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A petition calling on the Federal Government to label Black
Lives Matter a terrorist group was started on the White House website this week
in response to the recent murders of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge.[i][i] The petition had received 141,444[ii][ii] signatures by the time this was being written.
The petition itself is relatively short, a mere 104 words
long, but it compares the actions taken by members and followers of Black Lives
Matter to groups such as the Daesh Death Cult (aka ISIS). Is this an
appropriate comparison?
During the 1970s through the 1990s the ongoing conflict
between those who wanted to counties of Northern Ireland, which were left under
British occupation after the War of Independence in 1921, and the British
occupation forces were conducted primarily by the Irish Republican Army (aka
IRA) and consisted primarily of terrorist bomb attacks on soft targets in
England and its territories. The IRA was the militant arm of the movement to
reunite the counties of Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland.
There was also a political arm of the movement called Sinn
Fein. Sinn Fein worked to achieve politically what the IRA hoped to accomplish
through violence, murder and terror. Sinn Fein and the IRA were inseparable;
some would say symbiotic.[iii][iii]
When asked, Sinn Fein would deny they were the political arm
of the IRA and insist that the Irish Republican Army was a separate entity.
Yet, when you look at Sinn Fein’s actions, the group spent most of its time
defending actions by, raising money for, and propagandizing for the IRA. Not
until late in the conflict did Sinn Fein organize itself as an actual political
movement.
While it may be difficult to understand the parallel between
what took place in Ireland in the 20th Century and what we are
facing today, remember, the Irish who demonstrated against British occupation
and turned to terrorism when they felt their voices weren’t being heard and the
blacks in the United States today who are calling for and turning to violence
because they believe their voices aren’t being heard both have the roots of
their grievance in slavery.
The Irish people were enslaved by the British overlords and
occupiers, who saw the Irish as nothing more than another animal to be put to
work in the New World. Hundreds of thousands of Irish men, women, and children
were sold into slavery, though their story goes mostly untold, or
is glossed over using the term indentured servitude.[iv]
Africans were torn from their homeland and sold into slavery
by their own kind, bought and transported by the millions to the Western
Hemisphere, and hundreds of thousands of those millions ultimately arrived in,
first the colonies, and then the United States.
The difference, of course, is that the Irish could drive the
British from their land. For blacks in the United States, this is their land,
too. They cannot drive their oppressors out, nor can they leave. What they can
do is seek to be treated justly by law enforcement and the court system and to
be given an equal opportunity to succeed economically if they put the same
time, effort, and care into achieving that success as a person of any other
race. This is what Black Lives Matter wants us to believe the group is working
to achieve.[v][iv]
At the top of their own website, though, Black Lives Matter
plant the seed for responding with violence to what they see as deliberate
violence against blacks. “Black Lives Matter is an ideological and political
intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally
targeted for demise. It is an affirmation of Black folks’ contributions
to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly
oppression.”[vi][v] When a group uses language that indicates it believes its member
are facing genocide, which I believe this language infers, it is understandable
why some see their claims of peaceful resistance to be a smoke screen.
What Black Lives Matter may be, is the Sinn Fein to the New
Black Panther Party’s IRA. You can include the Nation of Islam with the NBPP.
The shooter in Dallas and the one so far identified in Baton Rouge, were both
adherents to or members of either or both the NBPP and the NOI. Just as Sinn
Fein once justified the terrorist acts and murders committed by the IRA, so too
do leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement do for the actions of the “lone
wolf” gunman who are mass murdering police officers. One leader of the BLM
movement responded to the murder of the police officers in Dallas by saying
that while BLM doesn’t condone officer shootings, such shootings are
understandable.[vii][vi]
Terrorism is defined as “the use of violent acts to frighten
the people in an area as a way of trying to achieve a political goal.”[viii][vii]
Does the apologist nature of BLM’s response to the actions
of followers and members of the NBPP and the NOI warrant its being identified
as a terrorist organization?
Is comparing BLM
to groups such as the Daesh Death Cult an apt comparison?
Would stopping its demonstrations stop the violence, or has
BLM opened a racial Pandora’s box that it cannot close?
These questions, class, are for you to answer.
As always, I remain,
The Exhausted Educator
[i][i]
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/wh-responds-to-petition-to-label-black-lives-matter-a-terror-group/ar-BBuqWxg?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartandhp
[ii][ii]
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/formally-recognize-black-lives-matter-terrorist-organization
[iv] http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-irish-slave-trade-the-forgotten-white-slaves/31076
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