In January 2015, BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors joined representatives from the Dream Defenders as well as a number of likeminded anti-police-brutality protesters in taking a 10-day trip to the Palestinian Territories in the West Bank. Their objective was to publicly draw a parallel between what they defined as Israeli oppression of the Palestinians in the Middle East, and […]
In January 2015, BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors joined representatives from the Dream Defenders as well as a number of likeminded anti-police-brutality protesters in taking a 10-day trip to the Palestinian Territories in the West Bank. Their objective was to publicly draw a parallel between what they defined as Israeli oppression of the Palestinians in the Middle East, and police violence against blacks in the United States. A complete list of the delegates who made this trip included five Dream Defenders (Phillip Agnew, Ciara Taylor, Steven Pargett, Sherika Shaw, Ahmad Abuznaid); Tef Poe and Tara Thompson from Ferguson/Hands Up United; journalist Marc Lamont Hill; Cherrell Brown and Carmen Perez of the Justice League NYC; Charlene Carruthers from the Black Youth Project; poet and artist Aja Monet; and USC doctoral student Maytha Alhassen.
In April 2015, Cullors participated in a Harvard Law School panel titled “Globalizing Ferguson: Racialized Policing and International Resistance.” There, she said: “Palestine is our generation’s South Africa, and if we don’t step up boldly and courageously to end the imperialist project that’s called Israel, we’re doomed.”
In August 2015, BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors was one of more than 1,000 black activists, artists, scholars, politicians, students, “political prisoners,” and organizational representatives to sign a statement proclaiming their “solidarity with the Palestinian struggle and commitment to the liberation of Palestine’s land and people”; demanding an end to Israel’s “occupation” of “Palestine”; condemning “Israel’s brutal war on Gaza and chokehold on the West Bank”; urging the U.S. government to end all aid to Israel; and exhorting black institutions to support the Boycott, Divestment, & Sanctions movement against the Jewish state. Key passages from the statement included the following:
In late July 2016, a BLM delegation arrived in Israel to promote “the fight for dignity, justice and freedom” against the Israeli “occupation” and the “genocide” of Palestinian Arabs. In a July 28th Facebook post, the delegation’s members wrote:
“In the fight for dignity, justice and freedom… the Movement for Black Lives is committed to the global shared struggle of oppressed people, namely the people of occupied Palestine and other indigenous communities who for decades have resisted the occupation of their land, the ethnic cleansing of their people, and the erasure of their history and experiences.
“In this violent, political climate, it is urgent that we make clear the connection between violence inflicted on Black people globally that is encouraged and permitted by the state and the profiling, harm, and genocide funded by the United States and perpetrated by Zionist vigilantes and the Israeli Defense Forces on Palestinian people. Our collective oppression mandates that we work together across geography, language and culture to decry and organize an end to capitalistic, imperialist regimes.
“We commit to global struggle, solidarity, and support of the Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) movement to fight for freedom, justice and equality for Palestinian people and to end international support of the occupation.”
Over the Shavuot festival on May 30, 2020, BLM members carried out a pogrom in Fairfax, a Los Angeles community largely populated by ultra-Orthodox Jews. On that day, the BLMers not only vandalized five synagogues and three Jewish schools in Fairfax, but also looted most of the Jewish businesses on Fairfax Avenue. Moreover, they chanted “Fuck the police and kill the Jews.” Soon thereafter, National Council of Young Israel president Farley Weiss said: “[I]t is sickening to see that the Black Lives Matter movement has been co-opted by people who wear their antisemitic beliefs on their sleeves. Whether it is yelling antisemitic comments during a march in our nation’s capital or vandalizing and defacing synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses in Los Angeles with antisemitic messages during a protest, these blatant expressions of bigotry are intolerable and must end.”
At a July 1, 2020 demonstration in Washington, D.C., BLM protesters tied their own cause to that of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. The rally was billed as a gesture of support for the “Day of Rage” that had been called by the Palestinian Authority and other groups to protest Israel’s plan to annex portions of the West Bank. The BLM protesters chanted: “Israel, we know you, you murder children, too.” Chants also alternated between “Black lives matter!” and “Palestinian lives matter!” The D.C. demonstration was led by Harvard student Christian Tabash, who read a poem condemning Israel’s alleged crimes against Palestinian Muslims, and referring to Israel as the “puppet master of continents.” Moreover, Tabash repeatedly emphasized that the Palestinian movement is “intrinsically tied to Black Lives Matter.”
At a BLM rally of several hundred people in Brooklyn that same day:
On July 15, 2020, Lawrence Nathaniel, the founder of BLM’s South Carolina chapter and a former organizer for Senator Bernie Sanders‘s 2016 presidential campaign, defended comments that had been made by the black television personality Nick Cannon during a recent podcast. In that podcast, Cannon had asserted that: (a) black people were the true, original Hebrews until Jews eventually usurped their identity; (b) light-skinned people are “a little less” than darker people whose skin possesses more melanin; and (c) historically, this “deficiency” has caused “Jewish people, white people, [and] Europeans” to fear for their own survival and to “be savages” who commit all manner of atrocities in order to eliminate their perceived enemies. “What Nick Cannon believes in,” Nathaniel subsequently stated, “is the beliefs of Louis Farrakhan and Malcolm X who taught the same teachings of what white folks was and how they are and how they treat Black people. Personally I didn’t see nothing wrong with his comments at all, I just think that he spoke the truth.”
In July 2020 as well, UK Black Lives Matter announced that “As Israel moves forward with the annexation of the West Bank, and mainstream British politics is gagged of the right to critique Zionism, and Israel’s settler colonial pursuits, we loudly and clearly stand behind our Palestinian comrades. FREE PALESTINE.”
On August 27, 2020, a BLM rioter was caught on video spray-painting the words “Free Palestine” on the driveway of the Beth Hillel Temple in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where violence had broken out four days earlier in response to the nonfatal shooting of a black man by a white police officer. Beth Hillel, like other leftist temples, had been openly supportive of the BLM riots. Lamenting that “people have no other outlet but to cry out on the street for justice,” the temple’s rabbi, Dena Feingold, had stated: “I’m a lot more concerned about the loss of life that the Black community experiences on a regular basis because of systemic racism, because of the violence directed at them, than I am about whatever damage or costs are incurred for us because of it.”
BLM commonly draws a parallel between blacks in the United States, and Palestinians in the Middle East — portraying both groups as oppressed minorities. On May 17, 2021, BLM announced that it stood in “solidarity with Palestinians,” adding in a tweet: “We are a movement committed to ending settler colonialism in all forms and will continue to advocate for Palestinian liberation. ( always have. And always will be ). #freepalestine.” That BLM statement came a few days after Democratic Congresswoman Cori Bush had gone to the House of Representatives’ floor and praised the late Bassem Masri, a Palestinian-American BLM activist who had openly called for the “death” of law-enforcement officers after the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
At daybreak on Saturday, October 7, 2023 — which was the major Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah — the Islamic terror group Hamas carried out a massive, multi-front, surprise attack against Israel, firing thousands of rockets from Gaza into the Jewish state, while dozens of Hamas fighters infiltrated the Israeli border in a number of locations by air, land and sea. “In an assault of startling breadth,” reported CBS News, “Hamas gunmen rolled into as many as 22 locations outside the Gaza Strip, including towns and other communities as far as 15 miles from the Gaza border. In some places they gunned down civilians and soldiers as Israel’s military scrambled to muster a response.” Said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a statement: “Citizens of Israel, we are at war. Not an operation, not a round [of fighting,] at war! This morning Hamas initiated a murderous surprise attack against the state of Israel and its citizens.” By Sunday, October 8, at least 600 Israelis had been killed and 1,800 wounded, making it the deadliest day Israel had seen in decades. Also by October 8, more than 300 Palestinians had died in retaliatory Israeli airstrikes against Gaza. Moreover, Hamas took hundreds of Israelis hostage, including dozens who were American citizens, and moved them to the Gaza Strip. The terrorists also paraded Israelis’ mutilated bodies in Gaza to cheering crowds of Palestinians. On October 8 as well, the Wall Street Journal reported that officers from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, along with agents of Hamas and three other Iran-sponsored terrorist groups, had recently attended meetings in Beirut to plan the previous day’s operation.
On October 10, 2023 — three days after Hamas’ deadly October 7 attack against Israel — a BLM affiliate known as Black Lives Matter Grassroots (BLMG) — which represented 26 local BLM chapters across the United States — released a statement “in solidarity with our Palestinian family who are currently resisting 57 years of settler colonialism and apartheid.” Some key excerpts included the following:
The BLMG statement ended by calling for the dismantling of the “entire [Israeli] apartheid system” and exhorting the U.S. government to “immediately stop funding war and redirect the $4 billion in annual spending from the Israeli military to repair the damage caused by U.S.-backed wars, military air strikes, coups, and destabilizing interventions against oppressed people around the world.”
Also on October 10, 2023, Black Lives Matter Chicago shared an image to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, of a Palestinian flag attached to the parachute of a paraglider similar to the Hamas terrorists who had paraglided into an Israeli music festival three days earlier to murder some 260 people in attendance. That image bore the words “I stand with Palestine.” “That is all that is it!” BLM Chicago wrote alongside the image. Moreover, BLM Chicago used its Facebook account to share various “conversation piecers” that were pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel, such as one that defined Hamas as “a political party in Gaza, who were also kind of started by Israel.”
The Morality of Punishment: Palestinian “Liberation” Extremists and Anti-Law Enforcement Groups Are Longtime Allies …
By Hannah E. Meyers
October 10, 2023