Black Lives Matter and the World’s Oldest Hatred

The group’s praise for Hamas’s ‘resistance’ comes as no surprise to those paying attention

By Jason L. Riley. Excerpts:

"During the previous round of major violence between Israel and Hamas, in May 2021, BLM made its position clear. “Black Lives Matter stands in solidarity with Palestinians,” it tweeted. “We are a movement committed to ending settler colonialism in all forms"

"After Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israeli civilians . . . While the body count was still being tallied, BLM groups in Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington issued statements supporting Hamas’s tactics. “Their resistance must not be condemned but understood as a desperate act of self-defense,” BLM Grassroots in Los Angeles wrote on Instagram.""

"Organizations such as BLM have done nothing to hide or sugarcoat their animosity toward Israel. In 2016, four years before Floyd was killed by police, BLM released an official platform that referred to Israel as an “apartheid state” and declared that America is “complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people.”"

"black nationalism has long been associated with animosity toward Israel and Jews. The “buy black” campaign of the 1920s, headed by the black nationalist Marcus Garvey, targeted Jewish-owned businesses that Garvey accused of exploiting blacks. Mainstream civil-rights leaders such as Martin Luther King and the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins denounced black anti-Semitism and were vocal supporters of the Jewish State. But Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam were advocates of racial separatism who insisted that Jews brought the Holocaust on themselves and urged blacks to sympathize “completely” with the Arab cause.

"In the 1960s, leaders in the Black Power movement denounced King as an Uncle Tom and rejected his goal of assimilation. After becoming head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the mid-1960s, Stokely Carmichael steered the civil-rights group in a more radical direction. This included forcing SNCC’s white workers and volunteers, almost all of whom were Jewish, to resign. When Israel was attacked by several Arab nations in 1967, Carmichael declared that “the only good Zionist is a dead Zionist,” and SNCC published a newsletter that described Israel as an “illegal state.”"

“I call them bloodsuckers,” Muhammad [Khalid Abdul Muhammad of the New Black Panther Party] said in a 1993 address at Kean College of New Jersey. “It’s that old no-good Jew, that old imposter Jew, that old hooked-nose, bagel-eating, lox-eating Johnny-come-lately. . . . I don’t care who sits in the White House. The Jews control that seat.”The anti-Semitism of the BLM movement isn’t a quirk. The social-media posts and manifestos aren’t coming from a few “intemperate voices” who can safely be ignored to advance some greater good. For BLM activists, the greater good is scapegoating Jews, destroying Israel and exploiting racial division."