Nicolás Maduro with Opal Tometi (right), co-founder of Black Lives Matter, in Harlem, New York. (Flickr)
The organization’s founders are avowed Marxists, more interested in ideology than in solving racial inequality.
Black Lives Matter purportedly exists to combat the alleged racism inherent in America’s police forces. Police abuse, and particularly police abuse against black citizens is the raison d’etre of the organization.
Yet, at the PanAm Post we have found that while Black Lives Matter claim to oppose police abuse and racism around the world, the organization is simultaneously a great supporter of some of the world’s most brutal and repressive dictators. In particular, the founders of BLM have been staunch supporters and allies of the sanguinary Venezuela dictator Nicolas Maduro and of the Castro regime in Cuba.
It is ironic that as BLM protest alleged police brutality in the United States, the organization praises a regime known for the brutal practices of its security forces.
In December 2015 Black Lives Matter sent a delegation, headed by the organization’s co-founder, Opal Tometi, to act as observers during the Venezuelan Parliamentary elections of that year. The Maduro regime did not allow accreditation for observers from the Organization of American States, the UN, or the EU. The only accredited observers where from regimes and organizations friendly to the “revolutionary cause.”
Later that same month Tometi penned an article where she espouses, word for word, the regime’s standard text for international propaganda. “In these last 17 years, we have witnessed the Bolivarian Revolution champion participatory democracy and construct a fair, transparent election system recognized as among the best in the world ,” wrote Tometi about one of the world’s most corrupt voting systems in history.
Earlier in 2015 Maduro was given an award at the “Afro-descendants Summit” held in Harlem. Maduro was invited at the behest of the Black Lives Matter leadership.
Scores of Venezuelans have been killed, not while resisting arrest, or while scuffling with the police in demonstrations, but by police snipers under orders to quell demonstrations by providing a few corpses. The best-known case is of former beauty queen, Genesis Carmona, killed by Maduro’s snipers in 2013, two years before Tometi publicly declared her deep admiration for Maduro and his regime.
Reading Tometi’s piece, while remembering the atrocities and inhuman conditions suffered by the Venezuelan people, superbly reported in The New York Times by Meredith Kohut, one realizes that it is not racism that the co-founder of BLM is fighting. This level of cynicism is always a sign of a fanatical adherence to an ideology.
In the case of Black Lives Matter, both its co-founders are fanatical Marxists, and they have publicly admitted as much. Patrice Cullors, Tometi’s colleague in the founding of Black Lives Matter, has publicly admitted to being “a trained Marxist” and “we are super-versed in ideological theory”.
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It is not surprising then that the leaders of this organization simply cannot find anything to criticize when asked about the dictatorships of the left.
On Fidel Castro’s passing, BLM’s global network officially stated: “We are feeling many things as we awaken to a world without Fidel Castro. There is an overwhelming sense of loss, complicated by fear and anxiety.” This, despite the fact that some of the organization’s own members, on returning from a visit to Cuba, wrote: “There is still so much evidence of oppression that was observed by the Black Lives Matter activists towards Black Cubans and diminished by White Cubans.”
It is impossible to deny that racism still exists, not only in the United States but also in Europe and elsewhere. Acting against racism is laudable, and organizations such as the NAACP and others have a well-deserved reputation for having helped improve the lives of people of color in the United States over the last 60 years. However, Black Lives Matter is not one of those organizations.
BLM’s main claim to fame, and its own name are derived from a premise that has been proven to be completely false. Police do not kill proportionally more black men than they do white men. Moreover, the organization has a lot of explaining to do regarding its support and collaboration with murderous and tyrannical regimes, some of which are intent on harming Americans of all colors.
It is truly stunning that some of America’s most renowned business leaders have chosen to ignore the evident and even glaring intent of BLM’s founders to promote Marxism and a so-called “revolution” in the United States, that has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with ideology.
There are 13 organizations with the name Black Lives Matter registered with the IRS as 501-3c charitable organizations. A simple perusal of these public records makes it evident that these organizations are mostly (with a few exceptions) not compliant with IRS regulations for non-profits. This is probably deliberate. It is evident that the organization does not want to reveal its sources of funds nor how it spends them. Yet no one seems to be reporting this fact.
It is unquestionable that racism exists. Black men from the conservative side, such as senator Tim Scott and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas have narrated their own personal experiences facing racist treatment or abuse. It is unfortunate that a radical Marxist movement has been allowed to become the voice of the oppressed.
As long as a group that is cynical enough to condemn police brutality in the United States while simultaneously allying with a murderous regime elsewhere is allowed, and is even supported by America’s richest corporations, to become the image of the struggle for racial equality, success will be a long way off.
Source: PanAm Post
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