We all need to take a much closer look at BLM:
With millions of protestors around the world jumping on the Black Lives Matter’s bandwagon, it is time to explain to any of them who are open to clarity of thought and to evidence that they might need to reconsider their involvement. Of course most of these marchers tend to prefer to emote rather than reason, so one wonders how far we can go here.
But it is worth trying. I discussed this group, along with Antifa, in a previous article, as I asked the question, ‘Who is behind all the rioting, looting and arson?’ You can view that piece here: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2020/06/02/who-is-behind-the-american-rioting/
-All lives matter
-All racism is wrong
-The real issue is a sin problem, not a skin problem
Let me begin with a bit of historical background. Former radical leftist David Horowitz has written a lengthy and well-documented piece on this group and what it stands for. He begins:
Black Lives Matter emerged as a national presence in the years 2014 and 2015 by declaring war on America’s law enforcement agencies. Black Lives Matter activists made headlines occupying America’s streets, targeting racially integrated and even majority minority police forces whom they accused of killing blacks at random merely because they were black. The Black Lives Matter activists fomented riots, burned and looted cities, and incited their followers with chants that ranged from “What do we want? Dead Cops! When do we want them? Now!” to “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot.” …
Black Lives Matter was formed in 2013 by three self-styled “Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries,” who selected as their movement icon convicted cop-killer and Black Liberation Army member Assata Shakur. Shakur had fled to Cuba after being convicted of the homicide she committed when her car was stopped for a broken tail-light by two New Jersey state troopers. Without any warning, Shakur shot trooper Werner Foerster. The 34-year- old Vietnam veteran was lying wounded on the ground pleading for his life, when Shakur walked over and executed him. Officer Foerster left a widow and a three-year-old son. Black Lives Matter activists refer to the murderer as “our beloved Assata Shakur” and chant her words as a ritual, “at every meeting, every event, every action, every freeway we’ve shut down, every mall we’ve shut down.” The chant is this: “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love and support one another. We have nothing to lose but our chains.” The last line is lifted directly from the conclusion to the Communist Manifesto, a document and war cry that has led to the murders of millions.
And he looks at the money trail:
The power of Black Lives Matter stemmed from its exploitation of the ideology of oppression – Identity Politics – a ready-made indictment looking for a crime. Black Lives Matter was at the center of a very large network, including hundreds of leftist organizations sharing the same vision. Among them: The Freedom Road Socialist Organization, Dream Defenders, Hands Up United, Black Left Unity Network, Black Workers for Justice, Black Alliance for Just Immigration, Right to the City Alliance, School of Unity and Liberation, Dignity and Power Now, Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, Causa Justa/Just Cause, Organization for Black Struggle, Communist Party USA, Showing Up for Racial Justice, and others.
Many of these organizations are funded by America’s largest corporations and philanthropies, including the Ben & Jerry Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Margaret Casey Foundation, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, and George Soros’s Open Society Institute.
In the summer of 2016, the Ford Foundation and Borealis Philanthropy announced the formation of the Black-Led Movement Fund, a six-year pooled donor campaign whose goal was to raise $100 million for the Movement for Black Lives coalition. This coalition embodies the extremist views and agendas of the Black Lives Matter radicals.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/black-lives-are-pretext-david-horowitz/
I encourage you to read the entire article. But their actions are not limited to America. With these groups also happy to run riot in England over the weekend, Nigel Farage had to publicly denounce their actions:
The Brexit Party leader said he was “utterly appalled” by the violence across the United Kingdom over the weekend “[T]he tearing down of the Edward Colston statue in Bristol… for the second day in a row, Winston Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square being defaced… a mob around the statue screaming ‘Churchill was a racist’; we saw another assault on the Cenotaph, this time with some yob climbing up there and trying to set fire with a cigarette lighter to the Union Flag — these were just some of the highlights from what happened in the United Kingdom,” he observed in the message posted to his YouTube channel.
The veteran campaigner poured scorn on the BBC for portraying the Black Lives Matter as “so peaceful and so wonderful” after multiple “violent and ugly” protests, with “over 50 Metropolitan Police officers” injured — “some of them seriously”. “And yet, my argument here isn’t against equality of opportunity,” he explained.
“It’s not to say there aren’t still things in society that aren’t perfectly fair — but it is to say this, and to say it very, very clearly: this Black Lives Matter movement is a dangerous, Marxist organisation, hell-bent on anarchy, and we need to wake up, get some facts into our heads, and understand what it is we’re fighting.” https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/06/08/farage-black-lives-matter-dangerous-marxist-organisation/
Conservatives and Christians should be aware that this group is about much more than just concerns with black people. They state quite openly that they affirm all the usual radical left agenda items, including homosexuality, transgenderism, the war on the family, and so on: https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/
And they of course support abortion on demand as well: “We deserve and thus we demand reproductive justice that gives us autonomy over our bodies and our identities while ensuring that our children and families are supported, safe, and able to thrive.” https://blacklivesmatter.com/responsestate-of-the-union/
Indeed, the world’s biggest proabortion group Planned Parenthood is happy to support and show solidarity with BLM, and it urges its follows to financially support it: https://www.ppaoregon.org/2020/06/01/our-commitment-black-lives-matter/
That of course is an ugly joke, since PP does NOT care about black lives or any other lives for that matter. Blacks are among the main groups being killed by PP and other baby killers. As Joseph Pearce has put it:
The problem is not whether black lives matter in this unequivocal, objective sense but in the fact that black lives don’t seem to matter to some people. Apart from the controversy surrounding the killing of young black men by the police, we might think of the shooting of nine black Christians in Charleston by Dylann Roof. It is, however, unlikely that we would think about the horrific abortion rate among blacks in the United States. Do these black lives matter?
They matter to South African Cardinal Wilfrid Napier, who referred to the number of black lives snubbed out in the womb as “genocide.” Quoting statistics from Planned Parenthood’s own Guttmacher Institute, Napier noted that since the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision more than 57 million babies have been legally aborted in the United States. He then went on to lament that some 31% of those 57 million babies have been black. In other words, to put the matter bluntly, 18 million black lives didn’t matter.
Currently in the United States, black children are aborted at nearly four times the rate of white children. Among white women, there are 138 abortions for every 1000 live births; among blacks, there are 501 abortions for every 1000 births. This means that blacks are aborted at 3.6 times the rate of whites. https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2016/08/black-lives-matter.html
Or as black pro-life advocate Angela Stanton-King puts it, Planned Parenthood “is the number one killer of black life.” https://www.lifenews.com/2020/06/08/black-pro-life-leader-angela-stanton-king-planned-parenthood-is-the-number-one-killer-of-black-life/
As black Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke put it: “When I hear these things that Black lives matter, the only people who really believe that statement are American police officers who go into American ghettos every day to keep people from killing each other. Alright, so, yes I did say that and I meant it. Look, the abortions? If Black lives – if they really mattered, that’s where the outrage would be that’s where we’d see protests…” https://www.lifenews.com/2014/12/30/black-sheriff-says-if-black-lives-mattered-theyd-protest-at-abortion-clinics/
Related to this is how so many governments are supporting the rioting and anarchy while clamping down on those blacks who really are standing up for life:
In the midst of violent riots and looting in New York City, police in the city chose to arrest two black women who were peacefully counseling women outside a Planned Parenthood abortion facility instead. Church Militant reports pro-life advocates Bevelyn Beatty and Edmee Chavannes were arrested May 30 on the sidewalk outside the Margaret Sanger Planned Parenthood Center in Manhattan. The women were arrested after allegedly violating city social distancing guidelines because of the coronavirus. Beatty and Chavannes said they were social distancing. https://www.lifenews.com/2020/06/05/black-pro-lifers-arrested-for-praying-at-planned-parenthood-while-hundreds-of-rioters-go-free/
Many other blacks also denounce the BLM hype. Consider Australian Jacinta Price:
Aboriginal activist Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has slammed Black Lives Matter protesters as ignorant ‘narcissists’ who don’t understand indigenous problems. ‘Just watching the footage of protesters and the conversations around white privilege make me sick to my stomach,’ she told Sky News. ‘These are narcissists … they don’t have to do any hard work just appear as though they care.’ Ms Price, a Warlpiri woman and Alice Springs Town Councillor, said more Aboriginal people die outside of police custody than within it, with the majority of Aboriginal people killed and maimed by other Aboriginal people. https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/sick-to-my-stomach-indigenous-activist-jacinta-price-slams-virtue-signalling-black-lives-matter-protesters-and-says-they-arent-interested-in-aboriginal-deaths-unless-they-are-killed-by-white-men/ar-BB15cm7O?ocid=sf2
Finally, Christians should not support BLM for even more reasons than what has already been stated. Ryan Bomberger lists ten reasons. Here are some of them:
-There is no goal of forgiveness or reconciliation. None. It’s never mentioned on their sites. You can’t talk about the sins of the past and expect to move forward if there is no intention of forgiveness. I’m tired of the color-based oppressed/oppressor critical race theory paradigm. It’s not Gospel-centered. This should, immediately, be a deal-breaker for Christians.
-It’s all about Black Power. It’s plastered all over the MFBL website. BLMF founders explain their “herstory”: “It became clear that we needed to continue organizing and building Black power across the country.” I don’t promote social colorblindness; I love all of our diverse hues of skin. But I’m so much more than my pigmentation. Martin Luther King promoted “God’s power and human power.” I’m with him.
-They want to abolish prisons and police forces. And…cue utter chaos. MFBL asserts: “We believe that prisons, police and all other institutions that inflict violence on Black people must be abolished…” Defund and remove the police have been rallying cries. That would be anarchy in any community. I advocate some needed police reforms, including more accountability and better community/police relations, but this is just foolishness.
-They are anti-capitalism. Oh the irony of this declaration made by a movement that is the result of capitalism: “We are anti-capitalist. We believe and understand that Black people will never achieve liberation under the current global racialized capitalist system.” The videos that make us aware of police brutality are captured on phones that are a result of capitalism. The best way to elevate people out of material poverty? Capitalism. This system is why the United States is the most charitable nation. https://www.christianpost.com/voices/do-all-black-lives-matter.html
Three further articles also discuss these matters and are well worth reading:
https://www.deliveredbygrace.com/three-reasons-why-christians-should-reject-blacklivesmatter/
In sum, BLF is not a group anyone concerned about real justice, concerned about all lives, and concerned about genuine reconciliation can support. As the final article I linked to just above puts it:
“Black Lives Matter is an anti-gospel movement fueled by postmodern social justice. The Black Lives Matter organization will never lead communities to peace, harmony, and unity. Do Black lives matter? Yes, in fact, all lives matter and we see this clearly articulated in the pages of Scripture. All people are created in the image of God (imago dei) and all human life should matter to the Church of Jesus.”
Two more brief things: this Tucker Carlson video is a must watch: https://www.foxnews.com/media/tucker-carlson-black-lives-matter-political-party
And if you think Australian marchers are any less clueless about these things than their overseas counterparts, consider this shocker of a video: https://caldronpool.com/watch-avi-yemini-asks-black-lives-matter-protesters-an-important-question/
[2079 words]