Mick Hartley

A Facebook post from NYU Students for Justice in Palestine, from Thursday:

In the past 48 hours another two black men have been lynched by the police. The total number of black people lynched by cops in 2016 now totals 136. We must remember that many US police departments train with the ‪#‎IsraeliDefenseForces‬. The same forces behind the genocide of black people in America are behind the genocide of Palestinians. What this means is that Palestinians must stand with our black comrades. We must struggle for their liberation. It is as important as our own. ‪#‎AltonSterling‬ is as important as ‪#‎AliDawabsheh‬. Palestinian liberation and black liberation go together. We must recognize this and commit to building for it.

Might have known the Jews were behind it. [And that "lynched" is doing a nice job stoking up the old race hate.]

Yair Rosenberg:

The irony of critiquing racism in American society through the bigoted displacement of responsibility for it to Jews in the Middle East was apparently lost on SJP. As was the fact that the sordid history of American violence towards black people far predates the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. (And let’s not even get into the libelous and offensive allegation of Israeli genocide, for whose refutation one need only consult the official Palestinian Bureau of Statistics, which records the Palestinian population’s exponential growth since Israel’s creation.)

What’s particularly pernicious about the posting is that by erasing the American history of predatory conduct towards blacks and instead exporting culpability to a scapegoat, SJP short-circuits any necessary national conversation about U.S. police violence. As long as shadowy outside forces can be blamed for the problem, there will be no internal reckoning.

As of this publishing, despite critical comments on its Facebook page, NYU SJP has not apologized for crudely instrumentalizing the suffering of African Americans to disingenuously attack the Jewish state…