David Swindle, writing for Campus Watch, points to Randolph-Macon College history professor Michael R. Fischbach’s new book, Black Power and Palestine: Transnational Countries of Color, as an example of “the intersectionality paradigm that has come to dominate academic study of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
Swindle attended Fischbach’s lecture at UCLA’s Center for Near Eastern Studies and found that, whether it was the Black Power movement or traditional civil rights activists such as Martin Luther King Jr., Fischbach promoted a narrative of Black-Palestinian solidarity at the expense of the Jewish state.
His article appears at the American Spectator.
The professor began his presentation to a small group of 16 attendees — mostly graduate students and younger faculty — with a string of well-worn anecdotes about the supposed depth of solidarity between African Americans and Palestinians today. In 2013, an American activist claimed to have seen a Palestinian mural of Trayvon Martin. During the August 2014 unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, a number of Palestinians posted tips about combating the effects of tear gas. In 2015, anti-Zionist campaigners managed to put just over a thousand African American signatures on a “Black Solidarity Statement.” But the icing on the cake, which Fischbach played to the audience in its entirety, was the 2014 music video “Checkpoint” by the obscure rapper Jasiri X, an angry tract with spurious apartheid comparisons and calls for a “free Palestine” that has managed to garner just 66,911 views on YouTube in the past five years despite zealous promotion by anti-Israel activists everywhere.
