Minneapolis Is Everywhere

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• HRAN (FNA)- Global protests against racism and police brutality continue to hit and undermine the United States, as outrage soars over new law enforcement abuses against American demonstrators and others that were caught on camera.

With protests over deliberate police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, surging into a second weekend, massive street demonstrations are set for this week across the globe, including in Europe where tens of thousands of people are expected.

The indefensible death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers - always on high alert and prepared to kill - and the indiscriminate police violence in subsequent protests have returned US foreign policy and military misconduct to the center of international conversation as well.

It’s all written on the wall. The United States is not the world's moral guardian. It has never been. And everywhere is Minneapolis, from Ferguson to Kabul, Baghdad, Sana’a, Damascus and Tripoli, where US occupying forces have been doing the exact same thing to the occupied populations: Unarmed civilians meeting their deaths as US troops and coalition partners massacre them with drones and bombs and artillery.

The only difference is that Western leaders have never bothered to equally utter words such as "sickened," "shocked and appalled," "horror and consternation" against these brutalities – the same words we have also never heard from US presidents and diplomats to condemn the brutality of their wars and occupations in Muslim heartlands.

Western leaders have never told us that they support the right to peaceful protest against war and occupation in occupied countries either; and they have never bothered to unequivocally condemn violence and racism of their troops or call for an end to their wars of aggression and deceit in the Middle East.

Indeed, there is nothing that can justify America’s endless war and the kind of force and brutality its occupying troops have been practicing on their subjects. This is while it goes significantly against international human right law and the right to protest occupation and the right to freedom and self-determination.

International human rights law obliges US occupying troops to protect the defenseless civilians of the lands they have invaded and occupied, yet what we have seen so far in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and Syria shows that blatantly is not what has been happening at least since 2001. At a time when civil society calls for an end to America’s endless war and violence, war-party Washington has threatened to stay the course and entertain because it helps achieve total domination - and it’s good for business.

No wonder the militarized police state is doing the exact same thing to peaceful protesters in the US as well. It’s a matter of both policy and culture – deliberate and systematic too. President Trump calls the protesters terrorists, and in concert with the war on terror, the military and the police have been armed with the mindsets, tactics, and weapons of war to handle the situation.

As a consequence, peaceful protests across the US are being treated as antiwar or anti-occupation protests in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. With the same mindset, the American military gear are always deployed to kill and disperse the crowd – the kind of scenes and photos we nowadays see on the streets of America where never feeling constrained police roll through suburban streets in armored vehicles which look like American tanks in a Mideast capital.

The outcome for both the long-suffering people of the Middle East and the United States has been the same: Killer cops, heavily armed SWAT teams and occupying troops using military gear and armored vehicles to threaten, kill and maim nonviolent protesters with no connection to terrorism. This has become routine in American policing, warring and occupying as soon as they call someone or something a danger and go for eradicating it.

This is by design. The belligerent Washington sees protesters and anti-war dissidents as the equivalent of insurgents and terrorists. The warmongers see domestic and foreign challenges to their status quo as illegitimate and dangerous, the kind of thing that must be eradicated.