder that they behave like an occupying army in black communities?” He praised JVP’s efforts in this matter and cited an Amnesty International article written by one of that organization’s many Israel-haters, Edith Garwood, who has maligned Israel for “ethnic cleansing.”
Zogby would be proud of his former employees Khaled Elgindy, who is now a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute after a previous position at the Brookings Institution. He has repeatedly retweeted Deadly Exchange-like tropes, including from Zaha Hassan, who is currently a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace visiting fellow. The pair shares a similar history of having worked as Palestinian Authority negotiators.
Elgindy retweeted Hassan’s tweet that
US law enforcement have a long history of violence against black ppl & communities of color but some of the tactics we see of late are also byproducts of Israeli military training US police. That needs to end.
The Palestinian-American tweeter Jareer Kassis has also received Elgindy’s retweet. Kassis wrote that the Minneapolis “Sheriff’s office of Hennepin County (where George Floyd was murdered) is among the departments that have sent delegates to Israel.” Relying upon a speculative blogpost, Kassis in his tweet thread baselessly asserted that brief Israeli contact with Minneapolis police officials somehow “make sense” of the domestic police misconduct that killed Floyd.
The same day (May 29) as Kassis, Elgindy retweeted the comments of Saree Makdisi, a University of California—Los Angeles English professor and nephew of the late intellectual and “refugee from the truth” Edward Said. “Just in case you need to be reminded where so many US police forces have learned how to apply militarized violence against a civilian population,” he implied of Israel. As “evidence,” he cited the same Amnesty International rant used by Zogby.
Days later on June 1, Elgindy retweeted remarks of Edo Konrad, the editor-in-chief of the anti-Israel website +972. “I’ll just leave this here and back away sloooowly,” he tweeted, as if he had found some smoking-gun, Floyd-Israel connection. Konrad’s supposed eureka proof was a 2012 Minnesota Public Radio story about Minneapolis police officials attending an Israeli counterterrorism conference in Minneapolis. In another tweet that day, Konrad claimed that “Israel plays a role in the militarization of U.S. police forces.”
The deceptive American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) National Legal & Policy Director Abed Ayoub was even more explicit in his libel of Israel on June 7. He tweeted that the “move used to kill George [Floyd] is being taught to Police Departments across the country during trainings in Israel.” Unsurprisingly, he supports Minneapolis’ anti-Semitic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.
The next day Rasha Mubarak, an Israel-hating, Hamas-celebrating Florida Democratic Party activist, similarly slanderously rejected ADL and AIPAC concerns about police abuse of minority communities. She wrote:
Are the @ADL and @AIPAC for real, right now? Ya’ll are literally part of the problem in police violence/oppressive forces against the Black community here in the states and against the Black community here in the states and against the Palestinian people living under Israeli occupation. SIT down.
From America’s other, west coast, Mubarak received confirmation from her like-minded radical, the America- and Israel-hating Zahra Billoo on June 17. She re-tweeted JVP’s Deadly Exchange falsehoods about Israel and the ADL and that the “ADL needs to end police exchanges” with Israel. This director of the San Francisco chapter of the Hamas-derived Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has thus promoted similar themes as the Hamas-supporters in American Muslims for Palestine (AMP).
Activists such as Billoo and Mubarak receive critical support from allies in academia like Rutgers University law professor Sahar Aziz. This director of Rutgers’ Center for Security, Race, and Rights (CSRR), with its emphasis on “Islamophobia,” tweeted on June 21 an article by Ramzy Baroud, who has previously incited violence against Israel. He wrote that “thousands of American police officers have been trained by Israelis, thus the burgeoning of violent military-like tactics used against ordinary Americans.”
Aziz proves how the totalitarian concept of “Islamophobia” often just masks Israel-hatred, like that of her academic colleague, Rice University sociology professor Craig Considine. Following Floyd’s death, Considine has ludicrously promoted Islam’s prophet Muhammad and Muslim-Americans such as Malcolm X as moral exemplars for healing American racial divisions. This adulation ignores that Malcolm X, sharing prevalent Islamic anti-Semitism, hated Israel just as much as another, modern African-American, Marc Lamont-Hill.
Likewise Considine on May 15, ten days before Floyd achieved tragic international notoriety, tweeted about this “Nakba” Day. This propagandistic anniversary demonizes Israel existence as the result of “ongoing” ethnic cleansing since the country’s independence in 1948. He correspondingly expressed being
inspired by Palestinian resilience in the face of ethnic cleansing, settler-colonialism, apartheid, occupation, & annexation. These are crimes against humanity. World leaders should recognize them as such.
Leftist-Islamist academics and political activists form an ideological trifecta with their comrades in the media Fourth Estate. Qatar’s Al Jazeera network, a mouthpiece for disseminating the oil sheikdom’s Muslim Brotherhood support, has recently promoted JVP’s Deadly Exchange. Meanwhile an editor of the “left-conspiracist” Intercept, Charlotte Greensit, has just become the New York Times opinion page managing editor. She tweeted in 2017 that “Israeli security forces are training American cops despite history of rights abuses.”
The anti-Semitic cartoonist Carlos Latuf has also colorfully drawn a connection between BLM and the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) economic warfare campaign against Israel. With appropriately vivid graphics, he announced that the
@BDSMovement calls on #Palestine solidarity activists in the US and elsewhere to stand with the Movement for Black Lives and other Black-led organizations in their righteous struggle for justice.
The modern blood libel linking Israel with American policing controversies only underscores the radicalism of the BLM movement and its Islamist-Leftist allies. This is all the more reason that well-meaning individuals, such as Hen Mazzig, an internationally prominent progressive advocate of his Israeli homeland, should refrain from praising BLM. Its nefarious networks deserve exposure and condemnation, not the opportunity to exploit legitimate concerns about race relations.
Marttheman says
The problem here is mainly finance. Left wing clubs for years have been able to get funded by a plethora of foundations and institutions that are bent on the destruction of Western civilisation. The right wing is actually harder to identify and therefore to fund. Which right wing organisation can be identified and funded so as to counter all those left wing movements that are now raising hell in the world? What would their name and slogan be? Right wing is a very blurry concept you can hardly put your finger on. I can only think of a movement called: Alt-right. They have been slurred by do-gooders and eternally underinvested. They desperately need funding. Perhaps some well to do investors could blow new life into this movement and make it florish again and more effective. Politics alone won’t do the trick, because most parties in Western Europe are caving in to the left. Alt-right must become at least as strong as blm.
James Lincoln says
Marttheman,
Your points are well taken.
Yesterday’s “centrist” is now labeled “Far Right” by Leftists. Even the policies of JFK would receive this label.
I agree, a lot of it has to do with funding – and the proper “branding.” Perhaps a brand new name that does not contain the “trigger” word “right”…
Ideas?
gravenimage says
Even if you are for women’s rights, gay rights, and freedom of expression you are deemed to be “far right” if you oppose Islam crushing these rights.
gravenimage says
Red-Green Twitterstorm to America: Burn, Baby, Burn (Part Four)
………………..
Just disgusting calumny–but no real surprise.
Bad Penguin says
Ever notice non of the people slandering the Israelis and the Police in the US actually live amongst the masses they pretend to support?