The Black Lives Matter Movement, a movement totally unrelated to the Middle East, recently released their official platform, a vehement lambasting of Israel. They criticized no other country, but had no qualms about accusing Israel of apartheid, genocide, and a brutal, racist military occupation.
The twitterverse was soon after abuzz in vehement criticism of this new, deeply one-sided policy that divided the black community, claiming to speak for black interests when they in fact do the very opposite.
Black Lives Matter has responded bluntly and insensitively to the widespread criticism of their platform, which divides rather than unites the Black community. In response to this criticism, Director of Communications for the #BlackLivesMatter Movement, Shanelle Matthews, equated Zionism with racism: “Clearly you are actively ignoring the profiling, displacement, & murder of Palestinian ppl. [sic]. Zionism is racist AF. As are you.”
Matthews then blocked the pro-Israel tweeters who dared to criticize the anti-Israel section of the new #BLM platform:
In a nutshell, the woman hired to represent #BLM believes that anyone who doesn’t support BDS is a racist. How did this happen?
It certainly didn’t happen overnight. The movement, which began in 2012 following the February shooting of Trayvon Martin, was being actively courted by clever Palestinian social engineers for years while we were asleep, or actually having a life beyond our cause, or a career other than Professional Jew Hater.
The truth is, while we were asleep at the wheel, the opportunistic anti-Israel activists jumped on the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag while it was barely nascent. They sought to form alliances with a movement that eventually became a worldwide phenomenon, and made it about them to profit off #BLM’s success, which they do with every trend they feel will appeal to young people, contributing to the precipitous fall in pro-Israel sentiment and sharp rise in anti-Israel sentiment, with 29% of Millennials siding with Palestine in the conflict compared to just 9% in 2006. In tying the two movements together, as it does with many other movements, the anti-Israel activists can channel the emotional attachment to activists’ pet cause to the Palestinian cause by making activists believe that they are related. Such is social engineering, something we have utterly failed at doing for the most part.
We took our cause for granted, and are currently paying the price. Until we stop focusing our slactivism on entertaining rooms full of old people and completely ignoring the trends and emotional whims of the youth, when the older generation dies off, we will have no one left.
And in a way, we have no one to blame but ourselves for being so darn bad at this.
The good news is, we can turn this around. Hire speakers and organizers who know the youth zeitgeist, who are young and diverse and who can appeal to the rebellious youth, the snowflake generation, who could make them feel as if they are part of a revolution.
There are people who get it. Our own Ryan Bellerose gets it. Activities should be interactive, let the snowflake generation engage in their penchant for feeling special and feeling involved in changing the world. Hold vigils and speak with confidence, not apology. Take more of a youth-directed marketing-centered approach to advocacy. Stop calling it advocacy, call it activism. There is so much we can do to turn this whole thing around but so much inertia at the top, with their cushy salaries and stubborn closed-mindedness to new methods and ideas.
We have an adversary that has enough supporters that many of them can afford to do nothing except advocate. We do too, we just are too afraid to rock the boat.
The time to stop being afraid is now.
