District 3 representative Kshama Sawant was joined by two of her fellow Seattle City Councilmembers Monday in signing a letter calling for condemnation of Israel’s strikes on Gaza in the renewed conflict with Palestine and announced plans to introduce legislation that would ban Seattle Police from “engaging in training with Israeli military and police.”
Sawant’s office announced Councilmember Lisa Herbold (District 1, West Seattle/South Park) and Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda (District 8, Citywide) joined Sawant in signing the letter. The six other councilmembers including mayoral candidate and council president Lorena González did not. According to Sawant, the council’s Tammy Morales and Dan Strauss said they would draft their own letters.
Sawant’s office said the letter (PDF) calls “on the Biden administration and U.S. Congress to publicly condemn the Israeli state’s brutal attacks on the Palestinian people, to end military aid and weapons sales to Israel, and to pass legislation banning US funds from further subsidizing the occupation and further human rights abuses by the Israeli police and military.”
As for the proposed Israeli police training legislation, Sawant’s office cites a 2017 Seattle Weekly report that says Seattle Police Department personnel “participated in at least two such trips to Israel—in 2013 and 2015 —where they swapped tactics with the Israeli military.”
“While we have been told that there are no current plans for SPD to have personnel train with Israeli military or police, we know that has happened in the past and want to make sure that it never happens again, as long as Israel brutalizes the Palestinian people,” Sawant said in the press release about the letter and proposed legislation from her office.
Sawant’s office said the Coalition of Seattle Indian Americans, MAPS-AMEN, the Community Alliance for Global Justice, and UAW 4121 plus messages from “773 community members” joined in her call for the council to sign onto the Biden administration letter.
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Ms Sawant, I would never fault you for your activism but I am begging you- please vacate your position on the city council and let someone who will focus entirely on D3 fill that role. There are national offices to run for and other ways for you to fight for the global issues you care so much about.
Thank you Ms Sawant for continuing to demonstrate that you have everything on your mind except the serious work to be done here in District 3.
I’m so glad City Council is focused on preventing activities our city has no plans to actually engage in. Those are obviously the highest priority ones, of course.
Incredibly, it somehow gives me greater compassion for conservatives’ investing legislative resources around preventing trans kids from theoretically having an unfair advantage in sports, even though there’s no evidence that’s real, either.
“Sawant brings together people to solve a problem in District 3” is a headline we will never see.
As the Recall campaign is gearing up, Sawant is running scared and is doing anything to attract media attention, She is absolutely shameless.
Thank you, High Priestess and Benevolent Leader Kshama Sawant, for tweeting about international disputes and not fixing sidewalks, streetlights or homelessness in District 3.
Please update the headline. “Sawant says will pursue” does not make sense.
Has anyone looked in to fact checking the claim that SPD has previously trained with the IDF?