Jewish Leaders Criticize Anti-Israel Platform of Black Lives Matter

Photo by Sander Crombach on Unsplash

Editor’s note: The following article was reprinted with permission from Metrvoicenews.com in Kansas City, Missouri.

By Dwight Widamin

Liberal Jews who support Black Lives Matter ave been surprised to learn that the organization is anti-Semitic and has an anti-Israel agenda, The Washington Times reported. The agenda, which is clearly laid out on the BLM website, is now being criticized in the Jewish community after synagogues were spray painted with “Kill the Jews” during BLM protests–a fact not covered by American news media.

“The U.S. justifies and advances the global war on terror via its alliance with Israel and is complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people,” according to BLM”s online “Invest-Divest” policy brief.

Through foreign aid to Israel, which the platform describes as an “apartheid state,” Americans are made “complicit in the abuses committed by the Israeli government,” the brief says. The strong anti-Israel language stunned liberal Jews, many of whom have expressed support for the Black Lives Matter movement’s protests.

“The Black Lives Matter platform contains anti-semitic aspects,” said Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan M. Dershowitz during a recent televison interview on KUSI in San Diego.

In a 2016 Boston Globe op-ed, Desrshowitz wrote, “It is a real tragedy that Black Lives Matter — which has done so much good in raising awareness of police abuses — has now moved away from its central mission and has declared war against the nation state of the Jewish people.”

Israeli-born philanthropist and activist Adam Milstein, who lives in Los Angeles, was quoted in the Times of Israel as calling out the targeting of synagogues during recent Black Lives Matter protests.

“The Jewish community is in denial,” he said. “The fact that synagogues got tagged and Jewish businesses were looted with signs saying ‘Free Palestine’ and ‘Kill the Jews’ is no coincidence The rioters are Antifa and Black Lives Matter and they are inherently anti-Semitic.”

Milstein called on the Movement for Black Lives coalition to rescind the anti-Israel component of the platform, backed by 67 groups, including Color of Change, which is funded by top Democratic Party donors George Soros and the Center for American Progress.

The Ford Foundation announced last month that it would partner with Borealis Philanthropy, Movement Strategy Center and Benedict Consulting on a six-year commitment to fund “the organizations and networks that compose the Movement for Black Lives.”

Dershowitz said that many Black Lives Matter supporters “may have no idea what the platform says.”

“The genocide paragraph (in the organization’s platform) may well have been injected by radicals who are not representative of the mainstream,” he wrote in the Boston Globe. “But…all decent supporters of Black Lives Matter — and there are many — must demand its removal.”

In a recent Jerusalem Post article, Dershowitz wrote that he did not want to generalize all protesters into one category because, “the vast majority of protesters are focused on the injustices of police misconduct. But we cannot ignore those – even if they are relatively few in number – who would turn these protests into bigoted attacks against Israel.”