The glib comparisons between US racism and Israel (Daled Amos)

by Daled Amos

The tragic death of George Floyd at the hands of police has triggered an ongoing outcry across the country. Anger has generated protests from coast to coast. These started off as peaceful protests and many of those protests continue to be organized as peaceful protests. But many have turned violent. And others have been violent from the start. For its part, the media has made a point of emphasizing that these are protests as opposed to riots -- and 'peaceful' protests at that. For example, early on, a reporter from MSNBC was determined to convince viewers that the protesters were "not generally speaking unruly" -- while a building was in flames behind him.

The New York Times just cannot seem to help itself either. It is determined to call them protesters instead of rioters -- and no burning neighborhoods or smashed shop windows are going to get them to say otherwise.

For a week, cities across America have been theaters of dissent. The protesters are in the torched neighborhoods of Minneapolis. They are banging the barricades outside the White House, surging through New York’s Union Square, smashing shop windows in Beverly Hills.

The people giving voice to their anger are individual pieces of a movement, like drops of water to a wave. Their strength is in cohesiveness. Yet they are strangers, divided by geography, age, color and experience. [emphasis added]

There is an agenda, of course. The politicians want to play down the violence, because their failure to control the situation makes them look bad. As for the media, they see the 'protests' as a cause to be promoted, not as a news event to report. And if they can play up police's frustrated reactions while playing down the mob violence and then blame it all on Trump -- so much the better. Matters have come to the point that some want to control the narrative by controlling the language that is being used:

This is reminiscent of the ongoing attempt of the media to frame the Gaza riots -- and the attempts to infiltrate into Israel -- as 'peaceful protests'.

But there is more than just a passing similarity in the narratives the media is trying to pass off on its readers. There are some who are very determined that people should draw a connection between the riots in the US and Israel. The US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR) claims that programs that send police from the US to be trained in Israeli techniques in law enforcement are the direct cause of the death of George Floyd in general, and police abuse in general. Former Israeli politician and author Dr. Einat Wilf is among those who address the issue, which assumes there is no other source or history of police brutality in the US (let alone in other countries)

The Guardian tries to draw a comparison between the police killing of George Floyd and the death of Iyad Halak who was shot and killed by Israeli police who apparently mistook his cellphone for a gun. Both policemen were questioned and one was put under house arrest. In reaction to the effort to compare the two incidents as examples of deliberate neglect, CAMERA UK notes:

Though Palestinian Arabs were, from the earliest Jewish return to the land in the 19th century, subjected to bad decisions by their leaders, who rejected any Jewish presence in the land, many if not most are willing participants in the decades of war, terror, incitement, antisemitism, and rejectionism that’s driven the conflict. The conflict in general, and the occupation of disputed land in particular, isn’t fueled by race, but by the failure of two people to reach a political agreement on how to share the land. The black civil rights movement in the US was overwhelmingly non-violent, and based, to this day, on co-existence and classical liberal principles of freedom and equality expressed in the US Constitution. Martin Luther King often characterised his movement as one dedicated, by peaceful means only, to encouraging the country to fulfill the moral and political creed of the founders.

Not surprisingly, the advocacy group J Street has also made an effort to make hay out of this situation:

Gilead Ini, a senior research analyst for CAMERA, responds:

Again, the underlying point is the distinction between Blacks and their history in the US in contrast to the Arabs in Israel. There is a world of difference both in terms of their situations among the larger population and in how they deal with it. But none of that matters to those who want to exploit the tragic killing of George Floyd and are determined to never let a crisis go to waste.