At pro-Palestinian Black Lives Matter rallies in New York and Washington, chants were heard calling for “Death to Israel,” “Death to America” and “From Gaza to Minnesota, globalize the Intifada!”
Several hundred protesters attended the July 1 demonstration in Brooklyn dubbed as a “Day of Rage” event, set to coincide with the earliest date Israel could begin its plans to apply Israeli law over parts of the West Bank and the Jordan Valley.
Speakers issued inflammatory rallying cries that ran the gamut from anti-Semitic and anti-American to just plain absurd. One pro-North Korea activist called for the end of the United States of America and its “puppet governments,” the liberation of “Palestine,” and for Korea to “be one again.”
There were multiple attempts to connect the pro-Palestinian cause with Black Lives Matter.
Dequi Kioni Sadiki, the wife of former Black Panther Sekou Odinga, said: “The European Jews who occupy, slaughter and continue to force millions of Palestinians onto their killing fields called refugee and concentration camps, are the relatives of the Europeans… who kidnapped, slaughtered and forced millions of Africans and indigenous” into slavery.
Calls to “abolish the police” were joined with calls to eliminate “the Zionistic state of Israel.”
Speakers and organizers made it clear they were not interested in Israel arriving at a peace agreement with the Palestinians. Instead, they said the Palestinians deserve the entire land.
“The land that Israel exists on is still stolen. The 1948 lands are still stolen — Jaffa, Haifa, Tel Aviv… was stolen. We don’t want to go just back to our homes in Gaza and the West Bank. We Want all of it,” activist Nerdeen Kiswani, one of the organizers, said.
“We don’t want a fake Palestinian state that they give us while Israel still exists,” Kiswani added.
Chants of “Fuck your two states!” were later heard.
One speaker, known as Rob from the Party for Socialism and Liberation, led an Arabic-language chant shouting “Death to America!” “Death to Israel!”
Meanwhile, protesters at a separate“Day of Rage” march in Washington, DC, were heard chanting “Israel, we know you, you murder children, too.”
One of the march’s organizers, Harvard student Christian Tabash, read a poem about Israel’s alleged crimes against Palestinian Muslims according to the Washington Examiner. The poem, called Mr. War — an apparent reference to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — included the line “Curse thee, the corrupters of Zion. Fuck this occupation!” and referred to Israel as “puppet master of continents,” paying homage to the anti-Semitic trope that Jews control the world.
Tabash also paused several times during the march to remind protesters that the Palestinian movement is “intrinsically tied to Black Lives Matter,” the report said.
The Republican Jewish Coalition published a statement responding to the march saying it was “horrified by this vicious hatemongering by Black Lives Matter protesters.”
“The Black Lives Matter charter is filled with anti-Israel and anti-Semitic lies. It is deeply disturbing, but not surprising, to hear those sentiments chanted in the streets of Washington, DC,” the statement said.
The RJC further called Democratic hopeful Joe Biden, “as the standard bearer of the Democrat Party, to condemn these anti-Semitic chants by BLM protesters.”
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