Leaders of the Lynch Mob

My article in today's FrontPage magazine:

Leaders of the Lynch Mob

By Matthew Vadum

Leaders of the “Black Lives Matter” movement are obliquely endorsing killing cops and rioting as legitimate forms of political activism as the radical community organizers of the so-called Black Spring ramp up political violence and civil unrest.

For example, on-the-record statements by Twitter stars DeRay Mckesson, 29 and Johnetta Elzie, 26, are all over the Internet. Mckesson (Twitter handle: @deray) and Elzie (Twitter handle: @Nettaaaaaaaa) are influential activists who have become legacy-media darlings by using social media to push their racial-grievance agenda.

A very long, fawning profile of the duo by writer Jay Caspian Kang, who in his day job is an editor at The New Yorker magazine, elucidates what they believe.

Both of these community organizers bounce between reverence for nonviolent action and a refusal to condemn violent activism, which this writer would argue is tantamount to endorsing violent activism.

Mckesson and Elzie believe that the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. has been distorted.

“He is held up as an avatar of genteel protest,” Kang writes, “invoked by conservative politicians and leaders in the black community as a way to discredit their movement.”

But they “frequently point out that King was in fact a revolutionary who believed in the power of confrontation, and that it’s a crime against American history to confuse the real King with an appealingly passive one,” Kang writes.

“To make their point, they participated in an action called #ReclaimMLK, which sought to counter ‘efforts to reduce a long history marred with the blood of countless women and men into iconic images of men in suits behind pulpits.'”

“If you bring up nonviolence as the only civilized way to effect change, they will recite King’s words: ‘A riot is the language of the unheard,’ or they will say they don’t condone rioting, but they understand it,” he writes.

The New York Times Magazine notes, almost in passing, that respected activist Ashley Yates “created T-shirts and hoodies that read ‘ASSATA TAUGHT ME’ — a reference to the former Black Panther Party member Assata Shakur — and that became part of the protest iconography.”

Understandably, the article doesn’t bother to explain the historical significance of Shakur, a black fugitive from American justice who was long ago granted asylum by Communist Cuba. Doing so would disrupt the narrative that dogmatically reinforces the idea that Black Lives Matter must be viewed by all as a noble, nonviolent movement and that any suggestion to the contrary is inherently malevolent and racist. The left effected the same kind of whitewash with the rapists and fire-bombers of the ridiculously violent Occupy Wall Street movement even in the face of overwhelming evidence of rampant criminality among its activists and supporters.

Taking Cuba Off State Sponsor of Terrorism List

My FrontPage magazine article today:

Taking Cuba Off State Sponsor of Terrorism List

By Matthew Vadum

President Obama wielded his pen yesterday to begin the process of removing the longstanding U.S. designation of Communist Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism, a move that pushes the U.S. closer to restoring full diplomatic ties with the brutal Caribbean dictatorship.

Obama’s action comes as watchdog group Judicial Watch yesterday claimed ^[1] that America has a terrorist problem closer to home than Cuba which is 90 miles away from the U.S. coast in Florida.

The group says the Muslim terrorists of Islamic State (a.k.a. ISIS or ISIL) are operating a camp about eight miles from the U.S. border near El Paso, Texas. The base is located in an area called Anapra which is west of Ciudad Juárez in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Another Islamic State cell is located in Puerto Palomas and is targeting Columbus and Deming, N.M., for easy access to the U.S. Sources for the information include a Mexican Army field grade officer and a Mexican Federal Police Inspector, according to Judicial Watch.

It is unclear what, if anything, the Obama administration is doing about this.

Meanwhile, in a written message to Congress, Obama formally certified, as required under federal law, that “the government of Cuba has not provided any support for international terrorism during the preceding six-month period,” and “has provided assurances that it will not support acts of international terrorism in the future.”

This is, of course, at odds with reality.

Cuba is a longtime state sponsor of terrorism and has meddled militarily and otherwise in the affairs of its neighbors and in faraway countries such as the African nation of Angola. The State Department labeled Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism in 1982, citing “Fidel Castro’s training and arming of communist rebels in Africa and Latin America.” President Reagan ordered an invasion of Grenada after its Marxist dictatorship grew too close to Cuba and he struggled heroically to aid the anticommunist contras in their war against the Cuban-backed Communist regime in Nicaragua.

More recently Cuba has provided support to the Marxist narco-trafficking terrorists of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and has aided Venezuela’s communist dictators. FARC, in turn, reportedly has ties to al-Qaeda in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). The State Department acknowledged last year that Cuba has long been a haven for members of FARC and the Basque Fatherland and Liberty (ETA).

Berkeley Radicals Want to Honor Cop-Killing Communist

My article in today's FrontPage magazine:

Berkeley Radicals Want to Honor Cop-Killing Communist

By Matthew Vadum

Disgruntled black students at the University of California at Berkeley are demanding a campus building be named after convicted cop-killing terrorist and fugitive from justice, Assata Shakur.

The reason for the demand? In the stated opinion of the school’s Black Student Union, blacks are disrespected on campus. BSU member Cori McGowens told reporters that “trying to excel academically is immensely difficult while coping with the issue of antiblackness on campus.”

“It troubles me that I have already been told countless times that antiblackness is not an issue to discuss within the context of the American political system,” said McGowens, a political science major. “My professors and graduate-student instructors have told me that I shouldn’t bring up the politics of race and the reality of my black experience.”

That politically correct, ultra-leftist UC Berkeley would be infected by “antiblackness” or that teachers there would tell any student of color to shut up about race is nearly impossible to believe. Viewing America through the Marxist lens of race, sex, and class, is all that today’s predominantly leftist academics spend their time doing. Professors can’t stop talking about race or any of the picayune peeves about which the Left constantly obsesses.

But the Black Student Union maintains that somehow black students on that campus are victims of oppression and feel isolated. To remedy these perceived problems the group delivered a set of 10 demands to Chancellor Nick Dirks. One of the demands is to rename Barrows Hall, home to Ethnic Studies, Women’s Studies, and African American Studies, to honor communist murderer Shakur.

Dirks sent out a letter pandering to the students.

“Too many students have told us about being excluded from study groups, ignored during class discussions, verbally harassed at parties and social events, and feeling, in a general sense, vulnerable, isolated, and invisible,” he wrote. “This is something we deplore.”

He added that Berkeley’s black students “feel the least respected of any group on campus” according to a survey taken last year.

According to a San Francisco Chronicle article that actually takes the students’ bratty-sounding complaints seriously,

“The demands include hiring nine people, including two black psychologists experienced in racial discrimination and advisers to recruit and mentor black students and student athletes; creating an African American Student Resource Center; and — in a different vein — renaming a building after Assata Shakur, a former Black Panther and the first woman on the FBI’s list of Most Wanted Terrorists.”

Why Shakur? Because she’s a role model in the eyes of radicals.