Exposed: Years-long effort to blame Israel for U.S. police shootings of blacks
A group calling itself Atlanta is Ready (#ATLisREADY), aligned with the Black Lives Matter movement, recently issued a set of demands to the Mayor of Atlanta, including:Atlanta mayor shuts down Israel boycotters
We demand a termination to APD’s involvement in the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) program, that trains our officers in Apartheid IsraelThe Mayor rejected the demand, finding that counter-terrorism training benefits the Atlanta Police Department’s ability to protect Americans:
You could chalk this incident up to just some isolated ploy by local activists, but that would be a mistake.
Rather, there has been a multi-year effort by left-wing and Islamist anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and openly anti-Semitic activists to hijack racial tensions in the United States and redirect that anger towards Israel.
That effort has been on overdrive since the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson and is accomplished through a combination of false and misleading statements regarding the militarization of domestic U.S. police departments and U.S. police training in Israel.
The intellectual rubric is “intersectionality,” by which anti-Israel activists try to forge links with minority (particularly black) activists by holding out Israel as the key link to oppression around the globe.
Sometimes the results are truly twisted, such as at Columbia University, How student activists turned anti-rape group into an anti-Israel group.
Responding at a press conference to a journalist who asked why he rejected the list of demands, Reed said bluntly:
"There was a demand that I stop allowing the Atlanta Police Department to train with the Israeli police department.
"I'm not going to do that; I happen to believe that the Israeli police department has some of the best counterterrorism techniques in the world, and it benefits our police department from that longstanding relationship."
Leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement met with Mayor Reed for two hours on Sunday.
The city has seen a number of protests over the killings of black Americans by police in the US, though the Atlanta rallies have been largely peaceful.
Barry Shaw: Fighting anti-Israel hate
There is room for stating Israel’s historic and legal rights to a Jewish homeland in a reasonable manner, but this does not seem to be making much progress in projecting Israel as a normal country with the same system and values of regular democratic countries.
Indeed, it is these democratic countries that outrageous demonstrations based on lies and intimidation are being allowed to be perpetrated with increasingly hostile actions against Israel.
The reason we are not making headway is because we have considered it impolite to be as rude and forceful in our arguments as our detractors are. We don’t want to appear as aggressive as the intimidators that trash us 24/7. And so we lose the fight for the broad middle ground by conceding without a fight or, even worse, by adopting parts of our enemy’s narrative just to appear reasonable.
It’s time for a change.
The streets, the campuses and the media have become the battlegrounds that are under the control of the radical anti-Israel voice posing as human rights activists on behalf of the Palestinian people. This high moral tone perfumes the stench of the lies and hypocrisy of their tainted message. There real intent, admitted in rare moments of honesty, is to see an end to Israel and they justify this aim by drowning out the Israeli voice under a choking tsunami of disproportionate accusations and imagery.
It’s time to take to the streets and the campuses by adopting the same tactics the anti-Israel provocateurs are using so successfully. It’s working for them. It will work for us.
Enough already! The soft reasoning approach is losing us the ability to state our case against their shrill hatred that closes down our message.