Don’t Jewish Lives Matter? Apparently not

In the 60s, in America, three young men were active on behalf of civil rights for African Americans.

James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, spent the summer of 1964 registering African Americans to vote in Mississippi where they were brutally lynched by the KKK, their bodies tossed in a shallow grave.

Chaney was African American. Both Goodman and Schwerner were Jewish.

The sacrifice of these 3 men gave rise to the Civil Rights Acts of the same year.

The following year, Rabbis Abraham Joshua Heschel and Maurice Davis linked arms with Dr. Martin Luther King and other black civil rights leaders as they made their historic march from Selma to Montgomery.

American Jews aligned themselves with the African American struggle for life, liberty, and equal rights.

American Jews even aligned themselves with the Black Lives Matter movement, despite the utter lawlessness and violence that rampaged across America in its name.

But now that Jews have been slaughtered, Jewish girls raped and murdered, Jewish children, babies, Jewish women and elderly, including Holocaust survivors in their final years of lives, cruelly taken hostage by inhumane Palestinian Arabs, when supporters of this evil cause take to the streets of America chanting “Death to Jews,” in which many hateful voices were those of African Americans, Jews are rightful to ask.

Why?

Why have you deserted us in our pain?

We see them marching with clenched fists alongside supporters of a Jewish genocide.

We see and hear them threatening Jews.

They joined the selective women’s rights movements, supposedly representing oppression of women, especially those in minority groups, except until it comes to Jewish girls and Jewish women, particularly Israeli girls and Israeli women who can be gang-raped to their total silence, because the rapists and murderers represent a cause they support.

And in America, when it comes to verbal hate against Jews, followed by threats, acts of physical violence and even murder against Jews, both the champions of both women’s rights and African Americans are either silent, or on the side of those who hate Jews.

As evidence, the Chicago chapter of BLM gruesomely adopted the logo of Palestinian Arab terrorists using paragliders, the ones who landed at the music festival and slaughtered and raped young Israelis.

Yes. The major Jewish organizations have failed their communities by representing the interests of other minorites ahead of representing their own.

Whether out of a sense of ego, decorum, or not wanting to lift their heads over the parapet, their leaders’ failure to speak up boldly in defence of their own community, is a cause for public shame.

They should resign and make way for louder, more effective, more aggressive, young Jewish leaders.

However, I expected more, much more, support from the leaders of the Black caucus of America, especially those who have whispered how much they stand with Israel.

Their absence, their silence, their vocal support for Hamas, in our battle to exist against an immediate, life-threatening, anti-Semitism, is a mark of shame on them and on the basic universal principles they once stood for.

Black Lives Matter.

Don’t Jewish Lives Matter?

Apparently not!

Barry Shaw is International Public Diplomacy Associate,at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies