RUTHFULLY YOURS

These are exciting times for Black Lives Matter (BLM) and its comrades. First, they spent most of 2020 raking in countless millions of dollars in donations as compensation for turning dozens of American cities into war zones—an activity they describe as “racial justice” activism. Next, they helped get two their two most influential supporters on Earth, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, installed in the White House. And now, they have been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

The nomination was put forth by the Norwegian parliamentarian Petter Eide, who lauds BLM for its noble “struggle against racism and racially motivated violence.” In light of the fact that Mr. Eide has represented the Socialist Left party in Parliament since 2017, it is no surprise that he should be impressed by the agendas and tactics of BLM, an organization founded by three self-identified “trained Marxist” revolutionaries: Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi. Under their leadership, BLM has perfected the longtime Marxist strategy of portraying the U.S. as a racist cesspool in desperate need of fundamental transformation. Presumably Mr. Eide believes that such a message, if repeated with sufficient frequency and passion, will promote “peace.”

Perhaps he also believes that yet another Marxist ideal advocated by BLM—the dissolution of “the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure”—will likewise further the cause of “peace.”

While conceding that “people message me to say that BLM is a violent organization,” Mr. Eide dutifully explains that “if some elements of the movement may have been violent, that is not a reason to blame the whole movement.”

Thus, it apparently meant nothing when, in June 2020, BLM’s New York chairman, Hawk Newsome, exhorted African Americans to arm themselves and candidly declared that “we pattern ourselves after the Black Panthers”—a Marxist-Leninist gang that in the 1960s and ’70s waged armed warfare against the police and engaged in all manner of criminality: drug dealing, pimping, rape, extortion, assault, arson and murder. Commending the BLM rioters who were tearing apart city after city, Newsome explained: “People want to destroy because they’re angry and they’re frustrated. They want to go out and grab all those things that America told them that they should have, but they couldn’t have.” “If this country doesn’t give us what we want,” he said later in June, “then we will burn down this system and replace it.”

One can almost picture Mr. Newsome, in BLM’s name, tearfully clutching that Nobel Peace Prize to his breast.

By the end of June 2020, at least 14,000 protesters and rioters in 49 separate U.S. cities had been arrested at BLM uprisings during the five weeks since George Floyd’s death. As many as 26 million people had already participated in BLM demonstrations from coast to coast, prompting The New York Times to run a headline that read: “Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History.” Moreover, the 2020 riots were projected to become—in terms of losses due to theft, fire, vandalism, and other forms of destruction—the costliest sustained acts of civil disorder in American history. On top of this, approximately 25 people were killed amid the 2020 mayhem.

All that violence, coupled with the fecklessness of Democrat political leaders who refused to condemn BLM and its activities and rhetoric, had consequences that were beyond horrific. As it became increasingly clear that Democrats across the country had no intention of standing up in defense of the police, and no intention of rejecting BLM’s “defund the police” initiative which was gaining traction among the left, law-enforcement officers nationwide understood that they were on their own; that their careers, their pensions, indeed their very lives, could suddenly go up in smoke if they were to find themselves in a situation where they needed to use deadly physical force against a black criminal suspect. Thus the police became increasingly reluctant to engage criminals except where absolutely necessary. This, in conjunction with the ever-growing rage, self-righteousness, and sense of invincibility among violent criminals, resulted in a massive increase in homicides throughout urban America.

Chicago was hit particularly hard. “We’ve never seen anything like it at all,” said Max Kapustin, the senior research director at the University of Chicago Crime Lab. “I don’t even know how to put it into context. It’s beyond anything that we’ve ever seen before.”

New York City was likewise turned into a cauldron of violence by BLM hatred. June 2020, the month immediately following the month in which George Floyd had died, became New York’s bloodiest month since 1996.

Nationwide, homicide rates jumped by an astonishing 30 percent from 2019 to 2020, a statistically unprecedented occurrence. New Orleans-based crime analyst Jeff Asher called the trend “a symptom of this concept of police legitimacy, where police pull back because people are upset and questioning their legitimacy.”

In an important September 2020 report, the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), a nonprofit organization that tracks conflict in every part of the world, identified 1,143 post-George Floyd protests that had featured physical violence of some sort, such as looting, armed attacks, arson, rock-throwing, clashes with police, the use of pepper spray, etc. Of these violent incidents, 84 percent involved BLM.

Of the aforementioned 1,143 incidents, 582 were coded as full-blown riots whose leaders and participants could be definitively identified. Fully 95 percent of the 582 riots involved BLM. One of them occurred during the Jewish festival of Shavuot on May 30, 2020, when BLM members carried out a pogrom in Fairfax, a Los Angeles community largely populated by Orthodox Jews. On that day, the BLMers not only vandalized five synagogues and three Jewish schools, but also looted most of the Jewish businesses along Fairfax Avenue. Moreover, they chanted “Fuck the police and kill the Jews.”

None of these facts, of course, mean much to Petter Eide and other defenders of Black Lives Matter, who take pains to remind us that BLM events are “mostly peaceful.” That’s quite a trick: a “mostly peaceful” movement that just happens to have been responsible for more property destruction during 2020 than any other uprisings in American history, plus at least two-dozen deaths.

But to truly put Black Lives Matter’s devotion to “peace” in its proper perspective, we must remember that at all BLM events, the participants take time to formally invoke the words of the organization’s acknowledged heroine, Assata Shakur. They are words that Shakur once wrote in a letter titled “To My People”: “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.” (Shakur drew the fourth sentence from the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.)

Shakur is a lifelong, committed Marxist revolutionary, a former Black Panther, a convicted cop-killer, and a onetime member of a Panther offshoot known as the Black Liberation Army (BLA), an organization that was tied to the murders of more than ten police officers between 1970-73. As Jordan Schachtel writes in Conservative Review, Shakur “was the leader of a notorious New York City BLA cell that hunted down police officers for brutal assassinations.” Former Assistant FBI Director John Miller describes Shakur as having been “the soul of the Black Liberation Army.”

Shakur’s greatest fame came as a result of what she did at approximately 12:45 a.m. on May 2, 1973. That morning, she shot New Jersey state trooper Werner Foerster twice before her gun jammed. With Foerster on the ground, wounded and helpless, Shakur grabbed the trooper’s own firearm and blasted two fatal shots into his head, execution-style. The 34-year-old Foerster was survived by a wife and a three-year-old son. Shakur, for her part, escaped from prison in 1979 and has lived the past 42 years as a fugitive in Communist Cuba, under the continuous protection of Fidel and Raul Castro. And today, she – and she alone – is the person whom Black Lives Matter reveres above anyone else in this big, wide world. Assata Shakur is the soul of BLM, just as she was the soul of the BLA.

And so, with that in mind, let us congratulate Black Lives Matter and its acolytes for their Nobel Peace Prize nomination. If they end up winning the award, their achievements can be forever recalled in the same breath as those of 1994 Nobel Laureate Yasser Arafat, the prolific Jew-killer who likewise devoted his life to fomenting hatred, chaos, and suffering on a massive scale—all in the good name of “peace,” of course.