From Occupation to “Occupy”: The Israelification of American Domestic Security

By Max Blumenthal
December 3, 2011

In October, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department turned parts of the campus of the University of California in Berkeley into an urban battlefield. The occasion was Urban Shield 2011, an annual SWAT team exposition organized to promote “mutual response,” collaboration and competition between heavily militarized police strike forces representing law enforcement departments across the United States and foreign nations.

At the time, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department was preparing for an imminent confrontation with the nascent “Occupy” movement that had set up camp in downtown Oakland, and would demonstrate the brunt of its repressive capacity against the demonstrators a month later when it attacked the encampment with teargas and rubber bullet rounds, leaving an Iraq war veteran in critical condition and dozens injured. According to Police Magazine, a law enforcement trade publication, “Law enforcement agencies responding to…Occupy protesters in northern California credit Urban Shield for their effective teamwork.”

Training alongside the American police departments at Urban Shield was theYamam, an Israeli Border Police unit that claims to specialize in “counter-terror” operations but is better known for its extra-judicial assassinations of Palestinian militant leaders and long record of repression and abuses in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Urban Shield also featured a unit from the military of Bahrain, which had just crushed a largely non-violent democratic uprising by opening fire on protest camps and arresting wounded demonstrators when they attempted to enter hospitals. While the involvement of Bahraini soldiers in the drills was a novel phenomenon, the presence of quasi-military Israeli police – whose participation in Urban Shield was not reported anywhere in US media – reflected a disturbing but all-too-common feature of the post-9/11 American security landscape.

The Israelification of America’s security apparatus, recently unleashed in full force against the Occupy Wall Street Movement, has taken place at every level of law enforcement, and in areas that have yet to be exposed. The phenomenon has been documented in bits and pieces, through occasional news reports that typically highlight Israel’s national security prowess without examining the problematic nature of working with a country accused of grave human rights abuses. But it has never been the subject of a national discussion. And collaboration between American and Israeli cops is just the tip of the iceberg.

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http://www.alternet.org/story/153307/from_occupation_to_%E2%80%9Coccupy%E2%80%9D%3A_the_israelification_of_american_domestic_security?akid=7939.260530.4JdvSY&rd=1&t=13

It is a ridiculous error to respond as if America is small and weak. It instantly diminishes us.

Israel Weak with the most powerfully military in the mid east and a massive arsenal of WMD's that can destroy the whole mid east area and Europe and the full support of the US financially and militarily behind them?
How is that considered weak?
If Israel is that weak,I must the most Stupid and blind person on earth

"Having been schooled in Israeli tactics perfected during a 63 year experience of controlling, dispossessing, and occupying an indigenous population, local police forces have adapted them to monitor Muslim and immigrant neighborhoods in US cities.
Meanwhile, former Israeli military officers have been hired to spearhead security operations at American airports and suburban shopping malls, leading to a wave of disturbing incidents of racial profiling, intimidation, and FBI interrogations of innocent, unsuspecting people."

From the games to the movies to the majority of where our tax dollars go. Violence.

A nonviolent revolution can still happen. But the 1% have made sure the hurdles are high.

I knew it would get to this.We are Morphing into a Isreali state,as we see more and more of the tactics used in Israel used against especially the Arabs citizens start to be applied here in America.
America is inocorporating the same type of fascist tactics.
Arrest and Indefinet detention upon the sole basis of the law enforcement determining and branding anyone a secrity threat,preventing and threatening the media with,arrest to keep the media from documenting or seeing whats going on,and whole bunch of other undemorcatic,Tyranical moves against the masses.
Similar also to Egypt under Murabak and Libya under Khadaffi.
No wonder the powers that be are so concerned about the Arab spring