The Dangers of American Anti-Racists’ Embrace of Anti-Semitism

July 17 2020

Since the killing of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has been reinvigorated. And more than ever, much of its institutional leadership has made common cause with anti-Israel activists. Dan Diker writes:

Groups acting under the BLM umbrella, such as the “Movement for Black Lives,” championed by activists like [the Temple University professor and television commentator Marc Lamont] Hill, have accused Israel of genocide and apartheid. The Movement for Black Lives subsequently watered down these charges in its official documents, [which now merely claim] that Israel contributes to the “shackling of our community.” In the same brief, the Movement for Black Lives lists the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel (BDS) as one of its partners. [The group’s] leaders have not disguised their neo-Marxist ideological positions that prescribe the necessary dismantling of American institutions and the dissolution of the state of Israel.

BDS’s appropriation of BLM protests has also revealed the backing of Palestinian Marxist-Leninist terror organizations. For example, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a member organization of the PLO and a terror group so designated by the United States and the EU, issued a public statement of support.

BDS-BLM intersectionality, as the face of the current [intensification of] identity politics in the United States, . . . deepens the challenge to Israel and to American Jewry. . . . The rebranding of Israel as a white-supremacist entity categorizes Diaspora Jews as “white supremacists” by extension, unless they disavow Israel as a centerpiece of their American Jewish identity.

Read more at Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs

More about: Anti-Semitism, BDS, Black Lives Matter, PFLP, U.S. Politics

American Aid to Lebanon Is a Gift to Iran

For many years, Lebanon has been a de-facto satellite of Tehran, which exerts control via its local proxy militia, Hizballah. The problem with the U.S. policy toward the country, according to Tony Badran, is that it pretends this is not the case, and continues to support the government in Beirut as if it were a bulwark against, rather than a pawn of, the Islamic Republic:

So obsessed is the Biden administration with the dubious art of using taxpayer dollars to underwrite the Lebanese pseudo-state run by the terrorist group Hizballah that it has spent its two years in office coming up with legally questionable schemes to pay the salaries of the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), setting new precedents in the abuse of U.S. foreign security-assistance programs. In January, the administration rolled out its program to provide direct salary payments, in cash, to both the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and the Internal Security Forces (ISF).

The scale of U.S. financing of Lebanon’s Hizballah-dominated military apparatus cannot be understated: around 100,000 Lebanese are now getting cash stipends courtesy of the American taxpayer to spend in Hizballah-land. . . . This is hardly an accident. For U.S. policymakers, synergy between the LAF/ISF and Hizballah is baked into their policy, which is predicated on fostering and building up a common anti-Israel posture that joins Lebanon’s so-called “state institutions” with the country’s dominant terror group.

The implicit meaning of the U.S. bureaucratic mantra that U.S. assistance aims to “undermine Hizballah’s narrative that its weapons are necessary to defend Lebanon” is precisely that the LAF/ISF and the Lebanese terror group are jointly competing to achieve the same goals—namely, defending Lebanon from Israel.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Hizballah, Iran, Israeli Security, Lebanon, U.S. Foreign policy