Jewish Lives Matter
Jewish Lives Matter
But not to BLM, myriad politicians, or the establishment media.
By Joseph Puder
With many in America on bended knee as an expression of solidarity with Black Lives Matter (BLM), it is imperative to point out that Jewish lives matter as well. The mainstream media has, however, ignored BLM racism and antisemitism. While the mainstream media covered extensively the so-called “peaceful protests” stemming from the killing by police of George Floyd, it has ignored, and deliberately obfuscated, the violence, riots, and lootings during the demonstrations initiated by the BLM and the terrorist Antifa organization. Moreover, it overlooked the damage done to Jewish religious institutions and businesses, which carried an antisemitic overtone. The media honed in on Black victimhood, but has looked the other way on the killing of American Jews in Jersey City, Brooklyn, and Monsey late last year, by African Americans. These killings did not result in a national outcry or a mainstream media frenzy.
It is not only Jews that BLM vilifies, it has created a blood libel against Israel – the Jewish state. The BLM manifesto accuses Israel of genocide against the Palestinians. This simply amounts to a Nazi-like libel, not only because it is downright false and unfounded, but it is intended to generate hate and hostility against Jews. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, the most revered civil-rights leader, and the most distinguished African American leader in recent history, admonished an African American student who bad-mouthed Zionism at a Harvard University dinner. Dr. King snapped at him and said, “Don’t talk like that! When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking antisemitism.”
The BLM manifesto labels Israel an “apartheid state,” and it is calling for the total academic, cultural, and economic boycott of Israel. Much like the BDS movement, it singles out Israel. No such demand is made by BLM against any other state. The Marxist-left, and intersectionality have excluded Jews and Israel in their chart of “victims.” Proof of the BLM lie about Israel is the fact that Israel saved tens of thousands of Black Africans from Ethiopia who openly requested to come to Israel by choice, not by force. Who, more than Jews, have suffered for over 2,000 years of persecution, expulsion, inquisition, pogroms, and the Holocaust? And yes, in America, Jews have known discrimination, and unending prejudice. Israel, likewise, has endured Arab boycotts, wars that intended its destruction, and indiscriminate terror by Palestinian-Arabs. In fact, the BLM exclusion of Jews, and deliberately ignoring Jewish suffering is racist in itself. In BLM’s worldview, Jews are White people, and therefore “oppressors.” Israeli Jews defending their families and their country against their would-be murderers are deemed by the BLM to be “committing genocide against Palestinians.”
Jewish lives didn’t matter much to America during the Holocaust. While Six Million Jews were being systematically murdered by the Nazi Germans, the Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) administration shut America’s doors to Europe’s Jews. The U.S. at the time, supported the British ‘White Paper Policy’ that barred Jews from entering Palestine. Thus, the allies provided a ‘green light’ for Hitler’s Final Solution. During that same period, the mainstream media (especially the New York Times) in the U.S. largely ignored or hid the extent of the Holocaust against the Jews of Europe. Similarly, today, the same media is largely ignoring the victimization of Jews by Blacks, and the racist and antisemitic ranting by the leader of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan. Insofar as the liberal mainstream media is concerned, only Blacks are allowed to claim “victimhood,” and Whites are invariably “racist.”
Jacob Blake Sr., whose 29-year-old son was shot seven times by the Kenosha, WI, police officer when he resisted arrest, has a history of racist and antisemitic posts on Facebook. A follower of Farrakhan whom he frequently echoes, Blake repeated the canard of “Jewish controlled media.” He stated on that the Jewish victims of the antisemitic attack at Pittsburgh’s ‘Tree of Life’ synagogue, were warned ahead of time of the attack. He referred to Whites and Jews as “crackers,” and “pink toes,” and described White and Jewish women as “Hoes.” Blake Sr. is not, however, the only Black to incite anti-Jewish hate. Rapper Ice Cube, TV host Nick Cannon, and Philadelphia Eagle’s football player DeSean Jackson, used similar antisemitic and racist messages emanating from their guru, Farrakhan. Still, in order to curry favor with Black voters, Vice President Joe Biden, a contender for the U.S. presidency, graced Blake with a personal visit.
While there are multiple prominent Blacks expressing racist and antisemitic hate, there are also prominent Blacks opposing it. In the early 1990’s, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. wrote an op-ed in the New York Times titled Black Demagogues and Pseudo-Scholars, in which he condemned what he termed as ‘Rising Black antisemitism.’ Basketball legend Kareem Abdul Jabbar wrote (7/14/2020) that,“Recent incidents of antisemitic tweets and posts from sports and entertainment celebrities are a very troubling omen for the future of the BLM movement, but so too is the shocking lack of massive indignation. Given the new woke-fulness in Hollywood and the sports world, we expect more passionate public outrage. What we got was a shrug of meh-rage.”
A shortened chronicle of events taking place within a space of weeks illustrates the intolerance and antisemitism displayed by African Americans toward Jews. On December 24, 2019, the New York City Police Department released a video showing a group of Black teenagers assaulting a 23-year old Hasidic Jewish man in Brooklyn. A few days earlier, a 34-year old Black woman named Tiffany Harris attacked three Jewish women in front of their young children in Brooklyn. The 34-year old woman admitted to the police, “Yes, I slapped them. I cursed them. I said F… you Jews.” She was released shortly after being arrested. More violent and deadly assaults on Jews took place on December 10, 2019, in a Jersey City Kosher supermarket, where three people were murdered by Black racist antisemites. On the seventh day of Chanukah, 2019, a Black antisemite with a machete cut down and severely injured five Hasidic Jews at a home of a Chabad rabbi, in Monsey, New York. The rabbi, among the injured, subsequently died as a result of his injuries. A month earlier, a young Israeli exchange student was verbally assaulted and threatened on a busy New York subway, and once again, the perpetrator was a Black man. The police stood by doing nothing.
On July 19, 2020, the Santa Barbara News Press reported, “In what is a widely underreported event, protesters from the Black Lives Matter group of Los Angeles purposely met in the oldest Jewish neighborhood in the region to destroy Jewish businesses, schools and synagogues. In all, they managed to loot a large number of stores, three Jewish schools and five synagogues. The next day, locals woke up to scrawled graffitied images reading an obscene message attacking Jews, ‘Free Palestine,’ and, perhaps scariest of all, “Kill the Jews!”
Hate crimes against Jews by African Americans does not fit the progressive media playbook. For the media and the politicians, African Americans are permanent “victims,” and therefore cannot be racist or antisemitic. To the Marxist BLM movement, Jewish Lives don’t matter, but what is even more shameful is that it is the same for some politicians and the major media.