The Hypocrites Who 'Fight' Antisemitism

and cause more problems between Blacks and Jews

Over my 30+ years of preaching and pastoring, I developed a saying for the congregation whenever the sermon was going to be tough; I don’t want to offend you. I just love you enough to not care if you’re offended. The Institute for Black Solidarity with Israel (IBSI) must tell the ugly truth about the Kyrie Irving/Hebrew to Negroes controversy, and we are too passionate about the issue of authentic Black-Jewish/Africa-Israel solidarity to care who may be offended.

The NBA, the Brooklyn Nets, Nike, and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) are determined to make an example of Nets star, Kyrie Irving for sharing the link to an anti-Jewish film available on Amazon) entitled Hebrew to Negroes: Wake Up Black America on his Twitter account. Yesterday, I rented and watched all three and a half hours of the film. In the interest of time and length of this piece, I refer everyone to Sporting News author, Gilbert McGregor’s article for an accurate Kyrie/NBA/ADL synopsis. Suffice to say that Hebrew to Negroes is a woefully unacademic, agenda-driven film that basically states that people of African descent — specifically, the descendants of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade — are the real Israelites or Hebrews and that “Sephardic, Ashkenazi, and Mizrahi Jews…are just religious converts with no biblical blood connection to the ancient twelve tribes of Israel.” The film goes on to ask:

If the Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews falsely claimed that they are from the tribe of Judah, Benjamin and Levi, why did they decide to STEAL the identity of the REAL Israelites they sold into slavery? (capitalized empahsis theirs).

Finally, of all people, the film “includes a fabricated quote from Adolph (sic) Hitler.” In my opinion, Hebrew to Negroes is the radical Black Hebrew Israelite version of the 1991, antisemitic The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews promoted by America’s chief antisemite, Louis Farrakhan.

According to Senior lead NBA Insider for The Athletic and Stadium Shams Charania, the, Brookly Nets delivered Kyrie Irving six items he must complete to return to team:

• Apologize/condemn movie

• $500K donation to anti-hate causes

• Sensitivity training

• Antisemitic training

• Meet with ADL (Anti-Defamation League), Jewish leaders

• Meet with (Nets owner) Joe Tsai to demonstrate understanding

Before addressing the Irving/NBA/ADL debacle, let me clearly and unequivocally state that Hebrew to Negroes is Jew-hating propaganda. This constant question of the Jewish people’s identity, and accusing them of stealing someone else’s identity, is the vitriol that precedes genocides. As I explain on Twitter:

The film definitely touches on Israelite tribes/customs throughout Africa. It is helpful in that regard if disjunct in its approach (jumping from the Assyrian invasion to the TransAtlantic Slave Trade nearly [2,300] years later). The film just attempts to connect African Hebrew presence with the delegitimization of other parts of the Jewish diaspora — especially in Europe. Most dangerously, it blames…Ashkenazim and Sephardim for (African) slavery and the dispossession of African Israelites. Quoting Hitler (falsely) and Henry Ford (Hitler lover) was simply evil and, almost single-handedly disqualifies the film from any serious consideration.

Despite being only 2.4% of the population, the Jewish people are the most targeted ethnic group in the nation. Antisemitism and Israel-hatred spew everywhere from the halls of Congress to college campuses to social media, we live in dark times. The data is clear. And beyond the numbers, IBSI and other pro-Israel organizations have an abundance of anecdotal evidence that Jews are increasingly unsafe in the freest most liberal democracy in the world.

While Hebrew to Negroes appears to be intentionally invective toward Jews and damaging to the Black-Jewish relationship, I can draw no such conclusion regarding Kyrie Irving. I say this based on Irving’s own words including his awkward if lacking initial apology. Still, Irving is a star athlete in the premier and most elite professional sports league on the planet. The NBA has been a fixture on the international stage since the 1992, Michael Jordan-led U.S. Olympic Dream Team. So, NBA players and coaches live in a fishbowl. Everything they say and do is watched and analyzed 24/7. Therefore, each NBA representative must take full responsibility for what he or she says and does, especially in public and on social media. Sharing an antisemitic video on one’s personal social media account — regardless if the video is available on the world’s most popular streaming service — will rightly result in serious consequences. Imagine the blowback to a star White/European NBA player sharing the link to D. W. Griffith’s KKK-glorifying The Birth of a Nation (also available on Amazon). That player would likely already be fired, and virtually no one would lose sleep over it.

However, it is important that we operate with the utmost integrity, especially in such perilous times. IBSI has sought to be consistent in calling out the people and entities mainstreaming the hatred of Jews and Israel in our nation. One of the entities that have not gotten nearly the amount of scrutiny and condemnation it deserves is the progressive darling #BlackLivesMatter.

Appropriately, the NBA issued this statement about the Kyrie situation on October 29th:

Hate speech of any kind is unacceptable and runs counter to the NBA's values of equality, inclusion and respect. We believe we all have a role to play in ensuring such words or ideas, including antisemitic ones, are challenged and refuted and we will continue working with all members of the NBA community to ensure that everyone understands the impact of their words and actions.

Where is the NBA’s robust denunciation of the rabidly antisemitic, anti-Israel BlackLivesMatter, a movement and organization it has prominently featured and supported since 2020? Surely, the NBA painting BLACK LIVES MATTER on its basketball courts would qualify BLM as one of the “members of the NBA community,” if only an honorary one. And for those there’s-a-difference-between-BLM-the-organization-and-BLM-the-movement folk, that deception is a BLM-created feature, not a flaw.

Being an admittedly Marxist organization, BLM thrives on disinformation, which includes its name. Most people…cannot distinguish between the phrase Black Lives Matter, the Movement for Black Lives manifesto, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation…or the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter.

If the NBA believes that “we all have a role to play” in challenging antisemitic “words and ideas,” consider BLM’s antisemitic words and ideas.

BLM Co-Founder, Patrisse Cullors: If we don't step up boldly and courageously to end the imperialist project that's called Israel, we're doomed.

BLM Member, Marc Lamont Hill: Black Lives Matter, very explicitly, is talking about the dismantling of the Zionist project.

Observe how those BLM members’ words closely resemble those of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei:

Our stance against Israel is the same stance we have always taken. Israel is a malignant cancerous tumor in the West Asian region that has to be removed and eradicated: it is possible and it will happen.

Unlike BLM and the ayatollah regime, Kyrie Irving has not called for the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel. Neither has he led attacks on Jewish neighborhoods from New York to Los Angeles. The following excerpt is from The LA Black Lives Matter Rally That Became a Pogrom by Daniel Greenfield.

“It’s no coincidence that the riots here escalated in Fairfax, the icon of the Jewish community. I saw the Watts and the Rodney King riots. They never touched a synagogue or house of prayer. The graffiti showed blatant antisemitism. It’s Kristallnacht all over again,” Rabbi Shimon Raichik, a Chabad Rabbi in Los Angeles, wrote.

Allyson Rowen Taylor, the former Associate Director of the American Jewish Congress in LA, and a co-founder of StandWithUs, passed on an account of hearing chants of, “F___ the police and kill the Jews.”

“The antisemitic chants are not being widely reported.  This is insane and very, very scary,” she noted.

The looting not only devastated countless small businesses in the area, but graffiti, some of it explicitly anti-Semitic, was scrawled across at least 5 Orthodox Jewish synagogues and 3 religious schools.

Melina Abdullah, the lead organizer of Black Lives Matter in LA and a professor of Pan-African Studies at Cal State, had been very clear about her motive for bringing her hateful campaign to the area.

“We’ve been very deliberate in saying that the violence and pain and hurt that’s experienced on a daily basis by black folks at the hands of a repressive system should also be visited upon, to a degree, to those who think that they can just retreat to white [read: Jewish] affluence,” the BLM-LA co-founder ranted.

If “hate speech of any kind is unacceptable and runs counter to the NBA's values of equality, inclusion and respect,” where is the NBA's condemnation of BLM’s assaults against Jews in America? Why is the NBA not only ignoring BLM’s Jew-hatred but helping to fund and promote it?

The league said the charity would be public and that the foundation would work to deepen “the NBA family’s commitment to racial equality and social justice.” Those missions have been front-and-center at the restart at Walt Disney World, where games are played on courts with “Black Lives Matter” painted on them.

The ADL initially accepted and then rejected a $500,000 donation from Kyrie Irving after his Hebrew to Negroes offense. Ironically, it was the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt that enabled BLM to receive such largess from corporations like the NBA and Nike. Writing for Tablet Magazine, Liel Leibovitz states:

[Greenblatt was] a perfect fit for the Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation, a creation of the Obama administration basically designed to allow the White House to quarterback the donations to, and the investments of, a wide swath of America’s enormous nonprofit sector. Rather than having NGOs operate distinctly, the apparent idea was for the administration to issue marching orders, set agendas, and apply enough pressure for corporations and the donor class to follow suit. If you want to see this synergy of corporate America, social causes, and the Democrat Party in action, just look at the Black Lives Matter movement, which has, to date, raised $49.5 billion in pledged corporate dollars without delivering anything by way of transparency or accountability.

In his May 2022 JNS piece, How Jewish support for ‘anti-racism’ empowered anti-Semitism, Jonathan Tobin said:

Major groups like the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and the Anti-Defamation League, as well as some of the major religious denominations, were…willing to lend support to a Black Lives Matter movement that had gone mainstream after spending its first years [2013-2015] as a marginalized radical force.

Legitimizing such a movement may not have been the intention of the Jewish leaders who signed declarations supporting BLM. Racism is terrible and opposing it is laudable. But by going along with the mob mentality that embraced the “1619” lies and legitimized a heretofore radical BLM movement, that’s exactly what they helped foster. Some, like the ADL, are not only unrepentant, but doubling down on their rhetoric about “white supremacy” instead of focusing their considerable influence on combating the BLM movement. That many of them also attacked and sought to treat those Jews who spoke up against it, such as the Zionist Organization of America, as beyond the pale is even more disgraceful.

Bearing all of this in mind, it is incredible that the NBA and ADL are taking Kyrie Irving to task for sharing the link to an antisemitic video. The term disproportionate response does not even begin to cover it. Why the NBA and ADL are choosing a public flogging of Irving while ignoring (or supporting) much more grave, intentional threats to the Jewish people is anyone’s guess. IBSI will not speculate. What we will say is that, even among Black supporters of Israel and the Jewish people, eyebrows are being raised. For IBSI’s part, our work combatting antisemitic yet progressive preferred Critical Race Theory, Critical Ethnic Studies, and Black Lives Matter is a constant reminder that what drives all too many efforts in this space is politics, not peace.

What IBSI will continue to do is strengthen the Black-Jewish, Africa-Israel alliance in every way that we possibly can. We will gladly do this in partnership with other like-minded individuals and organizations, both Jewish and non-Jewish. What we are not going to do is be silent as someone from the Black community is offered as a sacrificial lamb under the guise of combatting antisemitism while much more lethal attacks on the Jewish people go unaddressed or even praised. If that position is offensive or unacceptable to anyone then, with all due respect, perhaps we are not the organization with which you should partner. We will not sacrifice our integrity to achieve our objective of solidarity any more than we would expect someone to do that on our behalf.