Taxpayer-funded Bronx legal aid honcho blasts Israel for ‘rampant state violence’ and ‘colonialism’

A taxpayer-funded Bronx legal aid attorney has blasted Israel for ‘rampant state violence’ and ‘colonialism’ which she claimed is sponsored by the ‘US Empire.’

Shannon Cumberbatch, head of Bronx Defenders’ Office of Equity and Institutional Transformation, sent the e-mail to colleagues on the ‘anti-oppression’ team she leads.

Bronx Defenders represents low-income clients in criminal, civil, child welfare, and immigration cases and has received more than $260 million from New York City over the last decade.

In the email, Cumberbatch said her team stood ‘in solidarity with our comrades in Colombia, Brazil and Palestine who are fighting rampant state violence by militarized police forces that the US Empire helps to train and support financially and otherwise, while disproportionately targeting black, brown and native people in their countries, just as those forces do in the United States.’

Written on May 14, at the height of the Israel’s recent bombing campaign in the Gaza Strip, Cumberbatch said she wanted to ‘highlight the suffering of our Palestinian colleagues and comrades whose loved ones continue fighting for their survival and security.’

She referred to Israel’s ‘raid’ on the Al Aqsa Mosque in east Jerusalem, when security forces moved in to quell Palestinian protests on Temple Mount in early May. 

However, she downplayed the role of Islamist terrorists in the conflict. Hamas militants fired rockets at civilians in Israel following the Temple Mount riots before Israel began its bombing campaign. 

‘The present reality of the displacement, disenfranchisement and military violence happening abroad is reminiscent of the settler colonialism, state violence and sanctioned genocide weaponized against Native and people of color in the United States,’ Cumberbatch wrote.

She also claimed that the NYPD has ‘collaborated’ with Israeli security forces, ‘sharing tactics of surveillance and suppression.’

Cumberbatch compared protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, following the killing of Michael Brown, to those by Palestinians in Israel.

‘Our struggle for freedom is international and our liberties are intertwined,’ she wrote.

But another Bronx Defender lawyer disagreed with her email and forwarded it to former Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind, chief of Americans against Antisemitism.

Cumberbatch’s email was written on May 14, at the height of the Israel’s recent bombing campaign in the Gaza Strip (pictured: Smoke billows from a building housing various international media, including The Associated Press, after an Israeli airstrike on Saturday, May 15)

‘Personally, I don’t care for anyone’s anti-Jewish views, but when a government-funded organization offers their unsolicited opinion on foreign policy so as to increase divisions here at home then we must demand accountability,’ Hikind told the New York Post.

‘And this isn’t the first time they indulged in objectionable behavior, so why does New York City, among other governmental agencies, keep funding them to the tune of tens of millions of taxpayer dollars annually?’

Bronx Defenders were in the spotlight in 2014 when two of its employees appeared in a rap video which urged people to kill NYPD cops.

But Bronx Defenders’ Executive Director Justine Olderman defended Cumberbatch in a statement to the Post, writing: ‘This email was part of an ongoing internal discussion about how events around us impact our clients and our employees and was a communication that, as a Jewish person, I endorsed at the time and stand by today.’

She added: ‘Our naming and amplifying the suffering of Palestinian people in an email to staff should not be mistaken for organizational indifference to the experience of people in Israel who have been living in fear and have lost loved ones, to the growing threat of anti-semitism at home and abroad, or to the history of Jewish oppression.’