Don't let Palestinian extremism hijack debate about policing in America

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Transcribed from the clipping

A winter of discontent is brewing in America.

Over the last fortnight, large parts of the country have seethed with anger, first at the decision of a grand jury in Ferguson, Mo., not to indict police officer Darren Wilson for the shooting of Michael Brown — 18 years old, and black — and second, at the decision of a grand jury in New York not to indict Daniel Pantaleo, the Staten Island police officer who placed Eric Garner — 43 years old, and black — in the chokehold that contributed to his death minutes later.

The proximity, in terms of timing, of the two killings, together with the proximity of the grand jury decisions, has dealt a blow to the artfully simplistic notion that with Barack Obama’s election as president in 2008, America entered a new, post-racial era.

Many Americans now believe that, as far as law enforcement is concerned, the lives of African-Americans — and particularly those of African-American men trying to eke out a living at the margins of the economy — are worth far less than the lives of everyone else. Moreover, it’s a belief that is spreading.

Those persuaded that there were enough procedural and moral ambiguities in the Brown case are finding it hard to reach the same conclusion in the Garner case, because we’ve all seen the video of the New York Police Department officers rounding on Garner, and we’ve all heard the pitiful plea of “I can’t breathe” as he was wrestled to the ground.

And I’m pretty positive I was not alone in reacting to Officer Pantaleo’s claim that he was trying to protect Garner from being injured by his colleagues with an inner groan of contempt.

In this charged environment, no mental gymnastics are required to understand why slogans like “Black Lives Matter” — something that really shouldn’t have to be said in a civilized, democratic society — become so appealing. But therein lies the danger.

Talk to some of the protesters (or just read the signs they carry), and you will walk away with the impression that police forces across the U.S. are targeting African-Americans with all the zeal of a Haitian death squad.

So, instead of discussing policy remedies regarding policing methods in those African-American neighborhoods where distrust between the cops and the community reigns supreme, and instead of trying to understand the degree of racial bias that informed the actions of the police officers in the Brown and Garner cases, we default to the overarching explanation that America is an irredeemably racist society.

How this transcription was made

Date and publication rest on the collector's slide label; no masthead, folio or printed dateline appears on this clipping. The page prints: CONTINUED ON PAGE 46

Context added by this archive

Logged because of the headline, not the body. Across the visible portion the column never mentions Palestinians at all - the word appears only in the headline, which frames Palestinian solidarity at Ferguson protests as a hijacking. The argument itself is on page 46 and is not in this batch, so I can report the framing but not the case.

Worth retrieving the jump before this one is used for anything. Note that this and the Lurie column (slide 30) face each other in the same opinion section: one says Palestinians in the West Bank are 'oppressed by army occupation', the other calls Palestinian politics an extremism that hijacks American grief.

Cite this clipping

"Don't let Palestinian extremism hijack debate about policing in America," South Florida Sun Sentinel, 10 December 2014. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2014-054. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2014-054