Are the Chicago cops on security detail at the DNC trained by the Israeli Defense Force, paid for by the Anti Defamation League?
Today’s meeting of the Chicago City Council will consider an ordinance permitting Chicago police and federal law enforcement officials to enforce various restrictions inside yet-undefined boundaries for “security zones” near the United Center and McCornick Place during the Democratic National Convention.
Protests are planned by opponents of Israel’s genocidal war on Palestine and of Biden’s support for it.
The ACLU and other groups have expressed concerns with the way Chicago is planning for the protests with a so-called security zone around the United Center.
An issue of concern that has come to light is the degree to which police departments around the country, including the Chicago Police Department, have received training in Israel, paid for by pro-Israel groups like the the Anti Defamation League (ADL).
From a 2016 U.S. Department of Justice finding regarding police abuse in Baltimore:
Baltimore law enforcement officials, along with hundreds of others from Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, Arizona, Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Georgia, Washington state as well as the DC Capitol police have all traveled to Israel for training. Thousands of others have received training from Israeli officials here in the U.S.
Many of these trips are taxpayer funded while others are privately funded. Since 2002, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee’s Project Interchange and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs have paid for police chiefs, assistant chiefs and captains to train in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT).
From Jewish Voice for Peace:
New York City (March 17, 2022) — A key facilitator of police exchange programs between the U.S. and Israel was forced to pause its programs following a nation-wide grassroots campaign, according to a leaked document and their own admission. Articles published today by The Guardian and Jewish Currents reveal a draft memo addressed to Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, written during the height of the Black-led uprisings in June 2020 sparked by the police murder of George Floyd. Entitled “Law Enforcement Trainings in Israel” and authored by senior staff at the ADL, the document details how the ADL, one of the main facilitators of police exchanges between the U.S. and Israel, was forced to acknowledge that its exchange program helped militarize U.S. police and harm communities of color.
The leaked memo also reveals that the ADL decided to disrupt their police exchange program in large part due to sustained campaigning by the nation-wide Deadly Exchange campaign and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). JVP, along with its coalition partners across the U.S., sees this as a key, vital step towards stopping the militarization of our communities, defunding and abolishing policing, and challenging the US-Israel alliance that maintains Israeli apartheid.
The articles quote a California county sheriff who went to Israel for an ADL training in 2017 discussing how Israeli officers used force during arrests: “We’d be in jail if we did something like that here.”
The Chicago Police Department has a long history of participating in weeklong security seminars in Israel hosted by the Anti-Defamation League.
Among the participants in a 2015 seminar were officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the US Marshals Service, the US Naval Criminal Investigative Service and the International Association of Chiefs of Police along with senior police executives from Chicago, Las Vegas, Austin, Seattle, Oakland and Miami-Dade.
David Friedman, the ADL’s director of national law enforcement initiatives, told The Jerusalem Post that the objective of the trip was “to learn lessons from Israel in terms of tactics and strategies,” with the added benefit of churning out influential supporters for Israel’s colonial project.
Officers who take part “come back and they are Zionists,” boasted Friedman.
When protesters of Israel’s war on Gaza march towards the United Center in August will the officers on the police lines be among those trained in Israel paid for by the ADL?
I, for one, would like to know.