Video cam­eras have trans­formed how we view police killings. First, there was the hor­ri­fy­ing homi­cide in July 2014 of Eric Garner, placed in a choke-hold for sell­ing loose cig­a­rettes and denied med­ical assis­tance for sev­er­al long min­utes despite plead­ing “I can’t breathe” eleven times. Then there was the shock­ing slay­ing in April 2015 of Walter Scott, stopped for a non-func­tion­ing third brake light and shot in the back in broad day­light while run­ning away from the police. Most recent­ly, there was the fatal shoot­ing this July of Samuel Dubose, stopped for a miss­ing front license plate and shot in the head while attempt­ing to dri­ve away. In all three cas­es — two of them caught by cit­i­zen videos and the third by police cam­era — the vic­tims were African-American.

In the wake of these events and protests that have done so much to focus pub­lic atten­tion on them, our knowl­edge of police killings has rapid­ly expand­ed. So, too, has the issue’s polit­i­cal salience. The videos — and the out­rage that fol­lowed — helped ignite the most pow­er­ful civ­il rights move­ment since the 1960s. Thanks to this move­ment, the issues of police killings and mass incar­cer­a­tion are now square­ly on the pub­lic agenda.

Like the move­ments against lynch­ing, state-sanc­tioned seg­re­ga­tion and the death penal­ty before it, today’s move­ment is part of a cen­turies-long strug­gle for racial jus­tice. These move­ments have repeat­ed­ly chal­lenged the tak­en-for-grant­ed prac­tices of the day and rede­fined them, step-by-step, as no longer moral­ly accept­able. As I will dis­cuss below, this pat­tern describes the strug­gle that led to the decline and ulti­mate elim­i­na­tion of lynch­ing, and it cap­tures as well the ongo­ing fight against the death penal­ty that may well cul­mi­nate in its abo­li­tion. Today’s move­ments aim at a sim­i­lar trans­for­ma­tion: to define rou­tine police killings and mass incar­cer­a­tion — prac­tices now tak­en for grant­ed as nor­mal fea­tures of American life — as nei­ther nor­mal nor moral­ly acceptable.

How Common Are Police Killings?

The cur­rent move­ment emerged out of mount­ing anger over the killing of unarmed cit­i­zens by police. When the ques­tion of how often such killings take place quite nat­u­ral­ly arose, the shock­ing answer was that no one knew — a state of affairs the FBI direc­tor James Comey has apt­ly described as “embar­rass­ing and ridicu­lous.” Though the FBI annu­al­ly issues a report that pro­vides fig­ures on “jus­ti­fied police homi­cides,” report­ing from local police forces is vol­un­tary and thou­sands of them turn in no infor­ma­tion. Investigations by the Wall Street Journal and FiveThirtyEight deter­mined that hun­dreds of police killings went unre­port­ed annu­al­ly, but they could do no more than pro­vide rough esti­mates. This is in strik­ing con­trast to many European coun­tries, where every killing by the police is care­ful­ly record­ed; indeed, in Germany and Finland, each and every shot fired by the police is entered into a nation­al database.

In response to the upsurge in pub­lic inter­est in police killings, the Washington PostandGuardian have stepped in to per­form a task that should have been done by the gov­ern­ment: the record­ing of every police killing. Though the news­pa­pers use slight­ly dif­fer­ent method­olo­gies, both news­pa­pers draw on two cit­i­zen-ini­ti­at­ed sources, “Killed by Police” and “Fatal Encounters,” which col­lect news reports of peo­ple killed by law enforce­ment offices, and both include data on whether the per­son was armed.¹ In addi­tion to the time and place of the killings, both data­bas­es include basic demo­graph­ic infor­ma­tion, includ­ing race, gen­der, and age. Neither attempts to deter­mine whether the killings should be deemed “jus­ti­fied.”

As recent­ly as the sum­mer of 2014, when the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner thrust the issue of police killings into nation­al promi­nence, the most wide­ly used esti­mate of the num­ber of peo­ple killed by police was pro­vid­ed by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report: slight­ly more than 400 per year. But we now know that this fig­ure was a gross under­es­ti­ma­tion, for the actu­al num­ber is more than 1,100 police killings each year — about one every eight hours.²This is a lev­el of police vio­lence that is sim­ply unimag­in­able in oth­er wealthy demo­c­ra­t­ic coun­try; in Germany in 2012, a total of sev­en peo­ple were killed by the police, and in England a sin­gle per­son was killed in 2013 and 2014 com­bined. And Japan, a nation of 126 mil­lion peo­ple that is as non-vio­lent as the US is vio­lent, had no police killings over the past two years.
Read more here :Police Killings Surpass the Worst Years of Lynching, Capital Punishment, and a Movement Responds

KINGSTON, Jamaica – Leader of the Opposition Andrew Holness says that the Government appears to be inca­pable of man­ag­ing crime.

In a release yes­ter­day on the posi­tion tak­en by the Opposition in the dis­cus­sions which fol­lowed Tuesday’s state­ment in the House of Representatives, by Minister of National Security Peter Bunting Holness said:

“The PNP [is] try­ing to cov­er up mur­ders and crime in Jamaica. The old PNP trick of attack­ing the mes­sen­ger in the hope that the mes­sage will die will not work. We are on to them this time. The facts are incon­tro­vert­ible. Whenever the PNP is in pow­er mur­der ris­es. Lawlessness and dis­or­der increases.

“No one is argu­ing that crime is not a nation­al prob­lem with many caus­es and we all have a role. National secu­ri­ty like health, edu­ca­tion, and all oth­er min­istries are the nation­al con­cerns and we all have respon­si­bil­i­ty. However, when we elect a gov­ern­ment we don’t expect them to turn to the pub­lic to say we can’t do any­thing about crime, it’s an all out respon­si­bil­i­ty. If that’s the case why have a government?

“Why pay Peter Bunting to tell us that the increase in mur­ders is a mere bump in the road and since then mur­ders have almost dou­ble. We all can pray for divine inter­ven­tion on our own we don’t need a paid Minister of Government to tell us that.

“The PNP has a nerve to talk about a bi-par­ti­san approach to crime fight­ing. We have facil­i­tat­ed every Bill that has been brought to Parliament to be fast tracked for pas­sage. However, when the great­est oppor­tu­ni­ty pre­sent­ed itself to erode the crim­i­nal net­works in Jamaica by extend­ing the state of emer­gency in 2010, the PNP reject­ed the very bi-par­ti­san­ship of which they speak. The PNP have no moral author­i­ty to speak about crime giv­en their his­to­ry and lack of per­for­mance in this regard.

“I will not stop talk­ing on the mur­der issue… If mur­ders were reduced by almost 500 under the JLP gov­ern­ment, the pub­lic is jus­ti­fied in expect­ing a con­tin­ued decrease under the PNP. Instead this is not. Murders are now 24 per cent ahead of what they were last year. This Government sim­ply does­n’t care and is inca­pable of man­ag­ing crime.”
Holness explains posi­tion on crime situation

After a week of silence, the “Pulp Fiction” direc­tor has gone medieval at crit­ics of his anti-cop rants — and has tak­en a few swipes at NYPD Police Commissioner Bill Bratton.

“You’ve got (Police Commissioner) Bill Bratton saying…’There are no words to describe the con­tempt I feel for him.’ Him being me,” Tarantino told the LA Times Wednesday. “Yet when asked about the Eric Garner case, his quote is: ‘I per­son­al­ly don’t think race was a fac­tor in that inci­dent.’ If you watch the tape, you can tell that it was absolute­ly a fac­tor in that inci­dent. But I’m the only one he has no words for the con­tempt because I was against police brutality.”

Being against police bru­tal­i­ty for (Bratton) is being against the police,” he said.

Tarantino’s royale with cheese smack down came on the same day Nassau County cops joined a boy­cott of Tarantino’s upcom­ing film “The Hateful Eight,” which hits the­aters on Christmas Day. Tarantino said he is not wor­ried that his movie is going to tank as a result. “The peo­ple who are scream­ing against me are the mouth­pieces for the police,” he told the west coast paper. “They can call for a boy­cott. That doesn’t mean that cops are going to respond. I actu­al­ly have a whole lot of fans that are police offi­cers. And they’re not going to take (Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association President) Patrick Lynch’s word for what I said.”
Read sto­ry here…Tarantino fires back at cops call­ing for boy­cott of his new film: ‘Being against police bru­tal­i­ty for (Bratton) is being against the police’ 

Authorities say a 6‑year-old boy is dead and his father is in crit­i­cal con­di­tion after mar­shals for a city in cen­tral Louisiana shot at a vehi­cle they were flee­ing in. Officials say the two were shot about 9:30 p.m. Tuesday in the city of Marksville.

Avoyelles Parish coro­ner Dr. L. J. Mayeux iden­ti­fied the dri­ver as Chris Few and his son as Jeremy Mardis, a first-grad­er at a near­by ele­men­tary school. Mayeux says city mar­shals were chas­ing Few after he fled an attempt to serve a war­rant. The coro­ner says Few reached a dead end and was back­ing into the mar­shals when they fired. The coro­ner says the boy was “caught in the line of fire” and was killed. State police are han­dling the inves­ti­ga­tion, but they pro­vid­ed few details.
6‑year-old son of man flee­ing arrest dies in police-involved shooting

THE Tivoli Enquiry heard yes­ter­day that res­i­dents of Tivoli Gardens could not iden­ti­fy a num­ber of the men killed inside the com­mu­ni­ty dur­ing the May 2010 oper­a­tion to appre­hend Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke because they were “import­ed” into the area to defend the for­mer strongman.

This evi­dence was giv­en by Inspector Mario Pratt, who was one of the dri­vers pick­ing up bod­ies through­out the com­mu­ni­ty and in the neigh­bour­ing Denham Town between May 24 and 25 of 2010.

He tes­ti­fied that a total of 13 bod­ies were placed in his truck on May 25 and that res­i­dents told an accom­pa­ny­ing col­league of his that the men were import­ed so they would­n’t be unable to iden­ti­fy them.

He also tes­ti­fied that oth­ers refused to co-oper­ate with the police when asked if they knew the men. Pratt tes­ti­fied in his exam­i­na­tion-in-chief, led by attor­ney Deborah Martin, that the bod­ies were picked up in path­ways and on the road and that none was removed from hous­es or yards in the community.

Evidence had already been giv­en that upwards of 300 gun­men were in Tivoli Gardens to defend Coke and that they were paid hand­some­ly to be there.

A senior Jamaica Defence Force sol­dier tes­ti­fied that a num­ber of men with rur­al address­es were round­ed up in the area and some were even put out by Denham Town res­i­dents after mem­bers of the secu­ri­ty forces grad­u­al­ly took con­trol of the area. The men were unable to say what they were doing in the com­mu­ni­ty and were pre­dom­i­nant­ly dressed in white shirts and blue jeans. Evidence was giv­en that this was the mode of dress for gun­men, who had engaged mem­bers of the secu­ri­ty forces in the West Kingston area dur­ing the operation.

– Paul Henry

The enquiry, being held at the Jamaica Conference Centre in down­town Kingston, is look­ing into the cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing the deaths of more than 70 peo­ple dur­ing the oper­a­tion to appre­hend Coke and restore law and order to the area after gun­men bar­ri­cad­ed sec­tions of the com­mu­ni­ty and turned it into a fortress.

Questioned by Terrence Williams, who heads the Independent Commission of Investigation, Pratt agreed that he nev­er put in his state­ment the evi­dence that res­i­dents said the bod­ies belonged to import­ed men.

The cop, who was a sergeant back in 2010, said that his intent in November of that year when he wrote his state­ment was to give an out­line of what occurred in Tivoli Gardens when he entered the com­mu­ni­ty. Read more here : Cops say sev­er­al dead men iden­ti­fied as ‘imports’

KINGSTON, Jamaica — Leader of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) Andrew Holness has expressed con­cern that as many as 800 mem­bers of the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) may be leav­ing the force this year. “Just today I did some research, and I am told that the attri­tion rate in the police force is over 800 this year. Eight hun­dred police­men have decid­ed to leave the police force,” Holness told the crowd at Sunday night’s JLP mass ral­ly in May Pen, Clarendon. “If you want to fight crime, you have to make the crime-fight­ers hap­py. If you want to fight crime, you have to make the police feel appre­ci­at­ed and moti­vat­ed,” Holness stated.

“And so the Labour Party makes a com­mit­ment that we will look very close­ly at the remu­ner­a­tion of police. We will look very close­ly at the con­di­tions and terms of ser­vice of police­men to ensure that they are com­fort­able in the fight against crime,” he added. Holness also referred to the armed rob­bery of the JLP coun­cil­lor for the Mocho Division of the Clarendon Parish Council, busi­ness­woman Henene Simpson, on Saturday, and com­ment­ed that not many Jamaicans are as lucky she was. “Not many Jamaicans are so lucky, because crime is out of con­trol in this coun­try. Whenever the People’s National Party is in pow­er mur­der ris­es; when­ev­er the PNP is in pow­er crime ris­es; and I keep telling peo­ple that you have a greater chance of being mur­dered in Jamaica than being hit by a car,” he said.

“We believe that there is a lot that we can do to solve crime in this coun­try,” Holness said. “There is a lot that we can do to bring down mur­ders in this coun­try. There is a lot that we can do to make you safer in your own homes and pub­lic spaces. “The first thing that we have to do is to let our police­men feel appre­ci­at­ed again. The morale among police­men is very low,” he added.

Balford Henry
See more here : Holness says Gov’t must moti­vate police to fight crime

CAMBRIDGE — As the lights rose, Ted Cruz held cen­ter stage, dressed in black and kneel­ing at a bed­side. The first-year stu­dent at Harvard Law School deliv­ered his lines with the emo­tions of a man gripped by anger, fear, and wor­ry for his reputation.

“Do you under­stand that I have many ene­mies?” he thun­dered. “There is a fac­tion that is sworn to dri­ve me from my pul­pit. Do you under­stand that?”
Cruz, then a devot­ed ama­teur thes­pi­an, was play­ing the role of the Rev. Samuel Parris in “The Crucible,” Arthur Miller’s alle­gor­i­cal play about McCarthyism.

The lines — and the part — seem prophet­ic today.

In the US Senate, the Tea Party Republican from Texas has con­tin­ued to seek out a spot at cen­ter stage. His ene­mies — and he has many, includ­ing some in his own par­ty — char­ac­ter­ize him as pow­er-hun­gry, self-right­eous, dri­ven by sin­gle-mind­ed polit­i­cal piety. He even mount­ed what detrac­tors called a ground­less witch hunt, against the pres­i­den­tial nom­i­nee for sec­re­tary of defense.

View Story
Where Ted Cruz stands on key issues
Cruz hopes to ener­gize the evan­gel­i­cal wing of the GOP and sup­ple­ment his already strong sup­port among tea par­ty and grass­roots conservatives.
Video: Cruz act­ing in ‘The Crucible’

None of which, to his for­mer Harvard Law class­mates, is surprising.

Interviews with more than two dozen alum­nae and pro­fes­sors fill in a por­trait of Cruz, in Cambridge two decades ago, that would be ful­ly rec­og­niz­able to those who know him now in Washington. He made a last­ing impres­sion as some­one both arro­gant and pre­ten­tious, as well as some­one unwill­ing to yield or compromise.

But he was also uni­ver­sal­ly respect­ed for his intel­lect, described by friend and foe alike as bril­liant but with a hard edge.

“He nev­er real­ly had an off switch with his debater’s demeanor,” said Ted Ruger, who was pres­i­dent of the Harvard Law Review dur­ing Cruz’s third year. “We just real­ized that was the way a dis­cus­sion with Ted was going to go. If you expect­ed some­thing dif­fer­ent, you came away shak­ing your head.”

Some two decades lat­er, Cruz has deft­ly tapped into a rebel­lious, angry strain in American con­ser­vatism and emerged as a leader in the Tea Party move­ment. He was a pri­ma­ry force behind last month’s gov­ern­ment shut­down, and has been men­tioned as a pos­si­ble 2016 pres­i­den­tial candidate.

The man who prod­ded his col­leagues on the Harvard Law Review is now the one draw­ing the ire of his Senate col­leagues. He remains more noto­ri­ous than popular.

Looking back, Cruz said those three years at Harvard Law School, from 1992 to 1995, sharp­ened his polit­i­cal vision and trained him for the intense spar­ring with lib­er­als that has become his sig­na­ture style as a nation­al politician.

But he also said he has mel­lowed since then.

“I sus­pect I was not the first 21-year-old who thought he knew more than he did,’’ Cruz said in an inter­view in his Senate office. “And one of the virtues of age, one of the virtues of get­ting mar­ried and becom­ing a father, is it often leads one to take a more mea­sured approach to life.”

Born in Canada

Ted Cruz arrived in Cambridge as an outsider.

He was born in Alberta, Canada. His father fled per­se­cu­tion in Cuba, even­tu­al­ly set­tling in Austin, Texas, where he learned English and earned a col­lege degree.

After grow­ing up in the Houston area, Cruz stud­ied pub­lic pol­i­cy at Princeton, where he devel­oped a rep­u­ta­tion as a quick-wit­ted nation­al debate cham­pi­on. His near-per­fect score on the LSAT helped him ful­fill a dream of going to Harvard Law School.

It was a long way from Texas. Cruz’s father called it “mis­sion­ary work,” a place that would allow his con­ser­v­a­tive son to preach to the lib­er­al élite. And Cruz’s stri­dent views stood out as much as the cow­boy boots he wore to class, or the large Texas flag in his dorm room.

“Going to school on a cam­pus where the fac­ul­ty over­whelm­ing­ly dis­agrees with you, and where the stu­dent body over­whelm­ing­ly dis­agrees with you, is chal­leng­ing,” Cruz said. “If you go in with­out a firm foun­da­tion, it can under­mine what you believe.”

Cruz enrolled in 1992, a year after President Obama left and just as Elizabeth Warren began teach­ing as a vis­it­ing pro­fes­sor (she nev­er taught him). He imme­di­ate­ly stood out aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly, even in a class of 560 of the country’s bright­est students.

“He came in with his right hand raised and basi­cal­ly kept it raised the entire semes­ter,” said Alan Dershowitz, who taught Cruz in a first-year crim­i­nal law class. “Every year you see two or three stu­dents who you know are nat­ur­al lead­ers. Everybody saw that with Barack Obama … Everybody saw that with Elena Kagan. There are stu­dents who come in with charis­mat­ic qual­i­ties who oth­er peo­ple fol­low. He was one of them.”

While talk­a­tive and out­go­ing, he struck some class­mates as naked­ly ambitious.

As they were enter­ing their sec­ond year in law school, Melissa Hart agreed to give Cruz a ride from New York, where Cruz was at the end of the sum­mer, back to Cambridge. She didn’t know him well, but he sought her out after she had been giv­en a pres­ti­gious award for first-year students.

“We hadn’t left Manhattan before he asked my IQ,” Hart said. “When I told him I didn’t know, he asked, ‘Well, what’s your SAT score? That’s close­ly coör­di­nat­ed with your IQ.’ ”

“It went from, ‘Nice guy,’ ” she said, “to ‘uh-oh.’ ”

A for­mer room­mate told the mag­a­zine GQ recent­ly that Cruz pre­ferred to study only with grad­u­ates of Harvard, Princeton, or Yale, dis­miss­ing the rest as “the minor Ivies.”

“It’s com­plete non­sense,” Cruz said. “It’s sim­ply not true.”

The five-mem­ber study group includ­ed one mem­ber, Jeff Hinck, who attend­ed Northwestern.

Law Review post

Cruz lived in Hastings Hall, a six-sto­ry brown­stone behind wrought-iron gates. The Hemenway Gymnasium, where he played intra­mur­al bas­ket­ball and vol­ley­ball, was 40 steps away; Gannett House, which housed the Harvard Law Review, was 70 more.

Occasionally he would ven­ture into Harvard Square for Mexican food or a movie. He avoid­ed Boston, although one class­mate recalls Cruz being the only one will­ing to shell out mon­ey to see Michael Jordan in the Boston Garden in his sec­ond game back from his brief base­ball career (Cruz can still recount the box score).

In his sec­ond year, Cruz joined the Law Review and became a prin­ci­pal edi­tor. He was also a found­ing edi­tor of the Harvard Latino Law Review (where he is list­ed as “Rafael E. Cruz”) and joined the con­ser­v­a­tive Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy (“R. Ted Cruz”).

Cruz focused pri­mar­i­ly on his stud­ies, and the law jour­nals. But he stayed up late play­ing marathon ses­sions of “Super Mario Brothers” on the Nintendo, or cards. If the game was hearts, his sig­na­ture move was to “shoot the moon,” the game’s riski­est, showiest, and most aggres­sive maneuver.

“It’s hard to exe­cute,” said Charles Morse, a law school friend. “Ted was fond of that.”

If the game was pok­er, he put all his chips on the table.

“He would go all in some­times … and you’d nev­er know if he’s bluff­ing,” said Alexander Acosta, anoth­er friend. “He’s some­one who’s will­ing to take risks.”

He also enjoyed antag­o­niz­ing lib­er­al class­mates. Late nights at the Law Review were the scene of fierce debates. Cruz’s beliefs are no dif­fer­ent now, and when it came to tax­a­tion class­mates recall him argu­ing that the gov­ern­ment was steal­ing mon­ey from the rich and giv­ing it to the poor.

“Some top­ic would come up and it was a free for all,” said Dean Newton, a fel­low con­ser­v­a­tive on the Law Review. “All you’d have to do is say some­thing remote­ly con­ser­v­a­tive and it would catch people’s hair on fire. It was fun to goad them.”

Poking at turtles

Newton com­pared the spar­ring he and Cruz would engage in with Harvard lib­er­als to pok­ing at snap­ping tur­tles stuck at the bot­tom of a barrel.

“It didn’t take much of a stick,” he said. “And they would imme­di­ate­ly snap.”

But with Cruz, those argu­ments became heat­ed. It wasn’t just the sub­stance, but how Cruz pre­sent­ed his case. To his adver­saries, he was relent­less. To his allies, he was misunderstood.

“Some peo­ple think his lan­guage is hard,” said David Panton, Cruz’s long­time best friend, and his room­mate their first year at Harvard Law School.“But he’s a lit­i­ga­tor. He has strong views and he makes his points clear­ly and empathically.”

Ted Cruz was, and in many ways still is, an actor.

In high school, he says, he con­sid­ered drop­ping out and mov­ing to California to pur­sue an act­ing career. His par­ents talked him out of it.

Shortly after he got to Harvard, he audi­tioned for “The Crucible,” which the law school dra­ma soci­ety was stag­ing to mark the 300^th anniver­sary of the Salem witch trials.

Miller’s play was writ­ten dur­ing Senator Joseph Mc-
Carthy’s Communist witch hunt in the 1950s. Since becom­ing a sen­a­tor, Cruz’s crit­ics have likened him to McCarthy for sug­gest­ing, with­out evi­dence, that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel might have accept­ed mon­ey from extreme or rad­i­cal groups. The com­ment drew a rebuke from Senator John McCain, who lat­er called Cruz a “wacko bird.”

Cruz rejects com­par­isons of him­self to McCarthy, sug­gest­ing he is the one being judged.

“It’s a tremen­dous play,” he said. “And it is obvi­ous­ly a les­son against jump­ing to con­clu­sions and being unfair­ly and harsh­ly judg­men­tal of oth­ers. That is a les­son I wish a lot more in Washington would take heed of.”

To the play’s cast mem­bers, “The Crucible” is mem­o­rable for anoth­er reason.

After the suc­cess­ful first per­for­mance, Cruz spent the cast par­ty imbib­ing so much Everclear — a pow­er­ful grain alco­hol — that he couldn’t make it through the next night’s per­for­mance. His fel­low actors had to coax him into going onstage, but by Act III his con­di­tion worsened.

A video of the per­for­mance shows him sit­ting on a bench onstage, his head buried in his hands for near­ly five min­utes straight. After meek­ly deliv­er­ing a line, he walked off stage in the mid­dle of the scene, forc­ing cast mem­bers to impro­vise around the depar­ture of a lead char­ac­ter. He didn’t return for the remain­der of the play.

“I was not feel­ing well, which was unfor­tu­nate,” Cruz said, tak­ing a philo­soph­i­cal view of the expe­ri­ence. “The young are not renowned for their wis­dom. And that’s cer­tain­ly not a prin­ci­ple from which I was exempt.”

Asked if he’d had a sip of Everclear since, he replied, “I doubt it.”

It was a rare dis­play of weak­ness for some­one who oth­er­wise seemed deter­mined to succeed.

From the moment Cruz stepped onto the Harvard cam­pus, he was intent on win­ning a clerk­ship with Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, a fast track to con­ser­v­a­tive legal prominence.

“From day one … that was his tan­gi­ble, near-term goal,” said Jeff Hinck, a study partner.

Cruz was so dri­ven to secure a clerk­ship that he resolved to learn ten­nis, since Rehnquist, an avid play­er, was known to orga­nize week­ly match­es with his clerks.

When he final­ly got an audi­ence with Rehnquist and was asked if he was will­ing to play, Cruz, while allow­ing that he was “not very good,” eager­ly agreed.

He got the job, but paid a price.

“What he didn’t real­ize until lat­er was that ‘not very good’ was an incred­i­ble boast,” Cruz said. “I was so hor­rif­i­cal­ly bad at tennis.”

Looking beyond campus

At Harvard Law, Cruz was a mem­ber of a small band of con­ser­v­a­tives whose pol­i­tics were out of step with most of their peers. But beyond cam­pus, con­ser­vatism was a gath­er­ing force.

As the 1994 elec­tions approached, with Newt Gingrich lead­ing the charge, Cruz and his friends threw a “Republicans Take Back the House Party,” in Hastings Hall. When Republicans tri­umphed, the cam­pus con­ser­v­a­tives erupt­ed in cheers — antag­o­niz­ing Harvard’s lib­er­als with their rau­cous celebration.

“I walked in and there were peo­ple going crazy,” said Matt Bodie, one of Cruz’s lib­er­al class­mates. “I said, ‘Oh I got­ta get out of here.’ But there were some very hap­py conservatives.”

By the time he left Cambridge, the right wing in American pol­i­tics was ascen­dant and Cruz, with his new­ly mint­ed Harvard Law degree, was one of its bright­est young stars.

Shortly after grad­u­at­ing magna cum laude, he took out a loan and bought his moth­er a new Saab con­vert­ible for her birth­day. Then he embarked on the series of pres­ti­gious clerk­ships that plant­ed the seeds for his polit­i­cal career.

Inside his Senate office, on a shelf with some of his writ­ings in Harvard law jour­nals, he keeps a base­ball cap that has the words “WACKO BIRD” on it, memo­ri­al­iz­ing the term McCain gave him.

As Cruz leaned back in his chair, nurs­ing a cold fol­low­ing a week­end trip test­ing the pres­i­den­tial waters in Iowa, he reflect­ed on the lessons he took from Harvard Law School. And that man who has so roiled the Republican Party, and upset Washington for his demeanor and his tac­tics, said there need­ed to be more civility.

“There is a depress­ing ten­den­cy in mod­ern polit­i­cal life to dis­par­age those who dis­agree with you as either stu­pid or evil,” he said. “’They’re either too dumb to know the right answer or, even worse, they’re smart enough and yet they wish suf­fer­ing on oth­ers and are just down­right evil.’ The truth of the mat­ter, most peo­ple are neither.”
SEE MORE HERE : Harvard Law out­sider became Tea Party hero

Excessive force may be the most com­mon­ly dis­cussed form of police bru­tal­i­ty but accord­ing to a new study from the Associated Press, sex­u­al mis­con­duct is among the most preva­lent type of com­plaint against law enforce­ment in the United States.

With the tri­al of Daniel Holtzclaw, the Oklahoma City police offi­cer indict­ed for rap­ing at least 13 women while on-duty, set to begin today, an aston­ish­ing new report sheds light on the enor­mous scope of ram­pant sex­u­al mis­con­duct by police offi­cers across the U.S.

In a year­long inves­ti­ga­tion of sex­u­al mis­con­duct by state and local police, sheriff’s deputies, prison guards and school resource offi­cers, the AP uncov­ered about 1,000 offi­cers who were fired between 2009 and 2014 for “rape, sodomy and oth­er sex­u­al assault; sex crimes that includ­ed pos­ses­sion of child pornog­ra­phy; or sex­u­al mis­con­duct such as propo­si­tion­ing cit­i­zens or hav­ing con­sen­su­al but pro­hib­it­ed on-duty intercourse.”

And 1,000 is sure­ly an under­count as the state’s with the largest law enforce­ment agen­cies in the coun­try, New York and California, were not includ­ed in the count because they do not have a statewide sys­tem to decer­ti­fy bad cops. Neither does New Jersey. Three oth­er states did not hand over their records.

Only 25 states require a police depart­ment to tell the state board any­time an offi­cer is fired for mis­con­duct — or any­time an offi­cer is fired at all. And only 10 of the states that require police depart­ments to report fir­ings also require them to report res­ig­na­tions due to mis­con­duct. In fact, as has become painful­ly obvi­ous to even the most casu­al observ­er of the nation­al dia­logue on police mis­con­duct, there is no nation­wide data­base of offi­cers who have even been fired for any cause because the FBI does not col­lect such data.

So, the AP obtained records from 41 states that do keep records on police decer­ti­fi­ca­tion from 2009 to 2014:

550 offi­cers were decer­ti­fied for sex­u­al assault, includ­ing rape and sodomy, sex­u­al shake­downs in which cit­i­zens were extort­ed into per­form­ing favors to avoid arrest, or gra­tu­itous pat-downs. Some 440 offi­cers lost their badges for oth­er sex offens­es, such as pos­sess­ing child pornog­ra­phy, or for sex­u­al mis­con­duct that includ­ed being a peep­ing Tom, sex­ting juve­niles or hav­ing on-duty intercourse.

[…]

About one-third of the offi­cers decer­ti­fied were accused of inci­dents involv­ing juveniles.

[…]

even among states that pro­vid­ed records, some report­ed no offi­cers removed for sex­u­al mis­deeds even though cas­es were iden­ti­fied via news sto­ries or court records.

“It’s so under­re­port­ed and peo­ple are scared that if they call and com­plain about a police offi­cer, they think every oth­er police offi­cer is going to be then out to get them,” said Chief Bernadette DiPino of the Sarasota Police Department in Florida, who helped study the prob­lem for the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

The AP’s report is, of course, only lim­it­ed to those offi­cers who were actu­al­ly stripped of their badges as a result of their sex­u­al misconduct.

As Truthout’s Candice Bernd sad­ly tracked, in the month of June alone:

[A] coun­ty sheriff’s deputy in Georgia was charged with fondling women involved in court cas­es; a deputy in Colorado was arrest­ed on a domes­tic vio­lence-relat­ed sex assault charge; a police deputy chief in Utah resigned after alle­ga­tions of sex­u­al harass­ment; a woman in New York City filed a law­suit accus­ing an offi­cer of rape, assault and bat­tery after the offi­cer alleged­ly pres­sured her into a date by promis­ing to clear up her case; a for­mer Georgia offi­cer was sen­tenced to 35 years on child molesta­tion charges after he forced sex acts from two girls and a woman while on duty; an offi­cer in Texas was arrest­ed on domes­tic vio­lence charges, say­ing in a record­ing that his wife need­ed to be ‘cut by a razor, set on fire, beat half to death and left to die’; sev­er­al sex­u­al assault charges were filed against a for­mer California offi­cer who alleged­ly molest­ed a 14-year-old Explorer Scout; an offi­cer in North Carolina faces peep­ing charges; a for­mer Arkansas offi­cer plead guilty to five counts of sex­u­al assault of a 16-year-old girl; a for­mer DC offi­cer admit­ted in fed­er­al court recent­ly he forced under­age teenagers to work as escorts out of his apart­ment; and a for­mer Wisconsin police offi­cer, Steven Zelich, was arrest­ed for alleged­ly mur­der­ing two women and stuff­ing their bod­ies into suitcases.
See more here The police bru­tal­i­ty epi­dem­ic that goes unno­ticed: More than 1,000 police offi­cers fired over the last six years for sex­u­al misconduct

Updated | The South Carolina stu­dent flipped and tack­led by sher­if­f’s deputy Ben Fields is in fos­ter care, her attor­ney told the New York Daily News.

The stu­dent, who has not been iden­ti­fied by author­i­ties, refused to leave the room after dis­turb­ing a class on Monday at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina. Fields, a school resource offi­cer, entered the class­room to remove her after a teacher and admin­is­tra­tor was unable to do so. In a video filmed by anoth­er stu­dent, the offi­cer is seen flip­ping the girl over in her chair and throw­ing her across the room.

Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott fired Fields on Wednesday, say­ing it was the throw that com­pelled him to do so.

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In an inter­view on the Joe Madison Show on Thursday morn­ing, Todd Rutherford, the girl’s lawyer, said her bio­log­i­cal moth­er and grand­moth­er are both alive. His remarks clar­i­fied a sto­ry pub­lished in the New York Daily News on Wednesday sug­gest­ing the girl’s moth­er had recent­ly died. The Daily News updat­ed its sto­ry on Thursday morn­ing, but main­tains that the stu­dent is cur­rent­ly in fos­ter care. The girl’s rela­tion­ship with her father is unknown, and she has not spo­ken pub­licly about the inci­dent or Fields’s firing.

After the video went viral on Monday, author­i­ties said the stu­dent was not injured. However, her attor­ney Todd Rutherford told WLTX that she suf­fered neck and back injuries from the inci­dent. “He weighs about 300 pounds. She is a stu­dent who is 16 years old. Who now has a cast on her arm, a band aid on her neck, and neck and back prob­lems. There’s some­thing wrong here,” Rutherford said.

The stu­dent still faces charges of dis­turb­ing the peace, Lott said on Wednesday. “She was very dis­rup­tive, very dis­re­spect­ful. She start­ed this whole inci­dent with her actions.”

The inci­dent is being inves­ti­gat­ed by the FBI and U.S. Justice Department to deter­mine if any fed­er­al laws were vio­lat­ed. The offi­cer has not been charged. Report: South Carolina Student Flipped by Police Officer Is In Foster Care

More than 30,000 people have signed a petition calling on the news channel to fire bombastic newsman Don Lemon.

Another day, anoth­er dose of sour Lemon-aide for CNN.

More than 30,000 peo­ple have signed a peti­tion call­ing on the news chan­nel to fire bom­bas­tic news­man Don Lemon after he insist­ed that his col­leagues Wolf Blitzer and legal ana­lyst Sunny Hostin with­hold decid­ing whether South Carolina “resource offi­cer” Ben Fieldsused exces­sive force when remov­ing a stu­dent from a class­room ear­li­er this week.

With an aver­age of around 600,000 view­ers, that’s about 5‑percent of Lemon’s audi­ence call­ing for his ouster.

RNC ON NEXT DEBATE: ‘NBC-YA LATER!’

But his many of his co-work­ers are unfazed by the incident.

“Don Lemon is in trou­ble again? What else is new?” a CNN pro­duc­er said.

“The more he says out­ra­geous things, the more peo­ple tune in — most peo­ple here are not sur­prised at any­thing that comes out of his mouth anymore.”

A CNN rep said Lemon had declined to com­ment about the peition.

Ripping Lemon and the things the news­man says has become some­thing of a cot­tege indus­try for media watchers.

He drew fire last June while cov­er­ing Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s call for the removal of the Confederate flag from the state capitol.

GOFUNDME STARTED FOR SPRING VALLEY HS GIRL THROWN IN VIDEO

On CNN Lemon held up a con­fed­er­ate flag and then a sign with the n‑word in big block let­ters and asked : “Does this offend you?

Last November, as Ferguson, MO erupt­ed into anger, bul­lets and flamesLemon ham-hand­ed­ly drew tear gas into his own gas mask, whined for water and a device to con­tact his pro­duc­ers, and then made a cul­tur­al­ly insen­si­tive com­ment about pro­test­ers smok­ing pot.

A few days ear­li­er Lemon was roast­ef ro

insin­u­at­ing that one of Bill Cosby’s alleged sex­u­al assault vic­tims should have bit­ten the com­ic instead of per­form­ing oral sex.

This week’s peti­tion, post­ed on change​.org declared:

“We, the peo­ple, want a jour­nal­ist and an anchor that will not be afraid to accept the facts that are occur­ring with­in the African-American com­mu­ni­ty and who will encour­age our peo­ple the same way that per­son will encour­age oth­ers across the board,” explains the Change​.org peti­tion. “We, the peo­ple, have no con­fi­dence in Mr. Lemon’s abil­i­ty to do that. Therefore, we are ask­ing CNN to remove him from his position.”

Video record­ings of police offi­cers bat­ter­ing or even mur­der­ing unarmed black cit­i­zens have val­i­dat­ed long­stand­ing com­plaints by African-Americans and changed the way the coun­try views the issue of police bru­tal­i­ty. Police offi­cers who

might once have felt free to arrest or assault black cit­i­zens for no cause and explain it away lat­er have been put on notice that the truth could be revealed by a cell­phone video post­ed on the Internet.
This kind of pub­lic scruti­ny is all to the good, giv­en the dam­age police bru­tal­i­ty has done to African-American com­mu­ni­ties for gen­er­a­tions and the cor­ro­sive effect it has on the broad­er soci­ety. Yet the peel­ing away of secre­cy on these indis­putably uncon­sti­tu­tion­al prac­tices is now being chal­lenged by politi­cians who want to soft-ped­al or even ignore police mis­con­duct while attack­ing the peo­ple who expose it or raise their voic­es in protest against it. This trend is like some­thing straight out of Orwell.

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey — the increas­ing­ly des­per­ate pres­i­den­tial can­di­date who is going nowhere fast — took this pos­ture on Sunday when he accused President Obama of encour­ag­ing “law­less­ness” and vio­lence against police offi­cers by acknowl­edg­ing that the coun­try need­ed to take both police bru­tal­i­ty and the “Black Lives Matter” protest move­ment seriously.

The pres­i­dent is absolute­ly right. This move­ment focus­es on the irrefutable fact that black cit­i­zens are far more like­ly than whites to die at the hands of the police. The more the coun­try ignores that truth, the greater the civic dis­cord that will flow from it.

The recent remarks of James Comey, the direc­tor of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, were not as racial­ly poi­so­nous as Mr. Christie’s, but they were no less incen­di­ary. In a speech at the University of Chicago Law School on Friday, Mr. Comey said that height­ened scruti­ny of police behav­ior — and fear of appear­ing in “viral videos” — was lead­ing offi­cers to avoid con­fronta­tions with sus­pects. This, he said, may have con­tributed to an increase in crime.

There is no data sug­gest­ing such an effect, and cer­tain­ly Mr. Comey has none. But his sug­ges­tion plays into the right-wing view that hold­ing the police to con­sti­tu­tion­al stan­dards endan­gers the pub­lic. Justice Department offi­cials who have made a top pri­or­i­ty of pros­e­cut­ing police depart­ments for civ­il rights vio­la­tions — and who dis­pute that height­ened scruti­ny of the police dri­ves up crime — were under­stand­ably angry at Mr. Comey’s speculations.

His for­mu­la­tion implies that for the police to do their jobs, they need to have free rein to be abu­sive. It also implies that the pub­lic would be safer if Americans with cell­phones nev­er start­ed cir­cu­lat­ing videos of offi­cers bat­ter­ing sus­pects in the first place.

A day after Mr. Comey made his remarks, The Times pub­lished a lengthy inves­ti­ga­tioninto racial pro­fil­ing and abu­sive police behav­ior in Greensboro, N.C., the third-largest city in the state. After review­ing tens of thou­sands of traf­fic stops and years of arrest data, Times reporters found that the police pulled over African-American dri­vers at a rate far out of pro­por­tion to their share of the local dri­ving pop­u­la­tion. The police searched black motorists or their cars twice as often as whites — even though whites where sig­nif­i­cant­ly more like­ly to be caught with drugs and weapons.

Greensboro police offi­cers were more like­ly to pull black dri­vers over for no rea­son and more like­ly to use force if the dri­ver was black, even when the dri­ver offered no phys­i­cal resis­tance. A black Greensboro man who near­ly lost his job as a result of ask­ing an offi­cer why he was being ordered out of his car dur­ing a night­mar­ish encounter said: “Every time I see a police offi­cer, I get a cold chill. Even if I need­ed one, I wouldn’t call one.”

This is the kind of treat­ment that some Americans rou­tine­ly face at the hands of their police depart­ments. Mr. Comey’s spec­u­la­tions about alleged pres­sure on offi­cers to stand down shows that he hasn’t begun to grasp the nature of the problem.
Read more : Political Lies About Police Brutality

The par­lia­men­tary Opposition has ratch­eted up its resis­tance to the Government’s push to have the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) installed as the nation’s final appel­late court, declar­ing yes­ter­day that it is pre­pared to mount a con­sti­tu­tion­al chal­lenge all the way to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in the United Kingdom.

And if that fails, Delroy Chuck, the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) spokesman on jus­tice, has warned that the par­ty would “use a sim­ply major­i­ty of Parliament” to ditch the CCJ if it wins State pow­er in the next gen­er­al elections.

“The only way the CCJ can be the final appel­late court is when we put it to the peo­ple and we say to the peo­ple ‘do you want the CCJ or you want a final Jamaican court’ and let the peo­ple of Jamaica make that deci­sion,” Chuck vowed yes­ter­day dur­ing a Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) Area Council One meet­ing in St Andrew.

Chuck, who is also an attor­ney, warned that if any JLP sen­a­tor broke ranks and vot­ed with their gov­ern­ment coun­ter­parts, they are going to be embarrassed.

“If one, two, or eight [JLP] sen­a­tors make the error [and vote for the bills], not only would they be embar­rass­ing them­selves, but what they would do is cause the Labour Party to expend mon­ey to take these three bills to the Supreme Court, the Court of Appeal, [and the] Privy Council,” Chuck cautioned.

“Let me make it even fur­ther clear. If one, two, or all eight of them go ahead and sup­port the bills, the leader of the Jamaica Labour Party, the spokesper­son on jus­tice, and the Jamaica Labour Party will take those three bills to the Constitutional Court, right up to the Privy Council, to show that they are a mock­ery to the Jamaica Constitution,” he said.

Members of the House of Representatives have already vot­ed by a two-thirds major­i­ty to pass three bills that are aimed at hav­ing the CCJ replace the Privy Council as the coun­try’s final appel­late court. The bills are now being debat­ed in the Senate and will need the vote of at least one oppo­si­tion sen­a­tor and all 13 gov­ern­ment sen­a­tors for them to be passed.

But, accord­ing to Chuck, the JLP’s pend­ing legal chal­lenge is based on the view that the bills “do not sit well with the Jamaican Constitution”. He pre­dict­ed that none of the eight oppo­si­tion sen­a­tors would vote in favour of them.

However, for­mer Justice Minister K.D. Knight dis­agreed, argu­ing that the move to have the CCJ entrenched through a two-thirds major­i­ty would sat­is­fy the scheme of the Constitution as well as a pre­vi­ous Privy Council rul­ing on the issue.

Knight, who is an attor­ney-at-law, also took aim at calls by the par­lia­men­tary Opposition for a ref­er­en­dum that would make the CCJ deeply entrenched in the Constitution.

“This request for it to be deeply entrenched real­ly has nei­ther a log­i­cal foun­da­tion nor a legal one,” he told The Gleaner yesterday.

Opposition Senator Arthur Williams, who many believe is like­ly to break ranks and vote in favour of the bills, said yes­ter­day that his col­league’s com­ments would have no bear­ing on how he votes.

Knight also chimed in say­ing Chuck’s asser­tion “does not have the log­i­cal force that would cause any­body to change an opinion”.

With JLP del­e­gates urg­ing him on, Chuck also made it clear that if the JLP’s legal chal­lenge to the CCJ bills was unsuc­cess­ful, that would not be the end of the issue.

“If they put the CCJ in sec­tion 110 of the Constitution, the next JLP gov­ern­ment, which will be in pow­er lat­er this year or next year … when­ev­er the elec­tions are called, we are going to use a sim­ple major­i­ty to remove it,” he emphasised.

“Mek all the con­sti­tu­tion­al lawyers in Jamaica tell us we can’t do it. I, as one con­sti­tu­tion­al lawyer, say we can do it and we will do it,” he insisted.
Story orig­i­nat­ed here : Senators Warned — Chuck Predicts Embarrassment For Opposition Members If They Vote For CCJ

Police offi­cers are ter­ri­fied that if the pub­lic sees how they do their work, they will be less able to do that work effec­tive­ly. That men­tal­i­ty seems to have made its way all the way to the FBI Director who said Friday that the increased pres­ence of cell phone video may be con­tribut­ing to the increase in vio­lent crime.

James Comey said that he has been told by offi­cers that the increas­es in vio­lence in major cities is tied to “the era of viral videos.”

“I don’t know whether this explains it entire­ly, but I do have a strong sense that some part of the expla­na­tion is a chill wind blow­ing through American law enforce­ment over the last year, and that wind is sure­ly chang­ing behav­ior,” he said.

Comey said the offi­cers he has spo­ken with have told him that they feel “under siege.”

“They told me, ‘We feel like we’re under siege and we don’t feel much like get­ting out of our cars,’” said Comey.

For more on this, read the arti­cle from CBS News titled: “FBI direc­tor: Cellphone cam­eras may part­ly explain rise in vio­lent crime.“
See sto­ry here : FBI Director: Violent Crimes Are Up Because Police Officers Can’t Be As Abusive with Cell Phone Videos Everywhere

In August 2012, the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) in Washington, DC entered into a secret agree­ment with the FBI.

The MPD was promis­ing not to dis­close any details about its use of a high­ly con­tro­ver­sial antiter­ror­ism sur­veil­lance tech­nol­o­gy known as a Stingray. About the size of a suit­case, the Stingray sim­u­lates a cell phone tow­er and inter­cepts mobile phone calls and text messages.

The MPD also agreed that if the depart­ment learned that any tech­ni­cal details about the sur­veil­lance tech­nol­o­gy was at risk of being exposed dur­ing a judi­cial pro­ceed­ing, MPD would con­tact the FBI so the bureau could ask MPD to “seek dis­missal of the case” in order to con­tin­ue pro­tect­ing the over­all secre­cy of the Stingray.

The unusu­al and poten­tial­ly ille­gal arrange­ment between the FBI and MPD was memo­ri­al­ized in a six-page non-dis­clo­sure agree­ment (NDA) signed by MPD Assistant Chief Peter Newsham [pdf at the end of this sto­ry] after the police depart­ment request­ed “cer­tain wire­less col­lec­tion equipment/​technology” — what is com­mon­ly called the Stingray — man­u­fac­tured by Harris Corporation, a Florida-based defense contractor.

“Consistent with the con­di­tions on the equip­ment autho­riza­tion grant­ed to Harris Corporation by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), state and local law enforce­ment agen­cies must coör­di­nate with the Federal Bureau of Investigation to com­plete this non-dis­clo­sure agree­ment pri­or to the acqui­si­tion and use of the equipment/​technology autho­rized by the FCC autho­riza­tion,” states the August 17, 2012 NDA sent to Newsham by the FBI.

Related: Police in Washington, DC Are Using the Secretive ‘Stingray’ Cell Phone Tracking Tool.
See more here :DC Police, the FBI, and Their Secret Agreement to Hide Cell Phone Spying

KINGSTON, Jamaica — The People’s National Party Youth Organisation (PNPYO) has lashed out at the Opposition, telling them not to politi­cise health care.

The Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) and its affil­i­ates have called for the sack­ing of Health Minister Dr Fenton Ferguson over the out­break of health care-asso­ci­at­ed infec­tions at the University Hospital of the West Indies (UHWI) and Cornwall Regional Hospital which have claimed the lives of 18 babies since June.

However, the PNPYO said in a release last evening that the Opposition “must imme­di­ate­ly remove their favourite polit­i­cal­ly coloured lens­es and call a spade a spade”.

The organ­i­sa­tion explained that kled­siel­la is well known as one of the most com­mon hos­pi­tal bugs, caus­ing pos­si­ble fatal ill­ness­es worldwide.

“Kledsiella’s spread among neonates does not aver­age above six per cent in Jamaica, includ­ing the deaths this year, and while sta­tis­tics will not bring back the lives of some of our youngest Jamaicans, we still fare bet­ter than some more eco­nom­i­cal­ly suc­cess­ful coun­tries, such as Brazil with a 50 per cent affect­ed rate of its neonates” the PNPYO argued.

The Opposition, in its call for Dr Ferguson’s sack­ing, also said it doubts the minister’s claim that he act­ed as soon as he was informed of the situation.
Read more here : PNPYO accus­es JLP of politi­cis­ing health care

Remarks from US Secretary of State come after Israeli PM suggested mufti of Jerusalem persuaded Hitler to kill Jews

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry called Thursday for an end to inflam­ma­to­ry Israeli-Palestinian rhetoric dur­ing a meet­ing with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which took place as the death toll from a recent surge of vio­lence again climbed. Speaking to reporters ahead of talks with the Israeli PM, Kerry made no ref­er­ence to Netanyahu’s sug­ges­tion this week that Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem dur­ing the 1940s, per­suad­ed Adolf Hitler to exter­mi­nate the Jews. Those com­ments, which come after three weeks of Israeli-Palestinian vio­lence, have attract­ed wide crit­i­cism from, among oth­ers, Israeli oppo­si­tion politi­cians and Holocaust experts, who accused the prime min­is­ter of dis­tort­ing the his­tor­i­cal record. Meanwhile, the cycle of vio­lence con­tin­ues in Israel and the occu­pied Palestinian ter­ri­to­ries. On Thursday, a Palestinian was shot dead dur­ing an alleged stab­bing attack Israeli at a bus stop west of Jerusalem.

Israeli police said on Thursday that the two sus­pects attempt­ed to get on a chil­dren’s school bus in Beit Shemesh, a major­i­ty ultra-ortho­dox area. After they were asked why they were doing so, they attempt­ed to stab an Israeli at the bus stop at which point they were shot by the police, wit­ness­es said. The Israeli, a 25-year-old man, was mod­er­ate­ly injured in the attack, police said. The injured men were tak­en to hos­pi­tal, with the sec­ond sus­pect said to be in a crit­i­cal con­di­tion. Since Oct. 1, a total of 52 Palestinians — includ­ing sus­pect­ed attack­ers, unarmed demon­stra­tors and bystanders — have been killed by Israeli sol­diers or set­tlers, while eight Israelis have been killed in Palestinian attacks. Israeli forces have been accused of using exces­sive force against pro­test­ers and sus­pect­ed attack­ers. Rights groups have said “dis­pro­por­tion­ate vio­lence” has been used against Palestinian chil­dren, with at least 10 killed in the violence.

Among the caus­es of the tur­moil are Palestinians’ anger at what they see as Jewish encroach­ment on the al-Aqsa mosque com­pound in Jerusalem’s Old City, Islam’s holi­est site out­side Saudi Arabia, which is also revered by Jews as the loca­tion of two ancient tem­ples. “It is absolute­ly crit­i­cal to end all incite­ment, to end all vio­lence and to find a road for­ward to build the pos­si­bil­i­ty, which is not there today, for a larg­er process,” Kerry told reporters as he and Netanyahu posed for pic­tures. Kerry said he hoped that the two men could agree on steps “that take us beyond the con­dem­na­tions and beyond the rhetoric.” Diplomats hold out lit­tle hope for any resump­tion of broad­er Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, which col­lapsed in 2014. Netanyahu blamed the Palestinians for the recent surge in killings, sin­gling out Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. “There is no ques­tion that wave of attacks is dri­ven direct­ly by incite­ment. Incitement from Hamas, incite­ment from the Islamist move­ment in Israel, and incite­ment, I am sor­ry to say, from President Abbas,” he said.

A senior U.S. State Department offi­cial told reporters that Kerry hopes to per­suade both sides to “tamp down” their rhetoric dur­ing a four-day trip to Europe and the Middle East in which he also plans to meet Abbas and Jordan’s King Abdullah. His tone mir­rored that of German Chancellor Angela Merkel at a joint news con­fer­ence with Netanyahu on Wednesday evening. “We have to do every­thing to calm down the sit­u­a­tion and in this spir­it I think all sides need to make a con­tri­bu­tion,” she said. It is not clear why Netanyahu launched into the issue of the then-Mufti of Jerusalem, Husseini. His remarks come with Israeli-Palestinian ten­sions at a new peak, notably over the Jerusalem holy site over­seen by the cur­rent mufti. Israel says it respects the sta­tus quo, which allows tourists and non-Muslim vis­i­tors to enter the Al Aqsa com­pound at some hours but for­bids non-Muslim prayer.

Palestinians say that ultra-Orthodox and nation­al-reli­gious Jews are exploit­ing the rules to enter the area, called the Noble Sanctuary by Muslims and the Temple Mount by Jews, in grow­ing num­bers and sur­rep­ti­tious­ly pray there, in breach of the sta­tus quo. Israel says it expels any­one who prays, but the prac­tice con­tin­ues and some Israel gov­ern­ment min­is­ters have been open about encour­ag­ing Jewish access to the area, say­ing all monothe­is­tic reli­gions should have the right to pray. U.S. offi­cials say they hope a change in the rhetoric over the holy site could help ease ten­sions more generally.
Read more here:Kerry urges end of inflam­ma­to­ry rhetoric in talks with Israel’s Netanyahu

The Israeli prime min­is­ter, Binyamin Netanyahu, has attract­ed a storm of crit­i­cism for an incen­di­ary speech in which he accused the sec­ond world war Palestinian grand mufti of Jerusalem of hav­ing sug­gest­ed the geno­cide of the Jews to Adolf Hitler. The com­ments in a speech to the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem came in the con­text of the cur­rent vio­lence between Israelis and Palestinians and were con­demned by his­to­ri­ans and the Israeli oppo­si­tion leader Isaac Herzog for triv­i­al­is­ing the Holocaust. On the Palestinian side, senior offi­cial Saeb Erekat described the remarks as absolv­ing Hitler.

In his speech, Netanyahu pur­port­ed to describe a meet­ing between Haj Amin al-Husseini and Hitler in November 1941. “Hitler didn’t want to exter­mi­nate the Jews at the time, he want­ed to expel the Jews. And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said: ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here [to Palestine].’” According to Netanyahu, Hitler then asked: “What should I do with them?” and the mufti replied: “Burn them.” Among those ques­tion­ing Netanyahu’s inter­pre­ta­tion of his­to­ry was Prof Dan Michman, the head of the Institute of Holocaust Research at Bar-Ilan University and head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem. He said that while Hitler did indeed meet the mufti, this hap­pened after the Final Solution began.

Yad Vashem’s chief his­to­ri­an, Prof Dina Porat, told the Israeli news web­site Ynet that Netanyahu’s claims were incor­rect. “You can­not say that it was the mufti who gave Hitler the idea to kill or burn Jews. It’s not true. Their meet­ing occurred after a series of events that point to this.” Netanyahu made the claim – which he also made in 2012 – to illus­trate what he said was the Palestinian his­to­ry of using holy sites in Jerusalem as pre­texts for com­mit­ting acts of vio­lence against Jews. However, almost as soon as the tran­script was released by his office, he was accused on social media and then by a raft of Israeli polit­i­cal fig­ures of fac­tu­al errors in his assertions.

The claim that Husseini – who met and sup­port­ed Hitler – was the one to ini­ti­ate the idea of the exter­mi­na­tion of Europe’s Jews has been sug­gest­ed by his­to­ri­ans on the fringes of Holocaustresearch, but is reject­ed by most his­to­ri­ans. Defending his com­ments, Netanyahu said: “I didn’t mean to absolve Hitler of respon­si­bil­i­ty, but to show that the father of the Palestinian nation want­ed to destroy Jews even with­out occupation.”

Speaking before fly­ing to Berlin to meet the US sec­re­tary of state, John Kerry, Netanyahu said he did not mean to dimin­ish Hitler’s respon­si­bil­i­ty for the Holocaust. “He is respon­si­ble for the Final Solution, and he made the deci­sion,” he said. “It is also absurd to ignore the role played by the mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, who was a war crim­i­nal and encour­aged Hitler to exter­mi­nate European Jewry.”

A spokesman for the German chan­cel­lor, Angela Merkel, how­ev­er, reject­ed Netanyahu’s fram­ing. “All Germans know the his­to­ry of the mur­der­ous race mania of the Nazis that led to the break with civil­i­sa­tion that was the Holocaust,” her spokesman, Steffen Seibert, said. “I see no rea­son to change our view of his­to­ry in any way. We know that respon­si­bil­i­ty for this crime against human­i­ty is German and very much our own.”

At the cen­tre of the row is Netanyahu’s sug­ges­tion that Hitler had want­ed to expel Jews and that it was Husseini who some­how per­suad­ed him instead to kill them when the two men met in late November 1941. In real­i­ty, the mass killings of Jews by SS mobile killing units – Einsatzgruppen – were already under way when the two men met face to face. The first was in Lithuania in July 1941, described by Yad Vashem as the “begin­ning” of the Final Solution. In September 1941, again before Husseini’s meet­ing with Hitler, Einsatzgruppe C, com­mand­ed by Otto Rasch, killed more than 33,000 Jews over two days in the Babi Yar ravine on the out­skirts of Kiev, an act of mass mur­der ordered by the new Nazi mil­i­tary gov­er­nor of Kiev, Maj Gen Kurt Eberhard.

Netanyahu’s incen­di­ary com­ments come amid a ris­ing death toll and accu­sa­tions of incite­ment on both sides, with Israelis point­ing to com­ments made by Palestinian offi­cials and inflam­ma­to­ry mate­r­i­al on social media, and Palestinians equal­ly accus­ing Netanyahu’s gov­ern­ment of fan­ning the flames and point­ing to anti-Palestinian mate­r­i­al on social media. The vio­lence con­tin­ued on Wednesday with sev­er­al inci­dents, includ­ing a stab­bing that crit­i­cal­ly injured a 19-year-old Israeli female sol­dier. Over the past month, 10 Israelis have been killed in Palestinian attacks, most of them stab­bings. In that time, 46 Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire, includ­ing 25 iden­ti­fied by Israel as attack­ers, and the rest in clash­es with Israeli troops. AnEritrean asy­lum seek­er died after being shot by a secu­ri­ty guard and beat­en by a mob that mis­tak­en­ly believed he was a Palestinian assailant dur­ing a dead­ly Arab attack at a bus sta­tion. Reacting to Netanyahu’s com­ments, Herzog wrote on his Facebook page: “This is a dan­ger­ous his­tor­i­cal dis­tor­tion and I demand Netanyahu cor­rect it imme­di­ate­ly as it min­imis­es the Holocaust, Nazism and … Hitler’s part in our people’s ter­ri­ble disaster.”

He added that Netanyahu’s remarks played into the hands of Holocaust deniers. “A historian’s son must be accu­rate about his­to­ry,” Herzog wrote. “Netanyahu has for­got­ten that he’s not only the prime min­is­ter of Israel but the prime min­is­ter of the Jewish people’s gov­ern­ment.” The grand mufti, added Herzog, “gave the order to kill my grand­fa­ther, Rabbi Herzog, and active­ly sup­port­ed Hitler”.

Herzog’s fel­low Zionist Union MP Itzik Shmuli called on Netanyahu to apol­o­gise to Holocaust vic­tims. “This is a great shame, a prime min­is­ter of the Jewish state at the ser­vice of Holocaust-deniers – this is a first,” he said. “This isn’t the first time Netanyahu dis­torts his­tor­i­cal facts, but a lie of this mag­ni­tude is the first.” Denouncing Netanyahu’s com­ments, Erekat, the chief Palestinian peace nego­tia­tor, also weighed into the row. “It is a sad day in his­to­ry when the leader of the Israeli gov­ern­ment hates his neigh­bour so much so that he is will­ing to absolve the most noto­ri­ous war crim­i­nal in his­to­ry, Adolf Hitler, of the mur­der of 6 mil­lion Jews dur­ing the Holocaust.”

Seeking to defend Netanyahu, the defence min­is­ter, Moshe Ya’alon, told Army Radio that the idea for the Final Solution was Hitler’s and the mufti had joined him, and accused the Palestinian Authority of employ­ing “incite­ment” that was “the lega­cy of the Nazis”. “I don’t know what exact­ly the prime min­is­ter said. History is actu­al­ly very, very clear,” said Ya’alon. “Hitler ini­ti­at­ed it, Haj Amin al-Husseini joined him, and unfor­tu­nate­ly the jiha­di move­ments pro­mote anti­semitism to this day, includ­ing incite­ment in the Palestinian Authority that is based on the lega­cy of the Nazis.” Netanyahu’s com­ments fol­low remarks made by the ener­gy min­is­ter, Yuval Steinitz, at a recent con­fer­ence in Washington, who accused the Palestinian pres­i­dent, Mahmoud Abbas, of “Nazi-like incite­ment”. Steinitz – one of Netanyahu’s most loy­al allies who often echoes the Israeli prime minister’s posi­tions – labelled Abbas “the num­ber one inciter in the world against Israel and the Jewish peo­ple” and com­pared his attacks against the Jewish state to Nazi propaganda.
Read more here : Anger at Netanyahu claim Palestinian grand mufti inspired Holocaust

The death toll from vio­lence in Israel and the Occupied Territories has increased with new Palestinian stab­bing attacks and an inten­si­fied Israeli crack­down. On Sunday, an attack­er iden­ti­fied as a 21-year-old Arab cit­i­zen of Israel knifed an Israeli sol­dier to death and then opened fire at a bus sta­tion in Beersheba, wound­ing 10 peo­ple. The attack­er was killed. In an appar­ent case of racial pro­fil­ing, a mob of sol­diers and bystanders then shot and beat an Eritrean man to death, mis­tak­en­ly think­ing he was a sec­ond assailant. After seal­ing off East Jerusalem neigh­bor­hoods last week, Israel is widen­ing its crack­down on Arab res­i­dents and con­tin­u­ing mil­i­tary oper­a­tions across the West Bank and Gaza. The United Nations says last week was the dead­liest for Palestinians in the West Bank and Israel in 10 years, rais­ing con­cerns “of exces­sive use of force, and vio­la­tions of the right to life and secu­ri­ty of the per­son.” We are joined by two guests: Jamil Dakwar, a Palestinian human rights lawyer with Israeli cit­i­zen­ship, and Nathan Thrall, senior ana­lyst at the International Crisis Group whose new arti­cle for The New York Times is “Mismanaging the Conflict in Jerusalem.”

AMY GOODMAN: The death toll from vio­lence in Israel and the Occupied Territories has increased with new Palestinian stab­bing attacks and an inten­si­fied Israeli crack­down. On Sunday, an assailant iden­ti­fied as a 21-year-old Arab cit­i­zen of Israel knifed an Israeli sol­dier, then opened fire at a bus sta­tion in Beersheba with the soldier’s rifle, wound­ing 10 peo­ple. The sol­dier and the attack­er died. In an appar­ent case of racial pro­fil­ing, a mob of sol­diers and bystanders then shot and beat anoth­er man to death, mis­tak­en­ly think­ing he was a sec­ond assailant. Video footage shows the crowd kick­ing and assault­ing the vic­tim, 29-year-old Haftom Zarhum, as he lies on the ground. Zarhum lat­er died in the hos­pi­tal. He had been seek­ing asy­lum in Israel from his native Eritrea. The inci­dent comes after Israeli forces shot dead five Palestinians accused of stab­bing attacks, includ­ing three in the occu­pied West Bank city of Hebron.

After seal­ing of East Jerusalem neigh­bor­hoods last week, Israel is widen­ing its crack­down on Arab res­i­dents. A new bill before Parliament would give forces stop-and-frisk pow­ers to search any­one in the streets with­out cause. In addi­tion to severe restric­tions on move­ment, Israel is also erect­ing a wall in East Jerusalem that would sep­a­rate Palestinian neigh­bor­hoods from a near­by Israeli set­tle­ment. Israeli forces mean­while con­tin­ue mil­i­tary attacks across the West Bank and Gaza, raid­ing vil­lages and fir­ing on Palestinian demon­stra­tions. Over the week­end, a group of some 200 Israeli set­tlers report­ed­ly attacked two Palestinian vil­lages in the West Bank with firebombs.

The surge in Palestinian knife attacks and protests is par­tial­ly fueled by con­cerns over Israeli con­trol of the Al-Aqsa Mosque com­pound and vis­its there by far-right Israelis. On Sunday, Israel reject­ed a French pro­pos­al to deploy inter­na­tion­al observers at the flash­point holy site. Speaking today in Madrid, Secretary of State John Kerry backed Israel’s rejec­tion of a for­eign pres­ence at the Temple Mount, but said he would meet with both Israeli and Palestinian lead­ers in the com­ing days.

SECRETARY OF STATE JOHN KERRY: Israel has every right in the world to pro­tect its cit­i­zens, as it has been, from ran­dom acts of vio­lence. But in my con­ver­sa­tions with the prime min­is­ter, as well as with King Abdullah and the for­eign min­is­ter of Jordan, they have expressed a desire to try to see this process be able to find a way of mak­ing cer­tain that every­body is clear about what is hap­pen­ing with respect to the Temple Mount.

AMY GOODMAN: The over­all death toll stands at 44 Palestinians and eight Israelis this month. The U.N. says last week was the dead­liest for Palestinians in the West Bank and Israel in 10 years, rais­ing con­cerns, quote, “of exces­sive use of force, and vio­la­tions of the right to life and secu­ri­ty of the person.”

Joining us now are two guests. Here in New York, Jamil Dakwar is with us. He’s a human rights lawyer, a Palestinian cit­i­zen of Israel who pre­vi­ous­ly worked as senior attor­ney at Adalah, a lead­ing human rights group in Israel. And in Jerusalem, Nathan Thrall is with us, senior ana­lyst at the International Crisis Group cov­er­ing Gaza, Israel, Jordan and the West Bank. His new arti­cle for The New York Times is head­lined “Mismanaging the Conflict in Jerusalem.”

Nathan, let’s start with you in Jerusalem. What is hap­pen­ing there, and why do you believe that the sit­u­a­tion is so out of con­trol at this point?

NATHAN THRALL: So what’s hap­pen­ing now in Jerusalem is check­points are going up all over the east. At the exits to Palestinian neigh­bor­hoods in occu­pied East Jerusalem, you have big con­crete cubes going up and very, very long lines for Palestinians to exit their neigh­bor­hoods. And there is a sense among Palestinians in East Jerusalem that they are being pun­ished for these so-called lone wolf stab­bing attacks that have tak­en place so far. The oth­er morn­ing, res­i­dents of one neigh­bor­hood, where basi­cal­ly the traf­fic police, the park­ing — peo­ple who give park­ing tick­ets nev­er go, came and left 500-shekel tick­ets on everybody’s car. And there are a series of small steps like this that are lead­ing a lot of Palestinians in East Jerusalem to feel that they’re being col­lec­tive­ly pun­ished for what’s going on now.

I live right at one of the seam neigh­bor­hoods between the east and the west, and it’s filled with bor­der police who are basi­cal­ly stop­ping a high pro­por­tion of the Palestinian men who are walk­ing from one side of the city to the oth­er. Many of them work in the west side of the city. You had men­tioned a moment ago that there is a con­sid­er­a­tion of allow­ing the police to do stop-and-frisk with­out cause. You know, that’s news to the res­i­dents of Palestinian East Jerusalem, who are stopped and frisked with­out cause all the time and are being stopped and frisked with­out cause today. So the sit­u­a­tion in Jerusalem is extreme­ly tense. People are eye­ing one anoth­er sus­pi­cious­ly. A Palestinian woman in West Jerusalem was walk­ing around today and was telling me how peo­ple were star­ing at her, sur­prised that she was walk­ing around there.

So, the attacks don’t seem to have any kind of orga­nized lead­er­ship behind them, which makes them much more dif­fi­cult for any­body to stop. And one of the big prob­lems here is we don’t have an orga­nized polit­i­cal lead­er­ship in Jerusalem, a Palestinian polit­i­cal lead­er­ship in Jerusalem, which means that there’s no one for the Israelis to talk to in order to try and calm the situation.

AMY GOODMAN: I want­ed to go right now to what hap­pened on Sunday. The Israeli prime min­is­ter, Benjamin Netanyahu, reject­ed Palestinian con­cerns over the Temple Mount.

PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: The rea­son the sta­tus quo has been vio­lat­ed is not because we changed it. We didn’t change any­thing. The orders of prayer, the vis­it­ing rights have not changed for the last 15 years. The only thing that’s changed are Islamist hood­lums, paid by the Islamist move­ment in Israel and by Hamas, who are enter­ing the mosque and try­ing to put explo­sives there, and, from there, emerge and attack Jewish vis­i­tors to the Temple Mount, and Christian vis­i­tors. That’s the only change in the sta­tus quo. Israel will pro­tect the holy site, will guard the sta­tus quo. Israel is not a prob­lem on the Temple Mount, Israel is the solution.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime min­is­ter. We’re also joined by Jamil Dakwar, human rights lawyer, a Palestinian cit­i­zen of Israel, who pre­vi­ous­ly worked as a senior attor­ney at Adalah, a lead­ing Israeli human rights group. Your response to what Netanyahu just said?

JAMIL DAKWAR: Well, I think that what is real­ly strik­ing here is that the Israeli gov­ern­ment, every time there is any kind of a rise in ten­sion and cri­sis and use of vio­lence, it turns into mil­i­taris­tic approach towards deal­ing with the Palestinians. It’s using that same old poli­cies of a crack­down, on col­lec­tive pun­ish­ment, on see­ing the Palestinians with no real­ly val­ue of their life and their basic human rights. The response, and par­tic­u­lar­ly on the issue of sta­tus quo, you know, Israel is the only coun­try that is allowed to change the sta­tus quo in Jerusalem, and it’s been chang­ing that for years, for decades. And yet, if a coun­try or polit­i­cal par­ty is sug­gest­ing a change of the sta­tus quo towards more peace­ful res­o­lu­tion, towards more pro­tec­tion of civil­ians, then that is always reject­ed. So I think there is, clear­ly, a going back to giv­ing now the Israeli gov­ern­ment and Benjamin Netanyahu a pre­text to go — what he real­ly would pre­fer to do is to con­tin­ue his poli­cies of aggres­sion against Palestinians.

Certainly, this is going to be more and more dif­fi­cult, because in Jerusalem, in East Jerusalem, the rea­son that there is no lead­er­ship is because Israeli poli­cies were crack­ing down on insti­tu­tions. The Orient House was closed by the Israeli gov­ern­ment. The Palestinians who were elect­ed by their own peo­ple were not allowed to engage in polit­i­cal activ­i­ties. Many of them were impris­oned. So that, in and of itself, clear­ly shows that the Israeli gov­ern­ment wants to see only its own inter­est, mean­ing the Jewish Israeli inter­est in Jerusalem, and that con­tin­ue to per­pet­u­ate the sit­u­a­tion both in East Jerusalem and in the West Bank as a mil­i­tary occu­pa­tion, which is now near­ing 50 years.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain what has caused this lat­est esca­la­tion of vio­lence, from your per­spec­tive. Where did you grow up, by the way?

JAMIL DAKWAR: I grew up in Haifa. I went to school at Tel Aviv University. I remem­ber when I went to law school at Tel Aviv University, there were very, very dif­fi­cult times. There were times when there were sui­cide attacks going on inside Israel. Those hap­pened in response to the set­tler going to Hebron mosque and killing prayer — Palestinians who were pray­ing in the mosque. That kind of blew up the whole sit­u­a­tion. And it was clear that with­out crack­ing down on the set­tler vio­lence, with­out end­ing Israel’s set­tler activ­i­ty in the West Bank, there is no way that the Palestinians will sit back and allow the Israeli gov­ern­ment to con­tin­ue to con­trol their life in every way.

So I think the esca­la­tion that we’re see­ing now has been mount­ing, has been build­ing, because of what’s hap­pened in the last sev­er­al years. There is no hope for any real, nor­mal life. This is the new nor­mal for the Palestinians, which is mil­i­tary occu­pa­tion con­tin­ues unabat­ed, the Israeli gov­ern­ment con­tin­ues to send set­tlers to the West Bank. There’s a crack­down round­ing up chil­dren, Palestinian chil­dren, in night raids, doc­u­ment­ed by Palestinian and Israeli human rights orga­ni­za­tions. These kinds of things will make Palestinians despair or make the Palestinians, some of them, to resort to vio­lence and do what they are doing. And I think that is what is real­ly concerning.

AMY GOODMAN: Are these knife attacks new?

JAMIL DAKWAR: These knife attacks are new, although in the — we’ve seen in the — this is not the first time that there were these kinds of wave of knife attacks. And it hap­pened dur­ing the Shamir — appeared in the ’80s. They were very much sim­i­lar, in a sit­u­a­tion where the Palestinians were real­ly giv­ing up on their hope to have a nor­mal life. I think that there’s now also — there’s the impact on their lack of abil­i­ty to be able to express themselves.

You men­tioned the Arab Palestinian cit­i­zen who stabbed the sol­dier. The over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of Palestinian cit­i­zens are peace­ful. They’ve been peace­ful in their activ­i­ties for their entire career, and yet the Israeli gov­ern­ment is crack­ing down on their lead­er­ship, is crack­ing down — there are home demo­li­tions inside Israel, dis­place­ment of Arab Bedouin com­mu­ni­ties. That is mak­ing peo­ple see that despite the fact that you are mak­ing an effort to be a cit­i­zen, a law-abid­ing cit­i­zen, the Israeli gov­ern­ment is say­ing, “No, you are not wel­comed here. You are an ene­my. You are not going to be enjoy­ing the same basic rights as oth­ers in the country.”

AMY GOODMAN: On Sunday, a Palestinian report­ed­ly opened fire at a cen­tral bus sta­tion in the south­ern Israeli city of Beersheba, killing a sol­dier and wound­ing 11 oth­er peo­ple. He had tak­en the gun of the sol­dier. Afterward, the Israeli police spokesper­son, Micky Rosenfeld, addressed reporters.

MICKY ROSENFELD: As a result of the attack where the ter­ror­ist had a pis­tol and opened fire, we have six peo­ple that were injured, four of them being police offi­cers injured inside the cen­tral bus sta­tion. One man was severe­ly tak­en to hos­pi­tal and received med­ical treat­ment. Unfortunately, con­firmed that he passed away a few min­utes ago. Heightened secu­ri­ty is con­tin­u­ing in the area, and our police units are still in and around the cen­tral bus station.

AMY GOODMAN: Israeli eye­wit­ness to the shoot­ing, Sima Koseshvili, called for greater security.

SIMA KOSESHVILI: [trans­lat­ed] Do I need to live in a world where I am afraid to leave home to go to my col­lege stud­ies, to work or to go shop­ping? Everything is fright­en­ing, and I want the police to take more action and increase their secu­ri­ty presence.

AMY GOODMAN: Nathan Thrall in Jerusalem, can you talk about what hap­pened there in Beersheba? First you had the killing of both the Palestinian gun­man and the Israeli sol­dier, many oth­er peo­ple also injured, and then the Eritrean man being beat­en to death in a case of appar­ent­ly mis­tak­en identity.

NATHAN THRALL: Yes. Frankly, I know about as much as what — as much as you do about what hap­pened there. I wasn’t there, and I’ve seen the reports and watched some of the videos. And I’ve seen that the gov­ern­ment has, you know, acknowl­edged that a trag­ic mis­take was made. But beyond that, I don’t know the details of the incident.

AMY GOODMAN: The sig­nif­i­cance of this?

JAMIL DAKWAR: The sig­nif­i­cance is that, look, what’s hap­pen­ing is that now any­one appears to be an Arab Palestinian. And that starts with the racial pro­fil­ing, stop-and-frisk, that is a dai­ly expe­ri­ence of Palestinians. But also Israeli Jews who are Arab Jews, who come — [Sephardic] Jews, who appear to some Israelis or to the Israeli secu­ri­ty forces as sus­pi­cious Arab Palestinians, some of them are even being attacked. I think this is going out of con­trol, because the Israeli gov­ern­ment and the politi­cians are spread­ing those state­ments, mak­ing those state­ments that are very dan­ger­ous state­ments, encour­ag­ing cit­i­zens to take arms and shoot peo­ple, shoot to kill. And there are now human rights reports inves­ti­gat­ing the shoot-to-kill orders. This amounts to extra­ju­di­cial killing. There need to be clear inves­ti­ga­tions of these instances. You have peo­ple who did not pose any immi­nent threat to addi­tion­al peo­ple; even if they com­mit­ted crimes, they still should not be exe­cut­ed right on the spot. And that, I think, will bring the sit­u­a­tion to a much worse, because peo­ple are mis­trust­ing any­one who is a Palestinian, who is an Arab, who appears to be Palestinian, and that’s why the Eritrean refugee got in that sit­u­a­tion. And the lynch­ing — there’s sit­u­a­tions where a sol­dier is stand­ing by, secu­ri­ty forces stand­ing by and not pro­tect­ing those civil­ians. That, in and of itself, is a huge, dan­ger­ous esca­la­tion that I think even worse than the act of lone­ly or indi­vid­ual tak­ing some knives and stab­bing peo­ple, because that frus­trates entire — puts entire com­mu­ni­ties at risk, when law enforce­ment car­ries those attacks and crack­downs and opens fire with no respect to human life.

We see a sit­u­a­tion that real­ly requires more atten­tion and more action, not just — you know, con­dem­na­tion of acts of vio­lence is the easy part of this. What is real­ly need­ed to be done is what needs to be done about the sit­u­a­tion, the sit­u­a­tion of the occu­pa­tion, the sit­u­a­tion on East Jerusalem. And what we’re not hear­ing, what are the solu­tions, includ­ing admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials. Every time Secretary Kerry tries to say some­thing right, whether it’s the recent com­ment that he made, where he said, “Well, we’ve seen build­ing of set­tle­ments, an expan­sion, etc. That is now — and now we’re see­ing vio­lence.” So he’s mak­ing the right con­nec­tion, a very log­ic, com­mon­sense con­nec­tion, and yet he had to retract those state­ments, even though he’s real­ly say­ing what every­body knows, what every­body knows in the Obama admin­is­tra­tion, what every­body knows here in the United States, that set­tle­ments are ille­gal, and yet they are now get­ting full sup­port from this Israeli gov­ern­ment, and is now build­ing on turn­ing this con­flict into a reli­gious war. And I think that is real­ly the crit­i­cal point where I think we need to be very, very con­cerned about. People who know the sit­u­a­tion know that if you are going to speak to the youth about reli­gious wars and agi­tate them, they will take things like this, they will take knives and stab peo­ple. And with­out lead­er­ship, with­out any hope, with­out a future, this will become the norm. And unfor­tu­nate­ly, that would be a very dan­ger­ous route to go to.

AMY GOODMAN: Is there a role for the ICC here, the International Criminal Court?

JAMIL DAKWAR: Well, the ICC, as you know, there’s a pre­lim­i­nary inves­ti­ga­tion of the sit­u­a­tion in Israel and Palestine, par­tic­u­lar­ly the sit­u­a­tion of Palestine after Palestine joined the ICC. There were calls to ask the pros­e­cu­tor to look at the alleged crimes com­mit­ted in the recent month. I believe it will be a lit­tle bit dif­fi­cult for the pros­e­cu­tor to jump at this issue. There’s a sig­nif­i­cant devel­op­ment that hap­pened just last week with the ICC pros­e­cu­tor ask­ing to open full inves­ti­ga­tion in Georgia. That will be an impor­tant — has impor­tant impli­ca­tions on the sit­u­a­tion in Palestine, because this will be — if this full inves­ti­ga­tion will move for­ward, will be the first non­state par­ty full inves­ti­ga­tion that is tak­ing place in the ICC, which could, again, delay, on one hand, the Palestinian sit­u­a­tion, but, on the oth­er hand, would also set impor­tant prece­dent for that. I think, most impor­tant­ly, there should be a clear deter­rence to the Israeli gov­ern­ment from clear state­ments made, that the Israeli gov­ern­ment can­not con­tin­ue these actions with no con­se­quences. There is no account­abil­i­ty. We know from reports like B’Tselem, Yesh Din, Al-Haq and oth­er orga­ni­za­tions that inves­ti­ga­tions with­in the Israeli mil­i­tary are dis­cred­it­ed, they’re not cred­i­ble, they’re not seri­ous, and there­fore, at some point, there will be action by legal mech­a­nisms, includ­ing the ICC, to look into the crimes that are com­mit­ted in the occu­pied Palestinian territory.

AMY GOODMAN: On Saturday, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and his coun­ter­part in Jerusalem, Nir Barkat, vis­it­ed Israeli stab­bing vic­tims recov­er­ing in the hos­pi­tal. On Sunday, Mayor de Blasio vis­it­ed the Western Wall and toured the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum. He signed the guest book at the muse­um, “Never again,” then made a statement.

MAYOR BILL DE BLASIO: We’re here at a painful moment. We’re here at a moment where peo­ple are afraid, where peo­ple are strug­gling, because of the vio­lence in their midst every sin­gle day late­ly, more and more ter­ror­ist attacks on absolute­ly inno­cent civil­ians, some­thing uncon­scionable and unac­cept­able, accord­ing to all our val­ues, and some­thing that must end.

AMY GOODMAN: Nathan Thrall, I want­ed to get your com­ment — also the Joint Chiefs of Staff chair, Marine General Joseph Dunford, in addi­tion to de Blasio, are in Israel — to what you believe needs to be done and what de Blasio said.

NATHAN THRALL: So, what we’re see­ing is the begin­ning of the United States com­pen­sat­ing Israel for the Iran nuclear deal, and they’re dis­cussing now increas­ing the $3 bil­lion in aid that Israel receives each year. And regard­ing de Blasio’s state­ment, of course attacks on civil­ians are hor­ri­ble, and all of this death is hor­ri­ble. In terms of look­ing at the root caus­es, I see very lit­tle being done to address that.

What we’re see­ing right now among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and par­tic­u­lar­ly in Jerusalem, is a real sense that the idea of a Palestinian state with a cap­i­tal in Jerusalem is escap­ing them. Jerusalemites have felt for many years that they are los­ing Jerusalem. They feel that they’re los­ing con­trol over Al-Aqsa Mosque, as well. And so, they’re — the oth­er guest had men­tioned that the insti­tu­tions of the Palestinian polit­i­cal lead­er­ship used to exist in Jerusalem. The PLO had some­thing called the Orient House, which was its head­quar­ters in Jerusalem, that had been — that has been shut down and is shut down. And, you know, Jerusalem has been sep­a­rat­ed by an enor­mous wall from the rest of the West Bank. And when Palestinians come and vis­it from Gaza, for exam­ple — those few who are allowed exit per­mits and do get to come to Jerusalem — they’re in shock at what they see. And see­ing it with their own eyes and going around the West Bank, they come to the con­clu­sion that the pos­si­bil­i­ty of sep­a­rat­ing Israel from an inde­pen­dent Palestinian state passed a long time ago.

And nobody is offer­ing any kind of solu­tions or answers to Palestinians, includ­ing their own lead­er­ship. And I think that’s a big part of why you see Palestinians actu­al­ly act­ing right now out­side of the polit­i­cal fac­tions that dom­i­nate Palestinian pol­i­tics. Palestinians feel like those fac­tions are not offer­ing any solu­tions and that they are tak­ing mat­ters into their own hands. So, the cen­ter of some of the fight­ing against Israel has occurred specif­i­cal­ly among those groups who are not under Palestinian Authority con­trol. The Jerusalem — Jerusalemites, of course, are not at all under Palestinian Authority con­trol. The Palestinian Authority is for­bid­den from act­ing in any form in Jerusalem — and in oth­er domains, as well. Villages in the West Bank who are fight­ing against the wall cut­ting through and tak­ing part of their land also find — many of them are out­side of the Palestinian Authority’s con­trol and there­fore are able, actu­al­ly, to fight Israel. The same thing with hunger-strik­ing pris­on­ers and with Gazans now, who are approach­ing the bor­der fence every day and throw­ing rocks, and get­ting shot and killed in the process.

So, I think that Palestinians, in gen­er­al, feel that they are approach­ing the end of an era, and that era is the era that was inau­gu­rat­ed with President Mahmoud Abbas’s elec­tion in January 2005. This came just after Yasser Arafat had died and at the end of a very bloody and painful intifa­da, one that was bloody and painful for both sides. And what Abbas rep­re­sent­ed for Palestinians was a chance to try a total­ly dif­fer­ent strat­e­gy, one that was not based on armed con­flict, one that would basi­cal­ly give Israel exact­ly what it most want­ed, which is secu­ri­ty, and to coöper­ate with Israel, ful­ly in secu­ri­ty, to hunt down mil­i­tants in the West Bank and to pre­vent attacks against Israelis, against set­tlers. And Abbas — if you ask the Israeli secu­ri­ty estab­lish­ment, they will say that Abbas has deliv­ered that in spades. And what the secu­ri­ty offi­cials say is, you know, “We view our job as to pro­vide the calm that allows the polit­i­cal lead­er­ship to reach out and to make a deal, or at least to improve the sit­u­a­tion.” Even if you don’t have a final peace agree­ment, there are a thou­sand things that Israel can do to make life bet­ter for Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem and Gaza. And a lot of the anger — sorry.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I just — we have to wrap up, but I want­ed to bring Jamil Dakwar back in. Go ahead with “a lot of the anger,” and then I’m going to go back to Jamil.

NATHAN THRALL: Sure. OK, sure. I just want­ed to say that a lot of the anger is a sense that that strat­e­gy, that was inau­gu­rat­ed with Abbas’s elec­tion in January 2005, has been giv­en 11 years now to play itself out, and it hasn’t achieved any­thing. And it hasn’t real­ly eased life or restric­tions on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and Jerusalem. And so, what Palestinians are doing now is, in a very non­strate­gic and emo­tion­al way, rebelling against that, with­out a clear vision of where they’re headed.
See more here : Israel-Palestine: As Stabbings, Shootings Kill Dozens, Endless Occupation Fuels Vengeful Resistance