The current issue of muckraking journal Private Eye reports that Heathrow Airport will have shiny new equipment for screening passengers installed with the help of several Israeli firms as part of preparations for next year’s Olympic Games. The sporting event affords an opportunity to run a “live test” on the Total Airport Security System (TASS), a 14.5 million euro ($21 million) project mainly financed by the European Union.
As it happens, details of the project were announced almost exactly a year ago. In a June 2010 statement, the consortium behind TASS bragged that it had won formal EU authorisation for the scheme, which uses “real-time sensors” and various other tools to monitor aircraft, people, cargo, and restaurant areas in an airport separately and then blend all the resulting data in a “multisource labyrinth”.
The project is being coordinated by Verint, an Israeli supplier of surveillance equipment (or “actionable intelligence solutions”,according to its own bumph). Another participant in the consortium is Elbit, which made many of the pilotless drones that Israel used to devastate Gaza during 2008 and 2009. Elbit also helped install an electronic spying system into the annexation wall that Israel is building in the West Bank (illegally, according to a 2004 ruling of the International Court of Justice).
This is by no means the first indication that Israel’s shoot-first-ask-questions-later approach to security has caught on in London. Metropolitan cops who killed an innocent Brazilian man Jean-Charles de Menezes in 2005 had received specialist training in Israel. One year earlier, the aforementioned Verint won a contract to provide a video system to keep a watchful eye on users of the London Underground. Verint has also been tasked with putting a newclosed circuit TV network into Earl’s Court – a world-famous venue for exhibitions and events – ahead of the Olympics.
The Palestinian organisation Stop the Wall, meanwhile, has complained this week about how EU officials appear determined to keep on subsidising Israel’s war industry.
The Union’s executive arm, the European Commission, has recently invited comments on the future of its science policy, as part of a “public consultation exercise” about what priorities it should follow after 2014, when its current multi-annual programme for research expires. Israel is the most active non-European participant in that programme. And while the Commission received numerous pleas to declare Israeli firms such as Verint and Elbit ineligible for further grants, it has omitted any reference to them in the 24-page summary that it compiled of public responses.
Jamal Juma’a, coordinator with Stop the Wall, described the omission as “deeply disappointing”. He said: “By providing research funding to companies involved in constructing and maintaining Israel’s apartheid wall, the EU is undermining its own stated commitment to international law and a just peace between Israel and the Palestinian people.”
Informed citizens in the US have long been aware that Israel’s military machine is oiled with dollars. It is clear now that the same machine is oiled with euros, too, and that the Brussels bureaucracy is refusing to even acknowledge that this state of affairs is legally and ethically problematic, to say the very least.
David Cronin’s book Europe’s Alliance With Israel: Aiding the Occupation is published by Pluto Press.
Shoot first and ask questions later, indeed! And isn’t this the new USA’s policy? Call something a “danger”, call that danger a “danger to national security”, and you can imprison people, listen to their phone calls, etc., without the need for “probable cause” to believe whatever it is the police say they believed (at the instant of action). (A new standard, because, recall, the USA did NOT shoot down either of the two planes which crashed into the World Trade Center, and surely after the first, there was “probably cause” to suspect the second!
Sometimes the prose here is simply infuriating. On the one hand this is a perfectly acceptable article identifying European investment in Israeli products. I understand that if you believe in BDS then it is important to bring these things to people’s attention. But when you use crazy inaccurate rhetoric to back up your point, you sound like a fanatic.
Please explain how the implementation of surveillance equipment is part of a “Israel’s shoot-first-ask-questions-later approach”. This claim is idiotic.
Furthermore, your statement that “Metropolitan cops who killed an innocent Brazilian man Jean-Charles de Menezes in 2005 had received specialist training in Israel” is a lie. None of the men involved with the shooting were trained in Israel.
The true story is that a team of senior officers visited Israel, Sri Lanka and Russia after 9/11 (four years before this tragic shooting) to learn about counter terrorist measures. On returning to England the Met established Operation Kratos based on what they had learned. None of the men who shot Jean-Charles de Menezes received specialist training in Israel. In fact this shooting contravened everything they would have learned from Israel where ” officers had to be sure they could see a suicide vest or explosives before they opened fire.” – link to guardian.co.uk
Please note that the officer in charge on the day Jean-Charles de Menezes was shot and killed by 6 bullets fired into his head from a distance of 1-8 cms was Commander Cressida Dick. In June 2009, she was promoted to the rank of Assistant Commissioner, the first woman to hold this rank substantively. She holds the Queen’s Police Medal for distinguished service.
None of this has anything to do with Israel.
By all means protest security contracts for equipment made by Israeli firms, but don’t fabricate evidence which implicates Israel in crimes committed by ignorant and poorly trained British police.
“Sometimes the prose here is simply infuriating.”
How many times do I have to tell you, Guilty Feat, you just let us know where Phil has got you involuntarily sequestered, forced to read and comment on an infuriating and completely dishonest website which is simply an excuse for anti-Semitism, and me an’ The Litvaks (my all-Jewish sport-bike posse) will bust you out!
It is unconscionable that you are forced to participate here!
Please explain how the implementation of surveillance equipment is part of a “Israel’s shoot-first-ask-questions-later approach”. This claim is idiotic.
from wiki:
not idiotic
Great; after having Israel’s agents posted at almost every international airport in North America, now it’s starting to have them in European ones. Global Research wrote about them a couple of years back when Galloway was prevented from entering Canada:
British MP George Galloway barred from Canada under the Canada Israel “Public Security” Agreement
by Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research, March 26, 2009
British MP George Galloway was refused entry to Canada on the pretext that he supported Hamas, which is categorized by the Canadian government as a “terrorist organization.”
Contrary to what has been reported in the media, this was not a unilateral decision by the government of Canada.
In all likelihood, the decision was taken in close consultation with Israel under the terms of a farreaching agreement on “public security” signed in Tel Aviv on March 23 2008. The “Declaration of Intent” establishes a framework of bilateral cooperation between Canada and Israel in the area of “Public Security”. The agreement has not been the object of debate in the Canadian parliament, nor has it received media coverage.
Under the proposed agreement, the Deputy Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness of Canada is in liason with his Israeli counterpart the Director General of Public Security for the Government of the State of Israel. Together they chair a joint Management Committee.
The terms reference of the Canada-Israel “Declaration” are extremely broad. They include issues of immigration and ethnic profiling, the management of borders, intelligence and the exchange of information, emergency preparedness, correctional services, prisons, law enforcement and counter-terrorism. The agreement allows for officials from the State of Israel, to play a role in Canadian “public security” including border security and immigration.
The important question is whether Israeli officials were present in Canada and whether they were assisting their Canadian counterparts with regard to the decision to bar George Galloway.
The article below provides detailed information on the nature of this Canadian-Israeli project.
Also see text of agreement in ANNEX,
link to globalresearch.ca
Walid, Michel Chossudovsky’s overview of the 2008 Canada-Israel “Public Security” Agreement makes for ugly reading alright.
But let’s face it, here’s the crux of the matter: “The agreement appears to be built upon a much broader agreement between Canada and the US in the area of Homeland Security. However, it also replicates the pattern of a February 2006 agreement reached between US Homeland Security and Israel’s Ministry of Public Security.”
In the area of “Public Security” Canada does what the US wants and the US does what Israel wants.
Re George Galloway: link to rabble.ca
I hope he wins his lawsuit.
BTW, I’m beginning to think you are Canadian-ish. True?
Guilty, In the Guardian article you cite, it states that Major General Mickey Levy, was the police commander in Jerusalem from 2000 to 2004.
I’ve been checking Mickey Levy out:
Here is a documented account of one incident that occurred on his watch:
“In October 2000, Israeli police used live ammunition against unarmed civilians demonstrating their solidarity with Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Thirteen Palestinians, of whom twelve were Israeli citizens, were shot dead.
An official commission, headed by Judge Theodor Or, was appointed to look into the events which came to mark a dramatic deterioration in Arab-Jewish relations inside the country.
In 2003, the Or Commission confirmed that the police used “excessive” and unjustifiable force, reported that the police viewed the country’s Arab citizens as “enemies” and documented a pattern of “prejudice and neglect” towards them by Israel’s establishment.4
While the Or Commission recommended a number of measures to redress the sharp disparities between Jews and Arabs in the country, families of the victims regarded the report as a whitewash.
The Commission failed to examine the forensic evidence in each of the killings, and none of the killers, nor any responsible official, were ever brought to justice.5
By 2007, according to Elie Rekhess of the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University, there remained “yawning” gaps between Jews and Arabs in Israel and “the bottom line” is “that the conclusions and recommendations of the 2003 Or Commission remain conspicuously unimplemented.”6
link to thejerusalemfund.org
So, guilty, why on earth should we believe this fellow when he tells a reporter that Israeli “officers had to be sure they could see a suicide vest or explosives before they opened fire”??
Annie what does this have to do with airport scanners?
So, guilty, why on earth should we believe this [Mickey Levy] fellow when he tells a reporter that Israeli “officers had to be sure they could see a suicide vest or explosives before they opened fire”??
Why not answer my question?? guilty guilty!
“So, guilty, why on earth should we believe this fellow when he tells a reporter that Israeli “officers had to be sure they could see a suicide vest or explosives before they opened fire”?”
Er… no reason, I guess. It’s of absolutely no consequence to me either way who you believe. I just thought it was interesting.
“The Palestinian organisation Stop the Wall, meanwhile, has complained this week about how EU officials appear determined to keep on subsidising Israel’s war industry.”
If the issue gets too much public heat, they simply get a Muslim-looking patsy and stage a terror attack so you all shut up and buy more security systems.
By the way, the logo for the Olympics still spells “ZION”, doesn’t it? It probably doesn’t mean anything, though.
“One year earlier, the aforementioned Verint won a contract to provide a video system to keep a watchful eye on users of the London Underground. ”
Which apparently failed to provide any images -(only one was every produced and that was not in the London Underground) – whatsoever of the 4 supposed terrorists who supposedly blew up the train on 7/7 , 2005.
Verint was to claim that it’s CCTV’s were not working that day. As I recall it was something like 74 out of 75 cameras inoperable on the day…