The inhibited antisemitism within Black Lives Matter

This is the second part of the long interview of documentary film maker Pierre Rehov out of a total of 4 episodes. Thanks to Helene Keller Lindt for the English translation.

Geller Report: Pierre Rehov, how do you explain the radical evolution of the black cause from a wise man who wanted peace and condemned all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism, such as Martin Luther King, to that of the most radical heirs of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, known for their uninhibited Judeophobia? 

PR- The assassination of Martin Luther King destabilized the peaceful civil rights movement and paved the way for dissident advocating armed insurrection. Thus, personalities such as Louis Farrhakan, Angela Davis, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and Jesse Jackson have come to the forefront. Not being heirs to Gandhi’s pacifist philosophy, as Pastor King may have been, they advocated violence as a response to what they considered as state violence. But there is another factor that is not negligible, and that is the influence of Islam on black communities. In its expansionist, conquering and dominating will, political Islam (which I distinguish from religious and relatively peaceful Islam) has been able to adopt the methods that proved successful in the advent of the various fascisms i the 20th century. Violence, propaganda and social aid. Quite simply the use of the stick and the carrot to spread its ideology. But there is nothing really new when we know that the first two Jihads conquered the Middle East, part of Asia and Andalusia using similar methods. Choosing between death, torture, slavery or the chance to prosper, you would think that the peoples colonized by Islam have always chosen what was favorable to them. In the same way, Islam has been able to spread in black American communities and claim to be an alternative to the system, by spreading social aid in the most disadvantaged sectors, and by establishing sectors of local domination, especially in prisons. When one community fails, the first reflex is to blame the other for its own misfortunes, rather than taking even a share of the blame. The leader of The Nation of Islam, Louis Farrhakan, is fundamentally anti-Semitic like most radical Muslims, and has expressed this on many occasions. In 1972, he claimed that “the Jews control the media”. In 1984 he said that “Hitler was a very great man”. In 1995 he said in a speech that “you (Jews) are the synagogue of Satan, and you have wrapped your tentacles around the American government, you are deceiving and sending this nation to hell”. He was still an anti-Semite and homophobic at the same time when he barked in 2007 that it was “the wicked Jews who promote lesbianism and homosexuality. And on July 4, he expressed the same hatred when he said that he had “exposed this satanic Jew” and that he was here to “tell them that their time was up, that their world was over”. In the meantime, he had also taken the liberty of calling Jews “termites”. 

But his assertive anti-Semitism is also a way of rallying the troops around a common enemy whose successes have been pinned, distorted, and negatively inscribed in the collective unconscious. The Jews are thus, once again, the scapegoats of an organization that has understood that hatred is more unifying than love and the promise of prosperity. This, moreover, leads to this shameful wave of hashtags denouncing hypothetical Jewish privileges. The Jews would be “privileged whites responsible for all the misfortunes of the world” according to the Hip Hop artist “Professor Grif” interviewed by Nick Cannon who, himself, affirmed that the true Hebrews were Blacks, while the emblematic figure of rap, Ice Cube, was photographed in front of a fresco exhibiting a quantity of anti-Semitic “memes”.

 What is astonishing is that a community that has benefited from decades of positive segregation (quotas of Blacks imposed in universities and the arts) has chosen as its target another community that has never benefited from it. And which has helped it a lot in the past.

Can you give us some examples?

There are so many of them that I find it hard to choose. But let’s start with the “Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade” published in the 19th century by Granville Sharp and William Wilberforce on the basis of Jewish anti-slavery traditions dating back to Moses and the Hebrew people’s escape from Egypt. Rabbi M. Mielziner’s anti-slavery work, translated from German, was a resounding success in the USA when it was published in 1859. Immigrant Jews from Poland, Bohemia, and Vienna, including Theodore Viener, Jacob Benjamin, and August Bondi, were among the first fighters with abolitionist John Brohn in Kansas. Nathan Meyer Rothschild is known for his role in abolitionism through his funding of part of the £20 million paid by the British government to “compensate for the loss of manpower” in the plantation industry. Without this “ransom”, the farmers refused to free their slaves, despite the new laws. The grandfather of a close friend of mine, Julius Rosenwald, president of the giant Sears from 1927 until his death in 1932, initiated and partly financed a social program that included the construction of 5,000 decent schools for African Americans throughout the southern United States. These schools, called “Rosenwald Schools” and created to address the inadequacy of the American education system for the black minority, would have provided education for a third of this population. There are hundreds of other, more recent examples, not least Bernie Sanders, who has built part of his political career on a healthy anti-Zionist stance and supports BLM in all its interventions.