Violence

Ferguson Violence Exposes America’s Political Decay

August 22, 2014 Thomas Adams, www.theage.com Educate! Ferguson, Housing, Militarization, Police, Violence

For anyone with a consciousness of American history, the events of the last week and a half in Ferguson, Missouri, a predominately African-American suburb outside of St. Louis, should seem all too familiar. A police officer murders an unarmed black man. As days go by and more information on the shooting is released, residents take to the streets to protest. Their protests are met with force utterly disproportionate to a free society. In response, the protests turn sporadically violent themselves, producing and even more violent response on the part of authorities. Harlem, 1943; Philadelphia and Rochester, 1964; Watts (Los Angeles), 1965; Newark, 1967; Camden, 1971; Tampa, 1987 and 1989; Washington, D.C., 1991; Los Angeles, 1992; Cincinnati, 2001; Benton Harbor (Southwest Michigan), 2003; Brooklyn, 2013 - all these incidents, and many others, contain the basic contours of the situation in Ferguson. By now many in the United States and across the world have weighed in on the underlying causes of the escalating violence in Ferguson. Analysts have rightly pointed out the massive build-up in American police militarisation, the depths of poverty that are endemic to many American neighbourhoods, a broad culture that equates young African-American men with criminality, a failed war on drugs that has led to the incarceration of generations of the American poor and the corresponding transformation of much of urban America into a police state.

Autopsy In Case Of Ezell Ford Put On Hold

August 20, 2014 Matt Ferner, www.huffingtonpost.com Educate! California, Police, Protest, Violence

The Los Angeles Police Department has delayed the release of a pending autopsy report for Ezell Ford, the 25-year-old unarmed black man with mental illness who an officer fatally shot last week in a South L.A. neighborhood. "Pending further investigative and forensic analysis, the LAPD Force Investigation Division investigators have requested that The Los Angeles County Coroner place an investigative hold on the pending autopsy report," read an LAPD press release issued Monday. LAPD Commander Andrew Smith told Southern California public radio station KPCC that investigative holds are common in cases that are currently ongoing and and in active investigations, in order to keep witness testimony from being tainted. “They could use information from the autopsy to give credibility to their story,” Smith said. Ed Winter, the assistant chief of investigation at the coroner's office, told The Huffington Post that he didn't know how long the hold would last. The delay on the Ford autopsy report comes after two autopsy reports were released regarding the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown by Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson. The autopsy revealed Brown was shot six times.

The Killing Of Black Men Continues

August 20, 2014 Ron Daniels, www.ibw21.org Educate! Mass Incarceration, Police, Racism, Violence

When will it stop? The police killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, coming on the heals of the killing of Eric Garner, an unarmed Black man by a policeman’s choke hold in Staten Island, New York, is yet another painful, traumatic reminder of the long history of occupation, torture, abuse and killing of Black people in America, particularly Black men. Indeed, within hours of the killing of Michael Brown, Ezell Ford, an unarmed Black man with a history of mental problems, was killed in Los Angeles under suspicious circumstances. It doesn’t matter that there is an African American President of the United States or that Blacks are mayors of major American cities, run Fortune 500 companies or are pace setters as high paid and adored hip hop moguls, entertainers and athletes; the killing of Black men continues. Once again legions of Black people and people of conscience and goodwill are in the streets in Ferguson, Missouri and in solidarity rallies across the country. But, to add insult to injury, in scenes reminiscent of the brutalizing of civil rights protesters in Birmingham and Selma in the 60’s, St. Louis County Police units with sharpshooters, sniper squads, mine-resistant trucks and a “Bearcat armored truck” unleashed a ferocious assault on peaceful marchers, firing tear gas, stun bombs and rubber bullets into the ranks of terrorized protesters. The whole nation and the world witnessed this vicious onslaught against the First Amendment by highly militarized police that looked more like soldiers on the frontlines in Iraq and Afghanistan than the suburb of a major American city. There was “shock and awe” throughout the land.

Part II: DoD Data Mining To Track, Kill Activists

August 20, 2014 Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, www.occupy.com Educate! Activism, Data, Politics, Violence

The Pentagon’s multimillion dollar Minerva research program to fund social science research for military applications includes a flagship project established in 2009 at Arizona State University (ASU) to examine “radical” and “counter-radical” Muslim movements in Southeast Asia, West Africa and Western Europe. The project’s "expert wisdom gathering tool," used by academics involved in the project to assess and rank the threat-level from organizations and civil society groups, set its sights on the UK, Germany, France, Europe generally, Nigeria, Niger, Senegal, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines. Although purportedly designed to assess Islamic movements, among the 36 UK organizations targeted for ranking on the tool’s "radicalization" scale are several non-Muslim activist groups critical of US, British and Israeli foreign policy. A deeper analysis of the criteria used by the project to label organizations discloses serious deficiencies that tend to cast suspicion of propensity for violence on any group calling for radical social, political or religious change. Conflating violent and nonviolent "radicalism" Explaining the rationale behind the Minerva initiative, program director Dr. Erin Fitzgerald said, “Decreasing terrorism and political violence requires an understanding of the underlying forces that shape motivations and mobilize action. The vast majority of political movements – even only those with seemingly ‘radical’ political philosophies – do not turn violent or destabilize regional security; we want to understand what makes those leading to armed conflict different.”

Tear Gas Not The Only Thing Connecting Ferguson And Palestine

August 19, 2014 Ryan Rodrick Beiler, www.972mag.com Educate! Ferguson, Israel, Police, Protest, Tear Gas, Violence

The New York Times’ Robert Mackey recently tweeted a photo of the tear gas cartridges found on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, where police have been using the weapon against demonstrators angry at the shooting death of an unarmed black teenager. Both the cartridge and the tactics looked very familiar, and for good reason. Jamestown, PA’s CTS brand tear gas fired in #Ferguson tonight https://t.co/XwMO3tBuDp in the West Bank last week https://t.co/XNWlEDvqFF — Robert Mackey (@RobertMackey) August 18, 2014 A different tweet noted that the same brand of tear gas was used in Egypt’s Tahrir Square. As reported here last December, those shining shell casings, as well as the rubber-ball variety and spent stun grenades made by the same company, had decorated a tree in Bethlehem’s Manger Square at Christmastime as activists gathered those used by the Israeli military less than two kilometers away in Aida Refugee Camp and displayed them for holiday tourists.

Violence By Government Escalates Street Violence

August 19, 2014 Gary Younge, www.theguardian.com Educate! Missouri, Police, Protest, Violence

In 1966, Martin Luther King started to campaign against segregation in Chicago only to find his efforts thwarted by violent mobs and a scheming mayor. Marginalised by the city’s establishment, he could feel that non-violence both as a strategy and as a principle was eroding among his supporters. “I need some help in getting this method across,” he said. “A lot of people have lost faith in the establishment … They’ve lost faith in the democratic process. They’ve lost faith in non-violence … [T]hose who make this peaceful revolution impossible will make a violent revolution inevitable, and we’ve got to get this over, I need help. I need some victories, I need concessions.” He never got them. The next year there were more than 150 riots across the country, from Minneapolis to Tampa. As the situation escalates in the St Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, where police recently shot an unarmed black man as he walked down the street, many are clearly losing faith. As the first day of curfew drew to a close, hundreds of police in riot gear swept through the streets, using tear gas, smoke canisters and rubber bullets against an increasingly agitated crowd. Earlier this morning the governor, Jay Nixon, deployed the national guard.

Tell Dept. Of Justice ‘End Racist And Militaristic Policing’

August 15, 2014 Staff, www.popularresistance.org Resist! health, Police abuse, Violence, Wars and Militarism

Although the Department of Justice does not link their new decision to undertake a broad review of police tactics to any specific incident, it comes during a wave of notable instances of police killing unarmed black men and responding with excessive force to a peaceful protest of the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson. The DoJ is also considering reinstating a national commission to provide guidance to police policies. This move is supported by the International Association of Chiefs of Police. There has been a push to stop the growing militarization of police forces and the overuse of SWAT teams for some time. At present, local police units are being inundated with free military equipment including tanks, assault rifles and vehicles designed to resist land mines. They are also being trained in military tactics. And there is also a push to hire members of the military into the police force.

Rampant Police State: It Is More Than One Killing

August 13, 2014 Nick Bernabe, www.theantimedia.org Educate! Mass Media, police brutality, Violence

Following what may be the greatest few weeks in decades of exposure to police brutality, police in Ferguson, Missouri, have now shot and killed an 18 year old unarmed teen who, according to witnesses, was holding his hands in the air when he was shot. Peaceful protests that began shortly after the shooting yesterday were met with full on military style anti-riot police. What started as a peaceful protest soon turned into a small riot which resulted in some stores being looted and shots being fired at police. While the riots will not help the cause, they are also not surprising considering the sharp uptick in anti-police sentiment stemming from the massive amount of police violence against the working poor and minorities in America. Police violence which is increasingly being captured on cell phone cameras and posted online daily. We have a whole section on the Police State on our website which can be viewed here. Frustration is now boiling over after decades of discriminatory policing, near-zero accountability, and lack of will from lawmakers to reel in the spiraling police state. In fact, as we have documented in depth, the militarization of the police is only rising despite the increased outcry from concerned citizens against it. The overbearing presence of riot police in Ferguson deployed to contain peaceful protesters may have been the very spark which ignited the rioting in the first place.

Report: Obama DoD Covered Up War Crimes In Afghanistan

August 13, 2014 Amnesty International, www.amnestyusa.org Educate! Afghanistan, Violence, Wars and Militarism

The families of thousands of Afghan civilians killed by US/NATO forces in Afghanistan have been left without justice, Amnesty International said in a new report released today. Focusing primarily on air strikes and night raids carried out by US forces, including Special Operations Forces, Left in the Dark finds that even apparent war crimes have gone uninvestigated and unpunished. “Thousands of Afghans have been killed or injured by US forces since the invasion, but the victims and their families have little chance of redress. The US military justice system almost always fails to hold its soldiers accountable for unlawful killings and other abuses,” said Richard Bennett, Amnesty International’s Asia Pacific Director. “None of the cases that we looked into – involving more than 140 civilian deaths – were prosecuted by the US military. Evidence of possible war crimes and unlawful killings has seemingly been ignored.” The report documents in detail the failures of accountability for US military operations in Afghanistan. It calls on the Afghan government to ensure that accountability for unlawful civilian killings is guaranteed in any future bilateral security agreements signed with NATO and the United States.

Justice Dep’t To Conduct Broad Review Of Police Tactics

August 13, 2014 Kevin Johnson, www.usatoday.com Organize! Law, police brutality, Regulation, Violence

The Justice Department is leading a broad review of police tactics, including the kind of deadly force that prompted recent protests in Missouri and New York, a federal law enforcement official said Tuesday. The review is being conducted as the department weighs creating a national commission to provide new direction on such controversial issues. In addition to deadly force, the review is expected to examine law enforcement's increasing encounters with the mentally ill, the application of emerging technologies such as body cameras, and police agencies' expanding role in homeland security efforts since 9/11, said the official, who is not authorized to comment publicly and requested anonymity. The review is slated to be completed early next year while authorities consider establishing a special law enforcement commission similar to a panel created by President Johnson to deal with problems then associated with rising crime. Rather than violent crime, which has been in decline in much of the country, police are now grappling with persistent incidents involving use of force and their responses to an array of public safety issues, from drug overdoses to their dealings with the mentally ill and the emotionally disturbed. The call for a broader federal policy review, while not directly tied to any specific incident, grew out of a meeting involving law enforcement advocacy groups and Justice officials, including Attorney General Eric Holder, the official said.

Communal Lands: Theater Of Operations For Counterinsurgency

August 12, 2014 Renata Bessi, Santiago Navarro F. and Translated Miriam Taylor, www.truth-out.org Create! Indigenous Rights, Mexico, Mining, School of Americas, Surveillance, Violence

In 2006, a team of geographers from the University of Kansas carried out a series of mapping projects of communal lands in southern Mexico's Northern Sierra Mountains. Coordinated by Peter Herlihy and Geoffrey B. Demarest, a US lieutenant colonel, the objective was to achieve strategic military and geopolitical goals of particular interest for the United States. The objective was to incorporate indigenous territories into the transnational corporate model of private property, either by force or through agreements. Demarest's essential argument is that peace cannot exist without private property. "The Bowman Expeditions are taking places with the counterinsurgency logic of the United States, and we reported them in 2009. These expeditions were part of research regarding the geographic information that indigenous communities in the Sierra Juarez possess. The researchers hid the fact that they were being financed by the Pentagon. And we believe that this research was a type of pilot project to practice how they would undertake research in other parts of the world in relation to indigenous towns and their communal lands," said Aldo Gonzales Rojas in an interview with Truthout. A director for the Secretary of Indigenous Affairs in the state of Oaxaca, Rojas ensures that indigenous laws are being instituted and applied correctly in the state.

Eno: Today I Saw A Weeping Palestinian Man…

August 5, 2014 Brian Eno, www.stopwar.org.uk Resist! Arts, Israel, Palestine, Violence

Dear All of You: I sense I'm breaking an unspoken rule with this letter, but I can't keep quiet any more. Today I saw a picture of a weeping Palestinian man holding a plastic carrier bag of meat. It was his son. He'd been shredded (the hospital's word) by an Israeli missile attack - apparently using their fab new weapon, flechette bombs. You probably know what those are - hundreds of small steel darts packed around explosive which tear the flesh off humans. The boy was Mohammed Khalaf al-Nawasra. He was 4 years old. I suddenly found myself thinking that it could have been one of my kids in that bag, and that thought upset me more than anything has for a long time. Then I read that the UN had said that Israel might be guilty of war crimes in Gaza, and they wanted to launch a commission into that. America won't sign up to it. What is going on in America? I know from my own experience how slanted your news is, and how little you get to hear about the other side of this story. But - for Christ's sake! - it's not that hard to find out. Why does America continue its blind support of this one-sided exercise in ethnic cleansing? WHY?

Being Human Matters, For People Of Gaza And World

August 4, 2014 Stephanie Van Hook, www.wagingnonviolence.org Educate! Gaza, PalestineI, Violence

Dr. Mona El-Farra, medical doctor and associate of the Middle East Children’s Alliance recently made headlines on Democracy Now! with her plea to end the military assault on Gaza with one powerful statement: “We are human beings.” She is, of course, absolutely right. Human beings live in Gaza, and it seems like nothing could be more obvious — if not human beings, then who or what does? And why are we paying attention? Of course, what she is really saying is something much deeper. She’s saying, that to the people in Gaza, it seems like we have somehow forgotten that human beings are there — and that raises more questions. For example: How could one forget the humanity of another and what does it tell us about who we really are? For insight into these questions, we might first explore the basic dynamic of conflict escalation. Conflict, in itself, is not at issue — it’s the image we have of the human beings with whom we engage in conflict. Michael Nagler, president of the Metta Center for Nonviolence, maintains in his 2014 book, The Nonviolence Handbook: A Guide for Practical Action, that conflict escalates — that is, moves increasingly toward violence — according to the degree of dehumanization in the situation. Violence, in other words, doesn’t occur without dehumanization. Nagler’s thinking about violence was partially influenced by sociologist Philip Zimbardo, who famously conducted an experiment in controlled dehumanization at Stanford in 1971. What happened? He and his students created a prison scenario where some students took the role of the guards and the others as the prisoners.

Will This Homicide Result In A Prosecution?

August 3, 2014 Ben Mathis-Lilley, www.slate.com Educate! Law, NYPD, police brutality, Violence

New York City's medical examiner has ruled that Eric Garner—the 43-year-old Staten Island man who died after being put in a chokehold by an NYPD officer in an incident caught on video—was the victim of a homicide. Eric Garner's death ruled a homicide by medical examiner. "Cause of Death: Compression of neck (choke hold)" during restraint by police — jdavidgoodman (@jdavidgoodman) August 1, 2014 Goodman is a New York Times police reporter. From the New York Daily News: A spokeswoman for the medical examiner said Friday that Garner died from compression of the neck, which the office labeled a chokehold, and compression of the chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by cops. The Pix11 TV station reported this week that a police report on Garner's arrest did not mention that he was put in a chokehold. The NYPD's guidelines prohibit the move's use.

International Campaign To Expose And Document Israeli War Crimes

August 2, 2014 Occupied Palestine, www.occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com Resist! Israel, Palestine, Violence, Wars and Militarism

Solidarity activists have launched in London a new international media campaign to expose and document Israeli war crimes in Gaza. The London- based Academy of Refugee Studies has declared a media campaign under the title “Zionist Terrorism” aiming to expose and document Israeli war crimes and violations of the international laws and conventions. The campaign includes daily updates on Facebook and social media networks to shed light on Israeli crimes in Gaza and attract the world’s attention to the war on Gaza. The campaign came as the Israeli aggression on Gaza entered its third week. 1050 Palestinians have been killed while around 6,000 others were injured so far. How many more dead corpses of Palestinians does the international community need to see in order to act? How many more cruelties and violations of Human Rights, Regulations and International Law will be needed to intervene so this ongoing warcrime is being stopped once and for all.

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