American Thought Leaders - BLM’s Misguided Sympathy for Hamas: Pastor Dumisani Washington

Episode Date: December 2, 2023

"They have these torture facilities, sometimes right next to school. The kids can hear the people being tortured in Gaza. These kinds of guys are screaming out because Hamas is torturing them. Where's BLM? Where are they when these types of human rights abuses happen on a daily basis?"In this episode, I sit down with Pastor Dumisani Washington, founder and CEO of the Institute for Black Solidarity with Israel and the author of “Zionism and the Black Church.”"These rallies are just slogans, hashtags, and a complete demonization of Israel, which is why we're seeing attacks on Jewish people—on Jewish neighborhoods," says Pastor Washington.How did Black Lives Matter become anti-Israel? What is the origin of the terms “Palestine” and “Palestinian”? And how was the Soviet Union involved in creating the Palestinian national movement?"The PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] is a creation of the KGB," says Pastor Washington. "One of the KGB agents that defected explained that the liberation movements—many of them were crafted there, not for the help of people who may even have been legitimately struggling, but for the purpose of exploiting those people."Pastor Washington believes that anti-Israel protesters are, knowingly or not, doing PR for terrorists, promoting a version of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that is not only false, but a cover for Hamas."You're not concerned about the honor killings. You're not concerned about the fact that gays get thrown off the rooftops in Gaza. You're not concerned that the people of Gaza have regularly protested Hamas to their peril," says Pastor Washington.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

They have these torture facilities sometimes right next to school. The kids can hear the people being tortured in Gaza. Where's BLM? Where are they when these types of human rights abuses are happening on a daily basis? In this episode, I sit down with Pastor Dumasani Washington, founder and CEO of the Institute for Black Solidarity with Israel and author of Zionism and the Black Church. These rallies are just slogans, hashtags, and a complete demonization of Israel,

which is why we're seeing attacks on Jewish neighborhoods. How did Black Lives Matter become anti-Israel? What is the origin of the terms Palestine and Palestinian? And how was the Soviet Union involved in creating the Palestinian National Movement? The PLO is a creation of the KGB. One of the KGB agents that defected explained that the liberation movements, many of them were crafted there, not for

the help of people who may have been legitimately struggling, but for the purpose of exploiting those people. This is American Thought Leaders and I'm Jan Jekielek. Dumasani, Washington, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thank you Jan, thanks for having me. Great to be with you today. So we've been talking for some time about these mass protests and rallies that have been happening on university campuses. Today as we're filming, there's actually a pro-Israel rally that's happening here in Washington DC, which you're here for. I appreciate you taking a bit of a moment to speak with me.

Sure, thanks for having me. You are not surprised at this whole thing that's happening on our campuses, across society right now. A lot of people are, and because this is something you've been following for some time. So, you know, what's going on? It's so, there's so much to unpack, Jan. And again, I appreciate you reaching out and having the conversation. And yeah, I would imagine, especially now for people who don't know about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, who are not familiar with what's going on in the region, but they see all of this explosion of activity here in the states, on the campuses, on the streets, right? Matter of fact, the street protests that have unfortunately become very violent, I believe

there's a Jewish gentleman who was killed a few days ago in the LA area, they are an extension of what's been going on on the campuses for years, for a very long time. And those protests are done under the guise of justice, under the guise of Palestinian human rights. But it's not a real advocating for rights. It is a hatred for Israel, a hatred for the Jewish people. And even for those who don't understand it to that degree, they are caught up with it as some sort of social justice thing, that somehow if you are on the side of right, if you're against police brutality, if you're against racism, any of these things, right, that any thinking person would be against those types of things, then you are necessarily anti-Israel, because Israel then has been demonized for decades as a totalitarian police state,

apartheid state. Any pejorative you could think of has been affixed to Israel for many different reasons. That propaganda goes back decades as well. But by now it has so fomented that you are seeing the culmination of a lot of work, a lot of disinformation where Israel is concerned. Okay. Well, we're going to unpack that. As you said, there's a lot to unpack. Before we go there, I'd love to understand your background, because this is something you're, of course, with the Institute for Black Solidarity with Israel. You've been doing this for a while, but how did that all come about? So I am a pastor. I'm a musician also, professional musician by trade. I came up in church and with a strong what I would call spiritual Zionist ethos. I wrote a

book called Zionism in the Black Church and I explained about my background. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas in the late 60s during the segregated South. Grew up in California because my family moved to San Francisco in around 1968. So I didn't grow up in the segregated South, grew up in California but very much in this black church tradition. There's a great deal of spiritual Zionism within a traditional black church meaning songs, sermons, those types of things. A lot of parallels between the children of Israel, African Americans. Harriet Tubman, one of the most notable abolitionists, was called Moses. The Negro spirituals from centuries back were almost always set in this whole redemption

narrative, go down Moses, Joshua at the Battle of Jericho, all of these things. So there was nothing new. Even the Lift Every Voice and Sing, what Booker T. Washington dubbed the Black National Anthem, even though it's been politicized today, it was very much of a cultural heritage thing for Black Americans. That's how I was raised, right? This was my reality. And just if I may cut in briefly, it's this spiritual Zionism. What does that mean exactly?

A spiritual Zionism meaning an identifying with Israel and the Jewish people based on the scriptures. Everything from the Abrahamic covenant when God says in Genesis 12, 3, to Abraham, I will bless those who bless you, curse those who curse you. To an identifying of the children of Israel as the people who are almost always these underdogs who are having to fight because of the Amalekites and the Egyptians and you name it, right? So there was always that ethos in the traditional black church, which is why Dr. King, the day before, hours before he's killed, one of the things that he says in the speech there when he's in Mississippi, he says, I may not get there with you, but I want you to know that we as a people will get to the promised land. Why are all these allusions to Israel, these allusions to the Bible, right? This was a black church thing.

And it was not even just in terms of church, but in terms of culture, this was always kind of known, right? So I say spiritual Zionism, aside from the Jewish state of Israel, right? Not so much, it wasn't a political thing as much as it was as identifying spiritually, scripturally. So for many in the black church tradition, the support for the state of Israel, much further than that, because the geopolitical reality that is Israel and its struggle against particularly Palestinian terrorism,

that fight was brought to the door of the black community in the late 60s in the embodiment of Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization. And the reason why it so particularly impacts the black community isn't because, as I tell people often in our lectures, the black community didn't choose the Israeli- tell people often in our lectures, the black community didn't choose the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It chose us. It came for us. We didn't. When Dr. King was defending Israel's right to exist up until the time of his death, he wasn't doing it because he didn't have anything else to do, right? His plate was pretty full, right? He'd already said that the Jewish community, more than any other ethnic group, had distinguished itself in the Negro's struggle for justice, his words, right?

So that was true. But that wasn't the only reason why he supported Israel. It wasn't about the Jewish people are my friends, therefore I blindly support Israel. For him, it was justice as well. And for those, I talk about it in my book, but it's also, you can go on a website, anybody watching this, go to rabbinicalassembly.org. And for there, they have the transcripts of their meetings. And one of their last meetings, 10 days before he was killed, Dr. King was the honored guest at the rabbinical assembly. And what I'm saying now, he said it to them. The meeting wasn't about Israel.

It was about lots of different things. But this was about a year, almost a year after the Six-Day War, the 1967 war. Israel's being demonized as a settler colonial. I mean, they had the audacity to win the war against five Arab powers. That kept happening. Israel kept defending itself. When Israel would win, it would get demonized in the media, right? Israel, one of the only nations in modern history or if ever that would give up land

for peace even after winning the war. So Dr. King spoke soberly. He spoke in terms of morality. He spoke in terms of justice. And he spoke for the vast majority of the black civil rights community when he was saying those words defending Israel but also sharing much concern for what we now call the Arab Palestinian people I say that because they didn't use Palestinian in the late 60s Palestine is the name of the region that the Romans gave to Judea around 135 BC I'm going back almost 2,000 years but just for context so in the modern era a Palestinian was known as a Jew who lived in the region, and the Arabs were called Arabs. Yasser Arafat began to coin the term Palestinian as a weapon

against Israel to say the Palestinians are the indigenous people who own this land, and these Jews are interlopers who came and stole it. All of that is false, but it sells if you're trying to sell a social justice narrative, right? When you're telling the history of any nation, and let's just keep this in America for a moment, as great as the nation is, there's warts, there's flaws. I think Bob Woodson was the one who said that slavery was America's original birth defect, right? But it's still the freest nation in the world, even with its imperfections. Unfortunately, as we know, kids on campuses have been told that America is the most evil nation in the world, the most racist nation, which those things aren't true.

Well, who's America's closest ally? Israel. So by default, Israel gets demonized in that same way. The only viable democracy in the Middle East, a nation of 9 million people, but includes Jews and Christians and Muslims and Jews, and they serve in the military. I mean, it is a multi-ethnic and pluralistic society as exists outside of the United States. Yet it's demonized as the one that's always, that's oppressing, that's committing genocide. Again, those things are true, but that's perception. Hence, kids on college campuses saying free, free Palestine, not knowing what that means, saying from the river to the sea, not understanding that that is a call for genocide

against the Jewish people. Those things have been popularized and this is the tragedy of where we are right now. You know, I just want to comment on one thing. I keep thinking about this idea of projection. There was this, you know, one of the guests on this show, James Lindsay, coined this term, the iron law of woke projection, right? And this idea, we kind of have a real sense of, let's call it genocidal intent when you look at what happened on October 7th. I don't think that's even debatable. Yet, basically Israel is being portrayed as genocidal somehow. So in the context of a mentality, particularly of a far left bent that is more Marxist in its leaning, that is anti-American in its leaning, anti-democratic in its leaning.

One of the first things that happens is that truth is suspended. Words don't mean anything anymore. Bayard Rustin was one of the founding members of what was called BASIC, Black Americans to Support Israel Committee. It was founded by him, A. Philip Randolph. Members included Coretta Scott King. The who's who of the black community formed this pro-Israel organization because of the demonization that was happening about the Jewish state and the Jewish people, just like what's happening now. And one of the articles he wrote was called The PLO, Freedom Fighters or Terrorists. And in the opening pages or the opening sentences of that piece, he talks about how language

has been completely distorted, how terrorists are called freedom fighters, how a liberal democracy is called some sort of repressive regime. And the reason I mention that, that was 1975. It's a long time ago, right? So you've had this indoctrination that he's addressing that was already a problem then that has just been saturated, right? So in answer to your question, why can Hamas then launch a genocidal attack killing women, children, babies, and all the horrific things that people are aware of it, like an ISIS. Why can't it do that, but then be hailed as freedom fighters, as fighting oppression, right? Because language has been turned on its head, right? This has been the

systematic desire of what was the Palestine Liberation Organization's goal. The PLO, for those who don't know, is a creation of the KGB. I'm not saying that the Palestinians are not a people now. I'm just saying that the PLO as an organization was formerly the KGB. We know this because one of the KGB agents that defected explained that the liberation movements, many of them were crafted there, not for the help of people who may have been legitimately struggling with whatever, but for the purpose of exploiting those people. Right?

So Yasser Arafat becomes the chairman of the PLO in 1969, ironically, a year after Dr. King's death, which was 1968. And one of the first things that he does, Jan, is reaches out to the younger members of the black civil rights movement, the people like the Angela Davises, Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers. And why does he do that? Why a conflict six, seven, 8,000 miles away, right? From Oakland, from Chicago, right? Especially in terms of black civil rights, if you're talking about police brutality and those types of things that are going on in these cities. Why is a Palestinian leader, quote unquote, because he's born and raised in Egypt, right? But why is the leader of a PLO concerning himself with black leaders in America?

South Africa as well. He was close friends with Nelson Mandela. Nelson Mandela, who never condemned Israel's right to exist, none of those things, right? But why? Why did he single out the black American community, leaders in that community? Why? To sell his genocidal goals as a freedom movement. Again, it was going to be difficult for him to get press coverage saying, I want to destroy Israel from the river to the sea. Right. But if he says we want liberation, if he says these white Jews are oppressing us the way that white people are

oppressing black people in the United States, then that resonates with someone, even if they don't know the truth of what he's talking about. Even if they don't know what a Mizrahi Jew is, they don't know what the Jewish people are, they're not a color, they're an actual ethnic group of people, and they come in all colors. So if they're not aware of that, it just sounds familiar. So kids are saying Israel's an apartheid state. They don't know what apartheid is. If you even ask them where it originated, they don't know anything about South Africa. But it sounds bad, right? But because they had heard enough word association, Israel bad, Israel genocide. You know how disinformation works. You keep saying over

and over again. That's been going on for a long time. And that's what it's based on. I think I'm on the side of justice. I think I'm on the side of right. Greta Thunberg, just after the attacks, she's been the whole climate person and everything, and now she comes out, free, free Palestine. What? We didn't know you knew anything about the Middle East conflict.

Do you know what you're talking about? No. It became part of her social justice grab bag. So she pulls out her Palestinian flag and then boom, right? And some people were shocked. We weren't shocked because we knew she's part of that same leftist stream. So in order for you to keep your leftist bona fides, you better come out pro-Palestinian, even if you don't know what you're talking about. Parts of these rallies, right, which, again, I mean, I've been looking at them, and a lot of them are quite, maybe all, I'm not sure, but are very clearly pro-Hamas, not just free Palestine, which is... There have been ISIS flags.

What you are seeing on the streets, again, has been going on in the campuses for years, for a long time, right, in the quad, in the different places there and calls for genocide against the Jews intifada intifada globalized the intifada intifada is a violent uprising intifada means the buses that have been blown up in Israel the type of terrorism that has been visited on the Israelis for decades right so from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. It's a call for a genocide once again. From the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea is the entire nation of Israel. So it's not about land. It's not like Hamas doesn't

care about settlements in the quote unquote West Bank. Hamas slaughtered babies to send a message to Israel. We want in Hamas's own charter, their own words, they are committed to two main things where this conversation is concerned. Number one, the total destruction of Israel. Number two, the worldwide destruction of all Jews, right? How do we have a two-state solution conversation with Hamas? So they just slaughtered nearly 1,500 people. They still have another 240 plus who are held hostage. And Israel is being told by people of supposedly goodwill to cease fire, right? Hamas wasn't told to cease fire. Israel's been, because while they're saying cease fire, Hamas is still sending rockets from Gaza into Israel, attacking its civilian population.

For any logical thinking person would say, OK, Hamas is a bad actor, even if I thought they had some grievances. This is not a way to address any of those things. But you can see these nuanced conversations are not what's being had in these rallies. These rallies are just slogans, hashtags, and a complete demonization of Israel, which is why we're seeing attacks on Jewish people, on Jewish neighborhoods. This has been going on for a while as well. Black Lives Matter, which is supposed to be concerned with the black community, but almost immediately took up the Palestinian cause, which has nothing to do with Mike Brown, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, none of those things, right?

BLM LA, during the George Floyd protests, goes to the Fairfax area of Los Angeles, which has been a Jewish enclave for a long time. They face five synagogues, three yeshivas, Jewish schools. What does that have to do with police brutality? What does that have to do with Israeli-Palestinian conflict? But this is what's been just accepted. For years, those of us in the space, not just me, but long before me, have said that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. Those who held the opposite position always would push back on that.

What people are seeing now is that it's true. Why are people supposedly supporting the Palestinians in the street and are threatening the lives of Jews? Why is the Jewish community here in the United States seeing the type of hatred for them as a people, regardless of their politics, regardless of how they even feel about Israel itself as a nation. Why are they being threatened? Why are their children in school, Jewish kids in the library, barricaded because there were

Palestinian supporters outside kicking at the door? It was like something out of 1950's Selma, Alabama, right? This type of mindset has been present on the campuses for a long time, but now it's everywhere. It's somehow been tolerated, obviously. It's tolerated because, and I have to go political here, because it's considered in some circles progressive. It has become a staple.

To deny that is to deny reality. And I'll give an example. Picture these protests on these campuses, on these streets. But they're actually neo-Nazis and white supremacists. You know how fast the FBI would have shut that down? Do you know how quickly these people would have been paddywhacked, right? So why is it okay for this type of violence and this type of rhetoric, bloodthirsty, especially after?

I mean, Black Lives Matter, Chicago, tweets a picture of a paraglider who slaughtered the kids at this festival that was there, right? Why does that get a wink and a nod? When Hamas was sending 4,000 rockets to Israel in 2021, Black Lives Matter posted its support for the Palestinian, i.e. Hamas, right? But it didn't get the media coverage or anything. Because it's seen as progressive, because it's seen as pushing against totalitarianism or imperialism or Western encroachment, it's amazing. Dr. King called Israel an outpost of democracy. It's surrounded by despotism, right? Fast forward to now, now that's seen as some sort of bad thing that somehow it's outpost of democracy means a manipulative puppet of the

United States that's doing its bidding, right? That's what's actually been accepted. Not true, but that's what's been accepted. These are not happening on conservative Christian campuses, right? Nobody's calling for the death of Jews at Oral Roberts University, right? Okay, because if it was, it'd be on the front pages of the paper. They'd be shut down. Picture a white supremacist group setting up on a campus saying all these Negroes should die, right? The South shall rise again. They wouldn't last five minutes and rightly so. Shut them down. I'll be the first person shutting them down with you, right? But why is it okay for the Jews? Or why can I say from the river to the sea? Why is that okay? Because it's considered progressive, right? Some

people who are now seeing the level of vitriol for Jews and for Israel, one of the reasons why it's taking them aback is because it's new to them. Addressing the anti-Zionism on the campus now is very much like closing the barn door. All the horses, the horses are just gone. They've been gone in the next county. The horses are complete. That's what we're addressing. We're addressing it now way, way late in the game.

Well, I mean, you've tried to tell people before, though. That's just me. Many people were long before me. But, yeah, we have. I did an event with our Jewish friends out in South Jersey last spring, and we were talking about anti-Semitism in the black community. We talked about things like Louis Farrakhan, Black Lives Matter, a few other things. I made the point to the audience that was theirs that the greatest source of this type of Jew hatred is actually the college campus, right?

This is why the indoctrination, which has been happening for a long time. And as much as we were talking about anti-Semitism in the black community, and that's a worthy conversation, that it's not the black community that controls Stanford, Harvard, UC Irvine, Michigan. Some of the most, at this point, lethal types of activities where Jews are concerned are happening on progressive college campuses

controlled largely by white progressives. That doesn't mean there's no anti-Semitism in the black community, but we're talking about the systemic, wide-ranging, much of why we see what's going on on the streets right now, that didn't come from Howard or Spelman or from that came from Harvard, Yale, that came from where there's such anti-Zionism that's been there for such a long time. You know, there's people threatening to quit at the White House. There's congressional staffers walking out from work. And you mean because of their, what they feel is a lack of support for the Palestinian cause. Oh, no, absolutely. So this is what we call the oppression Olympics.

Once you put a team together based on how much each person is oppressed, at some point that team is going to start to crumble because that team is going to turn on itself. Meaning, for those who consider themselves concerned about Palestinian human rights, but have only fixed their gaze on demonizing Israel, not on Hamas, who've been the brutal rulers of Gaza since 2007. Israel removed every Jewish man, woman, and child from Gaza in 2005. By 2007, Hamas, which is a terrorist organization, again, dedicated to the destruction of Israel and the destruction of worldwide Jewry, they've been in charge of launching rockets, terrorist attacks, building tunnels, all of these things, right? If the person calls themselves concerned about the Palestinians, but have nothing to say about how Hamas has been brutalizing those people, they're not pro-Palestinian, they're anti-Israel. There's one thing to be against police brutality. It's another thing to just be against

police because they represent just oppression, the whole thing, right? So what you've had here now is that in that progressive coalition, those who consider themselves pro-Palestine but are actually anti-Israel, who don't want this current administration to do anything that looks like siding with or helping Israel. That's where some of those protests are coming. What's amazing is that this administration, which is a continuation of the Obama administration, we feel that the Biden administration, among other things, billions of dollars of funding for terrorism in the region is a lot of where we are here.

The Taylor Force Act was made law in 2018, which stated that no administration could knowingly fund Palestinian terrorism. From everything that we can see, it seems as though that law is not being honored. Billions of dollars that have gone to the Palestinian Authority, money that has gone to UNRWA, which is the United Nations Relief Works Agency for the Palestinian refugees, which is, those who know, it's a coffer for Hamas, which runs Gaza. Not to mention the money that has been released in terms of sanctions relief for Iran, which is the main actor. Iran funds Hamas, funds Islamic Jihad. It works with other destabilizing forces within the region.

It's the number one state sponsor of terrorism. This administration has totally empowered all of those bad actors. So when we see something like October 7th, we feel very strongly that the administration is very much unfortunately involved in what happened because of the funding that goes to this terrorism. So here you have those who are angry with the Biden administration, who feel that they've been too much of an ally of Israel, right? And our organization, I guess if you're a Biden administration, you can't win for losing because we feel the opposite. We feel that the funding of the terrorism is a lot of why we're here now. Right now, again, as we speak, I don't know how it's going to play out, but apparently it's being considered to do another $10 billion of sanction relief, if I understand.

Yes, I saw that. The fact that it's even a consideration, see that should give anybody pause. If Iran is the number one state sponsor of terrorism. To be considering releasing another $10 billion to Iran while there are still 240-plus hostages in Gaza, the people of Gaza are under the oppressive rule of Hamas. And so they are severely impacted by what's going on here now, even as Israel is in Gaza attempting to eliminate Hamas. Hamas uses civilians as human shields. Israel is in a no-win situation, but they have no choice but to go after and eliminate

Hamas. The humanitarian aid that's to go in is supposed to be for the people, but here's the further complication. Hamas rules with an iron fist. Every parcel of food and all the materials, and I'm not in any way suggesting that the people don't get what they need, but for our organization, we feel and have felt for a long time, there needs to be more of a systematic way of keeping Hamas from taking all of that, whether it's fuel, all of those things, right? And because Hamas is firmly and totally in control, there is no way to make sure that the people of Gaza get any of those goods unless you remove Hamas and see now we're right back in this quagmire, right? This has been what Israel's been dealing with for a long time. Iran is the main actor. In Sudan, just the other day, there was another slaughtering of

Sudanese Christians by an Islamist group that seems to have connections to Hamas as well, right? Because Hamas is not just this group that runs Gaza. It is a part of a network that's funded by Iran. So just like our Israeli brothers and sisters were slaughtered on October 7th, Christians have been slaughtered in different parts of Africa and the Middle East by Islamist groups, some of them connected to Iran for years. So the fight that many people were introduced to on October 7th, they may not recognize it has been, unfortunately, a religious war against non-Islamists, because many Muslims are also being killed in those parts of the world if they don't have the same ideology of the ISIS and all the others. So you mentioned how for MLK, it was just kind of obvious to basically support Israel. Similarly, you mentioned how for, let's say, Angela Davis types, Black Panthers and so forth,

it was kind of the opposite. I guess I want to dig into that a little more because you also talked about BLM, and BLM seems to be kind of the lineage of Angela Davis and the Black Panthers. What illustrates that is the story of Eldridge Cleaver. We've done articles on it, we've done a video on it. There's a video entitled Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver Became a Zionist. He was one of the original Red Pills back in the 1970s. And what happened? I mentioned before that Yasser Arafat quickly reached out to the younger members of

the civil rights movement, the younger ones, the younger lines, the more of the Malcolm X mindset, which was by any means necessary, right? They were really frustrated with the older guard, all the whole nonviolence and everything. And theirs was more of a radical, let's change this now, let's change it by force. So, Algis Cleaver meets Yasser Arafat around 1969 in Algiers, Algeria. Why is he there? He has fled the United States because of a shootout that had happened in Oakland. He was accused of killing an Oakland police officer. He was incarcerated for a little while, was released on a technicality, connects with

Fidel Castro's people at the United Nations in New York, right? And then he goes down to Cuba because Castro promises him weapons training and the whole thing. We're going to help you overthrow the American government, right? So he goes down there, right? And Castro sold them a bill of goods, right? They were using those young black people to demonize America. They didn't care about what was going on with them anymore. They care about what's going on with the Palestinians. When Eldridge Cleaver saw this, he gets disillusioned and then he heads off to the other communist regimes. His words on our video, we have him talking about his own journey. About what was going on in these communist countries,

the more I understood that it wasn't just in Cuba that things had gone wrong, but things were wrong in every one of those countries. How he went to Algeria, how he went to both Arabic and European communist or despotic nations, all of which were enemies of the United States and Israel, because he thought that these people were his friends. And of the many things that he experienced, Jan, was slavery. In Algeria, he saw for the first time ever with his own eyes, black African slaves. And then he saw them in other countries as well. He's going, wait a minute,

how are you our friends and you enslave people who look like me? You call them a BG. What's going on here? And slowly but surely, he saw that in as imperfect as the criminal justice system was in America, there in these different nations, there's no criminal justice. And they would just line people up on the wall and shoot them if they accused them of something. We just knocked down somebody's house. He said, I started to miss the Oakland police. People started laughing in the audience. He said, don't get me wrong. I'm still against police brutality. He said, but now I'm understanding a little bit more of what happens in the world in these communist regimes that I thought were my friends. I thought they were concerned about human

rights. And what they were concerned about was demonizing the United States. From Yasser Arafat, he also learned the whole PLO thing, that that struggle was parallel. Just like you're struggling here in the United States, this is again what the Jews are doing to us in the land. And so he started talking against the Zionists. Zionists are our enemies. We stand against the watchdogs of imperialism, the whole thing. But as he got red-pilled, not only did he see that what was being told to him was wrong, he understood even further in a deeper dive of the very close relationship between the Jewish and black community, Israel as a democracy that is doing great good in the world. He came back after seven years of this odyssey, he came back staunch Zionist. He's writing articles. He's condemning the UN for condemning Israel.

It was complete change. He started reaching out to his former colleagues, those on the far left. And he didn't die until like the 1980s, I believe it was. But he spent much of that time telling the people what he had learned. Many people didn't get to experience it the way he did, to be on one side and completely go to the other side. Eldridge Cleaver was that kind of person. You would try to show him the city. He would leave your tour group and go off into the highways and the byways and talk to the people himself. That's just the kind of person that he was. So in Cuba, he talked to Cubans. He stopped talking to Fidel Castro's minions. He talked to people who were like, it's terrible here. If I

could leave, I would. So he started seeing that everywhere. He said in every communist country that he went to, he saw the same oppression. He said, this is not what people are making out to be. This is what's going on now. These young people are being sold this thing, which includes anti-Zionism, because they're being deceived. Eldridge Cleaver, for us, is an example of what happens when someone sees the truth. And one of the things our organization does is we give the full story. Here's what's really going on. Who's Hamas? Who's the Palestinian Authority?

Who's Fatah? Who's Mahmoud Abbas? Who was Yasser Arafat? Why is Khaled Mashael, the leader of Hamas, worth $6 billion, the last count? What's actually going on? And we talked about BLM. BLM was formed in the mindset of the pre-red-pilled Eldridge Cleaver. They are giving a version of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that is not only not true, but it's simply a cover

for Hamas. It is a cover. You are doing PR for terrorists because you're not concerned about the honor killings. You're not concerned about the fact that gays get thrown off the rooftops in Gaza. You're not concerned. People of Gaza have regularly protested Hamas to their peril. As you know, this is a totalitarian regime. You don't get to make signs and march and, you know, we want peace, we want justice. No. So they do it knowing they're going to be incarcerated, tortured, or killed.

That's a level of bravery that's there, right? People in Gaza get on rickety boats and sail in the Mediterranean trying to get somewhere in Europe so they can be free. Where's BLM, right? When these people were being arrested and tortured, they have these torture facilities sometimes right next to school. The kids can hear the people being tortured in Gaza. These guys are screaming out because Hamas is torturing them. Where's BLM? Where are they when these types of human rights abuses are happening on a daily basis, right? They have that mindset like Eldridge

Cleaver had until he got red-pilled when he realized that maybe the PLO is not our friends as a black people. Maybe they're not the friends of the Palestinian people. Maybe they are terrorists. Maybe they're just trying to destroy Israel and they're using us as pawns in this game. Absolutely fascinating discussion, Umesani. Thank you. Any final thoughts as we finish? Well, just again, I thank you for having the conversation. I think that it is important. I think it's timely. Those of us in this Israel space, especially, we do Israel Africa work and everything. We're aware of these issues, but we recognize that the vast majority of people aren't people their lives are busy so i think it's

important for them to have access to information that's beyond the boilerplate beyond the hashtag right that they can actually a little bit do a little bit deeper dive so i want to thank you for giving us the opportunity and hopefully people will kind of go a bit further and find out some more for themselves too well dumas sandy washington it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you, Jan. Thank you for having me. Thank you all for joining Dumasani Washington and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.