Sunday, August 07, 2016
Elder of Ziyon
The Forward has a decent summary of how the Black Lives Matter platform is anti-Israel:What does it say about Israel?
It singles out Israel as the recipient of $3 billion in U.S. aid, calling it “a state that practices systematic discrimination and has maintained a military occupation of Palestine for decades.”The anti-Israel sections were written by three dedicated anti-Israel grups: Adalah, the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, and the Institute for Middle East Understanding.
The platform seems to imply that Israel benefits from military aid to Egypt. It invokes the fact that together the two countries receive close to 75% of U.S. aid money, and claims that Egypt is “Israel’s most important regional ally.”
The platform devotes a whole paragraph to Israel, in which it criticizes Israel’s “genocide” against the Palestinians, calls it “an apartheid state with over 50 laws on the books that sanction discrimination against the Palestinian people” and claims the Jewish state arrests Palestinians as young as 4 years old.
There is an irony here.
The Black Lives Matter movement is keyed on ending what it perceives as exploitation of blacks:
Black humanity and dignity requires Black political will and power. Despite constant exploitation and perpetual oppression, Black people have bravely and brilliantly been the driving force pushing the U.S. towards the ideals it articulates but has never achieved. ...While this platform is focused on domestic policies, we know that patriarchy, exploitative capitalism, militarism, and white supremacy know no borders. We stand in solidarity with our international family against the ravages of global capitalism and anti-Black racism, human-made climate change, war, and exploitation.
Yet the authors did not realize that they are being exploited by a group that has no interest in black lives at all, a group that only cynically uses black people for its own purposes.
The anti-Israel section of the BLM platform is filled with the usual lies (like the "fifty laws on the books" lie and charges of apartheid and genocide by Israel.) Those lies were placed there for only one reason, and it has nothing to do with the goals of Black Lives Matter - it is naked exploitation of blacks by a non-black group. Allowing the Palestinian groups to attempt to write part of the platform is a historic mistake that will hurt it.
This has been the Palestinian way of thinking for a while- infiltrate an organization and then hijack its goals to focus on hate for Israel. They did it with numerous UN agencies and other international organizations and commemorations that had been useful before they were co-opted.
The idea that the black movement was ripe for exploitation has been on the Palestinian radar for years. It is doubly cynical, because not only does it attempt to hijack the movement to become yet another vehicle to bash Israel, but it also disenfranchises the many Jews who have been in the forefront of the civil rights movement since it began.
Adding lies to the platform does not strengthen the movement, on the contrary, it weakens it considerably. What could have been the beginning of a serious discussion is now sidetracked and the Palestinian hijacking of yet another liberal social movement has begun - to the detriment of the actual people that the movement was meant to help.
One would have hoped that the BLM movement would have been more conscious of how it feels to be exploited by a group that doesn't give a damn about anyone besides themselves and who only wants to use blacks for its own purposes.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
