The Function of Police in Modern Society: Peace or Control?

A good read on creation of modern police force. Before the creation of police forces, & their resultant brutality, societies used to take care of miscreants in their midst through a mix of force & rehabilitation. Then came the modern police force, which was created by elites to control the poor masses of the society. I will extend it even further & say that then those elites started to control the government to control the masses, too, & hence, laws are made & enforced in today's society, all over the world, to effectively control the poor public.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BL-Hn_XjlS0

JAISAL NOOR, TRNN PRODUCER: The ongoing debate and protest around police brutality and how best to hold law enforcement accountable generally have one underlying assumption: the police’s role is to serve and protect the population. Police reform advocates are demanding reviewing police practices and increasing accountability through body cameras or civilian review boards with teeth.

A lot of people have told us in Baltimore and around the country that they need police, because the same people that are being affected by police brutality also live in high-crime areas, where policies have created a cycle of violence and the war on drugs is raging, there’s mass incarceration. And these areas are dangerous. People are driven to violence and desperation. And they need police to protect themselves. How do you respond to those arguments? And why do you think it’s important to bring up the history of police when having these discussions today?

SAMUEL MITRANI, ASSOC. PROF. HISTORY, COLLEGE OF DUPAGE: Well, I don’t think that people are wrong to say that we need police. We live in a very violent society with a lot of poverty, with increasing inequality, and all the problems that the society creates lead to more and more violence, the people who are ground up by the system. So I can totally understand people’s desire to be protected from those problems.

But I think the problem is the way that the police system that exists in this country was created isn’t actually to solve those problems. And I think the reason people say they need police is because that’s the only thing we can conceive of, it’s the only answer we’re given to the problems of crime, of violence, and really, I think, ultimately of poverty. But I don’t think the police are a very good solution to those problems. I think we really need to think about other kinds of systems. And I don’t think you could have a society like ours that grinds up so many people and that doesn’t defend itself with something like the police. But I think we need to understand where they come from.

NOOR: And so talk about where they come from, because I think a lot of people will be surprised to learn that the modern police force is only about 150 years old. There was no police force as we know it until the middle of the 19th century. Talk about where they came from and why they were instituted. And also I think people will be interested to know what form of police and law enforcement existed before the modern police force.

MITRANI: Well, I think there’s two different systems, if you’re talking about the United States, that existed in the 19th century. One was a system in the South which was really designed to control slaves, and it came out of slave patrols. In the North, in cities, you got police as a wage labor economy developed.

So I actually want to start by talking about the system that existed before, which is more or less a system of elected officials responsible for enforcing order. But they didn’t have a lot of separation from the population. So you’d have a constable elected in a small town, but that person would make their living by having their own farm. And they’d be called on when necessary. They could raise a posse. But the whole tradition of having a posse was a tradition of having the population itself be organized to deal with a specific, immediate problem–there’s a murderer loose, you know who did it, you have to catch the person.

That’s very, very different from the system we have now, with a military force of people whose professional training makes them separated from the population. They wear uniforms. They are full-time police officers. That’s something which really emerged as you got huge numbers of people in big cities, like New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, starting in the 1820s, ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, who we re no longer linked to the elite.

At an earlier time in the cities, you’d have a whole idea that people could move up. You started off as an apprentice. You could become an artisan. There was a much smaller group of people who were totally separated from that path and the people who were separated from that path, but there was some idea of controlling, didn’t live that far from other people, who were much more embedded in the society. But by the 1850s especially, you got more and more people who really had very little chance of moving up, who were going to be workers their whole lives. And this is especially true of immigrants coming from Ireland, coming from Germany, coming from other parts of Europe at that time in the northern cities.

And so people who were business people, wealthy people, were really scared–oh, man, in this city, there’s a whole huge number of people over there. We don’t know what they’re doing. They’re totally out of our control. They don’t necessarily like what’s going on, because they’re paying them extremely low wages. Many of them are forced into prostitution. So in that situation, elites develop the idea of a police force to put some control on those people.
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Definitely true. And also there’s plenty of racism against free people of color in the North during this time period, who had a better situation than slaves, but it’s not like they were treated equally to the white population, or even to the immigrants at that time. But in the cities like Chicago, their numbers are very small at the time period I’m talking about.

NOOR: And so talk about what was happening. Talk about the social turmoil, especially in the later half of the 19th century, in big cities like Chicago. And even in Baltimore, we had huge strikes here as well, and in New York, of course. So talk about what the turmoil revolved around and why the elites felt so threatened during this time period.

MITRANI: Well, there’s a basic truth, which is nobody really likes having a job. I mean, basically, having a job kind of sucks if what you’re going to do all day every day is go to work for somebody who pays you just enough to survive. You have no chance of owning your own business, which increasingly became true at all these cities–in Baltimore, for sure.

So people resented that, and they organized. And they had a preconceived idea that they were citizens of this republic, especially the white people who had been raised this idea, and they had the idea that they had the right to some better situation.

So coming out of the Civil War you had big organizing campaigns, big strikes, big conflicts over this new wage labor economy. In 1867 in Chicago there’s a general straight strike for the eight-hour day. Then, in 1877, there was a huge strike, which started on the railroads, and it reached big proportions in a bunch of cities across the country.

Actually, Baltimore is one of the cities where it get the most violent. And Baltimore at that time basically didn’t really have a modern police force. And so the strikers were put down with the National Guard. The National Guard came into Baltimore, shot down quite a few people ... . Chicago already had a police force that had been created in the few decades before, with a lot of violence put down those strikes. And after that, the business people who had been suffering from the strikes, who’d been struck, they raised from their own pockets enormous sums of money. In Chicago they bought the police Gatling guns, they bought them artillery pieces, they bought them muskets in order to make sure the population could be kept under control, because they were really scared.
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Now, what’s interesting is, ... , because as this wage labor economy was developing, that was also the time when you had a big increase in crime and you had a big increase in the numbers of people who were more or less pushed out of the system, who had no easy place, no easy way to make a living. So you had more petty crime, you had more prostitution, you had more street crime of all kinds in the late 19th century then you had in the first half of the 19th century in all these big urban cities. And so people also felt the need for some protection from this kind of disorder at that moment.

So, in Chicago, at least in the 1880s, some liberal politicians made an attempt to make the police more serve the population a little bit, reestablish some legitimacy. They did this by providing some services, like taking people to the hospital. They really publicized the things they did that were needed. And they especially developed this new ideology of order, which said what everybody says today: we need the police. They’re the thin blue line protecting civilization from anarchy. And we can’t possibly live without them; otherwise, things will go out of control. And this is something that got reinforced, especially after this Haymarket bombing in 1886, when there was another huge strike wave across the country and in Chicago. There was a bomb that went off that killed seven police officers. The aftermath of that: this idea of the police as the defenders of order and civilization against these crazy anarchists who are class conscious became implanted in a lot of the population’s mind. But there were still lots of people who resisted that, who organized in unions, who organized to resist police brutality (they didn’t use the term then, but that’s what they were resisting), and these people pushed the police back time and again.
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I think it’s a deep problem that there’s no easy solution to. We have a society that rests on violence in 100 different ways, starting with the military overseas with all the people in prisons. And how to keep this huge, violent system in place? Well, you have thousands and thousands of men with guns who are armed and trained to do so. But you also have to make them legitimate.

NOOR: And so, tying this back to today, there’s a lot of well-intentioned, serious activists around this country that want to live in a more peaceful society, and they want police to be held accountable. What lessons of the past do they need to understand to move the conversation forward? ‘Cause right now we’re stuck in a system where people are trying to, some would argue, put Band-Aids over a gaping hole that is the issues we have with law enforcement today, the killing of unarmed black men around this country and the numerous cases of brutality that are ongoing.

MITRANI: ... I think the problem is we live in this kind of society.

I think really that the needs of working-class people and of poor people need to be put first. This country has plenty of money that people shouldn’t be pushed on the streets, which need to have afterschool programs and very fully funded public schools all over the country that can get kids off the streets and give them a decent job. I think it, actually, everybody in the country should have the right to a job that provides enough money that you can live a decent life. This country is perfectly rich enough to have that.

That’s not on the table right now, unfortunately, but if you really want to talk about solving the problem of crime, you’ve got to address the problems that create crime. And I don’t think that the police do that. The police are a system that has violence to deal with the immediate problem created by a criminal right now in front of you.

So what I would say for activists is to push for all these issues and see how they’re related. I think that the more that the needs of working-class people, the needs of ordinary people can be pushed and put first, the more that we can demand the things that we actually need and not accept that the needs of business people and of bankers should come first, the more we have a chance of dealing with the problems in front of us. But that’s not so easy to do.

NOOR: ... I wanted to end with bringing up two points. One is the racial, the historical racial animosity law enforcement has to people of color, especially African-American people. And there were moments where police acted in solidarity with striking workers and the working class, and those police officers were either fired or removed from the police force in other ways. Can you briefly touch upon both those points?

MITRANI: Those are two very big points. The first point, I think, is central to the problem today. I think we had a situation where the police that I first started talking about, that developed in the 19th century, really developed in reaction to the development of a wage-labor economy with immigrant workers. But in the 20th century in the North–in the South the story is somewhat different–really the key story is a great migration of black people into the northern cities to form a key section of the American working class, and then to be the people who are the last hired, the first fired, who face all the problems created by the society first of all. And so the police have been used to keep that population in line, really since the 20 century. And you’ve seen this time and again with the rights in Chicago in 1919 through the ’50s, through the era of the black movement in the ’60s and ’70s, when in Chicago–I’m sure people know about the police murder of Fred Hampton, led by the state’s attorney, to really try to put a lid on that movement. I think the current system of mass incarceration is in part a reaction to that movement and an attempt to get young black people, especially young black men, off the streets. So I think that’s absolutely central to any discussion of this.
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And on the one hand, police are workers. They’re hired to do a job. And that creates all kinds of problems for the police themselves, the same kinds of problems that other workers can face. They can face very difficult working conditions, etc. But the nature of their job kind counterposes them to the population every single day. And I think many police officers start a few people through a very negative, almost cynical lens. I don’t think most police officers don the uniform thinking, what I’m going to go do is brutalize people. No. But what you’re forced to do every day kind of counterposes you to the population. And I think in that context it’s too much to expect very many police officers to side with the population. It would take a real act of bravery for a police officer to do so, and they would face some real repercussions, although it’s happened before. The Afro-American Patrolmen’s League in Chicago is an example of that, when you had a big mass movement and the man named Renault Robinson challenged a lot of what was going on with police brutality in Chicago. I know this story in Baltimore less. But it’s possible. But I don’t think we can ... expect it to be the rule.

Saudis appear to be using Canadian-made combat vehicles against Yemeni rebels

Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, is famous around the world for his humanity-loving & peace-loving stature & acts. But those are only words. When it comes to words, then this is Canada for you; selling weapons to those countries, which are proven to be habitual human-rights abusers. After all, what would you expect from selling $15 billions worth of weapons & Light-Armoured Vehicles (LAVs) to Saudi Arabia; that they use those vehicles to help Syrians or Iraqis or Yemenis?

Saudi Arabia gets correctly blamed for its bombing of Yemeni civilians but what about the "drug-dealer" who provided those "drugs" to the "drug-addict" in the first place? Canada & other G7 countries are developing or substantially supporting their economies through sales of weapons to the world, & especially to those countries, which are embroiled in wars in hot zones. But they don't get blamed for selling arms & weapons; users of those weapons get blamed for using those weapons.

This is the media for you. Canadian media & social media shows the face of Liberals & Trudeau to the world that shows how peace-loving & humanitarian Canadian government is, & they don't show how that same government is causing so much pain in the world, too.

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https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/saudi-arms-used-against-yemeni-rebels-seem-to-match-canadian-lavs/article28846678/

Canadian-made armoured vehicles appear to be embroiled in Saudi Arabia's war against Yemeni-based Houthi rebels – caught up in cross-border hostilities that critics say should force Ottawa to reconsider a $15-billion deal to sell Riyadh more of these weapons.

The Saudi-led coalition fighting the Houthis – who are aligned with Iran – has already been accused by a United Nations panel of major human-rights violations for what its report called "widespread and systematic" air-strike attacks on civilian targets. Along the Saudi-Yemen border, constant skirmishes pit Houthi fighters against Saudi ground forces such as the Saudi Arabian National Guard.

The Saudi Arabian National Guard, a buyer of many Canadian-made light armoured vehicles (LAVs) in the past decade, has published photos on its official Twitter account showing how in late 2015 it moved columns of combat vehicles to Najran, a southwestern Saudi town near the border with Yemen that is in the thick of the conflict.

A significant number of vehicles in the photos have the triangular front corners, the eight wheels and the headlamps fixed above these triangles that are familiar features in earlier LAV models made in Canada.

Neither the Liberal government nor LAV-maker General Dynamics Land Systems in London, Ont., would confirm these are Canadian machines.

But a retired Canadian general consulted by The Globe and Mail, who spoke on condition of anonymity, identified the LAVs being transported to Najran as fighting vehicles made by General Dynamics Land Systems. Stephen Priestley, a researcher with the Canadian American Strategic Review, a think tank that tracks defence spending, also identified the LAVs as Canadian-made.

Critics say having Canadian-made arms enmeshed in a conflict that has claimed more than 2,800 civilian lives should prompt Ottawa to rethink the recent $15-billion deal to sell hundreds or thousands more to the Saudis.

Canada's export control rules for weapons shipments are supposed to require Ottawa to restrict arms exports to countries such as Saudi Arabia, that have "poor human-rights records." Saudi Arabia, regularly ranked among the "worst of the worst" on human rights by Freedom House, qualifies for special scrutiny.

The same federal weapons export controls also say Canada should "closely control," or be very discriminating, about shipments to countries "that are involved in or under imminent threat of hostilities."

Foreign Affairs ... department refused comment Monday when pressed on whether it is concerned about the armoured vehicle shipments, saying it's bound to secrecy on anything to do with arms sales to the Saudis.

"In regards to your request, please see our response: For reasons of commercial confidentiality, specific contractual details cannot be shared," Tania Assaly, a spokeswoman for Global Affairs said in a prepared statement.

The Trudeau Liberals keep trying to dissociate themselves from the increasingly controversial deal. Last week, Mr. Dion argued his government merely inherited the contract and that cancelling it would cost taxpayers huge penalties. Pressed on this, Mr. Dion's department refused to provide details to back up the Foreign Minister's assertion, citing the need to keep the commercial pact with Riyadh secret.

General Dynamics Land Systems Canada of London, Ont., which employs about 2,100 people, did not respond to a request for comment about whether it is concerned about the LAVs caught up in the Saudi-Yemen conflict.

Ken Epps with the anti-war group Project Ploughshares, which tracks arms sales, said the Liberal government should rethink the latest $15-billion contract with Saudi Arabia. Ottawa, not General Dynamics Land Systems, is the prime contractor in this deal, which was also brokered by the federal government.

The Trudeau government still has power over the deal. It can suspend exports of these combat vehicles.

"Given a UN report accused the Saudis of war crimes because of their bombing of civilians, then clearly our concern must be that since they are involved in war crimes there, it should give the Canadian government additional pause in shipping these kind of weapons to them," Mr. Epps said.

The $15-billion Saudi LAV deal will provide Riyadh with weaponized armoured vehicles in what is the largest manufacturing export contract in Canadian history – but one that doesn't garner significant public support. A recent Nanos Research poll found nearly six out of 10 Canadians surveyed feel it is more important to ensure arms exports go only to countries "that respect human rights" than it is to sustain some 3,000 jobs by selling combat vehicles to Saudi Arabia.

A new report says Saudi Arabia was the second-largest arms importer in the world between 2011 and 2015 after India as Mideast countries upped weapons purchases significantly. Shipments to Saudi Arabia rose 275% in those years, by value, compared with the earlier 2006-10 period, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute said.

At least one wartime footage video posted on YouTube on the Houthi-Saudi conflict also shows what appears to be a disabled Canadian-made LAV, presumably abandoned by Saudi troops as their enemies approached.

Mr. Priestley said this December, 2015, video, purported to be shot near the southern Saudi town of Al Raboah, shows a National Guard LAV-AG model, made in London, Ont., being looted by combatants.

Identity and Collective Denial - Lia Tarachansky on Reality Asserts Itself (1/3)

Great interview. This is only the first part of a three-part interview. There are Jews in the world, as you may know already, who are not Zionist & actively reject Israel's claim, & the resultant brutality & occupation, of Palestine. 

I loved the last part of the interview where it shows that the only way a human being discards or reduces the humanity of another human being is through ignoring that there IS that another person who is like me. This ignorance can happen at international level (America, Saudi Arabia, Israel, India, Russia etc.) & it always happens wartime, e.g. the only way Saudis can bomb Yemenis & keep blockade on, is by thinking of Yemenis as something not human, or American soldiers bombing & firing at Iraqis, all the while laughing & enjoying, can only happen when those soldiers think of those Iraqis as not being living & breathing humans. This attitude of ignorance also takes place domestically when rich elites keep hoarding money & resources while their compatriots are dying of hunger, thirst, unavailability of medical facilities, no education etc., & this also takes place at individual level where a husband treats badly his wife because he thinks she is not a human but something less than a human.

We need to develop empathy & conscience to think & see as the other person as a human being with the similar needs & wants as ourselves. A Palestinian or Kashmiri or Chechen or a Yemeni or an Afghani needs & wants as an Israeli or an Indian or a Russia or a Saudi or an American; food, water, freedom, education, medical facilities, job, safety for his family & future etc.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWbvJ0DfJSM

LIA TARACHANSKY, ISRAEL-PALESTINE CORRESPONDENT, TRNN: I was born in the Soviet Union, in the former Soviet Union, in Kiev. And then, when I was six, we moved to Israel. We moved to the heart of the West Bank, into a settlement called Ariel, the same year that the Oslo Accords were signed. So, while the global community was getting involved in our conflict and trying to divide the two halves of the land into two states, we moved into the middle of what would become the Palestinian state, into a settlement that used the guise of all of these negotiations to double the numbers and then triple the numbers.

And that’s really the story of the failed peace process. While America was busy shuffling envoys back and forth between Ramallah, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv, we were growing as a settlement movement, getting more and more empowered by the total impunity.
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And the reason why we moved there is because my mother wanted to contribute back to Zionism, because my family is from the Soviet Union. As Jews, we’ve encountered a lot of anti-Semitism. Also, members of our family died in gulags. Most of the family was killed in the Holocaust in World War II fighting the Nazis. So all of this history is very prominent in our identity. And so we moved to Israel. And after 31 years of Soviet anti-Semitism, my mother is basically being told, it’s your turn to serve Zionism, to serve the Jewish national homeland. And so she says, what can I do? The settlements? Let’s do it. So we move to the settlements. And that’s where I grew up ...

... I was the only Jew in my kindergarten in the Soviet Union. That’s what to me is a Jew is my kindergarten teacher hated Jews. She made sure everybody knew that I was the Jew. And as the only Jew–and in Russia, it’s a visible minority. So, visibly, looking at me, they would know I’m not a Russian, I’m a Jew. ... And in Israel-Palestine, ... we are the powerful, but we identify ourselves as the not that, not the local.

And that’s particularly poignant when you look at the majority of Israelis, who are Mizrahi Jews, Mizrahi meaning Orientals. But Mizrahi Jews are basically Jews that came from Spain in 1492 and settled in North Africa, as well as Jews that have been living in the Middle East and in Yemen and in the Saudi Arabian Peninsula. And so, for them, they moved to Israel in the first years of the state. They come from the Arab world. They speak Arabic. A lot of their traditions are inspired by Arabic culture. And within a few years, they’re Ashkenized, they’re Europeanized. And their kids don’t speak Arabic, their grandkids don’t speak Arabic, they don’t identify as Arabs, and they identify very strongly with Israel. All of a sudden, the falafel becomes the Israeli food, you know, hummus becomes houmous.
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Yeah. That was amazing. But, I mean, I moved to Israel when I was six. I was more preoccupied with the fact that three months after we moved there, the first Gulf War started, and we spent the first months–my first memories of Israel are sitting under sirens in a gas mask waiting for Saddam to bomb us with gas. Like, these are the things I remember. I remember being–because in Israel, yes, I was now a Jew amongst Jews, but Israel is a very racist society. So, from being the stinking Jew in the Soviet Union, I became the stinking Russian in a Jewish state.

So these are my memories. I mean, as a child, you don’t have an analysis of your identity or of politics. So, for me, what I cared about is my relationship with people my age. And in Ariel, everybody was a Russian, or a lot of the people who lived there were Russians, so you immediately felt like you were part of something. Plus, being part of a closed, gated community in the middle of the Palestinian West Bank, it’s another layer of segregation and insularism. And being in a country that is a Jewish Europe style country in the middle of the Middle East, in the middle of Arab countries, is another layer of that. And so Israel is a bubble inside a bubble inside a bubble inside a bubble, and inside of all of that is the settlement right-wing movement.

And so those years in the settlements were the happiest years of my life, because I finally felt like I belonged to something, I was a part of something. And I never thought in bigger terms.

And, in fact, the first time I was ever called a settler, I was in my 20s. I was studying in university in Canada, and a Middle East correspondent called Jon Elmer came to speak on my campus, and I thought that he was very biased, and I was going to teach him what it’s all about, and asked him some kind of really ignorant question, and he just said, I’m so sick of you settlers coming to my talks and telling me I’m wrong. You go to Gaza. And I said to myself, what do you mean I’m a settler? I’m not a settler. And that’s when I started digging what does the settler mean.

I’ll tell you, one thing that is characteristic of ethnocracies, and particularly colonial ethnocracies that we see a lot in Israel, is a number of very strong contradictions. So Israeli identity is a mixture of the strong, the invincible, the strongest among the nations, we are the strongest army in the region and one of the strongest armies in the world, coupled with we are persecuted, we are hated, we are victims. Now, both of those things are true, and both of them work off of each other, and both of them are absolutely necessary for the ethnocratic project.

And what’s more important to me is not the colonialism that Israel perpetrates in the West Bank and in Gaza; what’s more important to me is the ethnocratic regime inside of Israel, because ethnocracies such as Israel, such as the former Balkan states, such as Sri Lanka and Macedonia used to be and South Africa used to be, are–this is the frontier of the global laboratory of how to deal with globalization. And this is why there is a rise of fascistic and extreme-right movements in the United States and in Europe and a lot of these Western places where they want globalized capital without globalized migration. And Israel is a laboratory for a lot of that, as well as weapons, but also a lot of those ideas. And that’s what I stay up at night worrying about.

And for that identity, for that national identity, you need a number of things. You need the justification for endless war. That’s where the victim identity comes from. You also need to inspire people. You need a story of success, of heroism. And this has been the story of Israeli military conquests throughout the last 67 years, to the point where if you ask an Israeli which war did Israel lose, they would say none. Maybe ’73, but none. No, we always win wars.

That’s complete bullshit. We have lost most of our wars, definitely in the last 20 years. We lost Lebanon I, we definitely lost Lebanon II, we lost the intifadas and these perpetual conflicts. Even this last summer attack–I was covering it for you, and I was out there on the ground every day covering what was happening all around us–Hamas didn’t just shock the Israeli military establishment in its ingenuous ways of combating this giant military machine with the tunnels, with the sneaking in through the sea, with rockets, with smuggling weapons from Libya after the 2011 civil war, and so on, and the number of things that they did that they pulled out of their hat of tricks that surprise us, but they forced us–and this nobody–nobody could have predicted this–they forced mighty Israeli into a negotiation with Hamas, a terrorist nothing group that was on its knees before the war started, was falling apart before the war started. And today, while everyone on the street was against Hamas before the war started, you won’t find a single person critical of Hamas. My point is we are perpetual war losers, and yet we have to perpetuate this identity that we are invincible.

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: It may be that–I mean, it depends what you consider winning, because it wasn’t clear the objective was to get rid of Hamas, ’cause I think Israel feared what the alternative would be. But in terms of the relationship of Israel and the Israeli state to the Palestinians, right now they’re winners. I mean, the occupation looks like it’s endless.

TARACHANSKY: It’s true. Let me explain what I mean by win and lose. As I’m sure you know, since World War II, we haven’t had many wars where you have a clear winner and a clear loser. And Israel is not fighting an army. And so there isn’t never going to be a checkmark–you won and you lost. We’re fighting a civilian, largely civilian population.

I’m talking about Israeli public identity, this point at which you can get to the Israeli public, average Israeli thinks, we won that war. And the average Israeli today thinks, we’ve lost the last 12 years of war. And that’s incredibly important, because, yes, on the ground we have the West Bank, we can bomb Syria if we want to, we can bomb Lebanon if we want to, we can do anything we want.
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... At this point, my intellectual identity was already very much questioning of the Zionist project. But to physically be there surrounded by these Palestinian villages is completely different than to understand something from watching the news and so on and so forth. And to physically be in that space and to realize that I had grown up here, I’d spent my happiest years here, and here comes “Allāhu Akbar”, and it’s the first time in my life that I’m hearing the sound that I had somehow–and the call to prayer happens five times a day. Israel is surrounded by villages whose names I didn’t even know, all around, each village, five times a day, the call to prayer, and I somehow didn’t even register hearing the sound. And when I turned around to point out to you what is a settlement and what’s a Palestinian village and what’s a settlement, what’s a Palestinian village, I was naming them to you, but in my mind I was thinking, I don’t even remember them being there.

You’re so busy constructing your identity, you’re not even paying attention to what’s right in front of you. And that is in essence the representation of collective denial. That is what Stanley Cohen, on whose work I did my documentary, exactly what he describes. What do two people looking at the same object, how can it be that they see two different things? And what do they do to that knowledge? And what does that knowledge do to them? For me, that changed my life, and I know that for the rest of my life I’m going to have to fight not just the Zionistic idea of Jewish exclusivity to the land, but I’m going to have to stand up against what’s going on in Israel-Palestine until there is justice for the rest of my life. And it doesn’t matter what I want to do with my life; it doesn’t matter what I want to do with my free time. This is my responsibility, just like it is the responsibility of every person in America to stop police brutality against the largely people of color minority. It is your responsibility. It’s not about right and wrong. You have to do this. You don’t have a choice.

And that’s what I realized in that moment is that implicated in my own guilt for having enjoyed colonialism on this land, this land that does not belong to just one group, it is now my responsibility to fight it forever. And this is the effect that this seeing and hearing for the first time had on me.

And I have to tell you the truth. Since have been the best years of my adult life, understanding that, having the clarity of thought to finally lay out not just the historical narrative, but also understand so many things that I was afraid to ask questions about, to finally look beyond my fear and go to the West Bank and have friends in Gaza and sit on the phone with them as they were being bombed by, supposedly, my army, and hear each other’s humanity, and have them tell me, Lia, I know this is not you, I know you’re in solidarity; I’m here with you, I’m sorry that there’s people sending rockets at you, it’s not my intention. My privilege to be able to see across these walls, it was a direct result of being able to have that moment.

And I wish for everyone in my country, I wish for all my people to have that moment, because it’s only once we look past these walls that we can see the humanity of the other and we can move out of this collective trauma.

Hector & the Search for Happiness, Quote 1

Similar to the advice Muslims have received in Islam that never compare your life with people who are above you (in social & wealth status) but always compare your life with people who are below you, so you may remain grateful to God (Allah).

We should never compare our life with other people, esp. wealthy people, because as soon as we start comparing our lives, we start losing our inner peace & gratitude, & become desperate to keep up with the joneses.

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US Intelligence Enables Israeli Attacks

This interview is from couple years back when Gaza was under attack by Israel. But, since, nothing has changed in conditions of Gaza, Israel or other stakeholders (US, Middle East countries etc.), this interview is still very much relevant today. This interview is interesting due to its discussion of 3 main topics which give Israel the legitimacy to build an open air prison (Gaza is essentially an open air prison) & then use it as its weapons testing facility (which Israel actually does, as discussed in another blog post earlier in 2017):

1. US sharing intelligence with Israel is nothing new. Israel is considered an staunch ally in the Middle East by US, & hence, it bends over backwards to accommodate any reasonable or unreasonable Israeli requests. US would even throw its own citizens under the bus, proverbially speaking, to furnish Israel's requests. US may not have enough money to help solve its own problems (homelessness, education, crime, unemployment etc.) but it has to give billions in financial aid to Israel every year, besides, military & intelligence sharing.

2. Arab dictators legitimizing Israel's occupation of Palestinian land is the worst form of crime against Muslims. Muslims fully expect to be railroaded by non-Muslims, but what can be said & felt when your own Muslim leaders, esp. those leaders who are called the "custodian of the 2 holy mosques" of Islam, make friends with Israel. Why? Because they operate per the idea that enemy of my enemy is my friend. Since. Iran is considered an enemy by both Israel & Saudi Arabia; that enmity of Iran made friends & allies of Israel with Saudi Arabia.

On top of that, since, Saudi Arabia is the leader of Sunni Arab world, other Middle Eastern / prominent members of the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) are also following the lead of Saudi Arabia; countries like Kuwait, UAE, Qatar etc.

So, Palestinians not only have Israeli, European, & North American Zionists & Evangelical Christians to deal with, they also have Muslim leaders from Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, & Kuwait etc. working against them & Iran.

Further to that, another tangential, but related, point, is that this alliance of Israel, US, & Saudi Arabia & its followers, show the American hypocrisy. The slogan of democracy is all well & good in theory, but in reality, as long as, American political & energy interests are secure, it doesn't matter to US & Western governments, what happens to human rights in Middle Eastern countries. As Glenn Greenwald says in the interview that the Western governments "... actually give the Saudis training and technology that bolster their surveillance, one of the most repressive regimes in the world, at the very same time that we pretend to be campaigning for democracy."

3. The role of media in US has become more of propagating what the government is saying. So, although, the Western governments talk about freedom of the press, the mainstream press has lost its way, & become the mouthpiece of their respective governments. The public has realized that & hence, a large majority disregard the media, & that's exactly, what Trump seized on, but he & his followers took the problem to the other extreme & label anything spewing out of Trump as facts & everything else as lies.

Western governments & press disregard media of countries they think are their enemies, for instance, North Korea, Russia, China etc. & bill the national media outlets of these countries as mere mouthpieces of their respective governments. But aren't the media of the Western governments doing the exact same thing for their own governments? For example, American news outlets like CNN, ABC, Fox, MSNBC etc. played a crucial role in drumming up the war rhetoric for Gulf War I, Gulf War II, Afghanistan, Iraq & Libya.

We can all blame the actions of the media losing its integrity due to their never-ending chase of the TV ratings & advertisement dollars but what's more troubling is the hypocrisy; bringing the perfect proverb to my mind that "kettle is calling the pot black."

The new administration of Mr. Trump is predictably doing what several other past administrations have tried to do, previously; broker a peace deal between Israel & Palestine, & finally bring the peace in the Middle East. However, the peace deal is like a corporate vision, which will never actually be attained & always remain an elusive dream, because the peace deals are not being negotiated with honesty. Hypocrisy & double agendas rule the day. Israel needs Gaza & West Bank to always show the world that they are in threat & is the victim (in addition to being those places as live testing places for Israel's billion-dollar arms industry). America needs Israel & repressive Middle Eastern regimes to control its own interests in Middle East. American media has also become the pawn of the government & the public is being fed the lies about Muslims, Islam, Israel, Palestine, & Arab countries to help manufacture domestic support for whatever American government actually wants to do in the Middle East.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMuxNOtNL9Q

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: So what do we know about this targeting? If I understand it correctly, the documents that Snowden released aren't about this particular attack or this specific attack on Gaza, but in the past there's evidence not only of intelligence sharing, but the word that leaked off the page to me when I was reading your piece was targeting. What do we know about that?

GLENN GREENWALD, AWARD-WINNING JOURNALIST, THE INTERCEPT: It's no secret that the U.S. is the key party enabling Israeli militarism and aggression. In general, it provides, obviously, huge amounts of cash to the Israelis, even in an ongoing attack, such as the one currently taking place in Gaza. The U.S. just in the last week has furnished arms and munitions and grenades to the Israelis that they're using in the attack.

So our piece focused on the role that the NSA and the intelligence apparatus that the United States has built plays in enabling the Israeli attack. And we revealed some documents showing that the relationship has grown substantially over the last decade between the NSA on the one hand and the Israeli counterpart, the SIGINT National Unit, on the other, in which the NSA provides the Israelis with all kinds of surveillance technology, training, but also lots of data that they collect in the course of doing surveillance that the Israelis then use to target people in Gaza, in the West Bank, and throughout the region, first for surveillance, but then, obviously, also for targeting with violence. And so the U.S. really is at the center of every form of Israeli aggression that takes place in that region.

JAY: Now, we're led to believe that the American satellites have the capability of actually seeing faces on streets. I mean, one, do we know whether that's true? And two, if that level of technology is being transferred, that would mean active, real-time involvement of the U.S. intelligence or U.S. army in Israeli warfare.

GREENWALD: The Americans share the vast bulk of their surveillance technology and surveillance activities in the region with the Israelis. It's a very close cooperative sharing arrangement.

I don't think there's any question that the Israelis are being reckless and more or less indiscriminate in the violence they're wreaking on Gaza. I mean, there are Israeli generals who have inadvertently acknowledged, essentially, that they are attacking heavily civilian areas and with their knowledge that lots of civilians are going to be killed. They have targeted UN schools that they knew and that coordinates for which had been provided to them many, many times. And so I don't think there's a lot of efforts being undertaken by the Israelis to be very precise or careful in the kinds of people that they're killing.
...

... I think they're interested in knowing the whereabouts of people who are of greatest interest to them. And certainly the sharing arrangement with the U.S. helps them to know where people are, and it helps them to geo-locate them. ... .

... I think the important point is this is not a careful and precise operation, where they're targeting people very carefully and then killing only them. They're engaged in the destruction of entire blocks, blowing up huge apartment buildings and homes. And that's why the death toll of innocent people has been so high.

JAY: Is there any limits on what type of technology the United States gives to Israel that you're aware of? Are they getting the same kind of technology that the American Armed Forces has itself?

GREENWALD: A lot of it, yeah. ... there was an agreement whereby the NSA agreed to provide raw communication, even of U.S. citizens, to the Israelis without first even minimizing--meaning safeguarding the identity of the American citizens to whom that communication pertained. ... it isn't that the NSA just wholesale hands over everything to Israel. But in some cases the NSA cooperates more aggressively with the Israelis than they do even with their closest surveillance partners in the U.K., Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. ... it's just reflective of this overall policy that the U.S. government has to be incredibly loyal to the Israelis when it comes to providing pretty much anything the Israelis want.
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JAY: ... the political side of the American administration's essentially driven by domestic politics. But ... this is more about big money than it is about Jewish voters.

GREENWALD: ... what's interesting is there's this sort of taboo on how you're supposed to talk about the role that domestic politics plays in our policy toward Israel, because it touches on longstanding anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish money controlling foreign policy for the benefit of Israel and at the expense of the United States or other countries. But if you look at what political consultants and the like say when they're speaking candidly, ... that's more or less what they say. Hank Sheinkopf is one of the most sort of savvy and experienced political operatives. He was a high-level aid to the Clintons. He helped run Hillary Clinton's Senate campaigns in New York. And there's this fascinating New York Sun article from 2007 that talks about how all of the Democratic presidential candidates, like John Edwards and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and the like, are parading before AIPAC and speaking very, very aggressively and militaristically about Iran. And they asked Hank Sheinkopf why that is. And he said, well, it's very simple to understand: it's because Jewish voters are essentially the ATM of American politics--in New York.

But I think it's not just Jewish voters. I think it's really important to understand that one of the biggest factions supporting Israel, probably in a more aggressive way than a lot of Jewish voters, are evangelicals, who for religious reasons believe that it's really crucial that Israel occupy not only Israel but sort of what they view as greater Israel, which includes the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, because they believe God wanted Israel to possess that land and that a unified Israel, as they see it, is necessary for the return of Jesus and for the rapture. And so you have not just Jewish voters, but evangelical Christians who are very fervent in their demands that the U.S. government support Israel, even at the expense of American interest. And that definitely is a big part of the domestic pressures.

JAY: ... the other issue is do you not think that much of the foreign-policy elite, professional and political, share this vision of Israel as this necessary outpost for America in a sea of oil with angry Arabs that don't like Americans very much, so it's not just about the potential money in American elections, it's also a convergence of interest and seeing that Israel, for better or worse, is absolutely essential to American hegemony in the Middle East?

GREENWALD: Yeah, I think it's an important point. First of all, ... I don't think that the issue with Israel is different in terms of domestic politics than pretty much every other issue, which is that money dominates, and there's much more money on the side of pro-Israel or support for Israel than there is, say, support for the Palestinians, which is why it's so lopsided. ... .

But the point you make is an important one, which is sometimes it gets depicted that Israel is this kind of domineering force that kind of commandeers American politics for its own interest at the expense of the United States. I think you're right, though-- it's much more of a two-way street than that. The Americans definitely look at Israel as an important weapon that they use to advance their interests in the Middle East, just like they look at support for the dictatorial regimes that are their allies as well, in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Jordan, Bahrain. You know, these are just ways that the United States kind of dominates that region in order to secure their energy and oil interests. And Israel is an important weapon in the eyes of a lot of American policymakers. It's not just that they're forced to do so because of domestic political constraints.

JAY: And this relationship with the Saudis is kind of an interesting piece of this puzzle, because ... the Saudis are also in on this intelligence sharing. So you have both Israel and Saudi Arabia within the American intelligence confidence circle. Supposedly, the Saudis are so in support of the Palestinians. But sort of at a deeper level, you almost have a kind of quasi-alliance between the Saudis and the Israelis to help manage the region under this American intelligence and military umbrella.

GREENWALD: Oh, there's definitely a de facto alliance, or at least a coalition, between the U.S., the Saudis, and Israel. Especially since the Saudis began viewing Iran as their great rival in the region, they viewed working cooperatively with the Israelis as something that was very much in their interest. And, of course, they made kind of meaningless pronouncements in support of the Palestinians because they need to do so for political consumption. I mean, even the Saudi tyrants care a little bit about the public not viewing them as partners of the Israelis.

But that is one of the most undercovered and underexamined issues in U.S. foreign policy is the unbelievably close relationship between the U.S. and the Saudis, and now increasingly the Israelis. I mean, we did do an article a week ago publishing the documents showing very close intelligence sharing between the Saudis and the Americans. We actually give the Saudis training and technology that bolster their surveillance, one of the most repressive regimes in the world, at the very same time that we pretend to be campaigning for democracy.

But the thing that's even more amazing about that is we've had this 12 year period of running around trying to pin the blame of 9/11 on all sorts of parties, from Saddam Hussein to Iran to whoever the sort of enemy du jour is, and the Taliban in Afghanistan, and yet the country that probably bears most of the blame, if anyone does, is Saudi Arabia. 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi. You have people in the Saudi government who at the very least were close to some of the people who were helping to plan the 9/11 attack, probably financing the people who were responsible. And yet they become our closest allies. It's just one of those ironies that underscores how propagandistic the war on terror has become.

JAY: ... how much is mainstream media paying attention to the some of the kind of stuff you're breaking?

GREENWALD: I mean, I think they're paying attention in several different respects. I mean, the stories that we've broken, the Snowden revelations in general, have made a big impact on the media landscape. I think part of that is just the drama of it all, the sort of spycraft, the drama about where Snowden can go or where he would get asylum, all of that.
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... I think that the stories themselves get some media attention. But I do think that some get more attention than others based upon not what's actually newsworthy, but based upon the kinds of things the American media likes to systematically ignore.
...

And I think some of the revelations that we published about spying with Saudi Arabia, about spying with Israel, have been more or less ignored by the American media for the same reason, that it's just so contrary to the narrative that we like to sustain about what the role of the U.S. government in the world is, and any kind of attention to that sort of stuff would require a whole lot of digging and further investigation that American media outlets in general like to avoid because of how uncomfortable it makes people.
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... They like to propagate that narrative and avoid things that call any of it into question. And I think that's actually one of the reasons why people have lost faith in established media outlets is because it doesn't really seem to serve any real purpose if all they're doing is bolstering and propagating what the government is saying instead of questioning and investigating it.