Israel, Blamed for George Floyd’s Death, Replies to Its Calumniators

by Hugh Fitzgerald

As is well known, the monstrous regiment of anti-Israel “activists” – BDSers, antifa fanatics, Muslim infiltrators at Black Lives Matter rallies – have been attempting to blame Israel for the death of George Floyd. They claim that the police in America learned to use the knee-on-neck method of restraint practiced by Derek Chauvin from the Israeli police. Shortly after Floyd’s death, the Democratic Socialists of America’s BDS national working group tweeted, “The police violence happening tonight in Minneapolis is straight out of the IDF playbook,” adding, “US cops train in Israel.” A pro-BDS petition to the University of California made similar claims.

Al-Awda, the Palestine Right of Return Coalition, a BDS group that has ties to terrorist groups in the Middle East, issued a statement on June 8 that featured a cartoon showing an American police officer and an Israeli soldier, arm-in-arm, sitting with their knees over the necks of a black man and a Palestinian man respectively. The cartoon appeared first on the Fatah Facebook page and was then published in the Palestinian Authority (PA) newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida. That wasn’t all.

“We must stop training our American police officers to be gestapo units. #GeorgeFloyd #Palestine,” tweeted Abbas Hamideh of the same Al-Awda. Similarly, the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights and a student leader in Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) also blamed Israel for the police tactics, claiming that “the Israeli military trains US police in racist and repressive policing tactics, which systematically targets Black and Brown bodies.” Israel, of course, does no such thing. And the American police who have gone to Israel for training can testify to that effect.

Others in the anti-Israel universe have chimed in with similar charges. For many, the death of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin, who never attended any training sessions conducted by Israeli law enforcement, should nonetheless be blamed on Israel, that mighty colonial-settler empire that now bestrides the world like a colossus. No need for evidence. Just make the charge. Repeat it enough and it’s bound to stick. And so, in the great tradition of Linda Sarsour, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Nihad Awad and so many others, the anti-Israel charges came fast and furious at so many of those George-Floyd-Black-Lives-Matter rallies. On many signs the slogan reads: “From Minneapolis to Palestine/Racism is a Crime.”

Still others claimed in the same vein that “We know the Minneapolis police were also trained by Israeli counter-terrorism officers” (not the regular police), according to a ferociously anti-Israel pro-BDS petition at the University of California, signed by dozens of campus groups. It said: “The knee-to-neck choke-hold that Chauvin used to murder George Floyd has been used and perfected to torture Palestinians by Israeli occupation forces through 72 years of ethnic cleansing and dispossession. Police departments view Israeli Defense Force tactics as models for responding to ‘public health and safety crises.”

The Israelis were not about to let those calumnies go unanswered.

The story is at Algemeiner.com.

An Israel Police spokesperson appeared to push back on Tuesday [June 9] against efforts by some activists in far-left circles to blame the Jewish state for police brutality in the US.

Charges that certain tactics — including the knee-to-neck restraint move that led to George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis two weeks ago — were taught to American law enforcement personnel by Israeli counterparts have been circulating online recently.

It was time to state the truth. There are many thousands of national, state, and local police forces around the world, in Europe (France) in South America (Brazil and a dozen others countries), in Asia (India, China), and of course in the United States, that use the knee-on-neck chokehold, all without any input or training from Israel.

On June 9 Israeli Police foreign media spokesperson Micky Rosenfeld tweeted, “There is no procedure that allows an officer of the #israel police dept to carry out an arrest by placing a knee on the neck of a suspect.”

“None of police Counter terrorism training that #Israel national police provide to foreign law enforcement officers involves such a measure,” he added.

These were definitive statements. There is “no procedure” that allows an Israeli police officer “to place a knee on the neck of a suspect.”

The Israelis do not permit their own officers to use such a chokehold. They do not train others in how to perform such a chokehold.

Period. End of story. No wiggle-room was left in that answer by Micky Rosenfeld.

But who will listen to him or to any other defender of Israel when Antifa and BDSers and Palestinian propagandists still manage to shout down those who tell the truth, while they continue to scream their nonsense and lies?

First published in Jihad Watch.