Dominic Green writes for the UK’s Spectator:
Show me who you lie about and I’ll tell you what you are. The big lie in this, our season of historical illiteracy and gratuitous destruction, is that the Jews are responsible for police killings of black Americans. How? The racist police of Amerikkka are trained by the Zionists.
That’s right. America has no history of violence against blacks and no history of anti-black policing. In the new blood libel, America was one big interracial paradise before the Jews taught Derek Chauvin to put his knee on George Floyd’s neck.
‘Israel security forces are training American cops despite history of rights abuses,’ tweeted Charlotte Greensit in 2017. Greensit, an editor at the left-conspiracist website the Intercept, was promoting a demi-literate promotion of this conspiracy theory by Alice Speri. Greensit is now the managing editor of the New York Times’s opinion page. As she slithered up the greasy pole, Greensit deleted thousands of old tweets, this one included. But the snail-trail of slander is quite clear, and not at all new.
As soon as the Ferguson, Missouri protests began in August 2014, the slogan ‘Ferguson is Palestine’ appeared on the placards. When the Movement for Black Lives, a group affiliated with Black Lives Matter, promulgated a common platform in August 2016, its only foreign policy was that Israel must be shunned and destroyed as an ‘apartheid state’ that commits ‘genocide’ against the Palestinians. Another big lie.
In the same month, Amnesty USA claimed that ‘hundreds’ of American law enforcement officials from many states had received ‘training on crowd control, use of force and surveillance’ from Israel’s ‘national police, military and intelligence services’. That’s not true.
Amnesty’s claims are routinely cited as fact by the hard left and radical black identity groups. Its report and the libel it fosters have filtered into outlets as varied as the the British communist newspaper the Morning Star, the Washington Post and the website of the New York Review of Books.
‘The Israeli military trains US police in racist and repressive policing tactics, which systematically targets Black and Brown bodies,’ tweeted the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, which rejects Israel’s existence, in late May.
This is also inaccurate. As Amnesty itself admitted, the programs that took American officers to Israel were for ‘police chiefs, assistant chiefs, and captains’. Amnesty’s report contained no evidence that American officers received any information, let alone ‘training’, from their Israeli peers on relevant matters such as the militarising of the American police, targeting minorities for traffic stops and minor violations, or using deadly force in routine encounters.
Nor is there any evidence to suggest that American police chiefs have retrained their officers to copy any Israeli policing techniques. But why let the facts get in the way when you’ve got a big lie to push?
