I was going to do a serious post tonight, really. There’s a lot of heavy stuff going on.
But then I saw a tweet by our old “friends” at Dream Defenders. You remember DD, don’t you? They are the activists who formed after the Trayvon Martin shooting, with the help of the Tides Foundation. Over the years they turned into a toxic stew of Israel and America haters, but mostly Israel.
We first wrote about Dream Defenders in 2015:
Anti-Israel activists have been attempting to hijack the Ferguson, Eric Garner and #BlackLivesMatter protests since early August, just after Michael Brown was killed.
I documented the infiltration and hijacking in a series of posts and an Op-Ed in The NY Post:
This is all part of a larger effort, particularly on U.S. campuses, to use “intersectional” theory to tie domestic race issues into Palestinian complaints about Israel, among other ways, through exaggeration and in some cases fabrication of alleged Israeli training of U.S. police. That way, any use of excessive force by a U.S. policeman is cause for anti-Israel activists to blame Israel and try to stoke hatred of Israel in domestic communities….
The group produced a video … of a “flash mob” it organized in Nazareth in Israel (which they referred to as being in “Palestine”):
In 2016, we did an exhaustive research post, Dream Defenders: Defending the Dream of Anti-Israel Activism:
We wrote recently how BDS is a settler-colonial ideology, in that it invades, conquers, and subjugates other movements to advance anti-Israel actvism.There are few instances where this is more apparent than Dream Defenders, one of the key groups in the Black Lives Matter movement.Dream Defenders was initially formed to protest ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws in Florida, in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting.Yet, following the pattern of many organizations who organize under the ideology of ‘intersectionality‘, Dream Defenders has transformed itself from an organization fighting for a change in the criminal laws of the state of Florida, into one which is identified with the bizarre attempt to link Black Lives Matter to the Palestinian cause. The struggle to protect young black men in Florida and elsewhere in the U.S. from allegedly unlawful police violence apparently also involves ‘liberating’ Palestine, i.e. the destruction of the state of Israel, and bizarre crushes on terrorist organizations like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine….This post will look deeper into the evolution of Dream Defenders from a local organizing committee in Florida into a national movement inciting against Israel.In the course of just 3 years, the movement evolved from a group of college students and activists into a national organization celebrated by traditional ‘radical chic’ celebrities such as Angela Davis, and newer ones, like Marc Lamont Hill; was invited to the White House to meet President Obama; has organized propaganda ‘delegations to Palestine’ with high visibility on social media; has endorsed the BDS movement, advocating boycotts of Israel; celebrates terrorist movements, such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; and culminating in members of Dream Defenders authoring the highly controversial statement endorsing boycott as the official position of the Movement for Black lives, and smearing Israel as an ‘apartheid’ state that practices ‘genocide’.
Read the whole post, it goes into excrutiating detail on the role DD played in the rise of BLM.
I haven’t thought much about Dream Defenders in the following years; they hold periodic protests, but no longer are at the center of the BLM or other universes. Somehow I’m on their mailing list, and they have a habit of announcing grand protest plans that are going to change everything, and change nothing.
I got an email blast about a plan to take over Ron Desantis’ Governor’s office today.
EMERGENCY PRESS RELEASE
HAPPENING NOW: DREAM DEFENDERS OCCUPY GOVERNOR’S OFFICE AND DEMAND MEETING AND END OF RIGHT WING ATTACKS ON DEMOCRACY ACROSS THE COUNTRYDream Defenders lead an alliance to challenge the right wing attempt to dismantle American democracy and establish a new Confederacy.Dream Defenders are currently occupying Ron DeSantis’s office and demand he come home to face his constituents; and to inspire other states with similar extremist governments to take action against the right wing attempts to dismantle democracy and establish a 21st century confederacy across the United States.”Gov. DeSantis and Republican lawmakers have chosen to attack many of Florida’s most vulnerable and historically marginalized communities with policies that attack who they are, who they love and how and what they learn,” said Dwight Bullard, Sr. Political Advisor at Florida Rising who is currently sitting down in the office….
And so they did. So much drama!
But then I saw this on Twitter, and got a good laugh:
That guy deserves a raise.
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