Two years ago this summer, an 18-year-old African American man who had lunged for the gun of a white police officer in his patrol car was shot and killed on the street. The officer was subsequently exonerated by a grand jury, but Ferguson, Missouri, erupted in a week of race riots.
Soon after, Sixties Black Power activist Angela Davis delivered a lecture at UC Santa Cruz entitled from “Ferguson to Palestine.” That was the launch of the age-old blood libel against Jews by affixing an American tragedy to the Israel/Palestinian conflict. Some in the emerging Black Lives Matter movement linked Israel’s self-defense against terrorist onslaughts from Hamas-controlled Gaza, to police killings of black men in America. Hamas operatives in Gaza took time out from their rocket barrages against Israel civilians to post selfies announcing their solidarity with Ferguson rioters. -Palestinian militants organized on St. Louis campuses actually were bused to Ferguson where they carried signs blaming the Jewish people for the alleged crimes of Ferguson police, a few of whom had once visited Israel.
Now, there is a new meme that Israel has African American blood on its hands has been revived by NYU’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Under the hashtag “#No Justice No Peace #From Gaza to Baton Rouge”—they accused Israel of responsibility for the shooting death in front of a convenience store by the police in Louisiana of an African American man Alton Sterling. An SJP post suggests that Sterling is the American equivalent of Ali Dawabsheh, a Palestinian baby killed in the West Bank.
SJP is already notorious for its history of harassing Jewish students on the NYU campus—including serving them with fake eviction notices. But it has reached a new low by libeling Israel for the new controversies over police shootings of African American in Louisiana and Minnesota. (The Wiesenthal Center has supported calls for a Justice Department investigation of the questionable police shooting of a black motorist Orlando Castile in St. Paul, stopped for a defective tail light.)
There is even a new academic theory behind the revived blood libel against Jews and Israel for alleged police brutality against African Americans. It’s “intersectionality” or that all of the twenty-first century world’s evils somehow connect back to the founding of Israel and the Jewish State’s attempt to defeat terrorist genocide against it. Here’s one example from the Facebook Page the New York City Students for Justice in Palestine announcing participation in 2015’s Million Student March against college tuition hikes: “The Zionist administration invests in Israeli companies, companies that support the Israeli occupation, hosts birthright programs and study abroad programs in occupied Palestine, and reproduces settler-colonial ideology throughout CUNY through Zionist content of education. While CUNY aims to produce the next generation of professional Zionists, SJP aims to change the university to fight for all peoples liberation.”
No doubt, now that Dallas has experienced a blood bath of dead and injured police ambushed by a crazed African American gunman said to be incensed by the shootings in Louisiana and Minnesota, we can expect new charges from SJP-types seeking to leverage outrage and angst over the American racial divide to their cause of ridding the Holy Land of Jews. By cynically seeking to connect imaginary dots between two real conflicts, these fanatics succeed only in creating more hate, divisiveness and distrust between two communities who should be natural allies in the struggle for human dignity.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper is Associate Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Museum of Tolerance. Dr. Harold Brackman, a historian is a consultant to the Wiesenthal Center
