The picture is chilling in its overt and malevolent celebration of the brutal Hamas assault of October 7, by which greater than 1,200 Israeli civilians died.
Launched by the nationwide workplace of Black Lives Matter (BLM) in Chicago and featured on X, with the slogan “I Stand With Palestine,” the meme portrays a Hamas fighter on a paraglider on his option to take part within the murderous mission final fall.
Individually, The Motion for Black Lives, a coalition of greater than 50 Black liberationist organizations – together with BLM – launched an announcement condemning “the lethal, racist assaults towards the Palestinian folks by the Israeli state.”
Demanding a full cutoff of U.S. army support to Israel, the Motion for Black Lives additionally known as on the Biden administration to impose sanctions till Israel “stops its apartheid practices and settler-colonial mission.”
For a rabbi who has devoted near 40 years to strengthening Black-Jewish relations in America, the bitterly anti-Semitic celebration by BLM of Hamas’s slaughter of Jews, together with the unspeakable atrocities akin to mass rapes, really felt like a dagger to the guts.
AN IMAGE OF BETRAYAL
The picture of the Hamas fighter on the paraglider is an obscene betrayal of the shared desires of freedom and equality that led hundreds of Jews to develop into Freedom Riders through the Civil Rights period, enduring beatings by white, racist law enforcement officials in locations like Selma and Birmingham, alongside their African-American brothers and sisters.
If issues weren’t bleak sufficient, December introduced the contretemps over Claudine Homosexual, the primary Black and feminine president of Harvard College. Testifying to a congressional committee on December 5, Homosexual, along with the presidents of the College of Pennsylvania and MIT, gave legalistic and nuanced responses throughout congressional testimony as as to whether it’s acceptable to advocate on their campuses for the genocide of Jews. What was most dismaying was the variety of Black activists who rallied in help of Homosexual, regardless of her lack of ability to sentence these anti-Semitic protests, assaults and diatribes.
Monday, January 15, marked Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and honors his legacy as the nice Civil Rights activist. Having authored Shared Goals: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Jewish Neighborhood, I can state unequivocally that King would by no means have used the phrase “context” in combating anti-Semitism. He had an abiding contempt for anti-Semitism and was color-blind on this problem. He publicly denounced purveyors of Jew-hatred, even once they got here from inside his personal African-American group.
Over the last years of his life, King confronted and known as out rising anti-Semitic rhetoric from radical leaders akin to Stokely Carmichael in teams just like the Scholar Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, with which his personal Southern Christian Management Council (SCLC) had beforehand intently collaborated.
Whereas some Black leaders sought to downplay the Jewish contribution to the Civil Rights Motion, King understood that the alliance was important to the success of the motion.
In 1965, he remarked, “How may there be anti-Semitism amongst Negroes when our Jewish buddies have demonstrated their dedication to the precept of tolerance and brotherhood, not solely within the type of sizable contributions however in lots of different tangible methods and sometimes at nice private sacrifice.
“Want I remind anybody of the terrible beating endured by Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld of Cleveland when he joined the Civil Rights employees … ? And who can ever overlook the sacrifice of two Jewish lives, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, within the swamps of Mississippi? It will be inconceivable to file the contribution that the Jewish folks have made towards the Negro’s wrestle for freedom – it has been so nice.”
The problem stays as as to whether Black activists right this moment will emulate King in unequivocally denouncing the rise of antisemitism in America and calling it out inside their group.
Marc Schneier is the founding senior rabbi of the Hamptons Synagogue in Westhampton Seashore, president of the Basis for Ethnic Understanding and creator of Shared Goals: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Jewish Neighborhood.
