Black Lives Matter, Hamas and the BDS Movement

By Lee Kaplan @ American Center For Democracy

In October 2014, the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation (a clearinghouse for the International Solidarity Movement) ended their Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) organizing conference against Israel in San Diego, California. At the conclusion of the weekend event, their lead organizer, Anna Piller, alias Anna Baltzer, a woman with a deceased Jewish grandmother but no foundation or knowledge of Judaism herself, who makes her living promoting the BDS for Arab terrorist groups, sent out an email blast. In it, she urged her followers to descend on Ferguson, Missouri in 2015 to demonstrate with American black radicals about the shooting of Michael Brown, a 17-year-old black robber who was killed by a Ferguson police officer when the youth attacked the officer nd tried stealing his gun. Brown had just robbed a liquor store.  That email also broadsided a cry for action “From Ferguson to Palestine,” bringing the BDS movement and Palestinian groups, both domestic and abroad, to ally with U.S. black “liberation” groups and radicals, thus tying the goals of Hamas to domestic complaints by American blacks over alleged unfair treatment by US law enforcement.

A “delegation” of Palestinians from Gaza and the Palestinian Authority, college-aged Arab activists, arrived in Missouri to plot strategy and tactics with Baltzer’s ISM group and similar groups in the USA shortly after Brown was killed.  Jeff Pickert, alias Max Suchan, another member of the ISM, was arrested by Ferguson police during the riots that ensued for inciting black crowds to riot and attack the police.

Left to right: Anna Baltzer; Jeff Pickert, a.k.a Max Suchan; Cornel West;

Bob Avakian, of the Revolutionary Communist Party.

 

The U.S. Department of Justice later proved the officer acted in self-defense, but despite this, a national campaign was launched gaining prominence in mainstream media that was led mostly by Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists such as Cornel West and the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP)in the U.S. led by Bob Avakian, whose purposes were to incite revolutionary violence against the police and white America. The RCP is not the same as the Communist Party USA but made up of many more militant blacks who espouse violence against whites as part of their communist revolution. Their numbers would be swelled by BDS activists and pro-Hamas groups to riot on the streets of America by such cooperation.  One BLM co-founder from Toronto, Yusra Khogali, is a black woman who is also a practicing Muslim and calls for murdering white people on the Internet, another form of jihad.  This alliance facilitated Islamists and anarchists being recruited as well as some black liberation group leaders for planning and rioting against the police. Riots soon occurred also in Baltimore, when another black man under arrest died in police custody and more recently Milwaukee, where riots unfolded calling for blacks to murder white people, even though the catalyst was a  black police officer shot an armed black felon in a gunfight.  Black members of the Revolutionary Communist Party were observed by police strolling through the crowds along with BDS activists inciting the riots.

The comparisons between Ferguson and Gaza are spacious, one a domestic dispute over policing in a city, the other a war brought about by terrorists firing rockets into Israeli communities to kill Jews and other Israelis.  Despite this, the connection was a long time in planning, going as far back at 2002. At another planning conference of the ISM at Duke University, Abe Greenhouse, a self-avowed anarchist, and ISM leader told one seminar that similar riots occurring weekly in the West Bank against Israel’s security barrier provided training for American and European anarchists to bring similar “direct actions” eventually to the U.S. border with Mexico.  As one presidential candidate discusses how he plans a wall along the U.S./Mexican border, it isn’t a long stretch to see what is coming, when busloads of anarchists will be brought to the U.S. southern border to riot and attack border patrol officers and the fence.

 

Left to right:Yusra Khogali, BLM Toronto; Abe Greenhouse,
ISM; Rasmeah Odeh and Angela Davis; Noura Erekat

The BDS movement and BLM came out with new videos, circulating on the Web to bolster the connection between current goals of Hamas and BLM.  One cries out a central theme of “When I see them I see us,” implying a connection between Hamas goals and black revolutionaries.  Mainstream media continues to largely ignore this connection. Viewers of one video who will only see a suite of black and white faces seemingly fighting alleged injustice  will not know is that some of those holding this statement  up are convicted terrorists like Rasmeah Odeh, who murdered two college boys with a bomb and is fighting deportation from the USA or Angela Davis, convicted of smuggling guns for a prison break during trial that resulted in a judge being killed . To the BLM and BDS activists, the idea of increased numbers and noise the film will generate through publicity and propaganda are all that matter.

Black “revolutionary” groups on American college campuses being anti-Israel is nothing new. Most of such movements always supported hatred against Jews and Israel by following Stalinist Marxist doctrine. But the anti-Semitism that resulted from this was mostly restricted to American college campuses during demonstrations and seldom spread further out into the general public. But this changed since black liberation and anti-police groups sought alliances with the mass BDS movement against Israel posing as concerned citizens for Palestinian “rights” as “human rights.” It is now being driven from the campuses to the city streets and now to be done on a global scale as soon as possible by the organizers. Unless one actively participates in campus activities, the public-at-large isn’t aware what is going on in via a daily basis.  Recent polls are showing that millennials are more sympathetic to the Palestinians and Hamas goals than previous generations. Students who are indoctrinated with this on a steady basis on campuses will be the judges, lawyers, journalists and even law enforcement leaders in the future with an inbred prejudice against Israel and even American resistance against dictatorial regimes.

In 2001, an Arab apparatchik and supporter of Hamas, named Hatem Bazian, secured himself sinecures as a lecturer in the Near East Studies Department and adjunct professor at Boalt Law School at UC Berkeley. Bazian had been a student leader at San Francisco State of the General Union of Palestinian Students, or GUPS, which is a pro-terror movement on an international scale based in Gaza and Europe. Bazian later founded the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at UC Berkeley that later became a national movement on many U.S. and Canadian campuses. Following a classic Rico-style network of action, the SJP became the main mechanism for BDS on nearly every campus in America while aligning its Hamas goals along with the Muslim Students Association that was also networking on US campuses, via the Saudis and their World Association of Muslim Youth (WAMY).The SJP also received funds and guidance by the Hamas front group, American Muslims for Palestine (AMP),  that Bazian heads. In alliance with the Muslim Students Association, this movement sways the educational development of America’s future.  This course of action is also being developed within America’s labor unions and even its churches, details of which brevity prevents coverage in this one article.

Bazian once publicly called for an “intifada” in America. In the Media, he claimed he was speaking rhetorically, but what is happening now is, in fact, his “intifada” coming to fruition. The race riots in Ferguson, in Baltimore and Milwaukee and the shooting of police officers in Dallas and elsewhere in the country are finally importing the violence Israel faces every day. And it will probably only get worse because these events are not designed to promote discourse but rather to bring down the current society in place. In Israel, it is to end a Jewish state in the Arab-Muslim umma. In America, it is to gain control of our government to facilitate the attacks on Israel and eventually subvert the rule of law in the U.S. Terrorism is a business for Hamas, and business is booming. An alliance with Black Lives Matter is creating an even bigger business.

Bazian at UC Berkeley had help from Noura Erakat, the niece of Saeb Erekat, the late Yasser Arafat’s second-in-command of the PLO and the Palestinians’ chief negotiator, Noura also led ISM conferences year after year and she too encouraged the linking of black movements with the Palestinian cause against Israel’s existence at these events. Noura is also featured in the “When I think of them I think of us” video. Endless organizing conferences of the SJP and ISM on campuses tried to claim Palestinians were “people of color” like African Americans and Latinos and as such should be in alliance with these groups – all against Israel as much as America. This didn’t take hold however because Arabs are Caucasians and not black. The majority of Israelis, except for Ethiopian Jews, are the same race as Arabs and as such also being indigenous to the Middle East. So this claim didn’t fly. It is important to note that “racism” and being called a “racist” on college campuses to this day became the weapon of choice of leftist groups to stifle any debate or discussion contrary to their stated views. Many non-whites fear to speak frankly for fear of being declared “racist,” a tactic currently in use by both leading presidential candidates against each other these days.

The BDS anti-Israel movement hopes that by drawing comparisons to South Africa’s apartheid regime against black in the 1980’s to Israel today they can trick the naïve into believing their cause is equally just. In fact, the case in the Middle East is just the opposite. But this doesn’t deter Israel’s enemies. And now, with BLM in the picture new opportunities arise for both them and their prospective allies in Hamas. Nihad Awad, a convicted terrorist who now heads the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a known Hamas front, recently spoke at a national conference on video where he called for unity of action between Muslims and BLM to promote BDS and antipathy against Israel worldwide.

In March of this year, a “delegation” of BLM was sent to Nazareth in the West Bank led by a Howard University Professor named Marc Lamont Hill. Hill has become something of a talking head on television in the US on CNN and even appeared on Bill O’Reilly’s show on Fox where he presented himself as a moderate black academic. The real Marc Lamont Hill appeared on a video in Nazareth where he led the BLM delegation in the West Bank to demonstrate and rant against “the occupation.” Occupation to the Palestinians means all of Israel is “occupied” by the Jews. BLM activists back in the U.S, have now started to claim the U.S. is occupied by white people with the country belonging to black and brown people. Meanwhile, Hill spouted revolutionary slogans and made a show for the cameras for people back home. The delegation also participated in a weekly riot held in the village of B’illin in the West Bank by the Palestinians who they joined to throw rocks and threaten IDF soldiers and police there to guard the security fence.

The delegation then made its way inside Israel proper inside the Green Line where they met with Israeli radicals like Canadian-Israeli David Sheen who lectures to ISM BDS anti-Israel radicals all the time. Sheen wrote an OpEd article for Alter-Net, a radical leftist website that wants Israel ended as a Jewish State. The article is replete with falsehoods about the Ethiopian Jewish community in Israel that is very pro-Israel having been rescued from persecution by the Israeli government. Sheen even implies that Ethiopian Jews were forced to walk to Israel where they were required to undergo circumcision on arrival! Israel followed a passage of the Bible that spoke of bringing Jews back to Israel “on the wings of eagles” that has been widely interpreted to mean the airlift that brought the Ethiopian Jewish community home. Sheen then tries to make comparisons with how blacks, be they Jews or Gentiles, are mistreated in Israel like America so that…” protests against racist police brutality in the United States that have exploded in recent times seem to have inspired Ethiopian-Israelis to take to the streets as well.

On April 30, some Ethiopian protestors drew a direct connection between their struggle and the ongoing anti-racist urban uprising in the U.S., with banners reading “Black Lives Matter” and chants of “Baltimore is here!” Sheen then suggests that black illegal immigrants in Israel from Sudan and Eritrea are equally brutalized because of their skin color. Israel has 300,000 Sudanese and Eritrean illegal immigrants who entered the country to find work, not as “refugees” from their homelands (many were allowed to pass through Egypt on their way there). Israel’s population of just over 5 million Jews sees a demographic threat to bringing in such a large number of unskilled laborers into a country still struggling to care for its people.

To BLM, the ISM, and even Israel’s radical leftists the truth is irrelevant. They see an opportunity to incite riots inside Israel, to kill any criticism by crying “racism” and a chance to show black faces that they can then try to compare with 1980’s Apartheid South Africa. Sheen recently completed a whirlwind tour to ISM and BLM leftist groups across the U.S. receiving housing and support from well-known anarchists and other radicals.

At a lecture at USC put on by the SJP on campus, Sheen blatantly lied saying black Israelis and residents are not allowed to ride on public buses. Nobody challenged this assertion. The ruse to compare Israel to the U.S. Jim Crow South during the Civil Rights Movement was apparently a success as was another shibboleth that Israel is murdering black children. In the BLM/ISM propaganda video mentioned above, an accusation is even tossed out that the American and Israeli governments are sterilizing black people! Such outlandish statements only help legitimize the BDS Movement’s goals to undermine both Israel, the little Satan, and ultimately American, the Great Satan. Those are the same goals of Hamas, and most people do not understand what is happening, The fact that a Jewish-Canadian anarchist subversive like Sheen is playing such an instrumental role only shows us it isn’t limited to a simple struggle between Arabs and Jews.

Nihad Awad is the national leader of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). CAIR has been identified as a Hamas front by many intelligence leaders in Congress. Awad has more than once proven he is an acolyte for Hamas and its goals involved in fundraising and propaganda support. Awad recently gave a speech at a Muslim American Society national conference where he urged attendees from the Islamic community join forces with the likes of Black Lives Matter to achieve their most important goals. Awad urged Muslim Americans to take up the cause of Black Lives Matter: “Black Lives Matter is our matter,” he said; “Black Lives Matter is our campaign.” He was joined by Khalilah Sabra, another Islamic leader in calling for making the BLM movement the cause of Muslims in the United States that will ultimately lead to “the revolution.” The conference concentrated on accusations of “Islamophobia,” a campaign began by Hamas front man Bazian in Berkeley to be further undertaken in alliance with Black Lives Matter. In fact, Awad and Sabra both called upon the Islamic community to make the Black Lives Matter movement an Islamic issue.

 

Nobody denies blacks in Israel their civil rights, but the BLM and Hamas see opportunities to smear the Jewish State, and no lie will be too great. And while black Americans are free to address perceived injustices back in the U.S., there is no government program to systematically deny them their rights or exterminate them. Yet, BLM, by joining with Islamists, can gain bodies, enforcers, strength and even money by unifying itself with Hamas goals against Israel. Communists from the 1960’s like Avakian and Angela Davis are now reemerging to plan direct actions and strategies coordinating with the two major players, Hamas and BLM.  Facebook postings have even described how Hamas operatives told BLM rioters they could use milk as an effective eye cleaner for tear gas based on experiences in the Middle East.

Israeli intelligence must take heed next time a BLM delegation tries to enter their country and all Americans should be better informed about plans to trick them into supporting the goals of the very terrorists who pose the greatest threat also to the United States and do not really serve the U.S. and worldwide black community here at home or abroad. As this united front goes on, Americans can expect to see terrorism on a daily scale as experienced by the Israelis, with shootings targeting police, riots in the streets and at our border, and general mayhem against “occupation” as blacks and minorities will be pitched the notion they are “occupied” like the Palestinian Arabs claim to be. This is something Middle East Studies needs to delve into also as this situation increases on the world stage, because what goes on there is now being brought home to America.

(Readers should note: The same day this article broke, three Phoenix, Arizona police officers were run over by a black driver who intentionally targeted them. Israel has been having these hit and run attacks by automobiles driven by Arabs as part of the “Intifada” for a long time. The Phoenix attack is a major news story in the USA, but the plethora of car attacks by Arabs against Israeli civilians and police get almost no mention in the mainstream Media. It is this writer’s opinion that the Phoenix attack is a harbinger for same tactics being shared by Black Lives Matter, and Hamas mentioned in this article. Hatem Bazian’s call for an Intifada in America is just starting.

* See Lee Kaplan’s DAFKA.org and StoptheISM.com