The outcome of all these movements is a vicious anti-Semitism. And while many black nationalists, such as Nation of Islam, remain mostly nonviolent in nature, their innate anti-Semitism is echoed in more violent terms among related movements such as the Black Hebrew Israelites, who have been connected to a number of violent incidents around the U.S. for some time.
The most notorious illustration of this was a speech given by NOI’s Louis Farrakhan in 2015 in which he responded to recent police shootings of black people by apparently urging violent retaliation: “Retaliation is a prescription from God to calm the breasts of those whose children have been slain … So if the federal government will not intercede in our affairs, then we must rise up and kill those who kill us; stalk them and kill them and let them feel the pain of death that we are feeling!”
And yet while black nationalists, including the Nation of Islam, share many structural similarities to their white-supremacist counterparts, they are not, as the Southern Poverty Law Center explains, analogous to them: “They should not be seen as equivalent to white supremacist groups—such as the Ku Klux Klan or neo-Nazis—in terms of their history of violence and terrorism.” Nor are their numbers even comparable; black nationalists comprise a tiny fringe with membership in the low thousands, compared to the multiple hundreds of thousands like engaged in right-wing extremist movements, particularly online.
Moreover, their hatred and paranoia about white people—unlike, say, white-nationalist fears of a looming “white genocide” that have fueled the recent wave of far-right violence—and their ability to inflict grievous harm on the African-American community is at least grounded in historical factual reality. Black extremism, in fact, is a reaction to real and brutal oppression.
Black Hebrew Israelites have been ratcheting up both their rhetoric and their real-world violence over the past decade. One of the most recent incidents, in October 2018, involved a Black Israelite in Miami who attacked worshippers at a synagogue with a knife, though no one was injured.
The movement was in the news earlier this year when a group of red-MAGA-hatted white teenagers became embroiled in a confrontation in Washington, D.C., with a cluster of Black Hebrew Israelites who shouted bigoted slogans at each other, while a Native American man beating a drum attempted to break up the confrontation. The brouhaha was captured in a video that went viral, especially after the white teens mocked the drummer as well.
A spokesman for the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Hebrew Israelites denounced Tuesday’s violence. “Everybody expects us to be violent because the things we are talking about are so horrible, what has happened to us in America. They just assume we’re going to be street thugs and criminals," Commanding General Yahanna of the Israelite School of Universal Practical Knowledge told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “We pull brothers out of prison and off the street and turn their lives around, have them open a Bible.”
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