Sheldon Adelson bankrolls NBA player trip to Israel to fight BDS

Israeli-born Sacramento Kings forward Omri Casspi and pro-Israel mega-donor Sheldon Adelson recently teamed up to recruit NBA stars for an anti-BDS promotional jaunt to Israel and Sports Illustrated is all over it, without mentioning the anti-BDS angle.

The SI article “Kings’ DeMarcus Cousins, Omri Casspi get muddy in the Dead Sea,” consists of a few fun in the sun tweets from Casspi, the Sacramento Kings and local press, the Sacramento Bee.

We can do that too:

Gives a fresh face to blackwashing now doesn’t it? The promotional trip, an idea likely cooked up during Adelson’s secret anti-BDS mega-donors summit in Las Vegas last month, condemned by human rights organizations as “the moral equivalent of fundraising to preserve apartheid in South Africa, or Jim Crow in the United States” has thus far gotten lots of press mentioning teammates DeMarcus Cousins, Rudy Gay and Caron Butler, Chandler Parsons, Tyreke Evans, Iman Shumpert and Washington Wizard Alan Anderson, “in an effort to shine light on the dangers of the BDS–boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel.”

Dave Zirin has a biting article up at The Nation over the recent much touted trip.  An Open Letter to the NBA Players Traveling to Israel serves as a double whammy. The letter, initially addressed to Rudy Gay, opens stating Israel’s “policing practices are going global and jeopardizing the safety of communities that you have pledged to defend” and raises questions the Casspi/Adelson junket has co-opted black NBA players in an effort to drive a wedge between freedom for Palestine and the #BlackLivesMatter movement:

On December 12, you were one of several Sacramento Kings players to wear an “I Can’t Breathe” shirt during warm-ups. The shirts were worn to commemorate the last words of Staten Island’s Eric Garner and protest his death at the hands of the New York Police Department. It was a brave act, a link in a chain, which aligned some of the NBA’s biggest stars with the #BlackLivesMatter movement.

Of course, lethal police brutality has been directed at black Americans for as long as there have been police. But the #BlackLivesMatter movement has emerged out of a dramatic spike in this violence. Roughly 400 people were shot and killed by police over the first five months of 2015, according to a Washington Post analysis. That is more than twice the average of the past decade. Those killed are primarily black and brown, as police departments have outfitted themselves in military fashion. Finding justice for those killed has proven to be a near impossible task.

This epidemic of killings has been aggravated by the influence of Israeli police practices on US policing. Since 9/11, police chiefs and high-ranking officers from across the United States—from Ferguson to New York City—have traveled to Israel for training in the arts of suppression. As Ali Winston reported, “[a]t least 300” chiefs from across the country have gone to Israel for these workshops. Former US Capitol Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer called Israel “the Harvard of antiterrorism” after one all-expenses-paid trip. The NYPD, which took the life of Eric Garner and broke the leg of NBA player Thabo Sefolosha, now has an office in Tel Aviv.

Since 9/11, Israel has turned its repressive capabilities into an exportable commodity. It instructs on surveillance, crowd control tactics, and psychological operations like keeping lights on police cars at all times. It’s these kinds of tactics that provoked thousands of Ethiopian Jews to protest police brutality in Israel this year under the banner of #BlackLivesMatter, only to be met with tear gas.

The direct connection between the Israeli military and American police repression has birthed a new solidarity between #BlackLivesMatter activists and those fighting for Palestinian rights. Earlier this month a “Black Solidarity Statement with Palestine” was issued and signed by people like Angela Davis and my personal hero, professor Robin Kelley…….

But it turns out Rudy Gay never got on that plane. No explanation has been forthcoming. Zirin contacted Gay’s agent, Alex Saratsis, who was “seething.”  Saratsis did not give a reason why Gay skipped the trip, and according to Zirin:

upset that it had been widely disseminated that Rudy Gay was a part of delegation

Understandably so. It’s a must read which has now been updated, again. 

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ugh

Great coverage, Annie! (no pun intended)

That video is pretty yucky.

First the NFL vets disgrace themselves, now the NBA follows suit~ in bathing suits.

I predict a big backfire. I really do.

I heart Zirin~ I read his letter the other day. He’s such a good guy, and is the best American political sports writer. Maybe he’s the only one on the planet who actually does his job. There’s a need, because there is politics in sports. Anything that is a multi- billion industry is political.

Adelson’s bombs are starting to blow up in his face.

RE: “Since 9/11, police chiefs and high-ranking officers from across the United States—from Ferguson to New York City—have traveled to Israel for training in the arts of suppression.” ~ Zirin’s Open Letter to the NBA Players Traveling to Israel

SEE: “The Anti-Defamation League Sticks to What it Knows Best: Racism”, International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, 2014

. . . In the wake of the decisions not to indict officers Darren Wilson or Daniel Pantaleo for murdering Michael Brown and Eric Garner, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) – a Jewish organization purportedly founded to fight racism and anti-Semitism – has revealed itself to be once again standing on the wrong side of history. Not only did the ADL urge “calm” of protestors in the face of righteous anger against the state murder of Black people across the United States, they also stood with the St Louis grand jury: “we respect the grand jury’s integrity and their commitment to meeting the heavy responsibility thrust upon them.” And, adding insult to injury, the ADL praised the NYPD despite the shameful and brutal murder of Eric Garner and the midst of their violent repression of protestors.

The ADL’s decision to firmly support the police and attempt to silence nation-wide collective action is no surprise given their history of collaboration with and support of police violence and surveillance in the US. The ADL directly trains tens of thousands of police and other “security forces” and leads population control training of US Police by Israeli military and police forces. By facilitating the training of US police in Ferguson and other cities, the ADL acts as a driving force in the cross-pollination of the most repressive practices and the increasing militarization of police forces in the US and Israel.

In this context, the ADL attacked Black football player Reggie Bush for courageously affirming the link between Ferguson and Palestine. Consistent with its pattern of suppression, the ADL slammed Reggie Bush for sharing messages of solidarity from Palestinians to the people of Ferguson on social media. The ADL claims that there is no connection between racist violence in Ferguson and across the US, the repression of community resistance to this violence through mass protest, and the racist violence against Palestinians. Yet, the ADL is itself perhaps the most direct link between the racist violence against Black people and Palestinians, having literally trained former St. Louis County Police Chief Timothy Fitch in Israel. Abraham Foxman, Executive Director of the ADL, went so far as to suggest that Reggie Bush does not understand racism in either the United States or Palestine, saying: “He should stick to football.”

We are disgusted that the ADL continues to stick to what it knows best: racism.

Beyond the ADL, Israel’s connection to Ferguson is not strange or exceptional, but is rather, as is laid out in “Israel’s Worldwide Role in Repression”, part of its broader role in global repression. Just as the US military trains police around the world based on its long history of repressing of Black people and other oppressed communities, Israel takes the technology, military tactics, and racist brutality it has developed through its colonization of Palestine and exports them to the rest of the world.

In the United States alone, over 9,000 US officials have trained with Israeli military and police, including the Atlanta police who killed a 92 year old Black woman, Kathryn Johnson, Oakland police who used tear gas and rubber bullets to repress Occupy Oakland, and the LAPD who are now utilizing the drone technology that Israel pioneered. Thus, when Palestinians declare their solidarity with the people of Ferguson or offer protestors advice on dealing with teargas, or when demonstrators in Missouri carry signs reading “from Ferguson to Palestine occupation is a crime,” it grows out of a deep recognition of the ways in which the struggles against racism and colonialism in the US and the struggle against racist colonization in Palestine are bound together.

As Jews committed to full justice for Black, Brown and Indigenous people in the United States, queer and trans communities, immigrants targeted by policing and repression, and for justice in Palestine, we assert that the ADL does not represent our interests and continually aligns itself with racism in the US and Israel and works to defend them against popular challenges. We reject this racism and proudly stand with Reggie Bush. We will work to expose the ADL, stop the role it plays in police collaboration between the US and Israel, and continue to organize against Police and military violence.

To sign on to this statement, follow this link – https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1PgWafnuqHRYkwN-y0h22g4PDCiyNrNUWbdOm36dDwYg/viewform?c=0&w=1

SOURCE – http://ijsn.net/iworr/the-anti-defamation-league-sticks-to-what-it-knows-best-racism/

P.S. ALSO SEE:“Israel’s worldwide role in repression”, Israel/Palestine International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, Mondoweiss.net, January 16, 2013
LINK – http://mondoweiss.net/2013/01/israels-worldwide-repression

So why and/or in what universe do professional sports players take free trips from gambling interests?

These players should be “Pete Rose-ed” for the integrity of the game. So should Adelson.