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The Chutzpah! Anti-Semites Appropriate Black Suffering to Libel Zionists

At least two separate BLM-related events descended into raw anti-Semitism and demonization of the Jewish collective.
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July 7, 2020
Protesters in Boston advocate for the anti-Israel BDS movement on July 1, 2020. Courtesy: CAMERA.

Last week, at least two separate BLM-related events descended into raw anti-Semitism and demonization of the Jewish collective, the state of Israel.

At a BLM march in Washington, D.C., on July 1, 2020, the crowd chanted things like: “Israel, we know you, you murder children, too”; and were treated to a poem about Israel’s purported crimes against Palestinian Arabs, a poem that referred to Israel as the “puppet master of continents,” bringing to mind age-old conspiracy theories about nefarious Jews controlling governments all over the world.

Ideally, these events would have been devoted to the cause of calling attention to the need for criminal-justice reforms and to improve police training to avoid further racial profiling and excessive-force incidents directed at Black people.

Protestors would have chanted about incidents of excessive force involving the D.C. or Capitol Police and Blacks, or about the fact that last year in D.C., more than 70% of the people stopped by the police were Black.

That same day in Brooklyn, at a pro-BLM and anti-Israel demonstration, attendees were regaled with chants of “Death to Israel,” “Death to America” and “From Gaza to Minnesota, globalize the Intifada!” At this event, one of the speakers made this doozy of a claim: “The European Jews who occupy, slaughter and continue to force millions of Palestinians onto their killing fields called refugee and concentration camps are the relatives of the Europeans … who kidnapped, slaughtered and forced millions of Africans and indigenous” into slavery and prison death camps.

While all of the things wrong with these various statements cannot be addressed in one article, there are two things these statements exemplify.

First, they epitomize the “new anti-Semitism” that Rabbi Jonathan Sacks often refers to: “Anti-Semitism is not an ideology, a coherent set of beliefs. It is, in fact, an endless stream of contradictions. The best way of understanding it is to see it as a virus … . Today, we are living through the fourth mutation. Unlike its predecessors, the new anti-Semitism focuses not on Judaism as a religion, nor on Jews as a race, but on Jews as a nation.”

The anti-Semitism in these attacks on Israel is evident to all but the most intentionally hateful or obtuse when we simply replace the word “Israel” or “Zionist” with “Jews” and listen to the rhetoric with any knowledge of the history of anti-Semitism.

In the 1930s, the Nazis and their co-ideologues in hate (such as Henry Ford, who ran 91 separate anti-Semitic articles in the Dearborn Independent, which he also published as a four-volume set called “The International Jew”) would claim the “Jews were conspiring to control all governments.” In the 21st century, for the anti-Zionists, it is “Israel controlling [or trying to control] foreign governments.”

The second thing these claims at BLM events demonstrate is the pernicious way the biggest and most virulent adherents and proponents of this “new anti-Semitism” have maliciously appropriated Black history for their own purposes − while they simultaneously lie about Jewish history.

In the Middle Ages and for centuries thereafter, it was the Jews who were generally and collectively labeled and libeled as “baby killers.” Now, for the anti-Zionists, it is Israel, the embodiment of the Jewish collective, they try to label and libel as “baby killers.”

The same applies to the centuries-old anti-Semitic canards about Jews controlling the media and the banks, or being satanic. All of these, and many other anti-Semitic canards, have now been recycled and are a part of the “anti-Zionist” nomenclature.

The second thing these claims at BLM events demonstrate is the pernicious way the biggest and most virulent adherents and proponents of this “new anti-Semitism” have maliciously appropriated Black history for their own purposes − while they simultaneously lie about Jewish history.

Members of the Orthodox Jewish community watch as protesters walk through the Brooklyn borough on June 3, 2020, during a “Breonna Taylor and Black Lives Matter” protest in New York City. (Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images)

While there is no merit to blaming Jews for the fact that 83 years after they were first offered (and rejected) the very first independent Arab state west of the Jordan River, there remain Arabs living in “refugee camps”; comparing these camps (which generally are sprawling cities) to “killing fields” or “concentration camps” is worse than hyperbolic. Far more nefarious, however, is the claim that Jews are the “relatives of the Europeans” who “kidnapped, slaughtered and forced millions of Africans and indigenous” people into slavery or deaths camps. This is not just an outright Farrakhan-esqe lie; in the context of trying to forge an alliance between Blacks and Palestinian Arabs against Jews, it is ahistorical chutzpah of the highest order.

While it is arguable which group suffered more at the hands of the Europeans, indigenous Africans or Jews, what cannot be argued, is that with the exception of Native Americans, certainly, no other groups have suffered as greatly.

Starting in the 15th century, European empires (principally, the Portuguese, Spanish, English, French, Belgian, German and Dutch) colonized, oppressed and enslaved indigenous Africans, including for the repugnant transatlantic slave trade.

During this same time, and for centuries before, these same Europeans oppressed, persecuted and often mass murdered Jews. Jews were first ethnically cleansed (expelled) from England in 1290 C.E., based on the false claim that Jews were killing English children for their blood. In every century that followed, until the mass murder of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust, there wasn’t a century in Europe when Jews were not subject to state-sponsored discrimination, oppression, expulsion and mass murder.

Concurrent and in some cases even before the centuries-long European oppression and mass murder of both indigenous Africans and Jews, however, was Arab oppression and mass murder of both indigenous Africans and Jews.

A woman places a flower around a chalk portrait of George Floyd on the steps of the Colorado State Capitol as people protest his death on June 6, 2020 in Denver, Colorado. (Photo by Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images)

Yes, that is right. While today’s greatest proponents of the “new anti-Semitism” are appropriating African-American history and suffering in order to libel the Jewish collective in Israel, they ignore it was the “relatives” of the Arabs who were colonizing literally all of the Levant and North Africa for centuries, starting in the 7th century.

These new anti-Semites ignore that well before Israel declared its independence in 1948, in all the lands colonized by Arabs after the 6th century, Jews regularly were subject to persecution and discrimination (based on apartheid-like Dhimmi laws). They ignore that just like in Europe, Jews often were mass murdered in Arab-controlled lands in state-sanctioned pogroms dating from the first massacre of Jews in 641 C.E., when almost all of the Jews were ethnically cleansed from the Arabian Peninsula, all the way through to the 20th century massacres of Jews from Morocco to Iraq.

Even more pernicious and ironic (given the raw appropriation of suffering and attempt to shoehorn a common bond against the “Joos”), these purveyors of the new anti-Semitism ignore that between 650 C.E. and 1900, approximately 20 million indigenous Africans were enslaved by Arab slave traders.

 Concurrent and in some cases even before the centuries-long European oppression and mass murder of both indigenous Africans and Jews, however, was Arab oppression and mass murder of both indigenous Africans and Jews.

In his 2001 book, “The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa,” Dr. Alembillah Azumah estimates that more than 80 million indigenous Africans died while being transported through the trans-Sahara slave route. And while the European slave trade was beyond evil, and with its reliance on pseudo-scientific theories of racial and ethnic superiority of white Europeans to justify and rationalize its evil – an evil that was certainly linked to the institutional European persecution and oppression of Jews (whom no one in Europe considered “white”) − it was at least matched by the sheer evil and cruelty of the Arab slave trade of indigenous Africans.

It was the Arab slave trade that saw thousands upon thousands of indigenous Africans castrated because of the high price eunuchs fetched from rich Arab caliphs, and which, incredibly, continues to this very day − with indigenous Africans being sold in 21st-century slave markets in Libya into a life of slavery in brutal Arab dictatorships such as Mauritania and Qatar.

Just like their European counterparts in colonialism and slavery, Arab oppression and persecution of indigenous Africans and Jews often have been supported by Arab media, literature, religious claims and pseudo-science.

The only word that can describe the attempted appropriation of Black suffering as part of the effort to create some phony connection between the Black experience and the Palestinian-Arab experience is “chutzpah.”

To justify their persecution and murder of Jews over the past millennia, both Arab and European literary, religious references, media and pseudo-science abounded with depictions of Jews as innately inferior and evil. In much of the Arab-controlled dictatorships, such propaganda (sadly), has only increased in modern times, not abated.

It is the same for the persecution, oppression and enslavement of indigenous Africans, which was supported by the “science” and philosophies of numerous supposed scholars during the Arab “Golden Age,” such as Nasir al-Din Tusi and Ibn Sina.

Today, in the 21st century, the Arabic word for slave, “abeed,” still is used interchangeably by Arabs in most Arab countries to refer to indigenous Africans. There is a reason that in modern Arabic parlance, the word for a slave and for an indigenous African remain almost synonymous. That reason is that after 1,400 years of Arab colonialism, oppression and slavery of indigenous people throughout the Middle East and Africa, Arab supremacism is at least as rampant as white supremacism was in the United States during the Jim Crow era.

And this is why the only word that can describe the attempted appropriation of Black suffering as part of the effort to create some phony connection between the Black experience and the Palestinian-Arab experience is “chutzpah.”

Just like their European counterparts in colonialism and slavery, Arab oppression and persecution of indigenous Africans and Jews often have been supported by Arab media, literature, religious claims and pseudo-science.

After more than 1,400 years of combined Arab and European oppression, persecution and/or enslavement of both indigenous Africans and Jews; and during a time when Arab dictatorships still enslave indigenous Africans, the new anti-Semites are remarkably whitewashing all this history. They are whitewashing the present-day destruction of Black lives in places such as Libya, Mauritania and Qatar to try and create some fake connection between the legitimate struggles of Black people for equality and justice in America and the near-century-long campaign of far too many in the Arab world to destroy Jewish sovereignty in any part of the Jewish people’s indigenous homeland.

That connection, however, doesn’t exist. It is just another in a long line of anti-Semitic tropes that the mutating virus of anti-Semitism has created. And if we don’t stand up to it and denounce it – loudly – it will only grow, mutate and become more destructive. As it always has throughout history.


Mitch Danzig served in the Israeli army and is a former NYPD officer. He is currently an attorney and is active with numerous organizations, including StandWithUs, T.E.A.M. and the FIDF. 

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