Welcome back, y'all. It's already two weeks after CPD chose to attack black & indigenous protestors in order to protect a hunk of rock, that symbolizes Colonialism and White Supremacist Pillaging. Can you believe it? #Fuck12Friday
We here at BLMChi want to keep the solidarity going, this week by telling you a little bit about the Palestinian Freedom Struggle. #Fuck12Friday
Palestine is far away, so what's the connection? In 2014, CPD Superintendent Garry McCarthy Israel's third International Homeland Security Conference to learn policing tactics, and this isn't an isolated instance. #Fuck12Friday
America is an international policing giant with over 800 military bases overseas, when most countries have less than 10. #Fuck12Friday
And the wealthy international bully that is the US has been using Israel as a trial stage for the theater of state violence for as long as politician's having been using the word terrorism as an excuse to subjugate people. #Fuck12Friday
A settler colony on Palestinian land, Israel is dependent on larger allies for it's continued existence, and as a country with mandatory military service, they have one export that the US wants: "security".#Fuck12Friday
Not only do our tax dollars go to police domestically, U.S. citizens have spent over $30 billion in military aid to Israel in the last decade. This is more than is designated in military aid for any country in the world. #Fuck12Friday
Since 9/11 US lobbying groups have been paying for US police to go to Israel for security training, functionally treating Israel as just another US military base, and our police as an extension of the military. #Fuck12Friday
Chicago Police have gone to Intensive Seminars in Israel where they learned techniques for "intelligence-led policing" and visited the checkpoints used to harass Palestinians, in order to learn tactics to control citizens. #Fuck12Friday
As of 2014, "commanders of every major division of the Chicago police had been to Israel," to receive these trainings. writes journalist Ali Abunimah. #Fuck12Friday
But what does that mean for us? The citizens whose police are being trained to think like a military going up against foreign combatants? What does that mean for Palestinians who are looked at as foreign combatants for living in their native land? #Fuck12Friday
Israeli Deputy Consul Arieli who worked with the FBI to organize these trainings for the MPLS PD, admits that the trainings only briefly touch on how these law enforcement techniques could violate civil rights, and instead focuses on the "prevention of terrorism." #Fuck12Friday
We know that "terrorist" is a meaningless label. Nelson Mandela was a "terrorist." Angela Davis was a "terrorist." Assata Shakur was a "terrorist." Every Palestinian that desires freedom and sovereignty is a "terrorist." The FBI calls us "Black Identity Extremists." #Fuck12Friday
Here in Chicago, as we saw two weeks ago, the police aren't considering our civil rights, they're not considering us people with a right to protest and free speech, they're considering us as enemy combatants. #Fuck12Friday
How many times has a member of the GOP called us those "Black Lives Matter Terrorists", with the supposition that that word will strip of us our rights? #Fuck12Friday
With the threat that if we continue calling attention to injustice, we'll see how quickly they can punish us under the onus of that word. Palestinians understand this well. #Fuck12Friday
The last months have shown the stark difference in how policing affects the black and brown folks on the South and West sides of our city and those on the North. #Fuck12Friday
Folks on the South and West have been policed more in terms of social distancing. Folks on the South side have been treated more violently at protests. #Fuck12Friday
It begs the question: does that have any connection to how Chicago Police were taken to East Jerusalem to see how Israeli police target residents of that neighborhood? #Fuck12Friday
The name of the game is terrorism, if they say it enough times, the marginalized's rights go away, and they get free reign to act out the brand of terror that's reserved for that international brotherhood known as the police. #Fuck12Friday
Why are we expected to go about our lives in the face of the constant threat of capricious and arbitrary violations of our rights and civil liberties. How are Palestinians? But they do. But we do. #Fuck12Friday
They've cordoned us off into neighborhoods and have decided for us where we belong. Of what we must be up to when we don't stay with in their lines, with black and brown bodies that they feel threatened by. #Fuck12Friday
It's no accident that where we "belong" is away from our resources and our homes. Black Chicagoans "belong" in food deserts, stripped of their ancestral land and culture. Palestinians "belong" walled away from lands their families farmed for generations. #Fuck12Friday
And if we dare test their boundaries, we are watched, stopped, questioned, arrested. We can lose our livelihoods or even our lives for questioning the lot in life they've set out for us. #Fuck12Friday
Our communities, like Palestinian communities, deserve the resources they've been denied. Our lives, like Palestinian lives, deserve justice and dignity. All of us have a right to be respected as fully human, as worthy of life. #Fuck12Friday
This carceral system of policing, that treats our bodies as being criminal by virtue of our birth, that treats our homes and neighborhoods as prisons, that assumes our existence is a threat to capitalist power, comes from the same root and is choking us both. #Fuck12Friday
Internationalism is not abstract. When we demand liberation, it is a collective, global demand. We will only be free when Palestine is free. #Fuck12Friday
