I'm getting really tired of people using the line, "there's just bad people in the world" to justify violent militarized political campaigns in parts of the world we don't belong. People who have never studied the nature of Islam or the Middle East in depth are unconscionably quick to use the allegedly “backward” nature of radical militants as a means to feel better about the fact that they either don’t understand the history of our involvement there, or they don’t [i]want to know just how much we’ve worked to destabilize the region for our own socioeconomic benefit. It doesn’t take a PBS historian to look at the last 75 years of the political development of countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Palestine, and Iran, to see that the Euro-American agenda has been forcibly levied against the sovereignty of their original statehoods. Hell, it doesn’t take more than a Wikipedia search of Mohammad Mosaddegh to learn about just how far our nation’s insidious leaders are willing to go to overthrow the very source of progressive leadership in these countries in favor of a NATO-approved “autocracy” that allows for our ongoing exploitative, symbiotic relationship with those countries. But if you think for a second that groups like Al-Queda, Boko Haram, or the Islamic State are just a group of out-of-the-blue Arab cavemen who one day decided to run around killing innocent people because their religious book told them so, not only are you woefully misinformed and in desperate need of a brush up on your political science…you might be confusing the Qu’ran for the Bible.
Specifically, the Old Testament.
⟦On the killing of Tamir Rice and the non-indictment of Timothy Loehmann⟧
Here's a simple, effective change: in instances of police violence where the victims are deceased, scrap the Grand Jury. The concept that a Prosecutor's office has to first sit before any sort of panel to determine whether or not the officer in question was acting outside of his duties is preposterous, due simply to the fact that the victim is DEAD. If a living plaintiff is part of the proceedings, then maybe - MAYBE - a Grand Jury would be appropriate in seeing if bringing a case of excessive police force to court was acceptable. But even clear cases of civilian manslaughter as a means of self defense have seen ample time in the courtroom, with the defendant having to make his or her case of taking a life to save their own. Let the people decide if a law enforcement officer was just doing their job, or if they were trigger happy. That's what our taxes SHOULD be paying for. This highly biased and politically binding extra step is little more than Supremacy at work, protecting its own at the expense of the marginalized and oppressed.
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