When something bad happens in America, or anywhere—blame the Jews. That’s pretty much what New York University’s Students for Justice In Palestine chapter alluded to concerning the recent string of police-involved shooting deaths of black Americans. Why? Oh, it’s because our police forces train with the Israeli Defense Forces, ergo, they must all be genocidal maniacs, right? They made these allegations on their group’s Facebook page, where they also said that the IDF is committing genocide against Palestinians the same way American police forces are systematically killing off black Americans (they’re not). I’m not going to say shut these people down. Nope—I’m a believer in free speech, even when those opinions are false, inflammatory, and devoid of reason. Yet, as Yair Rosenberg, who found this rather entertaining piece of social media, noted—these folks also have zero sense of history:
The irony of critiquing racism in American society through the bigoted displacement of responsibility for it to Jews in the Middle East was apparently lost on SJP. As was the fact that the sordid history of American violence towards black people far predates the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. (And let’s not even get into the libelous and offensive allegation of Israeli genocide, for whose refutation one need only consult the official Palestinian Bureau of Statistics, which records the Palestinian population’s exponential growth since Israel’s creation.)What’s particularly pernicious about the posting is that by erasing the American history of predatory conduct towards blacks and instead exporting culpability to a scapegoat, SJP short-circuits any necessary national conversation about U.S. police violence. As long as shadowy outside forces can be blamed for the problem, there will be no internal reckoning.
As of this publishing, despite critical comments on its Facebook page, NYU SJP has not apologized for crudely instrumentalizing the suffering of African Americans to disingenuously attack the Jewish state—or corrected their misspelling of Alton Sterling’s hometown of “Baton Rouge.”
Rosenberg added that this isn’t the first the NYU-SJP chapter has gone off the hinges and blamed Israel for something ridiculous. They previously had blamed high tuition costs at City University of New York on Zionism.