Posted on 08/05/2016 3:01:08 PM PDT by nickcarraway
The civil rights group’s newly published platform holds that societal reforms in America are somehow related to the Arab-Israeli conflict
On Aug. 1, the Black Lives Matter coalition (BLM) of groups and partners published a platform of objectives and demands ostensibly constructed to correct heavy-handed policing, educational negligence, and economic inadequacy in black communities.
That platform did no such thing.
Instead, organizers offered up a hodgepodge of half-baked ideas in the service of creating a new world order, one in which defunding police, releasing all political prisoners from jail, and redistributing of land are imperative.
Moreover, apparently believing that societal reforms in America’s inner cities are somehow related to the Arab-Israeli conflict, BLM included a section on Israel in its list of demands. With trite talking points, the group called for a divestment from the Jewish state as it is allegedly “complicit in the genocide against the Palestinian people.”
What this means is unpleasant to contemplate. An organization formed to confront systemic prejudice against black Americans—which predates the reestablishment of the state of Israel—is now intimating that such prejudice is caused by the Jewish state’s supposed genocidal tendencies (which, according to census reports, have led to a population increase among Palestinians).
Though I find no intrinsic value in “rebutting” crackpot conspiracy theories, it’s worth demonstrating how far removed BLM is from honoring the legacy of its ancestors by reminding readers just how pro-Zionist prominent leaders in the black community have been throughout history—and how Zionism helped shape black politics in America.
Edward Wilmot Blyden, founder of the 19th-century American Pan-African movement, famously wrote,“[I have] the deepest possible interest in the current history of the Jews—especially in that marvelous movement called Zionism.”
W.E.B. Dubois, founder of the NAACP, declared in 1919, “The African movement must mean to us what the Zionist movement must mean to the Jews, the centralization of race effort and the recognition of a racial front. … For any ebullition of effort and feeling that results in an amelioration of the lot of Africa tends to ameliorate the conditions of colored peoples throughout the world.”
Marcus Garvey, founder of the Back-to-Africa movement, stated in 1920: “When a Jew says, ‘We shall have Palestine,’ the same feeling comes to us when we say, ‘We shall have Africa.’ … Africa remains the heritage of black people, as Palestine is of the Jews.”
Even Malcolm X favorably declared, the year before he was assassinated, that, “Pan- Africanism will do for the people of African descent all over the world the same that Zionism has done for Jews all over the world.”
Not only has Zionism influenced black political movements throughout American history, Israel has long been used as a symbol of black liberation and freedom. By denigrating the memory of this legacy, BLM disrespects black American heritage and betrays the hard-won freedom it claims to stand for.
To make matters worse, BLM cites the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement as a source and an inspiration for its own movement—that is, declaring itself to be akin to a movement whose co-founder Omar Barghouti has called for the dismantling of the Jewish state, and a “right to resist [Israel] by all means”—i.e., terrorism. This is an insult to the memory of black leaders and the tradition of our struggle: a struggle that has been rooted in recognition of the rights and dignity of all human beings as well as love for peoples everywhere.
“Let no man pull you so low as to hate him,” stated Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Empathy and compassion for the other—even while being unjustly treated—were not words in manifestos but ideas that informed and contributed to the success of the civil-rights movement. Black Americans did not stab innocent 13-year-old girls sleeping in their beds or run over white men with their cars; they were the victims of such heinous acts. Yet still, even after four little girls were brutally murdered in a church, the black community decided to love, and to practice and preach nonviolence.
Perhaps BLM’s ugliest display of hypocrisy is in its claim to stand with black Americans while promoting movements whose Gaza-based heroes actively engage in the African slave trade. In 2013, CNN Berlin correspondent Frederik Pleitgen detailed Hamas’ involvement in the African slave trade in a piece titled, “Human Trafficking in the Sinai: To Fight It We Need to Know It.” According to Pleitgen, “Some of the major traffickers, including Abu Ahmed and Abu Khaled, have declared in interviews reported in the media, to be part of Hamas.” Pleitgen also reported that arms caches owned by Hamas have been “bought with profits from the slave and human-organs trade” in the Sinai Peninsula, according to EveryOne Group, an Italian based nongovernmental organization working for the preservation of human rights.
Human-rights activist Calev Meyers provided further details. In a 2014 article in the Times of Israel, Mr. Meyers relayed how, according to Israeli court documents, Sudanese and Eritrean men and women were kidnapped near the Israeli border, and tortured by Bedouin tribesman. Being freed required that they pay ransom money to their kidnappers. Hamas officials were complicit in extorting funds from the victims.
“Israeli court records describe a complicated network built to smuggle the funds out of Israel and into the hands of the traffickers,” Meyers wrote. “Once the family members pay up, the ransom funds move to the hands of Hamas operatives in the West Bank towns of Jenin and Nablus. From there, the funds flow into the Gaza Strip to Abu Jamil, a Hamas operative who pockets a tax and smuggles the funds. Jamil helps move the funds through Hamas’ network of underground tunnels running under the border between Gaza and Sinai, with the tunnels reaching within a few kilometers of the very buildings in which the abductees are held.”
Hamas has played a serious role in the human bondage of black Africans, yet this seems to go unnoticed by BLM. In contrast to the institutionalized racism that characterizes Hamas’ government, and their miserable mistreatment of Africans, it’s worth highlighting and celebrating a people that take the notion that black lives matter seriously: Israelis. That’s why, as Israeli Ambassador Danny Danon explained recently in the pages of The Wall Street Journal: “The Israeli government has announced a multimillion-dollar plan to strengthen its economic ties with Africa,” and on his recent trip, “the heads of 70 Israeli companies joined the prime minister to help strengthen African relationships.” That’s why, as reported in The Tower magazine, Israelis “extended aid to Guinea during its fight against Ebola in 2014, donating $10 million to the international UN fund to combat the disease.” That’s why through its desalination efforts and cutting-edge drip-irrigation technology, Israelis are developing what author Rowan Jacobson calls “resilient well systems for African villages and biological digesters that can halve the water usage of most homes.”
The fact that Israel puts its money where its mouth is by cultivating social and economic innovation in Africa through direct foreign investment and people-to-people outreach in addition to state-to-state ties is one big reason why Benjamin Netanyahu was greeted so warmly by African heads of state and by ordinary people during his recent visit to the continent. Perhaps in its revised manifesto, BLM will take note.
BLM is based on hatred, greed, and most of all ENVY.
The hatred against Jews, and Israelis in particular, is due to the fact they pulled themselves up (with notable help from others and probably G-d) while blacks have fallen and failed, starting really in the 1950s.
ENVY is a far worse affliction than greed, and greed can strengthen Envy in the weak minded.
Blacks also loathe the Asians, because he Asian cultures in general value work ethic, so when Asians succeed, they think they have “cheated somehow” because their culture is failing them.
“the group called for a divestment from the Jewish state as it is allegedly “complicit in the genocide against the Palestinian people.” “
I don’t think the folks in charge at BLM ever read a history book in their lives.
They seem to be an uneducated group of whiners.
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The BLM “platform” really demonstrates how twisted the whole thing is. Instead of just trying to address the already highly contested and complicated problem of police abuses, they can’t stop themselves from throwing in every other unrelated issue but the kitchen sink including the Israel-Palestine conflict, all sorts of weird identity causes, and of course a generalized call for overthrowing capitalism.
Hey Chloe; The BLM is anything but a “civil rights movement”. It is more akin to the murderous Black Panther Party’s “extortion/robbery/police killing movement” without practicing the two latter items (but some of their supporters do).
Stop giving the BLM a “legitimacy” that do not deserve. They are, as usual, a “self-appointed” spokesgroup for American blacks who never elected them. They practice threats and extortion, putting out long unintelligible Marxist platforms and black extremist tomes on “reparations”.
Since “Tablet” is mainly a Jewish media organ (and I’m Jewish), keep it sharp and don’t fall for the Marxist/progressive slant of the BLM, BDS, and Marxist support groups behind the scenes.
The old adage of “Know your enemy” is appropriate here. THe Left (be it white or black) and its revived alliance allies of Islamic extremism, are the masters of propaganda, disinformation (BLM), misinformation (the MS Media), and just plain lying.
For those of us who have been in the business of exposing extremists (in my case since 1969), as journalists (and as an undercover operative), my warning to the new kids on the Jewish journalism block is, don’t believe the Left’s “hype, press releases, speeches, and tears”. There isn’t much of the truth in any of it except for the covert Marxist lines and goals of Saul Alinsky, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Vann Jones, Prof. Charles Ogletree, and of our fearless Comrade Leader, Barack Obama.
First BLM is high jacked for gun control, now for Israel hatred.
This movement is completely bogus and could care less of blacks
They all follow the apology extortion tour. Jews were also constantly apologizing to Germans. Enough is enough of this Bs , dividing people
Hello, they aren’t going back to the motherland willfully, they will carve it out right here in the US of A.
Or try to...
Some of my fellow Jews in Nazi occupied Europe weren’t ‘constantly apologizing to the Germans’, though.
Bill Steiner, Vienna, was being constantly beaten by Himmler’s Gestapo until he escaped. His sister was executed by the Germans when they seized a ship full of Jewish refugees in Yugoslavia and killed over 800 of them.
He came to the US, joined the Army and went back overseas. He later fought for Israeli independence.
(Dr) William Perl, Austria, led one of the most successful Jewish children escape operations right under the Nazis’ noses. He saved an estimated 40,000 children by smuggling them out of Europe to the US or Palestine.
I think his first book version of this story was “The Four Front War” and the later edition was “Operation Annihilate”.
He was also one of the intelligence officers to investigate the SS massacre of US POWS at Malmedy, Belgium.
Mike Damon, of Blitz, Yugoslavia, jointed the Partisan resistance against the Germans/Italians as a teenager.
A woman I met at the 1983 World Congress? of Holocaust Survivors in DC, was in Mila 20 in the Warsaw Ghetto. She made Molotov cocktails for the Ghetto’s resistance army until they forced her to flee through a hole in the wall. She ended up in a woman’s labor camp opposite Sachsenhausen Work/Concentration Camp until liberated by the Red Army.
And a late, non-Jewish friend of mine, Stefan Korbonski, led the Polish Free Army against the Germans. He was one of the few Polish leaders to give arms to the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto, for which he was awarded the honor of “Righteous Gentile” by Israel.
Kurt Braun, a German Jewish lawyer, spent all his time trying to, and in many cases, successfully getting imprisoned Jews out of Dachau and other German prisons before the war started. He bribed the guards/jailers and others in the prison system or whatever else he could do.
Then one day his wife tapped him on the shoulder while visiting a prison and said,”We’ve got to leave. The Gestapo is coming”. Fortunately they got out in time.
Some of our brethren weren’t stupid or blind or cowards. Unfortunately not enough of them were as aware of what was happening and coming. And we know how that ended.
Much like the Democrats of today. But they don’t care. The lesson of “Never Again” has not been taught to the Millenials, Gen-X or 60’s protest movement. If it was, they have long forgotten or rejected it. That is the shame of today’s liberal Jews and the cost to us and to America has been serious.
Some of us have long tried to educate and correct the leftist thinking of Jewish liberals/progressives and their leaders. However, it is hard to teach people who are “Still stuck on stupid”, who never learned the lessons of the Holocaust, though some use the Holocaust as a pretext to attack centrists and conservatives.
Oh well, “Once more into the breach”. “We will never retreat, we will never surrender. We will only attack, attack and attack until victory or death”.
This Jew is no surrender monkey!
(APPLAUSE)
Move to Sierra Leone. A black created paradise.
Chloe. In a second reading of your article, I see that you did a good job of looking at BLM from several perspectives, but there was a need for looking at their affiliates and sucker-fish friends (those who join in somebody else’s projects to get publicity for their own causes).
Photos produced by FreeRepublic readers and from related on-site articles show the signs and flags of these affiliated and suckers. Exposing who they are and what they are trying to do is also important because they give more “heff” to the BLM movement by providing bodies and signs (for TV consumption).
Knowing who is in this new/old black extremist movement is very important because once you understand where they came from (BPP, RAM, RNA, N’COBRA, ROAR, and Marxist groups), you will understand who they are, what they want, and what tactics they will use.
In the end, the BLM is still a black extremist/extortionist organization that will never be denounced by the once friendly to Jews organizations such as the NAACP (went Left and never came back when Julian Bond and Comrade Benjamin Chavis took it over), the Black Congressional Congress (Marxist led by John Conyers, Barbara Lee and Keith Ellison), and the Urban League (of the late gentleman, Whitney Young).
Today black student groups on campuses are as much hate-whitey organizations as they are anti-Jewish (under the guise of anti-Zionist). They openly align with Palestinian extremist groups, aided and abetted by campus and off campus Marxist organizations (NLG, CCR, CRP, VVAW, ISO, Spartacist League, RNA, and the New SDS).
If you look at the protests over the Freddy Gray case in Baltimore, you can see where the BLM coopted the issue of “justice” and made the Maryland DA for Baltimore into one of their open supporters, Marilyn Mosby.
This is what we are up against and it is more pervasive and deeper than most know. The shouting down of Jewish and non-Jewish Pro-Israel speakers on campus, with no real administration response to the New Black Fascists and their white and Moslem/Arab radical friends, is strongly similar to the rise of Nazi fascism and anti-Semitism in 1930’s Germany.
This is what we face so we must not let the liberals put a “happy face” on a black fascist movement. We’ve seen how that came out in Germany.
Great stories
BLM is not a "civil rights movement" and it wasn't formed "to confront systemic prejudice against black Americans." It was formed by homosexuals to advance the Hegelian/Marxist/Gramscian dialectic.
Isn't it amazing how some "Zionists" who are so embarrassed by white Fundamentalist Protestant support will contort themselves into pretzels to tout/solicit support from "politically correct" groups? Disgusting.
The author is obviously a purely secular nationalist for whom 'Eretz Yisra'el has absolutely no cosmic significance whatsoever. It is purely a secular refuge, and the Jews are to him no different from any other minority group.
And btw--Marcus Garvey was a right winger who was despised by the NAACP and the Communists. Unfortunately, he later became anti-Semitic and pro-Hitler.
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