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Court blocks NYPD bid to fire whistleblower as commissioner brags of ‘awesome powers’

RT | June 21, 2013

The New York City Police Department’s latest attempt to fire Adrian Schoolcraft, the whistleblower who secretly recorded evidence of corruption among his superiors over three years ago, was blocked this week in federal court.

Schoolcraft has said he began wearing a microphone to defend himself against citizens’ allegations that he used racial slurs while policing the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant, a poor and primarily African-American section of Brooklyn. By wearing the device from June 1, 2008 until October 15, 2009, though, he soon began recording directions from NYPD higher-ups who pressured officers to fill monthly arrest quotas, which is illegal.

“He wants three seat belt [summonses], one cell phone, and 11 others,” one police sergeant is heard saying on the tape. “I don’t know what the number is, but that’s what [an executive officer] wants.”

Upon complaining of corrupt policies and wrongful arrests, Schoolcraft has said, he began receiving threats from fellow police officers and was eventually reassigned to a desk job.

Three weeks after he told the NYPD the damning recordings existed, Schoolcraft’s home was raided by a large group of officers who forcibly checked him into a psychiatric ward in Queens citing suicidal tendencies. Approximately twelve of Schoolcraft’s superiors were on hand at his home. Reportedly among them was Paul Browne, a top aide to Commissioner Ray Kelly, whose presence would indicate Kelly knew of and approved of the raid.

After Schoolcraft refused treatment, the officers guarding him at a Queens hospital handcuffed him to a bed and prevented him from using a telephone. He was held there for three days until his father tracked him down and signed him out. The Schoolcraft family later received a bill for $7,185 for his stay at the facility.

Schoolcraft eventually turned over his recordings, including of the night when he was dragged to the hospital, to the Village Voice, which dubbed the audio “The NYPD Tapes.” In 2009 and 2010, the NYPD charged Schoolcraft with approximately two dozen charges of leaving work early, failing to respond to department summonses, failure to obey an order, being away without leave, and others.

The department could have tried and fired Schoolcraft in early 2010, the Voice reported, but presumably suspended him instead because of the bad publicity that would come as a natural result of dismissing a man for exposing corruption.

“I think within the precinct, he was probably seen as a little bit eccentric,” Graham Rayman, a reporter for the Village Voice, told This American Life in 2010. “And also, he wasn’t going with the program. And anyone who doesn’t go with the program is automatically marked.”

For nearly four years he has been on leave without pay, waiting for the start of a federal lawsuit he filed against the department for intimidation and retaliation.

In response, the NYPD filed its own administrative suit seeking to fire Schoolcraft, a move Schoolcraft’s lawyers said will unduly influence the verdict in the original suit. The department was blocked from filing that suit this week.

“You have the power to arrest, to take away someone’s liberty. You have the power and the authority to use force and sometimes deadly force,” Kelly said this week in a speech to this year’s graduating class of the NYPD academy. “Now these are awesome powers.”

The commissioner, quoted by CBS, also said that different ethnic groups are “not always happy” with the department and that “all it takes is one errant police officer” to undermine the “great institution” that has been built by generations.

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June 21, 2013 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Another Professor Fired for Views on Middle East

An Interview with Kristofer Petersen-Overton

By JOSHUA SPERBER | January 28, 2011

Brooklyn College fired PhD student Kristofer Petersen-Overton yesterday, one day after New York state assemblyman Dov Hikind (D-Brooklyn) sent a letter to BC president Karen Gould accusing Petersen-Overton of being an “overt supporter of terrorism.” Hikind has complained in interviews that Petersen-Overton’s academic work is anti-Israel, and that his attempt to “understand” suicide bombing is unfathomable. Petersen-Overton and I are colleagues at the CUNY Graduate Center.

JS: You were preparing to instruct a course on the Middle East and were fired. What happened?

KPO: I was hired by Mark Ungar at Brooklyn College’s political science department on the recommendation of Dov Waxman at the Graduate Center. I went in for an interview, and he was impressed with my credentials. I have an MA and I’ve published on the situation [in the Middle East], and he said “I would be honored to have you.” And this was for a grad level seminar, which is not lecture-based, meaning that our classes would be discussion-oriented and not some sort of alleged platform.

JS: What was the official explanation for your firing, and why doesn’t it make sense?

KPO: I have not once been contacted by the department itself, but I was told that the official reason I have been fired is that I don’t have a PhD, which is untrue, because no student teaching this course has a PhD, and there are of course many student teachers at BC who do not have their PhD’s. And I’ll point out that I am somewhat more qualified than many student teachers because I came into the program with a Master’s degree, which many students who are teaching for CUNY don’t have.

I was fired immediately after Dov Hikind contacted the school. He is an especially radical assemblyman who goes after people who he perceives as being anti-Israel. He’s actually made a career out of targeting people for alleged anti-Israel bias.

JS: And the charge of bias is doubly problematic. Because, one, it’s inaccurate. But, two, even if it were accurate, what does it imply?

KPO: We all come to the table with our personal political views; there’s not a single professor who doesn’t have their own views. So it all comes down to how one approaches those views, and I devoted an entire class in the syllabus to the subject of objectivity and humanism, meaning I wanted to put this issue of bias on the table to facilitate open and productive discussions.

JS: What does your firing suggest about contemporary politics and higher education?

KPO: They’ve targeted professors up for tenure for so long and have been relatively unsuccessful except for several cases, like with Norman Finkelstein (JS: and, among others, Nicholas De Genova and Thaddeus Russell, at Columbia University and Barnard College, respectively), now I think they’re going after graduate students before their careers even begin. One of the most direct implications of this which is deeply troubling is not the fact that people take issue with one particular class, which is inevitable, but the way in which the college administration caved so quickly – for it to occur within 24 hours is incredible to me, and the school never even consulted me. For this to be decided by a state official poking his nose in a college syllabus is Orwellian. I’ve received tremendous support, which I’m very grateful for. Norman Finkelstein wrote me, and after I contacted Neve Gordon he (Gordon) contacted BC’s provost, writing that he reviewed my syllabus and that it was excellent and reflected a number of different perspectives, noting that the textbook was mainstream and “emphasizes the Zionist narrative.” He also read a scholarly paper I had written, and wrote that he was “struck by (my) academic rigor.”

JS: What can people do to lend support?

I would be greatly appreciative if people can send an email to the provost, even better a letter, and tomorrow it would be great if people could call, and more importantly if people could disseminate this story. It’s especially disgusting that they would go after a grad student, because they have not only impacted my career but also my income and health insurance.

Office of the Provost (William A. Tramontano)
Brooklyn College
2900 Bedford Avenue
Brooklyn, New York 11210
718.951.5000
tramontano@brooklyn.cuny.edu

Kristofer Petersen-Overton can be reached at kpetersen-overton@GC.CUNY.EDU. His website is http://www.petersen-overton.com/_/home.html

Joshua Sperber can be reached at jsperber4@yahoo.com

Source

January 29, 2011 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , | 2 Comments

US tax-exempt organization seizes Jewish women that choose assimilation

By Yaniv Reich on January 16, 2010

Where to begin? Regular readers of this blog will undoubtedly know about the severe problem of Israeli racism against Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular. But this story leaves even me incredulous.

Meet Yad L’Achim (Hand to Brothers), a Jewish NGO whose goals, as described on their website, are to “fight with intensity for both the Russian Jewish immigrant who has become a regular at the missionary center in Afula and the Jewish woman who is married to an Arab. There are no ‘lost causes.’ Yad L’Achim will continue its rescue activities, together with its efforts at Jewish outreach, as long as the problem of missionaries and Jewish-Arab marriage persists.”

Founded by Rabbi Shalom Dov Lifshitz, this organization has a US branch, Yad L’Achim Peylei Israel, based in Brooklyn and listed with the IRS as a public charity to which one can give donations with 50% tax deductibility.

Lifshitz explains the organization’s motives in more detail on his chairman page:

“To our great sorrow, the phenomenon of Jewish girls getting involved with Arabs has reached startling proportions. . . . I’m sure you’ll find the information presented here to be eye-opening. It’s important that you not only become aware, but that you get involved. We must all raise our voices to demand legislation that puts an end to missionary activity and assimilation in Israel!

Jewish girls are not free for the taking and must not become enslaved to Arab men.”

The level of racist hatred on the website is simply mind-blowing.

The organization’s background page, for example, describes their focus on assimilation and their dedicated Anti-Assimilation Department.

This department deals with women and teenage girls who have become involved with Arab men. In most cases, these relationships lead to marriage, which then deteriorate into violence. Among the many serious problems that result from such relationships is the identity of the children. They are Jews, but are raised as Arabs. Thus, entire generations are being lost to the Jewish people.
[…]
Though it was once thought that this could not be a problem in a Jewish country, not even for the secular, the tragic facts show an increasing number of Jewish girls getting involved with foreign workers and, even more so, with Arab men. Indeed, Yad L’Achim gets some 1,000 calls a year reporting such cases.

Our Anti-Assimilation department responds to all such calls.

Military adventurism to “rescue” Jewish girls from assimilation

A number of these thousand calls per year result in “military-like rescues from hostile Arab villages and setting the women up in ’safe’ houses around the country, where they can build new lives for themselves.”

In the description of these military methods, the website explains how “Yad L’Achim’s activists literally risk their lives to rescue the women from hostile villages. These operations are organized and run by veterans of elite IDF combat units and require careful planning.”

When we press [“H”, the head of Yad L’Ahim’s rescue unit] for some insight into what it’s like to enter hostile Arab villages to extract Jewish women, he prefers to speak of the team effort that contributes to Yad L’Achim’s success.

A: “I’m not alone in this,” says H., a former member of an elite combat unit in the Israeli army. “There’s a whole team of volunteers who work with me. Each member of the team plays a crucial role. In some cases they receive a just few hours’ notice. They leave their families and businesses and put all their energies into getting a Jewish woman out of an Arab village, at risk to their own lives.”

Q: What’s it like in the moments before they enter the village?

A: “Before we get to that point, I’ve sat with our staff and pored over updated maps of the area. We have to be able to get in and out of the village, together with a frightened Jewish woman who often has a child or two. We’ve got to know all the routes in and out of the village and be prepared for all eventualities. Only when we have all the answers do we embark on our mission.

“Many times these preparations take place under pressure, but we have to keep our cool and act responsibly.

“On the instructions of Harav Shalom Dov Lipshitz [founding chairman of Yad L’Achim], at the moment we enter the village we all say together, quietly, chapter 121 in Tehillim, which begins, ‘I raise my eyes upon the mountains; whence will come my help?’We say the last verse – ‘G-d will guard your departure and your arrival, from this time and forever’ – out loud. This gives us a feeling of confidence that we will succeed in our mission.”

Q: Does he have a recent story he can share with us?

“Two weeks ago, the hotline at our Jewish Women Rescue Division received a call from Umm el-Fahm, the Arab town in the Galilee. On the line was a hysterical young woman who had married an Israeli Arab and was desperate for a way out. She grew up in a town in central Israel, where she met the man and, against the advice of friends and family, married him and even converted to Islam. Once she took that fateful step, she was expected to be completely subservient to her husband, in keeping with Islamic practice.

“In the hospital, after giving birth to her baby, she met a Jewish woman who could see that she was in distress and slipped her a piece of paper with the number of Yad L’Achim’s hotline. One day, an opportunity presented itself and she called. During the course of the conversation, it emerged that she had one day a month when she was allowed to leave home – the 28th, when the National Insurance Institute deposited her welfare payment into her bank account. We decided that that would be the day of the rescue.

“On the designated day, we showed up at Umm el-Fahm in three cars, one to do the rescue, and the other two to provide back-up. Based on a predetermined signal we identified the young woman, dressed from head to toe in Arab garb, with her baby in her arms. In order not to raise suspicions, she had left home with nothing but several layers of clothes on the baby.

“She entered the rescue car and we sped out of town. We took her to an apartment in a secret location that was equipped with food and clothing for mother and child, as well as warm, supportive social workers.

“Despite the difficulties and dangers, the rescue is the easy part. Then comes the rehabilitation.”

Q: Why does H. continue to put himself in danger in these missions?

A: “It’s impossible to stand by when you see the kind of danger a young Jewish woman is in,” he answers, challenging the rest of us to do our part as well in rescuing these women in distress and their children.

Is this legal? According to Tsipora Gutman, the official in charge of Jewish-Arab marriages in Yad L’Achim headquarters in Bnei Brak, the answer is sensitive but everything gets approved by Yad L’Achim’s legal department.

‘Some thing worth knowing’, according to these racists

How serious of a problem is this (in the lunatic minds of these fundamentalists)?

The website’s “Some things worth knowing” provides their answer.

“It’ll never happen to me,” we like to say. But experience shows that it does happen, in the finest of families, and young girls should be made aware of the facts before they get involved in such relationships.

Blood is thicker than water, and if the man is Muslim or Christian, sooner or later he will seek to undermine the relationship.

It’s important to understand that the Koran relates to a husband’s treatment of his wife very differently from Western norms. What a western woman would regard as a breach of her rights, Muslim women find perfectly acceptable.
[…]
It should also be stressed that children who are born to a Jewish mother and a Muslim father suffer from a serious lack of basic identity. They are Jews in the eyes of the Arabs, and stigmatized, but have no knowledge of their Judaism.

Elsewhere, the website publishes an interview with Shifra, one of Yad L’Achim’s social workers. She explains to concerned Jewish parents how to prevent their lovely Jewish daughters from falling victim to predatory Arab men.

Q: Jewish outreach workers of ours who man a booth in a major city in Israel report seeing young Jewish girls regularly entering cars of Arabs and going with them into Arab villages. Can you help us understand what leads these girls to engage in such dangerous behavior?

A: They are in distress, mostly on an emotional level. Some were victims of abuse as children, others witnessed violence at home between their parents. Many are the “black sheep” of the family and have never felt accepted at home. They grew up feeling that their parents didn’t understand them and didn’t love them. Unfortunately, such girls have low self-esteem and little confidence.

Many come from a low socio-economic background; all their friends have the latest-generation cell phones and new clothes, while they have nothing. These girls connect up with Arab men who are seeking to “have a good time” in a way that isn’t acceptable in traditional Arab society.

Even so, the girls don’t understand the danger they’re getting into?

In the beginning there’s a lot of denial. They tell themselves, “Nothing will happen to me,” “He’s not like the others,” or “Why be racist?” Things are good for them at the start, and they don’t think about the long-term. Their Arab suitors pamper them, buy them things, drive them around in fancy cars and make their drab lives much more interesting.

Q: Give us an idea of the scope of the problem. How many girls in Israel are involved with Arab men?

A: At Yad L’Achim we’re getting more than 100 calls a month for help. The phenomenon, I’m sorry to say, is only getting worse. And we know that those who are crying out to us for help are just a drop in the bucket.

Q: Tell us about the rescue operations from Arab villages.

A: These rescues are coordinated with the army, police and welfare agencies. They don’t always involve extricating a girl from a remote Arab village. Sometimes it can be a girl or a woman trapped in an apartment in the center of Haifa or Tel Aviv-Jaffa, which have large Arab populations.

In the Arutz Sheva article on one of Yad L’Achim’s recent “rescues”, the recent story is told of a Jewish mother escaping from Gaza with her children, who would be re-given Hebrew names now that they live in Israel. The organization carefully coordinated this escape with the army and with Interior Minister Eli Yishai (Shas party).

One IDF official told Yad L’Achim: “I donate to your organization regularly and I feel that it is in that merit that I was privileged to be able to participate in this rescue today.”

Ending tax-deductible support for such overt racism

Although I am no expert on non-profit tax law, I would be willing to wager that the activities of this NGO fall well outside the acceptable range of activities granted charity status by the IRS. As always, I encourage people to conduct their own research into this organization and its shady activities. And if you find out anything interesting, please leave a comment and/or write me directly. I would love to know more about this disgusting group.

Source

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January 17, 2010 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | 12 Comments