If you are surprised #BlackLivesMatter joined war on Israel, you haven’t been paying attention
For years we have been documenting the efforts by anti-Israel activists to stoke racial hatred of Israel through the concept of “intersectionality” – the notion that all revolutionary struggles, particularly against racism, are connected.
The almost exclusive focus, however, is Israel. Hence, Israel is falsely blamed for local police shootings of blacks in the U.S. based upon false and misleading claims I debunked in my post, Exposed: Years-long effort to blame Israel for U.S. police shootings of blacks.
The movement to connect Ferguson-to-Palestine launched after the Michael Brown shooting, and has been a singular focus of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) activists ever since.
Anti-Israel activists played an active role in stoking violence in Ferguson, as I documented in Intifada Missouri – Anti-Israel activists may push Ferguson over the edge and Anti-Israel activist still stoking fires in #Ferguson.
A good history also is in How The Black Lives Matter and Palestinian Movements Converged.
No other country except Israel is used as pervasively as the connector for intersectionality. It’s a seedy tactic meant to exploit domestic U.S. racial tensions having nothing to do with Israel, and to turn those tensions into racial hatred of the supposedly “white” Israel. Underlying it all are anti-Semitic stereotypes of omnipresent Jewish manipulation, such as those spread by Oberlin College professor Joy Karega.
There have been successes at the campus level, such as at Oberlin, of inserting anti-Israel language into list of Demands from Black Lives Matter protesters.
Many of the leading Black Lives Matters leaders are also anti-Israel activists. They receive encouragement and support from people like Marc Lamont Hill for linking Israel to problems of black in the U.S.:
So, with that said, it’s no real surprise that anti-Israel activist managed to insert anti-Israel language into the newly released Black Lives Matter platform statement, in the Invest-Divest section which accuses Israel of genocide and being an apartheid state (emphasis added):
In addition, approximately 3 billion dollars in US aid is allocated to Israel, a state that practices systematic discrimination and has maintained a military occupation of Palestine for decades….The US justifies and advances the global war on terror via its alliance with Israel and is complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people. The US requires Israel to use 75 percent of all the military aid it receives to buy US-made arms. Consequently, every year billions of dollars are funneled from US taxpayers to hundreds of arms corporations, who then wage lobbying campaigns pushing for even more foreign military aid. The results of this policy are twofold: it not only diverts much needed funding from domestic education and social programs, but it makes US citizens complicit in the abuses committed by the Israeli government. Israel is an apartheid state with over 50 laws on the books that sanction discrimination against the Palestinian people. Palestinian homes and land are routinely bulldozed to make way for illegal Israeli settlements. Israeli soldiers also regularly arrest and detain Palestinians as young as 4 years old without due process. Everyday, Palestinians are forced to walk through military checkpoints along the US-funded apartheid wall.
These accusations have been debunked so many times — yet Black Lives Matter adopts the propaganda talking points of the anti-Israel left and Islamists.
The reaction has been swift from liberal Jewish groups which naively didn’t understand what was happening behind the scenes to create a race war against the Jews under the guise of anti-Zionism.
The Jewish Community Relations Council of Boston issued a statement which reads in part:
We are deeply dismayed by elements of this platform, specifically the co-opting and manipulation of a movement addressing concerns about racial disparities in criminal justice in the United States in order to advance a biased and false narrative about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. To conflate the experiences of African-Americans and Palestinians oversimplifies complex matters and advances false equivalencies that diminish the unique nature of each.JCRC cannot and will not align ourselves with organizations that falsely and maliciously assert that Israel is committing “genocide.” We denounce an agenda to wage economic and cultural warfare against Israelis, including efforts to mobilize against state and local efforts that reject the “BDS” movement. We reject participation in any coalition that seeks to isolate and demonize Israel singularly amongst the nations of the world.As we dissociate ourselves from the Black Lives Matter platform and those BLM organizations that embrace it, we recommit ourselves unequivocally to the pursuit of justice for all Americans, and to working together with our friends and neighbors in the African-American community, whose experience of the criminal justice system is, far too often, determined by race….
The Forward collects several similar statements, including this one:
For some Jews of color, particularly African American Jews, who had embraced the popular movement, the language of the new platform was especially troubling.“It broke my heart,” said Stacey Aviva Flint, a student at Chicago’s Spertus Institute who is African American and Jewish and writes on parallels between black and Jewish nationalist movements.“I understand what Zionism was about when it first started. You had a group of people who were seeking self determination. And self determination was also something that African Americans desperately needed and wanted,” said Flint.“[In past months], I really thought, ‘a movement is starting, I want to support this, as African Americans are being targeted by the police,’” Flint said.“This dashed my hopes.”Flint said that calling Israel an apartheid state would only “muddy” Black Lives Matter’s message. “Now people don’t see Black Lives Matter as a legitimate platform.”
The Anti-Defamation League has previously embraced Black Lives Matter, including providing lesson plans for use in schools [Update 8-5-2016 – ADL took down the lesson plan, but *someone* had already saved it to Wayback Machine]:
The ADL tonight issued a statement and tweets rejecting the anti-Israel platform:
So what to make of all this?
My big takeaway from this doesn’t focus so much on the anti-Israel activists. They are nasty, hateful, and in many cases bigoted, people. I expect no less from them than to abuse the American civil rights movement by hijacking it for their own purposes without regard to the damage they do the movement.
My bigger ire is directed at the groups who didn’t understand the nature of the Black Lives Matter movement and didn’t have the guts or honesty to stand up to the lies about the Trayvon Martin and Michel Brown false racial narratives. Those same groups turned a blind eye towards well-documented evidence of infiltration and hijacking by the worst anti-Israel activists.
So, consider this a positive wake up call. No longer can Jewish Community groups like the ADL claim they are unaware. You now know what we’ve known for years — the issue is what you are going to do about it.
[Featured Image: Omar Barghouti, Co-Founder of BDS Movement]
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