Black Lives Matter’s Shameful Response to the Attacks on Israel

Is Black Lives Matter (BLM) a political and social movement that seeks to address racism, discrimination, and racial inequality experienced by black people in the United States (and around the world), or is it an extremist organization that makes excuses for—and even endorses—terrorism? Corporate America, nearly every institution in the West, and many Americans had believed the former in the time since the movement catapulted to the center of Western discourse during the tumultuous summer of 2020, though support for BLM has been falling ever since. Following the murder of George Floyd in May of 2020, companies such as Ben and Jerry’s rushed to lavish BLM with donations to help to advance the group’s aims. The company’s founders, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, for instance, put forward a four-step plan to help BLM’s goals come to fruition. Predictably, when describing step one, the company accused then-President Donald Trump of using Twitter to promote and normalize the agendas of white supremacist groups. As such, Cohen and Greenfield called upon President Trump to disavow them. Second, they demanded federal legislation to study the effects of slavery and discrimination, as well as recommend remedies. The third order of business was establishing a national task force to draft bipartisan legislation to end racial violence and increase police accountability. Fourth, the Department of Justice was to reinvigorate its Civil Rights Division as a staunch defender of the rights of black and brown people, who paid an “immeasurable price” for the ravages of white supremacy.

All the while, for “allies” such as Ben and Jerry’s, delivering justice for all victims of state-sponsored violence was paramount, and silence was not an option. And while some of those proposals may have seemed reasonable at the time, upon closer examination, there was more going on than met the eye.

When I first visited the BLM website around this same time, I noticed that there was no information about how the group planned to combat discrimination, as well as a noticeable lack of transparency. And then, upon closer examination, many of the group’s other stated aims were either head scratching or chilling. In 2023, the situation is, unfortunately, much the same. Merion West, however, was among the first news and commentary platforms to seek to understand the organization’s true nature, the hysteria behind its rise, and the advent of the activist-corporate alliance, which was unprecedented in the history of the United States. In a prescient essay, my Merion West colleague Alexander Zubatov, for instance, bravely challenged the prevailing narrative that BLM was a force for good. At a time when cancellations and public denunciations were running amok, there were vanishingly few writers willing to take positions such as these.