A Black activist called out Black Lives Matter chapters he believed were expressing support for Hamas' terrorism against Israeli civilians for embodying an "evil beyond description" in an interview with Fox News Digital.
Pastor Dumisani Washington is the founder of the Institute for Black Solidarity with Israel (IBSI), which strengthens the relationship between Israel and people of African descent through education and advocacy. IBSI also condemns those who push "Zionism is racism" ideology.
"The price that's paid for organizations like Black Lives Matter to feign concern about Baltimore, Oakland, Ferguson… to feign concern only to use those people and even the deaths there to then demonize Israel some 6,000 miles away is an evil beyond description," Washington said. "People are being destroyed for the sake of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism… How are we defending the people of Gaza by celebrating this type of blood and gore?"
Rather than express sympathy for the more than 1,000 Israelis murdered by Hamas terrorists, at least two Black Lives Matter groups declared their support for Palestinians. At least 27 American citizens have been killed, an unknown number are in Hamas captivity and others remain unaccounted for. Between 100 and 150 children, women and men are believed to have been taken hostage by Hamas, although the number could be greater.
BLM Grassroots published a statement to its Instagram page last week, which read, "Black Lives Matter Grassroots stands in solidarity with our Palestinian family who are currently resisting [75] years of settler colonialism and apartheid."
The Chicago Black Lives Matter chapter sparked outrage last week after it posted a graphic of a paraglider with the Palestinian flag that read "I Stand With Palestine." The group has since deleted the post.
Washington said of people who side with the "Palestinian resistance" – in this case often referring to Hamas – on the issue, there's something morally wrong with them.
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"I would challenge those individuals that if they are really people of conscience, really people of justice, who would then either celebrate or even just as bad sit back and be silent while children are killed and abducted. Then the moral problem that they're having is not the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it's them. They would have to look at themselves in the mirror," he said. "If you are someone cosigning on this barbarism in this war, that means some of that blood is on your hands."
Washington also believes that what he says is a reductive and false ideology – critical race theory – is creating a framework in which people see others as less than human, as "oppressors" based on perceived race.
"This type of education, this type of reductive reasoning it's a dehumanization… which is what the Nazis did to the Jews, which is what racists did to Black people. Once you dehumanize somebody, it doesn't matter what you do to them. This is the danger of where we are in our nation right now," he said.
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"Once a victim mentality has been sufficiently transferred into an individual. Everything is game. Everything becomes a revolutionary struggle. Everything becomes [about] breaking the bands of the power of the oppressor," Washington added.
"This is one of the reasons why Black Lives Matter, its leaders, and its ideology will still look at the horrific images that we're seeing and justify it," he continued. "It's 'I don't have to think, I don't have to have real empathy.' I can just affix a label so that even though I'm seeing the horrific things that we're seeing, mothers, children, elderly, I can just look at that as, hey, that's just the price that you pay when people want their freedom. Right? And those are the types of things that are being said."
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Fox News' Kendall Tietz and Gabriel Hays contributed to this report.
