Justice for Isak Aden!
Justice for Isak Aden!
Statement by Meredith Aby-Keirstead, a member of the Anti-War Committee on July 1, 2020 at the protest marking the one year anniversary of Isak’s murder
The Anti-War Committee stands here with the Aden family and the Black Lives Matter movement to demand justice for Isak Aden! We always come out for protests against police violence but this case is special to us as a committee because Isak and his sister, Sumaya, came to protests we organized in solidarity with Palestine. Today across the globe people are protesting against the annexation of the West Bank in Israel’s latest land grab. Isak is someone who would have protested that with us. He cared about Palestinians and justice. He was a part of our movement and he is not just a hashtag to us!
We see the connections between Isak’s case and Palestine in other ways too. All four Minneapolis officers involved in the murder of George Floyd had participated in local fear-based “warrior training” which teaches officers to consider everyone a threat. While on a human rights delegation to Palestine in 2002, I saw firsthand how the Israeli Defence Forces soldiers treat all Palestinians – even though they are on Palestinian land- as being a theat in ways similar to how US cops treat BIPOC in their own neighborhoods.
Minneapolis police officers, along with police from around the Midwest, also participated in a 2012 conference hosted by the Israeli consulate in Chicago to learn from the violent techniques used by the IDF against Palestinians. Other U.S. police departments have travelled to Israel for this training.
Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation have long dealt with the kind of brutality being enacted by some US police officers against African-Americans. Palestinians report many instances of choke holds by Israel occupation forces similar to the one that killed George Floyd. Palestinians are subjected to military occupation, tear gas and curfews as methods of control – something that people in Minneapolis have seen first hand. So it is no surprise that the US police that learn these maneuvers abroad are now using those same techniques at home, against their own citizens.
I know both as an activist and as a teacher that the Bloomington police force can be rough and escalate a crisis. We are glad to see folks from Bloomington here to protest the murder of Isak Aden at the hands of the Bloomington and Eagan police. We also are glad to see the growing Bloomington Black Lives Matter movement standing up and fighting back against this kind of police brutality.
We in the Anti War Committee join with you in calling for both Eagan and Bloomington to reopen their investigations into Isak’s murder and for prosecution of the cops who killed him.
Hey hey ho ho! Killer cops have got to go!