Cops and Blacks: Mirror Images?

  "Shoter tov tzhe shoter met!שוטר טוב זה שוטר מת"  said a good pale friend of mine with several degrees and full ownership of a nice apartment. He was making an angry statement about both Israeli racism and police brutality because he was playing with an unfortunate saying of racists about Arabs (Arav tov hu arav met). I used to live in Hadar, Haifa where some fairly genteel folks (along with the rest of us ) had a serious beef with the police. But as my friend went on to describe his opinion on the police he paradoxically revealed why we must search for solidarity with these people.
   "I am some majority guy who is a lowlife unemployed and has no money and no hope and can not find a normal job, I have no education at all....I know I'll become a police officer. I'm good at being violent." said my friend mockingly in his broken English. He drew the obvious tie between who the police are in Israel, and who they are in the USA. Unfortunately this cruel stereotype comes from somewhere. Joining the police is one of the few ways a working class guy can make a living nowadays. And, yes, we the working class are violent. We aren't the only violent ones, but our community bleeds violence in a way wealthy ones do not. Take child abuse. Rich people can abuse their kids. Child abuse is happening in Beverly Hills and the Upper East side. But statistically, in spite of the system's underservice of the poor, we see their kids as abused children more often. Poverty leads to crises, and poor people can not cope in the ways rich people can. Destressing through a weekend at a resort-spa may not be available to the borderline homeless.
   The real revolution will happen when we -those who live in ghettoes- begin to understand how difficult it is to be a good cop. When our compassion takes into account how miserable it is to interact with us. As a doctor I saw my share of prisoners, and thugs. They are not an easy crowd. To this day I talk about one gangbanger so proud to have killed multiple people that he got commemorative tatooes for each murder who complained to the hospital staff that I lacked compassionate bedside manner with him. We must understand not every cop is a killer; and they must understand not every black person is gangbanger like my whiney mass murdering patient. We must understand how the system is working to break our natural solidarity as working class people. We must honor those lawkeepers who walk into dangerous situations to protect us. We must not forget that at the scene of accidents, including shoot outs it is them that are tasked with not only catching criminals, but administering life saving CPR sometimes before any more specifically trained personel show up. The media almost never highlights the everyday heroism of law enforcers who happen to use their basic life support skills and save someone. The media seems caught in some kind of imaginary soccer match between blacks and the police. On the most illogical side is Fox news. Shortly after a recent decision they put up an article about how the police live in fear. Seriously? They are rolling into our communities with guns and now tanks; and they should be the ones afraid? What about me and my family?...we don't have any guns or tanks let alone a state legal apparatus behind us. Obviously the outpouring of protests are because people like myself, unarmed black people are both scared and fed up. Only in the distorted reality of the mainstream American media does this situation get turned on it's head. But this is a bit of a distraction from the underlying problems and questions. Why don't police come from communities they police? Why are police not trained better to diminish violence in confrontations as opposed to escalating it? How can we come to reasonable police community partnerships where law enforcement has serious buy-in from the community? How can we get out law enforcers better training? To what extent can we give communities autonomy in policing themselves and yet avoid more Zimmermans?
   And finally, who will dare extend the red roses of solidarity to our brothers in blue?
 

Top 10 Stupidest Comments on Israel 2014

  I'm often the recipient of stupid comments on Israel and Judaism. As there are only a few days left to this year, so I'm hoping I'm safe in revealing the stupidest things I've heard this calender year from angry anti-Israel protesters. I won't even bother with run of the mill idiots like the Italian backpacker who told me "I hate Jews" before he realized I was Jewish. I'm specifically writing a note to irritating uninformed protesters. These protestors need a cause. Maybe they could become pro-Palestinian for a start. I would coincidentally label myself as both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli, because I actually want peace and prosperity for all but as we will see in the comments this confuses people.

 I've decided to help these anti-Israel protesters stop annoying me by publishing some of the stupidest things on Levantine politics I have heard from them all year. For so long as angry yet uninformed leftists continue to repeat stupid nonsense, intelligent people like myself will be less and less motivated to  engage you, inform you, debate with you or at some point even acknowledge you.

  Dear misinformed angry anti-Israel anglos- please don't come at me with this nonsense in 2015. If you care so much, you may want to stop screaming slogans, shut up and learn something.

10. "You don't look Jewish!" yelled at me by an anti-Israel protester in London when I revealed I was Jewish... Yes, I had some surgeries to remove my horns and cloven hooves. Amazing what I can buy with my mountains and mountains of gold and money, eh? No seriously. Israel lies at the crossroads of Asia, Europe and Africa. If you had spent any time there you would realize there is a broad diversity to the way people from there look whether they are Jewish, Muslim, Christian or Druze. Additionally Judaism had a diaspora over 2000 years in which converts were added to her people. All I really have to say to the multiple people who have said this to me is that luckily for them, they don't look as stupid as they are. 

9. "You speak Arabic?" usually uttered in disbelief. I'm Jewish, enough of a reason right there. Additionally I lived in Haifa for some years. Arabs all know why I speak some Arabic even if they sometimes make fun of my accent. Why the hell is this so confusing for Westerners? Just FYI the two official languages of Israel are Hebrew and Arabic. An argument against Arabic as a national language I have actually heard from an Israeli is that Jews speak too many different dialects of Arabic to standardize a national language from them...however there is a somewhat standard Arabic in which local Muslims, Druze, Christians and even some Jews receive education and other services.   

8. "There are Arabs in Israel?" This leads to some serious confusion for some people....Christian and Muslim Arabs make up a significant percentage of the (inside the green line) Israeli population. Additionally, many Jews in Israel are descendants of Jews from countries around the middle east (Mizrachim). Added together Mizrachim and Arab/Palestinian citizens of Israel would constitute a majority of the people there. For people who spend so much time hating a country, you know remarkably little about it...

7. "Which side are you on?" Is this a sports rivalry gone bad? Be real. Either we can all win by coming to some kind of just peace or we can all lose by spiraling down into the hell of continued war and conflict together. Or something else...but more or less we are all going to go through this conflict together due to geography. Have you looked at any maps recently?

6. "Imagine how awful it is for the Palestinians to be bombed!" This was yelled at me by protesters when I identified myself as having lived in Israel. I've survived two bombings in my life. I don't have to imagine, I only have to remember. Where the fuck do you, comfortable Westerner assuaging your guilt by projecting your own cultural psychosis onto the state of Israel, get off yelling at me as if I liked bombings? I could tell you a thing or two about bombings...

5. "The state of Israel is racist" also yelled at me by New York protesters when I identified myself as having lived in Israel. OK, and the state you live in is a post-racial utopia right? No racial issues here at all...I wonder what all those "Black lives matter" protesters are protesting?  Turns out there is no utopia on earth. Except possibly Canada, but even in that case only for the non-native population. The first peoples of Canada have been getting the shaft for hundreds of years...

4. "ISIS- The New Israel" title of an article by Chris Hedges. I don't think this sincere although delusional Christian simpleton could be employing a complex rhetorical device like sarcasm. He thinks this is real. He is really comparing a country that literally enslaves captured women to rape them, kills non-Muslims and is  shamelessly running an attempt at genocide to the middle east's only democracy. With intellectuals like this, who needs the stupidity of the masses to laugh at...

3. "I'm against bombing poor children!" Yeah, me too. Whaddya know. We have something in common crazy stupid anglo protester. Do you seriously think anyone is for bombing poor children? Oh whoops...guess I momentarily forgot about the US and UK governments and their permanent war against the various parts of the middle east. Wait a second, why aren't you protesting them? Could it be that it is harder to look yourself in the mirror than point out problems in other peoples? 2014 has seen a spike in violent deaths of Iraqui civilians, and that isn't even counting the number of people whose lives have been cut short by bombed out infrastructure, food shortages or any of the other "collateral" damage from the United States. Research in 2014 suggests that U.S. drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan have had an unknown person to target casualty ratio of 28:1 with one attack in the study having a ratio of 128:1 with 13 children being killed. If you are against bombing children, please begin with the bombing of children done in your name...you have a functioning democracy, right? So basically your democratic will seems to kill these poor kids...

2. "Arabs have 22 countries..." OK, I think some Jews got jealous of all the stupid statements being made, and had to get in on the action. Pro-Israel activists often resort to some twisted arguments. I personally don't care if Arabs have 49 countries and all the shellfish products in the world. I'm not trying to live in Syria these days anyways, and I don't eat shellfish. There is a completely separate question of how Arabs will run their countries...and unfortunately recent history has shown a trend towards running them in a way extremely inhospitable to religious minorities. I think this unfortunate reality of religious persecution is where the counting countries argument really comes from. Since the 1940s Jews have been persecuted, targeted for murder and in some cases like Egypt outright expelled in mass as their property was looted from Arab countries.

1. "Academic Freedom Encompasses the Right to Boycott [Israeli academics]" well just any old person can make stupid statements, but it usually takes an academic to get downright moronic in word and deed. Rima Kapitan is the author of an article with the above name...but there are about a hundred variations of this roaming around the hallowed halls of academia. Academics boycotting Israel claim they are all about academic freedom, with the glaring exception of Israelis. Academia claims to embrace the free exchange of ideas, apparently unless they are somehow related to one particular unpopular state. Why can't these people just be honest and admit they are against academic freedom?

  And now, because I understand Murphy's law, I'm just waiting for someone to hit me with an even stupider comment in the next 48 hours...but here's hoping the uninformed take up a new object of protest in 2015. Believe it or not, the world is an incredibly large place. The one argument about Israel I never hear, but wish I would, is that it has occupied too much of the global geopolitical discussion. That would be the intelligent criticism.