‘You do not have the right to invoke my people’s struggle for your shoddy purposes’
(*SJP
– Students for Justice in Palestine)
The student
organization Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is prominent on many
college campuses, preaching a mantra of “Freeing Palestine.” It masquerades as
though it were a civil rights group when it is not. Indeed, as an African-American,
I am highly insulted that my people’s legacy is being pilfered for such a
repugnant agenda. It is thus high time to expose its agenda and lay bare some
of the fallacies they peddle.
• If you seek to
promulgate the legacy of early Islamic colonialists who raped and pillaged the
Middle East, subjugated the indigenous peoples living in the region, and
foisted upon them a life of persecution and degradation—you do not get to claim
the title of “Freedom Fighter.”
• If you support a
racist doctrine of Arab supremacism and wish (as a corollary of that doctrine)
to destroy the Jewish state, you do not get to claim that the prejudices you
peddle are forms of legitimate “resistance.”
• If your heroes
are clerics who sit in Gaza plotting the genocide of a people; who place their
children on rooftops in the hopes they will get blown to bits; who heap praises
upon their fellow gang members when they succeed in murdering Jewish school
boys and bombing places of activity where Jews congregate—you do not get to
claim that you are some Apollonian advocate of human virtue. You are not.
• If your
activities include grieving over the woefully incompetent performance by Hamas
rocketeers and the subsequent millions of Jewish souls who are still
alive—whose children were not murdered by their rockets; whose limbs were not
torn from them; and whose disembowelment did not come into fruition—you do not
get to claim that you stand for justice. You profess to be irreproachable. You
are categorically not.
• If your idea of a
righteous cause entails targeting and intimidating Jewish students on campus,
arrogating their history of exile-and-return and fashioning it in your own
likeness you do not get to claim that you do so in the name of civil liberty
and freedom of expression.
• You do not get to
champion regimes that murder, torture, and persecute their own people,
deliberately keep them impoverished, and embezzle billions of dollar from
them—and claim you are “pro-Arab.” You are not.
• You do not get to
champion a system wherein Jews are barred from purchasing land, traveling in
certain areas, and living out such an existence merely because they are
Jews—and claim that you are promoting equality for all. You do not get to
enable that system by pushing a boycott of Jewish owned businesses, shops, and
entities—and then claim that you are “against apartheid.” That is evil.
• You do not get to
justify the calculated and deliberate bombings, beatings, and lynchings of
Jewish men, women, and children by referring to such heinous occurrences as
part of a noble “uprising” of the oppressed—that is racism. It is evil.
Coretta Scott King,
A. Phillip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Count Basie and Dr. Martin Luther King Sr.
were all Zionists.
Indeed, they and
many more men and women signed a letter in 1975 that stated: “We condemn the
anti-Jewish blacklist. We have fought too long and too hard to root out
discrimination from our land to sit idly while foreign interests import bigotry
to America. Having suffered so greatly from such prejudice, we consider most
repugnant the efforts by Arab states to use the economic power of their
newly-acquired oil wealth to boycott business firms that deal with Israel or
that have Jewish owners, directors, or executives, and to impose anti-Jewish
preconditions for investments in this country.”
You see, my people have always been Zionists
because my people have always stood for the
freedom of the oppressed. So, you most certainly do not get to culturally
appropriate mypeople’s history for
your own. You do not have the right to invoke my people’s struggle for your shoddy
purposes and you do not get to feign victimhood in our name. You do not have
the right to slander my people’s good name and link
your cause to that of Dr. King’s. Our two causes are diametrically opposed to
each other.
Your cause is the
antithesis of freedom. It has cost hundreds of thousands of lives of both Arabs
and Jews. It has separated these peoples, and has fomented animosity between
them. It has led to heartache, torment, death and destruction.
It is of course your
prerogative to continue to utilize platitudes for your cause. You are entirely
within your rights to chant words like “equality” “justice” and “freedom
fighter.”
You can keep using
those words for as long as you like. But I do not think you know what they
mean.
2 comments:
If only this was published wider.
If everyone who reads this blog would circulate it to all friends, relatives and contacts, this would increase the number of readers 1000 fold
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