If Black Lives Matter, then don't Palestinian Lives?

Nothing is sacred and all is fair game when it comes to the “woke” generation taking personal or political offense.

By RUTHIE BLUM
A protester carrying a "Palestinian Lives Matter" sign at a Tel Aviv protest (photo credit: LEON SVERDLOV)
A protester carrying a "Palestinian Lives Matter" sign at a Tel Aviv protest
(photo credit: LEON SVERDLOV)
Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters across the West are on a rampage against cultural and historical symbols that they deem racist. No book, film, play or monument is safe from their scrutiny and disdain.
Minnesota removed Mark Twain and Harper Lee novels from its schools’ curricula. HBO pulled Gone with the Wind from its movie line-up.
The Paramount Network canceled the new season of the popular reality show Cops before its June 15 premiere. Other studios and companies are rushing to follow suit with everything from sit-coms to old classics.
Statues of American founding fathers George Washington and Thomas Jefferson have been defaced. Even the legacy of Britain’s lionized late prime minister Winston Churchill is under assault.
Indeed, nothing is sacred and all is fair game when it comes to the “woke” generation taking personal or political offense.
Given the unapologetic ignorance displayed by students everywhere these days, it is heartening to discover that the young people demonstrating from California to Melbourne are remotely familiar with the iconic figures they’ve been trashing since the horrific killing of George Floyd on May 25 by a Minneapolis police officer. While most are able to rattle off the names of every Kardashian, sports star and Instagram influencer, few appear to be versed in much of anything other than fashionable slogans and platitudes about the world in which they live.
It would be interesting to do a survey on the number of placard-waving demonstrators who actually read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or had a clue about battles fought in World War II. Apparently, however, there is nothing quite as effective as the kind of snap education gleaned on the Internet, in the wake of a contemporary murder-gone-viral.
This is not to deny the need for serious intellectual debate over the type of material that a society wishes to promote or discourage. On the contrary, democracies grapple regularly with this issue.
Take, for example, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fabricated document published in Russia in 1903, and presented as evidence that the Jews were conspiring to achieve global hegemony by underhanded means.
While some consider banning its sale a moral imperative, others argue not unreasonably that it should be included in syllabi pertinent to the study of antisemitism. After all, the vile text – falsely portrayed as the minutes of actual meetings among Jewish leaders – was translated into many languages, and continues to circulate both online and in print in certain Asian, South American and Middle Eastern countries.
WHICH BRINGS us to the Palestinian Authority, where The Protocols is presented as an authentic book that reveals the true nature of Jewish treachery.
The PA is also home to activists, and the origin of ex-pats, who have been piggyback riding on the BLM protests in the US to demonize Israel. One method of doing this is by claiming that the Israeli military trains American police in the art of brutality – a skill it hones on the necks of defenseless Palestinians.
The BLM movement doesn’t mind being exploited for this purpose, since it uses the Palestinians in its own campaign against Uncle Sam and the Jewish “apartheid” state.
What these co-champions of victimhood never admit to themselves or to anybody else is that Palestinian lives do not matter in the least to their leaders, who treat them as pawns and cannon fodder.
Yes, the honchos in Ramallah and Gaza – while engaging in an ongoing war between and among themselves – prevent the people over whom they rule from holding, let alone expressing, independent thoughts and aspirations.
They infuse their tightly controlled media, classrooms and cultural events with propaganda that denigrates Israel and the West, and glorifies martyrdom in the name of Allah.
They incentivize terrorism through the granting of hefty salaries to those who shed Jewish blood and stipends to the families of those killed in the process of doing so.
Meanwhile, they have spent decades pocketing the billions of dollars, euros and shekels given to them for humanitarian aid, rehabilitation and institution building.
In fairness, they have been steadfast in their dedication to culture, making sure to fund monuments, sports events, dance festivals and art exhibits dedicated to the heroes whom they wish their people to celebrate. It’s a hip way of conveying an ideology of death and destruction.
One monument of note is a structure in Ramallah honoring Dalal Mughrabi, a female Palestinian terrorist from Lebanon who led the 1978 Coastal Road Massacre, considered the deadliest terrorist attack in Israel’s history. The attack began with the hijacking of a bus and ended with the slaughter of 38 innocent passengers – among them 13 children – and the wounding of more than 70 others.
As for sports, well, Palestinian karate, chess, soccer, table tennis and other youth tournaments bear the names of “martyred” mass murderers. Ditto for murals, music videos and cartoons depicting Jews as hook-nosed aggressors in IDF uniforms, and urging Palestinians to commit stabbing, car-ramming, Molotov cocktail and missile attacks on Israelis. Oh, and hopefully to lose life and limb during the endeavor.
IF PALESTINIANS were to take to the streets of the PA to shout about their lives mattering, it would make perfect sense. Not only are they persecuted, kept impoverished and programmed to exist in a state of fear, but are egged on to sacrifice themselves and their children for a goal that their leaders perpetually block.
If the residents of Ramallah and Gaza were to topple portraits of terrorists, overturn police cars and demand a new order of democracy and civil rights, they would be justified. Unfortunately, they’d also be subjected to torture on a par with, or worse than, that suffered by George Floyd.
Nor would any Palestinian sadists-in-uniform tasked with quelling the unrest be punished by the authorities who answer to PA President Mahmoud Abbas. It’s not for nothing that he perpetuates the fiction – among his people and for international consumption – that Israel is at the root of Palestinian misery. Doing so has enabled him to stay in power, and in clover, for the past 15 years and counting.
The Palestinians know this and hate him for it, as was evident in interviews last week with Israeli Channel 13’s Arab affairs correspondent and analyst Zvi Yehezkeli.
“In Israel, there’s law and order; life is good,” said one West Bank Palestinian, when asked about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s intention to begin extending Israeli sovereignty to parts of Judea and Samaria next month.
Another admitted, “I prefer Israeli sovereignty [to Palestinian] 100%.”
A third asserted that if elections were held today in the PA between Abbas and Netanyahu, the latter would win for sure. Unlike their Western counterparts, Palestinians actually long to have a little liberty, not to mention a steady job.
How is it, then, that the world’s liberals – who are voicing solidarity with BLM, erasing history and offering special benefits to “black, indigenous and other people of color” (BIPOC) – are forsaking the Palestinians? And why do Palestinians imagine that BLM and company give a damn about them?
The answer is that the current chaos has nothing to do with wanting the US government or police to value life. It is, rather, a revolution fomented by radicals with an agenda: to destroy Western civilization by nullifying it.
The fact that participants in this effort imagine that it will result in an improved society for any citizen indicates how utterly ignorant they are – as if that weren’t already abundantly clear.


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