Hijacking justice for George Floyd and African-Americans to promote hatred of Jews and Israel - by Jonathan Tobin

Jews share the pain of those who protest racism. But extremists who link this crime to Israel’s efforts to defend itself against Palestinian terror are spreading a big lie.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
JNS.org..
01 June '20..

The outrageous murder in Minneapolis of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African-American man, by local police is a crime that cannot be tolerated or excused. Efforts by extremist agitators to hijack peaceful demonstrations and turn them into violent riots should also be condemned and not falsely rationalized as a form of legitimate protest or part of a necessary path to progress.

Sensible people know both those things can be equally true, and that concerns about the anarchy in the streets of major cities shouldn’t diminish our anger about Floyd’s death or any other crime that appears rooted in racism.

This perilous moment in American history should have created a consensus about the need to address both injustice and nihilist violence that ought to transcend partisanship. That is why Jewish organizations and religious groups have joined with people of faith throughout the denominational spectrum to express their dismay about what happened to Floyd, as well as their desire to combat prejudice.

But not everyone is prepared to observe the political ceasefire most Americans would prefer to observe in the wake of these traumas. And, as always, some of those looking to exploit tragedy are attacking Jews.

That was made clear when a synagogue and Jewish-owned businesses were vandalized in Los Angeles with pro-Palestinian propaganda. In and of itself, that would be terrible, but those buildings were just a few out of the innumerable places around the country that suffered the same indignity or worse.

The context for that incident—and the spate of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel hate that has flourished in recent days on the Internet—is not random anger that could have been directed at any target, no matter how removed it might be from the incident that set off this crisis. Such incitement is the direct product of an intersectional movement that has continued to attempt to link crimes committed on American streets against African-Americans with the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. And just like other forms of prejudice for which there should be no tolerance, the effort to blame Israel or Jews for what rogue American cops might do needs to be clearly labeled as a form of hate speech.

The effort to manufacture a connection between slayings of African-Americans with Israel isn’t new. The notion that the struggle for civil rights in the United States is connected to the Palestinian war on Israel has become a staple of the BDS movement. It is rooted in intersectionality, an idea that has gained popularity in certain sectors of academia.

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