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On October 9, BLM Grassroots, a popular Black Lives Matter organization, showed its support for Palestinians in the wake of the ongoing conflict with Israel. In fact, they took to Instagram to share a five-slide post which was captioned:
“Black Lives Matter Grassroots statement in solidarity with the Palestinian people.”
The BLM Grassroots Instagram post proclaimed that they side with the Palestinians as they “have been subject to decades of apartheid and unimaginable violence.” It further continued how “their resistance must not be condemned, but understood as a desperate act of self-defense.”
As soon as the BLM Grassroots post became viral, it sparked mass outrage online.
Disclaimer: This article contains visual and textual references to the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict.
BLM Grassroots is based in Los Angeles
BLM Grassroots was founded in 2012 and is based in Los Angeles, California. As per its official website, it is a Black Lives Matter movement organization affiliated with the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. Currently, the leader and co-director of BLM Grassroots is activist Melina Abdullah.
The organization serves as “an assembly of official Black Lives Matter chapters focused on local, grassroots level work.”
Although it was founded in 2012, BLM Grassroots rose to fame in July 2013, when it protested against the murder of 17-year-old Black teenager Trayvon Martin, alongside white supremacists. Later, in 2020, the organization took the Black Lives Movement forward after the death of other Black individuals, including Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd.
In fact, it deployed more than two dozen groups and active chapters on the ground, to help the Black community in grassroots organizing, movement infrastructure, and a radical vision to encourage a discrimination-free future.
Its mission is to support, sustain, empower, uplift, and advocate for equal rights and opportunities for the African-American community across local and global levels.
Twitteratti puts BLM Grassroots under fire for supporting Palestinians amid Israel-Hamas conflict
On Monday, BLM Grassroots posted a solidarity message for Palestinians on their official Instagram account. The post began by saying how everyone desires and prays for a world full of peace, but in a time of crisis, such as the Israel-Hamas conflict, it is important to “stand unwaveringly on the side of the oppressed [Palestinians].”
The post further continued by saying that Palestinians have been exposed to violence, colonialism, and apartheid for over seven decades, and the current attack by Hamas on Israel was “a desperate act of self-defense.” The post then drew a clear parallel between Black people reportedly oppressed in the USA and the Palestinians allegedly oppressed by Israelis:
“As Black people continue the fight to end militarism and mass incarceration in our own communities, let us understand the resistance in Palestine as an attempt to tear down the gates of the world’s largest open-air prison.”
In addition, the BLM Grassroots post mentioned how African Americans understood the meaning of being under surveillance, dehumanized, exposed to seizure of property, separation of families, and much more.
“We, too, dream of a world where our people may live freely on decolonized land. May the borders, checkpoints, prisons, police, and watchlists that terrorize our communities crumble and may the world we build from their ashes honor those who have fallen in struggle.”
Towards the end, the post urged that the “war” on Palestine be ended and also called upon the U.S. government to “immediately stop funding…the Israeli military,” and rather redirect the budget to “repair the damage caused by U.S. backed wars, military air strikes, coups, and destabilizing interventions against oppressed people around the world.”
Since the post surfaced on the internet, it earned massive backlash from social media users.
So far, the organization has not responded to the backlash.
For those uninitiated, the Israel-Hamas conflict began on Saturday, October 7, when the Hamas group launched an attack on Israeli soil, and the latter responded with a counterstrike. So far, the death toll stands over 1,350 on both sides of the Gaza border, with nearly 3,000 injured.
