Muslim civil rights group calls bulldozers ‘tools of destruction, dispossession, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid’
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, today condemned the reported delivery of dozens of U.S. bulldozers to the Israeli military for use in its ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the illegally-occupied West Bank.
CAIR called the bulldozers “tools of destruction, dispossession, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid.”
Last year, CAIR welcomed the reported freeze on the delivery of bulldozers to Israel as an “implicit admission” by the Biden administration that the far-right Netanyahu government is using that equipment in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Israel has weaponized bulldozers to destroy homes, flatten neighborhoods and displace civilian populations.
The government of indicted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu has systematically laid waste to residential areas and the civilian infrastructure in Gaza and the West Bank. Almost all Gaza civilians have been forcibly expelled from their homes and placed under a campaign of forced starvation.
SEE: Israeli Bulldozers Flatten Mile After Mile in the West Bank – New York Times
U.N: Investigate Bulldozers Used by Israel for Home Demolitions in Gaza, West Bank
In a statement, CAIR National Deputy Director Edward Ahmed Mitchell said:
“The Trump administration must stop using American taxpayer dollars, American weapons and American equipment to fund the Israeli government’s literal destruction of Palestinian life.
“Sending bulldozers that will be used to destroy more Palestinian homes and steal more Palestinian land deepens our nation’s moral and legal culpability in the Israeli occupation’s crimes.
“These machines are not tools of construction—they are tools of destruction, dispossession, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid. Like the Biden administration before it, the Trump administration’s Israel First policies are going to land our nation in the history books in the worst way possible.”
CAIR has previously condemned the flattening of whole areas of Gaza, including homes and mosques, by civilian contractors using bulldozers. CAIR also condemned the mutilation of a Palestinian child’s body by an Israeli bulldozer and use of bulldozers to desecrate of Palestinians bodies.
Twenty-two years ago, an Israeli military D9 bulldozer crushed to death human rights activist Rachel Corrie in Gaza while she was attempting to stop the demolition of a Palestinian home.
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CONTACT: CAIR National Deputy Director Edward Ahmed Mitchell, 404-285-9530, e-Mitchell@cair.com; CAIR Government Affairs Director Robert McCaw, 202-742-6448, rmccaw@cair.com; CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper, 202-744-7726, ihooper@cair.com; CAIR National Communications Manager Ismail Allison, 202-770-6280, iallison@cair.com