The UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs on June 11 invited to keynote its commencement ceremony Patrisse Cullors, the co-founder and former executive director of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation — who recently resigned amid controversy surrounding the group’s finances and her lavish lifestyle, including several expensive real estate acquisitions.
Under her leadership, BLM frequently agitated against Israel and accused the country of being an “apartheid state” that commits human rights violations against Palestinians. Along with this, the organization openly supports the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS)movement and “seeks to dismantle the Zionist project,“ according to remarks made by BLM supporter Marc Lamont Hill.
BLM has also called to end US military support to Israel and claims US police officers learn “brutal” tactics from their Israeli counterparts. Cullors also once told her group’s supporters to promote Rasmea Odeh, a woman responsible for two bombings in Jerusalem in 1969.
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BLM’s BDS Support
BLM’s backing of BDS is especially dangerous. BDS claims to not be antisemitic, even as the group seeks to end Israel’s existence and irrespective of comments from one of the group’s leaders calling all Zionists “thieves, settler colonialists, racists, purveyors of apartheid, ethnic cleansers, supremacists, and murderers.”
Unsurprisingly, the group rejects the IHRA definition of antisemitism even though it is accepted by a diverse cross-section of governments throughout the globe. The widely-adopted definition states that claims that Israel is a genocidal or racist state, or accusations of wrongdoing against Israel that the country never did or has no connection to, all constitute a double-standard against Jews and are therefore antisemitic.
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Cullors’ Antisemitism
Cullors also once said in 2015 that, “Palestine is our generation’s South Africa. If we don’t step up boldly and courageously to end the imperialist project that’s called Israel, we’re doomed.”
Recently, on May 16, Cullors posted a video from 2015 that showed her and a group of BLM activists somewhere in Israel or the West Bank where they took part in a pro-Palestinian flashmob. Cullors, along with a small group of other activists, called for “Boycott, Divestment and Sanction” on Israel.
This video was posted when Hamas was firing rockets at Israeli civilian centers.
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Notably, Cullors neglects to mention Hamas in the post. Nobody in the video mentions that Hamas is a terrorist group that builds tunnels under schools, and routinely commits war crimes by deliberately firing rockets at Israeli civilians, often launching these missiles from densely-populated civilian areas, thereby using its own citizens as unwitting human shields. Neither does Cullors acknowledge Hamas’s oppression of Christians, women and gay people in Gaza.
In the video, Cullors and others chanted the deeply problematic slogan, “from Ferguson to Palestine, end the occupation,” thereby egregiously linking Israel to a situation in a country thousands of miles away.
Related Reading: UK Media: BLM Antisemitism is “Criticism of Israel”
Whether she’s aware of it or not, Cullors undeniably spreads antisemitic tropes, and it’s shameful that UCLA would host her as a speaker. By honoring Cullors, the UCLA administration demonstrated that it’s willing to tolerate antisemitism and give a platform to people who spread vicious falsehoods against Jews and Israel.
Martin Luther King once stated that “when people criticize Zionists they mean Jews” — and this is seemingly as true as ever nearly 60 years later.
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Featured Image: Patrisse Cullors at UCLA’s Royce Hall via Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.
