On Feb. 15, 2022, NPR member station WXXI in Rochester, NY, aired a biased and inflammatory segment of the program “Connections with Evan Dawson.” The episode was headlined “Discussing the motivations bringing Black Americans to the Palestinian cause,” and the participants were four anti-Zionist activists finding common cause between the Black Lives Matter mission in the U.S. and Palestinian, anti-Zionist activists in Israel. Both were cast as liberation movements against imperialists, colonialists, white supremacists and racists. 

Indeed, the anti-Zionist Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement has long sought to attach itself to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and garner support among black activists.  BDS activist Ahmad Abuznaid co-founded a BLM-affiliated group, Dream Defenders, from which he urged black activists to follow in the footsteps Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and other Black Power radicals who were extreme anti-Zionists — Stokely Carmichael famously declared “the only good Zionist is a dead Zionist” — and called for re-establishing and fortifying the relationship between anti-Zionists and the new black American leaders in the “fight for liberation.”  

Abuznaid recruited black activists to join his “Delegations to Palestine” to meet with BDS co-founder Omar Barghouti and embrace the BDS movement. His efforts succeeded, resulting in a  2015 publicly issued “Black Solidarity statement with Palestinians” using the jargon associated with eliminating the Jewish state – buzz-words like Palestinian liberation and settler colonialism.  Even before the BLM movement emerged as the leading black rights movement in the US following the 2020 killing of George Floyd, its co-founder and (later to become) executive director Patrisse Cullors called on her followers to “end the imperialist project that’s called Israel” – in other words, eliminate the Jewish state.   

The NPR program neither explored this background nor aired a nuanced discussion, debate or diverse views on the topic. Instead, the show featured the mendacious propaganda of Iman Abid-Thompson, recently appointed National Director of Advocacy and Organizing at the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR), the American branch of the BDS movement that seeks the elimination of the Jewish state.  

The nature of anti-Zionist activism today, as exemplified by the BDS movement is both, in effect and intent, anti-Semitic in that it denies nationhood and a homeland to the Jews, singles out Israel as a Jewish collective for defamation, holding it to standards that don’t apply to any other country, and  serves as a cover for anti-Semites to express classic-Semitism under the guise of criticizing Israel or supporting Palestinian rights. 

Abid-Thompson used the program as a platform to express her extremist views and those views were bolstered by progressive Brighton Town board member Robin Wilt.  Joining them was former Black Panther member Jalil Muntaqim, introduced as a community organizer, and a local Palestinian-American student, Jonathan Khoury, an acquaintance/friend of Iman Abid and a fellow activist.  

Removing agency and responsibility for the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Abid-Thompson insisted the term “conflict” has been “completely destroyed as a term we should be using” and that it should be reframed as a Palestinian liberation movement struggling to free itself from an evil imperialist-colonialist apartheid state, i.e. the Jewish state.   

This is not the first time that Dawson has featured Iman Abid promoting BDS and attacking legislation against it. On January 15, 2019, WXXI aired an episode of the Evan Dawson program, entitled “The Debate Over BDS.” And while the former CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Rochester, Larry Fine, was brought on as a counterweight to Abid’s pro-BDS rhetoric, he, like Abid, expressed opposition to anti-BDS legislation. Now, two years later, Dawson does not even bother with the pretense of providing balance.   

WXXI listeners and Rochester residents must beware: Rochester BDS activists are amplifying their vilification campaign against the  Jewish state with the help of the local NPR station!

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