Dershowitz: Cut Ties with Black Lives Matter over Anti-Israel Platform

Alan Dershowitz, the renowned civil libertarian, defense lawyer, and Democrat, has called on political leaders to cut ties with the Black Lives Matter movement until it rescinds its anti-Israel platform, which accuses the Jewish state of “genocide.”

Hillary Clinton, whom Dershowitz has supported for many years, has embraced the Black Lives Matter movement, recently inviting the so-called “Mothers of the Movement” to address the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in July.

However, now Dershowitz is arguing that the Black Lives Movement is a stain on anyone associated with it, given its embrace of rabidly anti-Israel positions that are not only at odds with reality, but discriminate against Jews.

In an op-ed in the Boston Globe, Dershowitz writes:

Genocide means the deliberate extermination of a race, such as done by Nazi Germany to Jews and Sinti and Roma or by the Hutu against the Tutsi in Rwanda. It has no application to deaths caused by self-defense measures taken to protect citizens against terrorism. To falsely accuse Israel of “genocide” — the worst crime of all, and the crime whose very name was coined to describe the systematic murder of 6 million Jews — is anti-Semitic.

Until and unless Black Lives Matter removes this blood libel from its platform and renounces it, no decent person — black, white, or of any other racial or ethnic background — should have anything to do with it. We should continue to fight against police abuses by supporting other organizations or forming new ones. But we must not become complicit in the promotion of anti-Semitism just because we agree with the rest of the Black Lives Matter program.

Dershowitz’s call is not aimed directly at Clinton, but includes her among those to whom the demand is generally addressed.

For years, Dershowitz called upon Hillary Clinton to dissociate herself from the radical anti-Israel and antisemitic views of Max Blumenthal, the son of her close adviser, Sydney Blumenthal. Recovered e-mails from Clinton’s private server reveal that she often discussed Max Blumenthal’s views, and those of other Israel critics. Finally, in early July, Clinton distanced herself publicly from Max Blumenthal’s ideas, after Blumenthal slandered the late Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel.

However, convincing Clinton to cut ties with Black Lives Matter may prove more difficult — as difficult as it will be to convince the movement to drop its hateful rhetoric from its platform.

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.