Dr. Jill Stein, who is running for president on the Green Party ticket, announced Monday that her running mate would be Ajamu Baraka, an “international human rights scholar and activist.”
Stein’s overall campaign strategy is to attract former supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) — and, indeed, some disappointed Sanders delegates at last week’s Democratic National Convention told Breitbart News that they preferred Stein over Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Several former Sanders campaign staffers also published an open letter pleading with him to support Stein’s campaign.
Upon hearing that Stein had chosen Baraka, many Sanders supporters celebrated in social media. “Wow, what an inspiring choice by Jill Stein for her VP. Ajamu Baraka is a great choice to help continue the political revolution – I am stoked!” one wrote on Facebook.
The only problem: Baraka has bashed Sanders, repeatedly.
In a February 2016 blog post, “Beyonce and the politics of Cultural Dominance,” Baraka blasted Sanders as a member of the “pseudo-opposition” to white supremacy and capitalism. (His overall complaint: that Beyoncé had appropriated the symbols of black radicalism for her Super Bowl performance: “I saw the imagery and symbols of authentic black radicalism grotesquely transformed into a de-politicized spectacle by gyrating, light-skinned booty-short-clad sisters,” Baraka wrote.)
Baraka also criticized Sanders in September 2015 for supporting Saudi Arabia’s war against terror, including “war crimes”:
The political reaction to the killing spree in Yemen that now eclipses the murderous assault on Gaza by Israel, has not only been met with indifference but many leftists and radicals in the U.S. have given their support to Bernie Sanders who said very clearly that under his administration the Saudi’s [sic] would be given even more latitude to carry out military operations in the Middle-East. The Sanders’ [sic] position is that the Saudi’s [sic[ needed to get their “hands a little dirty.” For Bernie and his supporters, the mischief that the Saudi government and private individuals have been engaged in across the region financing groups like ISIS wasn’t dirty enough.
…
This is the world that a President Sanders promises—continued war crimes from the sky with drone strikes and Saudi led terror in support of the Western imperial project.
Baraka concluded that supporters of Sanders had “found a way to be comfortable collaborating with imperialism” and had decided “that lives in the White West matter more than others.”
In a November 2015 blog post, Baraka accused Sanders of racism, asking whether it was Sanders’s disregard for human lives in the Third World that led to his “support for U.S. war-mongering policies in the global South.”
Given the anti-Sanders views of Jill Stein’s nominee, disgruntled Sanders fans may have to make their peace with voting for Clinton, Libertarian Gary Johnson, or even Republican nominee Donald Trump.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. His new book, See No Evil: 19 Hard Truths the Left Can’t Handle, is available from Regnery through Amazon. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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