Black Woman Speaks Out Against Students for
Justice In Palestine: "You Do Not Have The Right
To Invoke My People's Struggle For Your Shoddy
Purposes"
From Tablet Magazine:
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.
• You do not get to pretend as though you and Rosa Parks
would have been great buddies in the 1960s. Rosa Parks was a
real Freedom Fighter. Rosa Parks was a Zionist.
Coretta Scott King was a Zionist.
A. Phillip Randolph was a Zionist.
Bayard Rustin was a Zionist.
Count Basie was a Zionist.
Dr. Martin Luther King Sr. was a Zionist.
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.
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