 Black Lives Matter had the establishment's full support while rioters were burning down businesses, looting stores, attacking innocent people in the streets and killing cops but all that appears to have changed with just one tweet.
"As Israel moves forward with the annexation of the West Bank, and mainstream British politics is gagged of the right to critique Zionism, and Israel's settler colonial pursuits, we loudly and clearly stand beside our Palestinian comrades," the official account of the Black Lives Matter movement in the UK tweeted on Sunday. "FREE PALESTINE."
The backlash was swift.
From The UK Telegraph:
Bosses at the [BBC] have decided not to allow "visual symbols of support" for Black Lives Matter to be worn on screen, senior sources told The Telegraph.
It comes as a number of high-profile organisations were forced to backtrack on their support for the Black Lives Matter movement as its UK arm publicly criticised Israel [...]
On Wednesday, Tottenham Hotspur became the first football club to publicly break with the movement after Black Lives Matter UK issued a barrage of tweets suggesting British politics had been "gagged of the right to critique Zionism".
In a letter to a concerned fan, seen by The Telegraph, executive director Donna-Maria Cullen said the club’s Jewish chairman Daniel Levy had been "equally disappointed" by the tweets.
"It is unacceptable that a value-based action is being hijacked by those with their own political agenda," Ms Cullen wrote. Incidentally, on Wednesday even President Trump came out hard against Black Lives Matter by calling it a "symbol of hate" after refusing to directly criticize it for weeks.
Jewish Currents reported last week on a leaked memo from the Anti-Defamation League suggesting they're "strategizing" behind the scenes on how best to support Israel's annexation of the West Bank while shielding the foreign state from "political consequences."
From Jewish Currents:
The "stakeholders analysis memo," which was issued by the ADL's Government Relations, Advocacy, and Community Engagement department and marked as a draft, warns that the group will need to find a way to defend Israel from criticism without alienating other civil rights organizations, elected officials of color, and Black Lives Matter activists and supporters. The memo suggests that the group hopes to avoid appearing openly hostile to public criticism of annexation while it works to block legislation that harshly censures Israel or leads to material consequences, such as conditioning United States military support.
The memo lists "eight top political and community engagement implications" annexation could have, among them: "complicate ADL's relationship with the Tri-Caucus (the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus) and the Progressive caucus"; "pit ADL on the wrong side of the black lives matter movement"; "be used to label Israel as an occupier, racist and apartheid state"; and "challenge relationships between ADL and many civil rights organizations and coalitions."
Of particular concern to the ADL, according to the memo, is that the group will have to find a way to credibly defend Israel from accusations that it has formalized a system of discrimination and subjugation on the basis of ethnonational identity. "The reference to apartheid or ‘separate but equal' systems to describe Israel will be a major political flashpoint," the memo states. "As an organization, how ADL responds to these attacks will be critical." The memo proposes as "next steps" that the ADL's communications team and executive office "game out how to respond to accusations of Israel being racist and an apartheid system and when to respond in public and when to respond in private."
[...] In a sign of the growing significance of the ongoing nationwide Black-led uprising, the memo repeatedly stresses that similarities between Israel's techniques of occupation and institutionalized racism in the US will lead to intensified criticism of Israel. "At this moment in our country, when we are collectively going through a moment of racial reckoning, Israel will be painted as akin to an ethno-nationalist country which continues to oppress and subjugate Palestinians," the memo states. "If violence erupts, the Middle East will be looked at from the prism of the George Floyd domestic movement."
The memo makes clear that the ADL does not want to be seen publicly as defending annexation, even as it hopes to mollify annexation's critics. "ADL must provide a space for local and national leaders to express their criticism of Israel's decision," the memo advises. "Do not give the impression that ADL is an ally of PM Netanyahu and a supporter of annexation." Looks like there's trouble in paradise...
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