What Happened in Uvalde is Why the Police Should Be Defunded

 While a Gunman was Killing 19 children and their teachers in Ulvade Texan Police Handcuffed, Pepper Sprayed and Tasered the Parents Instead!

The Problem Isn’t Gun Law but America’s Violent Racist Society - Gun Law Reform Won’t Change That

Police Cowards in Uvalde

If ever there was a demonstration as to why the Police should be defunded, it was on display in Uvalde, Texas. Heavily armed Police stood outside the classroom where the gunman was murdering defenceless children because they didn’t have a key to the door!

They apparently believed all the children were dead but didn’t have the courage to find out for themselves if anyone was alive. It has taken a tragedy like Uvalde to demonstrate that the Police aren’t there to protect people but to protect property.

Police Justify Doing Nothing 

Heavily armed police refused to go into the school and instead saw their job as harassing and persecuting desperate parents. One parent, Angeli Rose Gomez, was handcuffed. When freed she jumped the fence and went in to rescue her child whilst these heavily armed cowards stood outside, pepper spraying and tasering distraught parents.

40% of Uvalde’s budget was spent on these entitled cowards. They should not only be sacked but prosecuted for gross negligence manslaughter. But of course they won’t because the Supreme Court has given them virtual immunity.

Police cowards Outside Uvalde school Texas Tackle Parents Instead of the Gunman

Texas Governor, the Christian bigot Greg Abbott, an anti-abortionist and pro-death penalty supporter, meanwhile spent the aftermath praising the pigs in uniform.

Of course when it comes to shooting an unarmed Black kid then these heroes will rise to the challenge but otherwise they are useless. Ulvade doubled the amount it was spending in one year on providing school security but the killer still ran past police and armed guards. Indeed he was outside for 12 minutes shooting but no one had the gall to tackle him.

He posted what he was intending to do on Fuckerberg’s Facebook but the Moderators, who are so quick to uphold ‘community standards’ when it comes to supporting the Palestinians saw nothing.

Texas's Far-Right Governor Greg Abbott Grandstanding

If nothing else this shows that there is a need for a different, community model of policing. If the parents had had the guns that the Police had then the gunman would have been neutralised far earlier. We need to get away from the idea that we need separate groups of Police to protect us.  The Police have as their priority the defence of the wealthy and property not people.

Meanwhile the far-Right Governor of Texas, Greg Abbot, pontificated about ‘evil’ stalking the land. Clearly he was not in possession of a mirror because it is Abbott who represents evil. Abbot blamed the murder of 19 children and 2 teachers on mental illness and virtually anything but himself and the armed goons who saw attacking the parents as more important than tackling a lone gunman.

His Democratic opponent Beto O’Rourke confronted Abbot over his do nothing approach. Of course Abbot is an easy target. He opposes gun control on principle. Abbot is a particularly vile creature. But it is easy to fall back on the panacea of gun control.

Norway has a very high rate of gun ownership and yet despite the USA having 50 times the population of Norway it has 10,000 times the murder rate. The reasons for the high rate of gun crime in the USA and in particular this phenomenon of shooting children in schools can’t simply be explained by lack of gun control.

The fact is that as a settler-colonial society which recently had slavery, the US is an endemically violent society. It is the only Western state that has the death penalty. To this day the USA maintains a concentration camps in Guantanamo. It has the highest rate of incarceration, some 2 million prisoners, some of whom are kept in conditions that amount to torture. Super-max prisons where inmates are kept in shackles and solitary confinement.

The US is responsible for a phenomenal amount of violence around the world, from Iraq to Afghanistan to Israel. The CIA has been given a license to torture and the US even has a training school for torturers and death squads, the School of the Americas which is now renamed the Institute for Security Cooperation.

If Israel maintains a violent occupation it does so courtesy of US weapons and subsidies. At the moment the US is doing its best to encourage a genocidal war in Ukrainian by supplying it with limitless weapons. The US is the world’s major arms supplier.  The US is the prime factor in violence in the world. Is it any wonder that US violence abroad is imported back home?

The US is of course a massively unequal society and the purpose of the Police is to keep it that way. Inequality breeds violence. The US can’t afford a national health service but it can afford 800 foreign bases and at spends at least $750 billion on its armed forces. It spends more than the next 9 countries put together on its military.

Why should anyone be surprised when this makes some people mentally ill enough to want to kill American kids? After all the US army has been killing children for years in its Drone Wars without any comeback.

The idea that gun control by itself can solve the problem of internal violence is a pipedream sown by the Democrats who, as the Ukraine war has proven, are worse imperialists than the Republicans. In Congress it was 57 Republicans who opposed the $40 billion to Ukrainian neo-Nazis. In the Senate it was 11 Republican Senators who voted against. 

Not one Democrat in Congress – not Sanders, not AOC, not Ilhan Omar or Rashida Tlaib voted against supplying the Azov Battalion with nice, shiny new US weaponry.

It is a tragedy that 19 children and their teachers died in Texas but no one should be fooled that gun control by itself that will be the remedy.  The United States is a violent society and violence begets violence.

Tony Greenstein

See Parents reportedly handcuffed, tasered, and pepper sprayed by police during Uvalde school shooting

Israel applies to Israel's High Court in order to commit a War Crime

When Tom Watson, Luke Akehurst, Warren Morgan or any other creature of Labour’s Right talks about ‘anti-Semitism’ you can be sure that they aren’t talking about anti-Jewish racism but defending Israel’s colonial racism by making counter accusations of racism as a means of throwing sand in peoples’ eyes.

Palestinian Bedouin children playing at the Tyre School, Khan al-Ahmar, the only robust structure in the village (it is made of rubber tyres).The school has 170 students, of which 85 are girls, and is run by 15 teachers. The students come from five different Bedouin communities in the surrounding area. It is partially funded by EU governments. It has many classrooms, a small football field made with turf, and a playground. Photo uncredited.

Israel’s racism, in Judaifying an area, is no different to the Nazis 'deJewifying' areas of Jews.  It is indefensible politically or morally.   The only response is to ratchet up the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions campaign.  We know that this is the weapon that the Israeli state most hates because they have set up a $50m+ dirty tricks fund under the Minister of Public Security, Gilad Erdan.

Everywhere BDS is under attack because it is held to be ‘anti-Semitic’.  In America states such as Kansas are demanding of those who do business with the state that they declare they have nothing to do with BDS.  In Texas people are being refused aid as a result of the recent hurricane unless they agree to sign a piece of paper saying they oppose the Boycott of Israel. Apart from this being an outrageous infringement on the right to free speech under the First Amendment this shows the lengths that Israel's Apartheid Lobby will go to force people to support their state.

It is therefore good to see the American Civil Liberties Union taking legal action against the State of Kansas in order to stop it penalising people who exercise their right to engage in BDS actions.

In this country we see those apostles of anti-racism – the Daily Mail/Express/Telegraph et al in the forefront of labelling solidarity with the Palestinians as ‘anti-Semitic’.  Their hypocrisy is belied by their own racist record when it comes to discrimination against every other group bar Zionists.

Tony Greenstein

Israel asks court to approve forcible transfer of entire Bedouin community

By The Palestine Monitor
September 26, 2017

The Israeli government has asked the Supreme Court to approve plans to demolish an entire Palestinian Bedouin community. The government said the demolition should take place by mid-2018.

This would be the first time an entire Palestinian community has been demolished since 1967. Khan al-Ahmar, home to 173 people, is located in Area C – the 60 percent of the West Bank under full Israeli control. The Israeli government considers the community’s presence there illegal, and has issued demolition orders for all of its structures earlier this year.

The village is home to one of 20 Jahalin Bedouin communities at risk of expulsion due to Israeli settlement expansion in this area, strategically located between East Jerusalem and Ma’aleh Adumim, the West Bank’s largest settlement. Known as E1, an Israeli construction plan for this area has been frozen since 2009, following international outrage. The communities are made up of 2,300 Palestine refugees who were originally displaced by Israel in the 1950s.

Plans for this area, critics have argued, are aimed at linking Ma’ale Adumim to Jerusalem, therefore breaking the territorial contiguity of a prospective Palestinian state – and jeopardising the feasibility of a two-state solution.

A Palestinian woman inspects the debris after Israeli authorities ordered the demolition of her home in the Bedouin village of Khan Al-Ahmar, February 2017. Photo by Hamza Shalash/Apaimages

Abu Khamis, the mukhtar of Khan al-Ahmar, knows that his community has become a symbol of the Palestinian struggle to remain in their lands.

“There’s proof this community has been here since 1967. We are only the first piece of the puzzle in the bigger picture,” Abu Khamis told Palestine Monitor. “If they relocate this community, they will relocate all other communities in the area,” he said, adding that he believes international pressure can help postpone the transfer – a strategy that has worked over the years, while leaving the community in a constant state of insecurity.

Residents of the nearby settlement of Kfar Adumim, together with the pro-settler organisation Regavim, have been filing petitions to evict the residents of Khan al-Ahmar and demolish its primary school – which serves 174 pupils from the village and five neighbouring communities – since 2009. Regavim, which is involved in other high-profile demolition cases in the West Bank, such as the village of Susyia in the South Hebron Hills, declares its mission to be “ensur[ing] responsible, legal, accountable & environmentally friendly use of Israel’s national lands and the return of the rule of law to all areas”, as stated on its website. The fourth and last petition was filed in 2016.

Unlike on previous occasions, the community’s lawyer, Shlomo Lecker, is concerned that this time the court will accept the State’s answer when asked to provide an alternative for residents. Israel plans to relocate them to lands near the Palestinian town of Abu Dis, in an area known as Jabal West.

“It’s a symbolic act to please the right-wing,” Lecker said, speaking at a meeting with representatives of NGOs and diplomatic missions last week.

The appearance of Bedouin villages, now often built from scrap materials, is, like Khan al-Ahmar L, often of a makeshift and ramshackle camp. Like other Palestinians, Bedouin cannot get permits to build more substantial homes.

Rights groups have opposed these plans.

“While the government argues that the residents of Khan al-Ahmar will receive alternative housing, they will in fact be evacuated against their will for the benefit of settlers, and placed above the garbage dump in Abu Dis,” said a statement from Israeli anti-settlement NGO Peace Now after the government submitted its answer to the Supreme Court on the settlers’ petition on Monday. “This type of forceful evacuation of protected persons constitutes a severe violation of international humanitarian law.”

“It appears that the forceful displacement of the residents of Khan al-Ahmar is a form of “compensation” for his right wing supporters for the upcoming evacuation of the Illegal outpost of Derech Ha’Avot, following a High Court ruling,” the statement added.

B’Tselem said Israel was asking the High Court for “permission to commit a war crime.” Hagai El-Ad, B’Tselem’s executive director, said:

“No sanctimonious language about a ‘planning, proprietary and realistic’ alternate, or ‘time to prepare’ can erase the disgrace or hide the facts: the destruction of Khan al-Ahmar means the forcible transfer of protected persons, and forcible transfer is a war crime.”

Abu Khamis told Palestine Monitor that voluntarily moving to the proposed location is not an option, and that the community will continue to fight to stay.

Learning to read and write, to paint and to play: what will happen to these children’s education if yet another Bedouin village is demolished?

Meanwhile, children at the “tyre school” nearby are taking a break and playing outside the class-rooms. The school, which stands out as the only real building in the village with its painted mud walls – the rest are makeshift structures made of wood and corrugated iron – provides a safe space for children to play as well as study in this isolated desert community. Despite its location just off a highway a few kilometres from Jerusalem, the only road that leads to the village is an unpaved, winding track.

“Students here, some of them from nearby villages, know the school is at risk,” said Halimeh Zahalka, the school’s headteacher. “They keep asking their teachers whether they will continue coming to the area if the school is demolished.”

Community Policing - Texas Style

Video: Israeli man describes Muslims as Nazis at far-right rally in Frankfurt

Pegida and Zionism - a Natural Alliance

The article below, from Electronic Intifada, describes an Israeli man speaking at a Pegida (anti-Muslim) rally in Germany.  In the course of his racist rant he forgives those he is addressing for the minor matter of the holocaust as it is Muslims who are the main enemy.

Israeli fascists attack anti-war demonstration in Tel Aviv

This is of course natural and understandable.  When you engage in colonialism and the occupation and oppression of others, it is natural that you will identify with other imperialists.  Zionism during the holocaust collaborated and in the case of the Stern Gang/Lehi, offered them a military pact.  Today, 70 years later, it is understandable that ideology and practice come together.

Tony Greenstein

Video: Israeli man describes Muslims as Nazis at far-right rally in Frankfurt

Submitted by Rania Khalek on Tue, 02/03/2015 - 11:09

Ein Israeli spricht bzw. brüllt für Pegida Frankfurt

Addressing a recent rally in Frankfurt, a self-identified Israeli man equated Muslims with Nazis, murderers and rapists, and implored the crowd to “never feel ashamed” of Germany’s past. 

The rally was called by Pegida, or Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West, a far-right organization founded last October in Dresden. Its demonstrations initially attracted hundreds of people protesting what they believe is Islam’s takeover of Germany. More recently, the number of people to attend has been in the thousands.

Neo-Nazis give the traditional salute - at Yad Vashem, the Israeli memorial to the holocaust dead

An assortment of rightwing groups, including neo-Nazis, have been taking part. Following the attacks on the paper Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket in Paris last month, a 12 January rally drew more than 25,000 people.  

A video, which was posted to YouTube by Journal Frankfurt last week, shows a man, wrapped in a German flag, describing himself as an Israeli with German heritage during a Pegida rally. 

“I come from Israel. Germany is yours!” he tells the crowd, to thunderous cheers. 

He continues: “Germany’s not Nazis. I am Jewish. My family lived here in Germany for 700 years. And I can tell you that I see here no Nazis. The Nazis are in the left.

Neo-Nazis wave Israeli flag

“Right here I see only patriots who love their country and want to save Germany from the Islam that wants to take over, to take your traditions, to take your beliefs, to take all of you down. But we will not let it.”

After naming Muslims as the true Nazis, the man goes on to forgive Germany for the Nazi-led genocide of European Jews during the Second World War. 

Israeli Jewish neo-Nazis wear the symbols of their comrades in Europe

“We will stand together and we will face the real Nazis. The Nazis are inside the Islam mentality and those who want to sell Germany for votes,” he says, adding, “Israel is with Germany. We respect you, we forgive, we love you. You are the best country in the world. Save it.”

“All the world is looking at you now and we are proud. You are the true spirit of Germany,” he snarls. 

“Islam wants to take you and to drink from the milk of Germany.”

As the hate sermon continues, the man implores the crowd to “Never feel ashamed of yourselves, not even because of the past.”

He then declares himself a proud Islamophobe while advancing a blood libel against Muslims, characterizing them as rapists and murderers who must be feared. 

“The Muslims say that we are Islamophobes. Yes, I am Islamophobe because phobia is fear and I am afraid of murder. I am afraid to be raped,” he roars. 

“So they can call you Islamophobes, they can call you Nazis and racists. But we are not. We are Germans. We are patriots. We love this country.”

“Antifa [German slang for anti-fascists], fuck you! We are stronger! We will win!” 

Mosque defaced with swastikas

As smaller Pegida offshoots spread to other parts of the country, they have sometimes been met with even larger anti-racist counter-demonstrations.

Yet Pegida’s reach is growing as the group held its first demonstration in Austria, on Monday night. In the lead-up to the march, vandals defaced a Vienna mosque with swastikas. This was just the latest in a string of anti-Islam attacks across Austria. “In December unknown culprits left a pig’s head and intestines in front of the door of another mosque in the capital. A street sign was changed to read ‘Sharia Street’ in September,” the news agency AFP reported. 

In recent years, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant incitement has become a rallying cry of the increasingly popular rightwing elements undergoing a resurgence across Europe. Although many right-wing European parties have neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic roots, they identify deeply with Israel and Zionism, which are often used as vehicles to promote hatred for Islam and multiculturalism in Europe as well as the United States. 

In some cases, formerly anti-Semitic political parties have seamlessly projected the anti-Semitic rhetoric they once espoused against Jews onto Muslim communities. 

Speaking to the media on the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Mattias Karlsson, leader of the far-right Swedish Democrats (SD), said, “the threat of Islamism is perhaps greater than it is from Nazism.” 

Rooted in fascism and the country’s neo-Nazi movement, SD captured 13 percent of the vote in the last general election, making it the third most popular political party in Sweden.

Kent Ekerot, an SD member and Jewish parliamentarian, has helped forge his party’s close relationship with the Israeli government. Although SD leaders continue to espouse anti-Jewish attitudes, Ekerot insists that anti-Semitism in Sweden is entirely “imported” and a result of “unrestricted immigration” of Arabs and Muslims, which he and his party fervently oppose.  

Emran Feroz, a journalist based in Germany, detailed the convergence of pro-Israel attitudes and right-wing European Islamophobia in an article for AlterNet last month:

Right-wing parties like the Austrian FPÖ [Freedom Party] have discovered that it is much easier for them to spread their hatred beneath pro-Israel cover. For instance, the FPÖ made it clear that “supporting the Jewish State against Islamism” has become one of their new political pillars. Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s National Front, has learned the same lesson, scrapping her father’s overt anti-Semitism and opposition to Europe’s special relationship with Israel and replacing it with an aggressively neoconservative outlook. In turn, she has attracted support from right-wing French Jews and cultivated a mainstream appeal her father [Jean-Marie Le Pen] could have only dreamed of. But the seething racism that was a hallmark of her father’s politics remains firmly entrenched in the platform of her National Front.

Geert Wilders and his Party of Freedom [in the Netherlands] were among the leaders of the European far-right’s alliance with Israel’s rightist Likud. In an interview with The Jerusalem Post’s Benjamin Weinthal, an American neoconservative operative funded by right-wing billionaire Sheldon Adelson, Wilders declared that Israel is the “only light of democracy in the Middle East.” He then demanded that the European Union and the United States stand by Israel’s side in the clash of civilizations — a war pitting the “Judeo-Christian” West against Islam. Wilders declared that the name of the state of Palestine should be changed to “Jordan,” suggesting that Palestinians either be forcibly expelled from their homes or stripped of national identity. In 2014, Wilders agitated unsuccessfully but flamboyantly for a commemoration for former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon in the Dutch parliament.

This hate is not isolated to the far-right, which only represents the most bellicose strain of an Islamophobia that is entrenched within the supposedly enlightened mainstream. 

As The Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah has reported, the French authorities are targeting Muslims, including small children, in a draconian, authoritarian crackdown on free speech.

Nor is the hate isolated to Europe. 

From Dresden to Austin

On 29 January, when Muslim men, women and children from across Texas gathered in Austin to meet with lawmakers and learn about the political process during the seventh annual Texas Muslim Capitol Day, they were met with anti-Islam protesters waving Texas and Israeli flags and holding signs that read, “Radical Islam is the new Nazi” and “Go home & take Obama with you.”

As Muslim schoolchildren sang the American national anthem, the demonstrators shouted in their faces, “Islam is a lie!” and “No Sharia here!” 

Prior to the hate fest, Texas lawmaker Molly White took to Facebook to say that despite being away for recess she instructed her staff to subject Muslim constituents to loyalty oaths as a condition of entering her office, where she left an Israeli flag on her desk as an apparent symbol of her allegiance to America. 

“I did leave an Israeli flag on the reception desk in my office with instructions to staff to ask representatives from the Muslim community to renounce Islamic terrorist groups and publicly announce allegiance to America and our laws,” White wrote on her Facebook page. “We will see how long they stay in my office.” 

This followed a similar anti-Muslim demonstration in Texas last month. As The Electronic Intifada’s Patrick Strickland reported at the time, the Israeli flag was waved alongside the American flag by white Christian extremists to signify their hatred for Muslims. 

Israel is not responsible for the anti-Muslim hatred sweeping the West. But its role as a symbol of and cover for hate reflects shared values and a growing alliance between support for Israel and right-wing hatred for Islam in the West.