Several Were Arrested As They Simply Tried To March In Brooklyn To Protest The Gaza War And The 1948 Ethnic Cleansing Of The Palestinians.
Police have beaten and arrested several demonstrators at a pro-Palestine protest in New York’s Brooklyn in the latest crackdown on voices speaking against the war on Gaza in the United States.
Protesters gathered on Saturday in the Bay Ridge neighbourhood in southwest Brooklyn, home to a large Muslim community, including people of Palestinian and Yemeni origins.
The peaceful protest to mark the Nakba – the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948 – went on for several hours amid heavy police presence, with officers trying to prevent a march.
“Protesters began to march in the street and shortly after, the New York Police Department came in from a side street and started grabbing people at random,” Katie Smith, a freelance journalist who was at the scene, told Al Jazeera.
“They were tackled to the ground and were often placed under arrest by multiple officers, who beat them, punching them on their upper bodies and around their heads. There were multiple waves of arrests during the march, which was peaceful.”
Smith said the response from the local community had been one of “outrage”, especially as Bay Ridge has seen pro-Palestinian marches for over a decade, but never a police response this brutal.
Local sources said at least a dozen arrests were made on Saturday out of a crowd of several hundred. Videos from the scene showed police dragging demonstrators away as people yelled at them to stop, and a line of handcuffed protesters could be seen loaded into a van.
The NYPD has made hundreds of arrests in protests demanding an end to the war on Gaza, including during a massive raid on the campus of Columbia University at the start of May.
Any American who believes they actually live in a free country, truly need some help.
The Peace Pirate 