The problem is not being able to diferenciate between disabled people fighting tooth and nail for their rights, and oil companies (as a single example of capitalisms) paying pocket change over cocktails to continue exploiting humanity and destroying the planet.
They are not the same, nor do they deserve the same rights and considerations, yet disabled people are still marginalised and widely discriminated against, while oil companies make record profits, because they're actively working to convince people like you that they are the same, and do deserve the same consideration, and that if you stop them, you'll be harming disabled people too. They're literally concern trolling you while they stomp all over the disabled people you've evoked to argue for the capitalists' rights, as well as billions of others.
Yes. And the fact is that if you are trying to systematically tip the scales in favor of moneyed interests versus the general electorate, the lobbyist system looks like a good design choice.
Exactly - it's there for those already hoarding all the wealth and power to control government, not an actual viable route for "every people" (never mind those who are further marginalised) to have any impact whatsoever on the system those aforementioned people are maintaining.
A blanket end to “lobbying” would also lock out citizens groups.
they already are locked out, one group that you clearly don't care about but I happen to be a member of managing to fight despite the current system to get less than the bare minimum isn't the proof you think it is of lobbying providing access.
But hey, if arguing in favour of avenues for legal corruption is the hill you want to die on, knock yourself the fuck out, you just don't get to do that, especially when you try to (badly!) use marginalised people as your debate tool, without getting your bullshit called out.. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Also, fuck off patronising and tone policing me, your first reply was perfectly clear, and me telling you you're wrong and explaining why isn't you being persecuted, despite how it might feel to your clearly privileged and wilfully ignorant (of, at the bare minimum, the fight for disability rights, never mind how lobbying actually works and who it actually serves) self.
Following the killing of George Floyd, as US riot police fired rubber-coated bullets, tear gas canisters, pepper spray and stun grenades at protesters, Palestinians shared tips on social media on how to best deal with the assaults.
Many in the Palestinian territories are well experienced with such tactics by security forces while living under a decades-long occupation by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank and besieged Gaza Strip.
According to the organisations Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Researching the American-Israeli Alliance (RAIA), one common theme shared between United States and Israel is the exchange of tactics and expertise in state violence, which has been ongoing for 18 years.
Months after the September 11 attacks, US law enforcement delegates attended their first official training expedition to Israel to exchange “best practices” in “counter-terrorism”.
Since then, thousands more from across the US – including agents from the FBI, CIA, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) – have been schooled at these meetings in both Israel and the US, sponsored by far-right Israeli lobby organisations.
But instead of promoting effective security for communities, the programme facilitates an exchange of tactics used in police violence and control including mass surveillance, racial profiling and the suppression of protests and dissent, according to the JVP and RAIA’s 2018 report (PDF) titled Deadly Exchange, which details the extent of the cooperation.
Among the thousands of US law enforcement officers who have reportedly participated in the exchange over the years was Anoka County (North Minneapolis) Sherrif James Stuart, who travelled to Israel in December.
Eran Efrati – executive director of RAIA, who has studied the subject for the past decade – told Al Jazeera that when training with Israel, US police delegates witness “live demonstrations of repressive violence in real-time, in protests across the West Bank, patrols in East Jerusalem, and visits to the Gaza border”.
“Delegates meet with the Shin Bet and chief officers in Israeli military prisons to discuss investigation tactics, with Palestinian Authority agents and police, to learn about how Israel uses their collaboration in suppressing Palestinian dissent, and with representatives from the Department of Defense and others to learn about Israel’s security expertise,” Efrati said. ‘Anti-blackness’
Leila, a campaign organiser at JVP who asked that only her first name be used, told Al Jazeera the exchange programme is just one aspect of violent policing in the United States that has existed for decades.
“The violence that we’re seeing today in the US is 100 percent the result of white supremacy and anti-blackness and institutionalised racism in the US,” Leila said.
“The exchange programmes create the opportunity for US armed forces and Israeli armed forces to come together and swap tactics, and deepen the harmful practices and policies that already exist in both countries.”
Among the topics covered during these exchanges, delegates learn how to suppress and infiltrate demonstrations, and how to coordinate with the media over coverage, Deadly Exchange found.
The training also involved sales of “crowd-control” weapons exchanged between the two governments, including US-made tear gas canisters that were heavily used in protests in Oakland, California in 2011 and Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, as well as Israeli surveillance technologies.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is among those to have criticised police – including departments in Oakland, Baltimore, Ferguson and Boston – for contracting tech companies to use surveillance software to profile residents based on their religion, race and political affiliation, the report said.
‘Mosque crawlers’
Some US practices have been influenced by the infamous Israeli infiltration of Palestinian communities as well.
Lawrence Sanchez, a CIA officer who worked to establish the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) “Demographics Unit”, which consisted of informants known as “mosque crawlers” spying on Muslim communities, acknowledged the team drew inspiration from Israeli practices in the occupied Palestinian Territories, according to the report.
The NYPD has also sent undercover officers to infiltrate Black Lives Matter protests and collect multimedia records of protester identities, activities and text messages.
The FBI and Department of Homeland Security justified their surveillance of Black Lives Matter activists by referring to them as “Black Identity Extremists” and “domestic terrorists”.
“These practices reflect the increasing use of security rhetoric to justify the surveillance and infringement of rights of US citizens and residents based on their race and political positions, a practice already fully institutionalised in Israel,” Deadly Exchange said.
“Like Palestinians who are arbitrarily defined as security threats and put on the Shin Bet’s list, people of colour and racial justice activists in the United States are subjected to systematic surveillance and can be placed on gang databases or government watch lists with little recourse or opportunities to hold the state accountable.”
‘Build a better world’
The campaign to end the “deadly exchange” started in 2017 and has so far seen a few successes.
In 2018, Durham, North Carolina became the first city in the US to ban police training with foreign militaries – including with Israel – after a coalition of community organisations successfully lobbied the city council.
Aman Aberra, a coalition member of the group Demilitarize From Durham2Palestine that spearheaded the campaign, told Al Jazeera it came together by combining the Palestine Solidarity Movement and Black organisers in Durham.
The key to the campaign, Aberra said, was to unite visions of divesting from Israeli “apartheid” and occupation, and to ensure public safety locally especially for marginalised, Black and poor communities often targeted by police.
“What Demilitarize is trying to do is build an internationalist movement to build a better world for everyone that’s safe, where we have structures that support us, where we have healthcare and housing, and where we’re not being threatened by state violence,” Aberra said.
In December 2018, Vermont state police also cancelled training in Israel after pressure from local organisers.
Leila said campaigns to end police exchanges with foreign forces and states with well-documented histories of human rights abuses are ongoing in Seattle and Washington, DC, as part of larger coalition efforts to defund and dismantle policing.
In the wake of mass protests against police brutality worldwide since Floyd’s killing, politicians have introduced legislation to reform police departments, while others believe that will not work and complete overhauls are necessary.
“There is a lot of power in communities and movements coming together, refusing to accept the structure and funding of police instead of their communities, refusing to accept that departments are trained and armed like the military, and the systemic and brutal violence they inflict on communities,” Erfati said.
“Organisers and movements are also coming together calling for investment in their communities instead of military industries. In this moment, we are seeing some amazing results of this long-standing organising.”
pretty directly connected, here’s just one example:
Atlanta law enforcement trained Israeli officers months before attack
For more than three decades, law enforcement leaders from around the metro have traveled to Israel to train officers there on best practices in community policing.
These are very direct connections. US police have very close ties to Israel police and military via trainings and seminars. Just because you don’t know about something doesn’t mean it isn’t real.
How to even start, everything isn’t about the USA.
What do you want to convey here? I mean why not take a smart, intelligent stake on some logic you think seems to be right instead of mixing some random meme stuff together?
Feels like Kremlin bait posting so please prove me you have an opinion more than A bad, B good or something.
$317.9 billion dollars from 1951 to 2022 plus whatever the total is for 2023 so far (I think we are at about 30 billion this year so far?) plus however much more we will siphon into their police state to enrich American military contractors.
Since the early 90s, hundreds of law enforcement officers, including police officers and agents from the FBI, CIA, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), have either been sent to Israel through police exchanges, or attended summits within the US that were sponsored by Israeli lobby organisations.
Police forces from Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, Arizona, Connecticut, New York, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Georgia, Washington state and others have participated in the training, including one that took place in Minneapolis, the city where Floyd was killed.
Leading human rights groups have denounced the exchange programmes, warning that Israeli police standards and tactics only serve to exacerbate racial profiling and police brutality in the US.
“With a long record of human rights violations, Israeli security forces are an incredibly problematic training partner,” Patrick Wilcken, Amnesty International USA’s researcher for arms control, security and human rights told MEE.
Micky Rosenfeld, an Israeli police spokesperson, rejected criticisms of the training scheme, telling MEE that the police exchanges in Israel provide American forces with valuable information on how to “prevent and respond” to attacks.
“The learning and sharing has saved many lives both in Israel and overseas throughout the years,” Rosenfeld said.
“The organisations that are calling out, specifically in the US, against law enforcement learning and sharing are weakening the nation’s preparedness to respond to terror attacks, hate crimes and extremists who break the law.”
On March 17, one of Israel’s two chief rabbis, Yitzhak Yosef, called black people “monkeys” and the Hebrew equivalent of the N-word in his weekly sermon.
It is highly unlikely that Yosef will face any real repercussions for his racist comments. He was not demoted after saying in a similar sermon exactly two years ago that all non-Jews – Africans, Arabs, or otherwise – could only live in Israel if they agree to serve the country’s Jewish population.
It’s unclear if Yosef’s recent comments were directly connected to the Israeli government’s impending expulsion of approximately 40,000 African refugees, mainly Christians and Muslims from Eritrea and Sudan.
The government has already coerced more than a third of the African refugee community in Israel, over 20,000 souls, to return to Africa. Israeli journalists have revealed in recent months that the government’s promises to secure status for them in Rwanda or Uganda were only a ruse, devised to deport them back into a stateless existence– with their ostensible acquiescence.
To be fair, racist comments from state-paid rabbis aren’t exactly a rarity in Israel. Israel’s other chief rabbi, Yisrael Lau, used the N-word to describe Black athletes on his very first day in office in July 2013.
But another anti-African comment made last week, by Israel’s most powerful politician, was almost certainly timed to coincide with the government’s efforts to ethnically cleanse the country of the refugees.
On March 19, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a public speech that the arrival of non-Jewish African refugees was “much worse” for Israel than “severe attacks by Sinai terrorists”.
Netanyahu’s comments come as citizens across the country have been publicly expressing reservations to his expulsion plan. Since the start of the calendar year, Israelis from all walks of life have registered their adamant opposition to the planned deportations, scheduled to begin on April 1: doctors and artists, professors and pilots, students and survivors of the Holocaust. On Saturday night, a pro-refugee protest in Tel Aviv drew over 20,000 thousand people opposed to the expulsion.
But Netanyahu need not worry about amassing support for the deportation plan. True, a recent poll proved that the majority of the Israelis that live in proximity to the African refugees – in the Greater Tel Aviv area generally, and in the slums of South Tel Aviv specifically – oppose the expulsions. But outside of that liberal bubble, Netanyahu has easily secured support for his plan.
It is highly unlikely that Yosef will face any real repercussions for his racist comments. He was not demoted after saying in a similar sermon exactly two years ago that all non-Jews – Africans, Arabs, or otherwise – could only live in Israel if they agree to serve the country’s Jewish population.
It’s unclear if Yosef’s recent comments were directly connected to the Israeli government’s impending expulsion of approximately 40,000 African refugees, mainly Christians and Muslims from Eritrea and Sudan.
The government has already coerced more than a third of the African refugee community in Israel, over 20,000 souls, to return to Africa. Israeli journalists have revealed in recent months that the government’s promises to secure status for them in Rwanda or Uganda were only a ruse, devised to deport them back into a stateless existence– with their ostensible acquiescence.
To be fair, racist comments from state-paid rabbis aren’t exactly a rarity in Israel. Israel’s other chief rabbi, Yisrael Lau, used the N-word to describe Black athletes on his very first day in office in July 2013.
But another anti-African comment made last week, by Israel’s most powerful politician, was almost certainly timed to coincide with the government’s efforts to ethnically cleanse the country of the refugees.
On March 19, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a public speech that the arrival of non-Jewish African refugees was “much worse” for Israel than “severe attacks by Sinai terrorists”.
Netanyahu’s comments come as citizens across the country have been publicly expressing reservations to his expulsion plan. Since the start of the calendar year, Israelis from all walks of life have registered their adamant opposition to the planned deportations, scheduled to begin on April 1: doctors and artists, professors and pilots, students and survivors of the Holocaust. On Saturday night, a pro-refugee protest in Tel Aviv drew over 20,000 thousand people opposed to the expulsion.
But Netanyahu need not worry about amassing support for the deportation plan. True, a recent poll proved that the majority of the Israelis that live in proximity to the African refugees – in the Greater Tel Aviv area generally, and in the slums of South Tel Aviv specifically – oppose the expulsions. But outside of that liberal bubble, Netanyahu has easily secured support for his plan. Sign up for Al Jazeera
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