Footage leaked from a censored documentary on Israeli influence in the United States shows Israeli officers gloating about targeting Black Lives Matter and convincing Martin Luther King's friend to write pro-Israeli propaganda.
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Judith Varnai Shorer boasted of a dinner she held with “very important” Black community leaders whom according to her, can be part of Israel’s “activities.”
In the past, Black Lives Matter (BLM) supported the International Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement, a call on Israel to end its illegal occupation of Palestinian lands in 2016. According to the documentary, their adoption of the movement's platform exposed them to the Israeli government's anti-BDS efforts.
Al Jazeera’s censored documentary ‘The Lobby-USA’ released by the Grayzone Project exposed some of these tactics. Due to political pressure, the release of the documentary had been stalled for almost a year. This led to the release of segments of footage by the Grayzone Project and Electronic Intifada.
The footage revealed that right-wing think tanks based in the U.S. arranged staged protests at a pro-Palestinian student conference. It also shows that a U.S. billionaire is behind an anonymous website which targets U.S. students supporting Palestinian rights and attempts to portray them as terrorists.
The latest released segment documents part of the Israel American Council (IAC) conference. An undercover journalist from Al Jazeera attends the IAC conference which is more right wing than the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee. At the conference, Israeli diplomats like Shorer spoke about their concerns with Black Lives Matter.
Andy David, the Israeli consul general in San Francisco, California, told the group present at the conference that he got Martin Luther King’s former lawyer Clarence B. Thomas to become an Israeli ally. He celebrated that, “because of that relationship, [Thomas] published three articles in the Huffington Post explaining why the [BLM’s] agenda was hijacked.”
“Martin Luther King will turn in his grave if he saw the anti-Israel tendencies or policies that are starting to emerge within Black Lives Matter,” David later claimed.
In 2014, Thomas said that King could have been a supporter of Israel as he collected an award at the Israeli consulate in New York.
The cancellation of one of BLM’s fundraiser in a New York nightclub Feinstein’s/54 Below was also a result of the efforts of the Israel Project lobby group’s development director Eric Gallagher as shown in the footage. The venue canceled the fundraiser because of BLM’s opposition to Israel as told by Gallagher to the undercover journalist present at the conference.