Aletho News

Director of Jerusalem Media Center Detained by Israeli Troops

By Saed Bannoura – IMEMC News – April 12, 2011

After filming an Israeli jeep blocking traffic and driving through pedestrians in Silwan neighborhood, in East Jerusalem, Muhammed Sadeq of the Jerusalem Media Center was detained by Israeli forces, then released soon after.

The neighborhood of Silwan has become a flashpoint for joint Palestinian-Israeli nonviolent protests against home demolitions and settler takeovers of Palestinian homes. The area was designated by the Jerusalem municipality five years ago, in the Jerusalem E1 Plan, as an area where the indigenous Palestinians would be removed, and Israeli Jewish settlers moved in. The municipality also plans to construct a Biblical Theme Park on the site of the historic homes and buildings, after it demolishes many of the homes.

According to local sources, Muhammed Sadeq was detained along with Fakhri Abu Diab, who is the leader of a non-governmental organization in Jerusalem known as the al-Bustan Committee.

They were questioned by an Israeli soldier, who took their IDs and held the men until a crowd gathered demanding their release. After several hours, the two men were released.

A number of people known as ‘leaders’ in the non-violent struggle in Silwan neighborhood have been detained and abducted by Israeli forces in recent days. Last week, Jawad Siyam, the head of the Wadi Hilweh Information Center, was held in Israeli custody until his wife agreed to come in and be interrogated. Such coercion of witnesses is considered illegal under international law.

April 12, 2011 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

Rights group calls for monitoring of mass Awarta arrests

Ma’an – April 11, 2011

RAMALLAH — The Ramallah-based rights group Addameer issued a call Sunday for international observation and intervention over the mass arrest campaigns being carried out in the West Bank village of Awarta by Israeli forces.

Sunday morning another nine men and women were detained, bringing to five the number of arrest raids, which rounded up a combined 600-700 residents since 11 March, when five settlers were murdered in their beds, including two children and an infant.

Israel’s investigation of the killings appears to be centered on Awarta village residents, though no suspects have been identified and the case remains under gag-order.

“These arrests have taken place despite the fact that no evidence has been brought forth to indicate that the murders are related to Awarta, suggesting a campaign of collective punishment against the village,” Addameer said in a statement.

The statement said 55 villagers remain in detention, are being held without charge, and include two under the age of 18.

“The arrest procedures also raised serious concerns,” the organization said, citing reports of detention of the elderly, sick and pregnant, saying they were “unlikely candidates for the brutal murders.”

Addameer said it was concerned that “no female soldiers were present and no arrest warrants were presented during the arrest operation,” adding that home-to-home searches lasted up to three hours, and residents were harassed by masked soldiers who used sniffer dogs to search homes, terrorizing families.

“The women’s treatment at the Huwwara Detention Center fell short of basic requirements of international law,” the center further accused, saying many of were arrested in their night gowns, were held in barracks used as military sleeping quarters, and were interrogated repeatedly.

“They were then asked to sign a 2-page statement in Hebrew, a language they do not understand, and threatened with prolonged detention if they chose not to sign it,” the organization said, adding that no lawyers were present for the duration.

In response to the violations cited by the organization, they asked that international observers be installed in the village to monitor the situation in Awarta.

April 11, 2011 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

Police training programs twin US-Israeli racism

Hira Mahmood and Wafa Azari, The Electronic Intifada, 7 April 2011

The racism of the American “war on drugs,” especially in the south, is notorious. So is the racism faced daily by Palestinians. In Atlanta, a university program allows these two manifestations of racism to feed off each other and community activists are organizing to shut the program down.

On the evening of 21 November 2006, the Atlanta Police Department’s recently disbanded Red Dog Unit killed Kathryn Johnston, a 92-year-old Black resident of the northwest Atlanta neighborhood of English Avenue. As she sat in her home watching television, several Atlanta policemen bashed in her front door to execute their fraudulently obtained “no-knock” search warrant. After firing 39 shots, the police officers handcuffed Johnston, placed a dime bag of marijuana on her and vacated her home, leaving her to bleed to death there (Ernie Suggs, “City to Pay Slain Woman’s Family $4.9 million,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 16 August 2010).

Organizers with the Movement to End Israeli Apartheid-Georgia (MEIA-G) read a newspaper article about the court proceedings following Johnston’s brutal murder, stumbled upon a brief note about the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) and wondered what it was and how was it connected to Johnston’s death.

MEIA-G was established in February 2009 after an unprecedented mobilization in response to the 23-day-long Israeli assault on Gaza. Hundreds rallied in the streets of Atlanta in solidarity with the Palestinian people, vowing to organize to support them in their struggle for liberation. After launching MEIA-G, we endorsed the 2005 Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions and identified GILEE as our primary campaign target.

Housed in Georgia State University’s (GSU) Criminal Justice Department, GILEE is a police exchange program whereby high-ranking Georgia police officers travel to Israel to learn counter-terrorism tactics from the Israel national police. Conversely, Israeli police officials travel to Atlanta every two years to learn Georgia’s drug enforcement tactics such as those employed against Johnston, Tremaine Miller, Pierre George and countless other African-American victims of police abuse and aggression. Through GILEE, the Israeli police adopt these tactics and employ them on Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians residing in the occupied West Bank.

While GILEE has relationships with several international police agencies, its relationship with the Israeli police is the most intimate and most troubling. Israel is one of the most brazen violators of human rights and international law in the world. Israeli police, in their execution of the racist and discriminatory policies of the Zionist government, have been and are a major source of these violations. MEIA-G hopes to keep the brutal police methods and tactics employed by the Israeli police from being adopted and implemented in Atlanta. To do this, MEIA-G seeks to expose and shift the practices of both the Atlanta and Israeli police by eliminating this exchange program, the aim of which is to proliferate repressive police tactics internationally.

Alongside 18 campaign endorsers and more than 1,200 individual supporters, the MEIA-G and GSU’s Progressive Student Alliance have built, cultivated and sustained a growing coalition organizing to eliminate GILEE from GSU and ultimately from Atlanta.

While the collaboration between the US military and the Israeli military is well-documented, social justice activists in the US are just now beginning to uncover the depth of collaboration between US and Israeli police forces. These collaborations further underscore the extent of the “special relationship” between the US and Israel, and their similar needs, as European settler-colonial projects, for elaborate systems of social control to manage the troublesome “undesirables” in their midst.

The US south has a particularly troublesome history of managing “undesirables.” With the formal abolition of slavery after the Civil War, a critical social question arose: how would the Georgia elite maintain its wealth and power in a society dependent on cash crops like “King Cotton” that relied upon a cheap, controllable and stable labor force? Policing provided the answer: newly established law targeting such activities as vagrancy and loitering were used to arrest and incarcerate southern Blacks. In short, prisons replaced plantations and police officers replaced plantation overseers (see Angela Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons and Torture, pp. 7-18).

Both the US and Israel are rooted in outside colonial forces invading a territory with the goal of possessing the maximum amount of natural resources — namely land — while erasing its indigenous population. In both cases, the US and Israeli militaries were created to engage the “external” threats of the unconquered indigenous populations, while their police forces were created to maintain control over the conquered indigenous populations (and other subjugated peoples like enslaved Africans) absorbed and “internalized” within these nation-state projects.

The US boasts the highest incarcerated population in the world — more than two million persons, including more than 800,000 Blacks. This does not include those on parole, on probation or unable to be employed because of a criminal record. Policing plays an integral role in not only surveiling, controlling and intimidating communities of color but also in funneling people into prisons. With such an exorbitant national incarceration rate, what do Georgia police officials like current Atlanta Police Department Chief of Police George Turner, former Chief of Police Richard Pennington and current Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director — all of whom have sojourned in Israel for the GILEE training — have left to learn about terrorizing and controlling these communities?

The Zionist project of confiscating the most amount of Palestinian land with the least amount of indigenous Palestinians remaining has one vital flaw. Evidenced in more than 60 years of resistance and resiliency to occupation, apartheid and genocide, Palestinians continue to resist the Zionist program of ethnic cleansing. Following the expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians in 1948, the Israeli state was tasked with controlling that pesky, residual population throughout historic Palestine. Under the guise of counter-terrorism, it is the Israelis’ sophisticated social control mechanisms that Georgia police officials learn to inflict upon Georgia residents.

The Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange operates within a public university but is largely funded by private donations, including donations from corporations and former graduates of the program. The extent of private support for this program is symptomatic of neoliberalism transforming public institutions in a way that compromises their integrity. GILEE does not reflect the desires of the Georgia State University community as evidenced by the opposition to the program voiced by numerous students, faculty and community members.

The director of the GILEE program is Dr. Robert Friedman, Professor Emeritus of Criminal Justice at GSU. Dr. Friedman serves on the advisory board of the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT), an Israeli organization that has actively opposed human rights groups and acted as an apologist for the Israeli security apparatus. Boaz Ganor, founder and executive director of the ICT, serves as a board member for the GILEE program.

Another highly influential, and controversial, Israeli politician — Avi Dichter — has visited Atlanta to meet with Georgia law enforcement officials as part of GILEE. Dichter has been charged with extrajudicial killings, war crimes and other human rights violations by the Center for Constitutional Rights for the 2002 air strikes on Gaza. The meetings between Israeli and Georgia officials, the unknown specificities of the training program, and the large infiltration of money into the GILEE program from unknown sources are all being done under the auspices of Georgia State University, a public institution.

Activists throughout the US are beginning to uncover more and more police exchange programs in which US law enforcement officials travel to Israel to learn “counter-terrorism” tactics. Campaigns organizing to shut them down continue to take root. We have a political obligation to expose these programs, highlight how they impact oppressed communities in the US and close them as we build a more just world free of racist violence in both the United States and Palestine.

Hira Mahmood is a student activist and BDS organizer studying English literature at Georgia State University.

Wafa Azari organizes with the Movement to End Israeli Apartheid-Georgia. Currently residing in Atlanta, she was born and raised in Oujda, Morocco.

April 7, 2011 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

Female protester killed in Bahrain

Press TV – April 7, 2011

A female protester has reportedly been killed in Bahrain’s crackdown as the government is putting more pressure on anti-government demonstrators.

Khadijah Al Abdulhayy has died from suffocation in the village of Sanabis, a Press TV correspondent reported on Thursday.

Her death comes after the killing of Seyyed Hamid al-Mahfood by the Bahraini regime forces after he went missing late Tuesday.

Mahfood’s body was found in a bin in the village of Sar, a few kilometers west of the capital Manama on Wednesday.

Dozens of anti-government protesters have been killed and many others gone missing since the beginning of the uprising in Bahrain.

Bahrain’s leading Shia opposition group Wefaq said over 450 opposition activists, including 14 women, have been also arrested since the uprising began in the country in mid-February.

Bahrainis have been demanding an end to the two-century-long rule of the Al Khalifa dynasty since February 14.

In March, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait deployed their troops to Bahrain to reinforce a massive armed crackdown on the popular uprising.

Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch said Wednesday it is worried about the growing abuses by the Bahraini regime against its citizens who are seeking political reforms and a voice in the government.

April 7, 2011 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

More than 100 women arrested in Awarta village

Ma’an – 07/04/2011

NABLUS — Israeli troops stormed a Palestinian village early Thursday, arresting more than 100 women in what local officials said was part of the ongoing investigation into the murder of five settlers in March.

Hundreds of troops entered Awarta — the village adjacent to Itamar, an illegal settlement where the murders took place — shortly after midnight and imposed a curfew after which they began rounding up the women, local council head Tayis Awwad said.

Officials told Ma’an that men and women were taken in the raids, which involved house-to-house searches in the early morning. Some of the women, witnesses said, were in their 60s, and many were taken by force.

Soldiers continued to conduct house-to-house searches through the night, the officials added. Palestinian security sources confirmed the report.

This was the fourth intensive raid of the village where scores were detained, the first coming the day after an unidentified attacker stabbed to death five members of the Fogel family, including two children and an infant.

But Thursday’s raid marked the first time they had arrested any women, Awwad said.

In the wake of the murders, Awarta has been the center of a massive manhunt. The village was put under military closure, and a curfew was imposed for five days between March 12 and 16. Some 40 men were detained during the closure, and since then two more mass roundups were reported.

Those detained have been questioned and subjected to DNA testing, officials said last week.

So far no one has been charged, with the military refusing to comment on the operation.

The Detainees’ Center in Nablus condemned the overnight arrest raid.

The mass detentions, a statement from the center said, were illegal and arbitrary and “go against the human rights of the residents.”

Awarta was the second village put under closure overnight, with locals in the Tubas area saying the Israeli army, backed by military bulldozers, entered the village of Aqaba where two homes were demolished.

April 7, 2011 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment