We have featured Tulane University student Chloé Simone Valdary before.
We highlighted a great video Valdary produced for a pro-Israel event to be held at Tulane.
For that effort, Valdary was attacked by the usual suspects like Max Blumenthal, as being an Israel Lobby paid stooge. As Lori Lowenthal Marcus reports, the event Valdaray promoted took place with great success in late March, attended by over 400 pro-Israel students.
But there has been a more sinister angle to the attacks on Valdary, as we highlighted in out post about The ugly, repugnant attack on a pro-Israel black American student, including a series of nasty racialized tweets by Richard Silverstein, like this one:
Is race behind the attacks on Valdary? Yes, says an op-ed column in The NY Post by Anthony Hardy Williams, the Democratic whip in the Pennsylvania state Senate, whose father worked with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and broke the color barrier at Penn State, The racism of the Israel-bashers:
The Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement against Israel is often seen as progressive — so it’s astounding to see its supporters turn to racism.The latest target: Chloé Simone Valdary, an African-American undergraduate at the University of New Orleans and founder of the Allies of Israel Association.Valdary recently wrote an article criticizing the Jewish Museum’s decision to invite Judith Butler, a University of California, Berkeley professor and outspoken BDS supporter to speak — an invitation Butler at first accepted, then declined.BDS supporters’ response to Valdary was vile. Activist Zaid Jilani tweeted, “Non-jew [Chloé Valdary] smears famous Jewish academic as ally of Hitler,” then mocked her outspoken stand against anti-Semitism. (Jilani, by the way, was ousted from a liberal think tank last year for use of what his boss called “terrible anti-Semitic language.”)Then there was Max Blumenthal, a former writer for the pro-Hezbollah Al Akhbar newspaper. (The Nation found Blumenthal’s recent book notable for its “equation of Israel with Nazis.”) He tweeted that Valdary is “beyond sickening” and “irrationally hateful” — and a “non-Jew” who represents “the future of Zionism.” ….I’ve seen this too many times before: a supposed “progressive” stepping on the backs of African-Americans, then walking away as if the pain he’s inflicted is different from that caused by any other racist. Why should such hate speech go unchallenged, just because it’s cloaked as criticism of Israel?As a civil-rights activist and leader in the African-American community, I’m exceptionally disturbed to discover that the response to this attack on Valdary has been subdued, almost nonexistent.
There is a reason the BDS movement goes after non-white supporters of Israel with a particular vengeance, including not just blacks but also Native Americans.
As we witnessed at Vassar recently, trying to racialize the dispute on campuses is a key strategy of the BDS movement.
BDS feeds off racial division, hoping that in a race war non-whites on campus will side with BDS. And if it needs to create those divisions, it will.
Don’t let BDS win. Stand with Chloé Simone Valdary.
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