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=<div><div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div style="font-size: small;"><div class="header-list-style" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative;"><h2 class="entry-title grid-title" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; letter-spacing: 1px;"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/anti-semitic-attack-in-jersey-city-fueled-by-black-nationalist-sects-hatemongering/" style="text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer; letter-spacing: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Anti-Semitic attack in Jersey City fueled by black-nationalist sect’s hatemongering</font></a></h2><div class="grid-post-box-meta" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 12px 0px 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span class="author-italic author vcard" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/author/david-neiwert/" title="Posts by David Neiwert" class="author url fn" rel="author" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">David Neiwert</a> / <a href="https://www.alternet.org/author/daily-kos/" title="Posts by Daily Kos" class="author url fn" rel="author" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Daily Kos</a></span><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">December 12, 2019</span></font></div></div><div class="item-content entry-content" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 18px 0px 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Black Hebrew Israelites occupy a complicated space in the realm of right-wing extremism.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Anti-Semitic attack in Jersey City fueled by black-nationalist sect’s hatemongering</b></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Written by <b>David Neiwert</b> / Daily Kos December 12, 2019</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When the news first crossed the wires Tuesday about a lethal attack on a Jewish market in Jersey City, New Jersey, in which six people, including a police officer and the two gunmen, died, speculation ran rampant on social media that it might be another act of far-right terrorism inspired by anti-Semitism. After the smoke had cleared, that concern had largely been confirmed, but with a complicated twist: at least one of the perpetrators turned out to be an apparent follower of the<b> black-nationalist Black Hebrew Israelite movement, which is indeed deeply anti-Semitic, and which has inspired an ongoing litany of violent acts over the past decade and longer.</b></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">According to The New York Times, 47-year-old David N. Anderson—who had posted anti-Semitic material on social media before the attack, and left a rambling manifesto behind in a van left at the scene full of hateful references to Jews—was connected to the Black Hebrew Israelite movement. He and 50-year-old Francine Graham, the second suspect, opened fire on customers inside the Jewish market after having first shot a Jersey City police detective near a cemetery.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The scene turned into a six-hour shootout and standoff with police, at the end of which both suspects were killed. A pipe bomb was found in the van alongside the manifesto. Police spokesmen have denied that the incident was terrorism, but local Jewish leaders are insisting that the case is a clear-cut hate crim</b>e.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></p><p style="margin: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Black Hebrew Israelites occupy a complicated space in the realm of right-wing extremism. Black nationalists such as these groups are largely isolated from other sectors of the far right, which are dominated by white nationalists, but still draw many of their ideas from bigoted and anti-Semitic elements of the old white-supremacist right.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">This is acutely true of Black Hebrew Israelites, because they adhere to a kind of religious belief system that portrays black people as the true Children of Israel. It is remarkably similar in form and content—in many ways a kind of <b>mirror image—to the old Christian Identity movement</b>, which held that white people are the true Israelites, and that Jews are the literal descendants of Satan</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. <b>This was the religion practiced by the Aryan Nations church in northern Idaho in the ’80s and ‘90s, which spawned a wave of horrific crimes around the West, as part of Identity’s program to create an all-white homeland in the Pacific Northwest; Black Hebrew Israelites similarly advocate for creating an all-black homeland for African Americans.</b></span></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The outcome of all these movements is a vicious<b> anti-Semitism. And while many black nationalists, such as Nation of Islam</b>, remain mostly nonviolent in nature, their innate anti-Semitism is echoed in more violent terms among related movements such as the Black Hebrew Israelites, who have been connected to a number of violent incidents around the U.S. for some time.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The most notorious illustration of this was a speech given by <b>NOI’s Louis Farrakhan in 2015 </b>in which he responded to recent police shootings of black people by apparently urging violent retaliation: “Retaliation is a prescription from God to calm the breasts of those whose children have been slain … So if the federal government will not intercede in our affairs, then we must rise up and kill those who kill us; stalk them and kill them and let them feel the pain of death that we are feeling!”</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And yet while black nationalists, including the Nation of Islam, share many structural similarities to their white-supremacist counterparts, they are not, as the Southern Poverty Law Center explains, analogous to them: “They should not be seen as equivalent to white supremacist groups—such as the Ku Klux Klan or neo-Nazis—in terms of their history of violence and terrorism.” Nor are their numbers even comparable; black nationalists comprise a tiny fringe with membership in the low thousands, compared to the multiple hundreds of thousands like engaged in right-wing extremist movements, particularly online.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Moreover, their hatred and paranoia about white people—unlike, say, white-nationalist fears of a looming “white genocide” that have fueled the recent wave of far-right violence—and their ability to inflict grievous harm on the African-American community is at least grounded in historical factual reality. Black extremism, in fact, is a reaction to real and brutal oppression.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Black Hebrew Israelites have been ratcheting up both their rhetoric and their real-world violence over the past decade.</b> One of the most recent incidents, in October 2018, involved a Black Israelite in Miami who attacked worshippers at a synagogue with a knife, though no one was injured.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The movement was in the news earlier this year when a group of red-MAGA-hatted white teenagers became embroiled in a confrontation in Washington, D.C., with a cluster of Black Hebrew Israelites who shouted bigoted slogans at each other, while a Native American man beating a drum attempted to break up the confrontation. The brouhaha was captured in a video that went viral, especially after the white teens mocked the drummer as well.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A spokesman for the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Hebrew Israelites denounced Tuesday’s violence. “Everybody expects us to be violent because the things we are talking about are so horrible, what has happened to us in America. They just assume we’re going to be street thugs and criminals,” Commanding General Yahanna of the Israelite School of Universal Practical Knowledge told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “We pull brothers out of prison and off the street and turn their lives around, have them open a Bible.”</font></p><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</div><div><div>a year ago, the Women’s March punctuated Trump’s inauguration with what was likely the largest single-day mass demonstration in American history. Today, it finds itself embroiled in an unexpected controversy after the initial refusal of several of its leaders to distance themselves from one of America’s leading anti-Semites, the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan. It’s a conflict that stems from the long, entangled history between black and Jewish communities in the United States, in which friendship and friction are giving way to struggle over the dimensions of peoplehood. It also reveals anti-Semitism as a crucial blind spot of contemporary left-wing activism.</div><div>
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</div><div>Like a series of other contemporary movements for social justice—Me Too, Time’s Up, Never Again—the Women’s March emphasizes accountability. Activists target not only perpetrators of different types of violence, but also what they see as their institutional enablers, from Hollywood bigwigs to the NRA and its congressional allies, in an effort to dismantle the structures that sustain social evils. The leadership of the group has taken on some high-profile activists, and it is now focusing on impressing its agenda on the 2018 midterms.</div><div>
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</div><div>Mass movements are sewn together from a wide variety of sources, so they often sweep in unwanted companions as they move toward their goals. No one, however, expected to discover that three Women’s March co-chairs—Linda Sarsour, Carmen Perez, and Tamika Mallory—had ties to Farrakhan. More mysterious and disturbing was the extended reluctance of the Women’s March, nearly a year since it became public, to acknowledge Farrakhan’s extremist views and disassociate themselves from them.</div><div>
</div><div>It all came to a head last week, after Farrakhan delivered his address to the annual Nation of Islam gathering for Saviours’ Day, the sect’s three-day holiday honoring its founder, Wallace Fard Muhammad. Farrakhan denounced “Satanic Jews,” said that “when you want something in this world, the Jew holds the door,” and at the climax of his speech, proclaimed, “White folks are going down, and Satan is going down, and Farrakhan by God’s grace has pulled the cover off of that Satanic Jew—and I’m here to say, your time is up.”</div><div>
</div><div>Naturally, this renewed interest in just what the Women’s March was thinking. Mallory further stoked controversy when a woman questioning her about Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism drew a response from a preacher asking her to condemn Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and praying for Jesus to cast out the “wicked spirit laying on her heart.” Linda Sarsour surfaced to say the man was “too blessed,” and Mallory tweeted, “If your leader does not have the same enemies as Jesus, they may not be THE leader!”</div><div>
</div><div>Understanding the controversy requires the context of more than a century of relations between Jews and African Americans. The two minorities are linked by histories of extreme and prolonged oppression, but the differences in their experiences are more meaningful than the similarities. The seminal one is that of origin: Jewish Americans are largely the product of immigration, often in flight from persecution, whereas black Americans mostly descend from people stolen from Africa to become slaves.</div><div>
</div><div>If Jews in the early 20th century could empathize with the African American experiences of ghettos and exodus, the two groups also found that their proximity, on the margins of society, bred tension. Jewish landlords and shopkeepers were willing to serve black communities; in the New South cities that flourished after the Civil War, many treated black customers with courtesy unusual for their era to win their business, addressing black customers as “Mr.” and “Mrs.” or letting them try on clothes. But these relationships could quickly sour. Black customers complained about aggressive sales tactics, exploitative credit arrangements, and other abuses—and that pattern repeated in urban settings after the Great Migration, as well. James Baldwin remembered “some who were certainly as thoughtful as the bleak circumstances allowed—but all of them were exploiting us, and that was why we hated them.” At the end of each business day, Jews would close up shop and resentful blacks would watch them leave the neighborhood with their money.</div><div>
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</div><div>It would be a mistake, though, to tarry too much on the specific origins of African American anti-Semitism. Conspiratorial hatred of Jews has been the poor man’s religion for centuries. For most of this time, Christianity was the vector by which people have been infected with anti-Semitism, and African Americans, among whom the religion is a touchstone, are no less susceptible to the idea that Jews draw preternatural power from an association with the Devil. If that hatred finds vigorous expression with the Nation of Islam, the idea can be heard all the way back in the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, who wrote that “the Jew is the heir to the slave baron in Dougherty, [Georgia].” (Du Bois later excised such references to Jews, because he could “see that harm might come if they were allowed to stand as they are.”)</div><div>
</div><div>The persistent tension existed alongside remarkable cooperation. Cornel West wrote that the alliances between blacks and Jews that culminated in their cooperation during the civil-rights movement were “a major pillar of American progressive politics” in the 20th century. This period spanned nearly 70 years, fueled by Jewish philanthropy, solidarity, and mobilization. Jewish activists fought to desegregate the South during the 1960s. Two Jewish volunteers for the Mississippi Summer Project, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, were murdered along with James Chaney by local white supremacists.</div><div>
</div><div>Yet even this often-romanticized era was fraught. The phrase “Mississippi Summer” has an odor of dilettantism that underscores the divide between blacks and Jews, whatever fraternity in oppression was thought to bind them together. The political scientist Andrew Hacker observed that local black organizers sometimes felt patronized by their well-meaning, drop-in Jewish allies. But resentment ran deeper than this. Hacker reported that Harold Cruse, author of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual—a work of early importance to black nationalism that urged the decoupling of black-Jewish alliances—once remarked that he found Jewish activists cloying because they seemed to presume: “I know how you feel because I, too, am discriminated against.”</div><div>
</div><div>And this is the fundamental, unbridgeable difference: Jews found asylum and assimilation in the United States, a path denied to African Americans. Eastern European Jews, who from 1880 to 1924 made up the largest wave of Jewish immigration to America, fled poverty, oppression, and even mass violence in the form of pogroms. While they initially inhabited an underclass, their refuge was real and permanent, and a road to assimilation was open to them. A not-precisely-altruistic United States then vanquished Hitler and liberated the death camps. In the two decades after the Holocaust, Jews achieved a great degree of upward mobility in their wealthy and bustling adopted home while actualizing the dream of Zionism in the Jewish state of Israel.</div><div>
</div><div>James Baldwin expressed how differently America functioned for African Americans: “The Jewish travail occurred across the sea and America rescued him from the house of bondage. But America is the house of bondage for the Negro, and no country can rescue him. What happens to the Negro here happens to him because he is an American.” African Americans are, by and large, not voluntary immigrants. They are a stolen people, cut off from their history. They have been denied the opportunity to assimilate and gain upward mobility, persecuted from slavery through Redemption and Jim Crow, and without recourse to the glittering dream of a Zion past or present, they remain captive in mind and body to a country whose institutions despise or ignore them.</div><div>
</div><div>This is the lot of a decapitated diaspora. In tragic and persistent ways, black people inhabit an orphaned exclave in America. This diasporic difference guaranteed that Israel would become a flash point of black-Jewish relations.</div><div>
</div><div>The heightening of that tension, as the civil-rights movement gave way to the revolutionary politics of black power, can be traced in the life of Stokely Carmichael. The historian Clayborn Carson argues that the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Carmichael were strongly influenced by New York City Jewish radicalism. The group worked with a small but influential core of Jewish volunteers, and the first demonstration Carmichael attended in high school was on behalf of Israel. Yet by the mid-1960s, SNCC was imbued with a black nationalism that crudely racialized the Arab-Israeli conflict, deeming Palestinians a people of color and the Israelis white imperialists, even as Mizrahi and other non-Ashkenazi Jews poured into Israel from Arab and Muslim countries. Carmichael became Kwame Ture, a cartoonish revolutionary in Guinea who would periodically yell, “The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist!”</div><div>
</div><div>It was against this backdrop that African American new religious movements accelerated a project of reconstruction—to rearticulate the history of black people so as to establish an ethnic nation. To this end, the Nation of Islam teaches a theology of racist, Afrocentric conspiracy theories. White people, compared invidiously to the “Original Black Man,” are the evil and ephemeral product of a mad scientist’s genetic experiment. The Jews among them are “Satanic” usurpers responsible for slavery and the ongoing affliction of black people, who are the indigenous and true children of Israel.</div><div>
</div><div>Farrakhan has cobbled together a history in which African Americans are centered as the children of light, and a replacement theology in which they assume the identity of the Jews—God’s chosen people. “Holy Land don’t belong to a white Arab or a white Jew,” Farrakhan admonished last May in an interview, “You are settlers on our land.” The Nation’s theology is, in this respect, Zionism mutated into anti-Semitic form.</div><div>
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</div><div>But for many in the African American community, Farrakhan’s specific theological or historical claims are of secondary importance. The Nation rebuilds and uplifts the neighborhoods it dwells in, and this has won it deep respect and gratitude—especially during the horror and anomie of the crack epidemic. Consequently, there is little Farrakhan might say that could threaten his standing among many of his admirers—his pronouncements may be crazy and hateful, but the Nation can really clean up a street corner.</div><div>
</div><div>“The black community is very complex,” Tamika Mallory explained to her critics. “This means other [people] may not understand how we organize and all that it takes to deal with our pain.” This, of course, is inadequate. No antiracist activist can contain a contradiction this profound. Worse is that an advocate for her people would help sell them a snake oil of racist nonsense.</div><div>
</div><div>The shameful reticence of Women’s March is easier to dispose. When it comes to racism, the modern left purports to be consequentialist. That is, they are less concerned with antiracist ideals, such as equality of opportunity and colorblindness, than with antiracist results. As the dogma goes, “racism equals prejudice plus power.” So the idea that black people, who are systemically oppressed, might be racist toward the whites who oppress them is derided as illogical and ridiculous. What matters are consequences, not feelings.</div><div>
</div><div>Anti-Semitism reveals the problem with this approach. Unlike anti-black racism, which punches down at a constructed underclass, anti-Semitism in the main is a racist conspiracy theory. That means it punches up at a perceived oppressor—the Jews, whom it casts as a diabolical elite that enslaves and exploits humankind. Punching up is naturally appealing to any group that is, or feels like it is, being ill-used by history. As often as not, anti-Semites are socially weaker than the Jews they target. And antiracist campaigners today have absorbed the specious racialization by 1960s radicals of the Arab-Israeli conflict. In their mental shorthand, Jews are white and privileged.</div><div>
</div><div>So what happens when an intersectional campaign learns that several of its officials have a powerful black ally whom the Anti-Defamation League considers to be “virtually synonymous with anti-Semitism”? Pretty much nothing for almost a year, until a groundswell of outrage stirred by one of the most visible journalists in America finally made official silence untenable. In a Facebook post, Women’s March characterized as “indefensible” a series of hatreds including anti-Semitism and said mildly that Farrakhan’s statements about Jews and others were “not aligned” with its Unity Principles. With an arcane flourish, it explained its ongoing silence as a strategy to “break the cycles that pit our communities against each other.”</div><div>
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</div><div>The perspectives of the movement’s leaders are, perhaps, clearer in off-the-cuff comments. “How can a black woman be racist?” asked co-founder Bob Bland of those challenging Mallory. “I think [Farrakhan] is a distraction,” said co-chair Carmen Perez.*</div><div>
</div><div>In reality, just like everyone else, people on the contemporary left pick and choose when to be practical and when to be idealistic. That there appears to be no desire on the part of Women’s March to confront Jew-hatred specifically and substantively, even as most religious hate crimes target Jews and anti-Semitism stats rise, is something that should trouble anyone of genuine antiracist sentiment. That the group refuses to be accountable for a high-level alliance with an open anti-Semite disqualifies it from ranking among today’s movements for social justice.</div></div><div>no linxx maNY</div></div>