...Racial profiling, police violence, mass incarceration and drone killings are among the wide array of abuses UN experts have raised at a review of US civil and political rights policies in Geneva attended by dozens of rights groups.

For Diala Shamas, senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, the US government has been using “dehumanising language” against Palestinians that is “complicit in genocide”.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrations in the US have also sparked backlash, including from city officials and other political leaders, Shamas said, adding that incidents of hate crimes, including the killing of a Palestinian boy in Illinois, felt “evocative” of the early days that followed the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

While the issue of Palestinian rights is at the centre of attention, Shamas notes that more broadly, “there is rising repression of protests in the United States, particularly under an expansion and we call it metastasization of the war on terror”. ...

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