The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) just approved a request by Airobotics, an Israeli government-funded company,¹ to fly “autonomous” drones over U.S. neighborhoods.²We don’t want unaccountable, autonomous “crime-fighting” drones snooping on us, filling our skies, and making life-or-death decisions.Tell the FAA: We need safety where we live, not spy drones funded by apartheid Israel.
Airobotics is not funded by the Israeli government. It received a specific grant at the end of August of $540,000 from the Israel Innovation Authority, which is funded by but independent of the Israeli government. The grant has nothing to do with the drone that the FAA approved. The Muslim group is stretching to find any connection, no matter how tenuous, to associate Israel with a myth of drones meant to spy on Muslims and people of color in cities.
But what does Airobotics' Israel connections have to do with what the drone does? The email pretends that it is trying to protect civil rights of people of color who they imagine will be surveilled disproportionately by these autonomous drones - but if that was really MPower Change's concern, what difference does it make whether they were manufactured or even funded by Israel? It is up to the people who actually purchase and deploy the drones to determine how they will be used, whether for good or evil purposes. The source has nothing to do with it.
This is hatemongering, not a concern for human rights. And the implication that a drone company is especially pernicious because it is Israeli is simple bigotry.
Notably, while the email mentions Israel eight times to whip up their subscribers into a frenzy, their auto-email to the FAA doesn't mention Israel once. Telling the FAA not to approve a drone because it is Israeli would be obvious bigotry. The advocacy group only tells that to fellow Muslims. MPower Change knows that Israel has nothing to do with the issue, but they also know that their email list is filled with people who hate Israel and Jews - and they want to leverage that hate to get them to take action (and raise their own profile.)
This email shows that the word "Israel" is now a dog-whistle for modern antisemites. They use "Israel" the way "Jew" used to be used, as a means to make people angry.
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