Black Caucus backs Israel, U.S. imperial wars, NYPD reform impossible, U.S. silent on Israeli crimes, Prisoners Have Voting Rights

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Show	Black Agenda Radio
Broadcast Title	Black Caucus backs Israel, U.S. imperial wars, NYPD reform impossible, U.S. silent on Israeli crimes, Prisoners Have Voting Rights
Broadcast Date	2014-07-30
Record Date	2014-07-30
Summary	World Opinion Turns Against Israel Israelis "can no longer frame themselves as the victims" in the conflict with occupied Palestinians, said veteran human rights activist and BAR columnist Ajamu Baraka. However, "it now appears that Black leadership has lost its moral compass and are standing shoulder to shoulder with something as brutal and backward as the assault on Palestine," said Baraka. U.S. Academics Largely Silent on Israeli Crimes American academics are largely mum on Israeli brutality in Gaza, said Dr. Johnny Williams, professor of sociology at Trinity College, in Hartford, Connecticut. "They are scared to talk about the kinds of war crimes that are being committed with this unprovoked war by Israel," he said. Kucinich: America Must Quit "Imperial Pretensions The U.S. is on the wrong side of history, said Dennis Kucinich, the former Ohio congressman, Cleveland mayor, and two-time presidential candidate. "Our policies of intervention, of regime change, of covert action, of linking up with groups that seek to destabilize and annihilate governments, are policies that are doomed to defeat," said Kucinich. NYPD Reform Impossible Under Bratton The choke-hold death of a Black New Yorker accused of selling loose cigarettes shows that Mayor Bill de Blasio should never have brought Bill Bratton back as police commissioner, said Josmar Trujillo, of New Yorkers Against Bratton. The group had warned that Bratton's obsession with so-called "quality of life" offenses would lead to disaster. "Back then, we said that his history and his policies were the exact opposite of reform," said Trujillo. Prisoners Have Voting Rights, Too Back in 2008, Rev. Kenneth Glascow won a lawsuit affirming the right of many incarcerated people to vote, in Alabama. Glascow and his Ordinary People Society have been making the rounds of county jails, to determine if they are in compliance with the law. "Anybody who is in jail in Alabama for a crime that is not a crime of moral turpitude" meaning, they caused harm or danger to someone else "never loses their voting rights," said Glascow, who is the half-brother of Rev. Al Sharpton.