Darnell Moore

In January 2012, Moore was a member of America’s first “LGBTQ Delegation to Palestine” organized by anti-Israel activist Sarah Schulman.

Moore has written numerous articles for the anti-Israel Mondoweiss website. He is Editor-at-Large at CASSIUS, co-managing editor at The Feminist Wire and writer-in-residence at the Center on African American Religion, Sexual Politics and Social Justice at Columbia University (Columbia).  

Moore is also an activist and co-organizer of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Demonizing Israel

In January 2012, Moore travelled to Israel as a member of the first United States “LGBTQ Delegation to Palestine.”

Following the trip, Moore wrote a number of essays calling for BDS and linking the struggles of black Americans to Palestinian “queer struggles.”

In one essay published on January 26, 2012, Moore accused Israel of “colonization” and linked Palestinians to a queer struggle, writing: “What’s queer about the Palestinian struggle for liberation? And, answer: Every(damn)thing is queer about the Palestinian struggle for liberation!”

Moore concluded his essay by declaring that the “Palestinian quest for self-determination is a queer fight.”

Moore also drafted a letter on January 26, 2012, titled “An Open Letter to LGBTQ Communities and Allies on the Israeli Occupation of Palestine.”

The letter, signed by the members of the 2012 LGBTQ delegation, called for BDS and issued support for “the liberation of the Palestinian people from the project of Israeli occupation.”

The letter added that “[w]e also understand that liberation from this form of colonization and apartheid goes hand in hand with the liberation of queer Palestinians from the project of global heterosexism.”

In a January 27, 2012 essay that Moore co-authored titled “Our Eyes Witnessed: On People of Color in the United States and The Palestinian BDS Movement”, the authors claimed that the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) manipulates “black and brown college students” to defend Israel.

The authors also accused Israel of practicing apartheid and enforcing “Jim Crow segregation” — a claim Moore reiterated by signing a statement titled “African Americans Affirming the Jim Crow analogy in Palestine/Israel.” The authors concluded their essay by calling for BDS.

In a March 2012 essay titled “The Occupation Stole My Words, June Jordan Helped me to Relocate Them”, Moore shared a poem that accused Israel of exterminating Palestinians and wrote that “I had become a Palestinian, though, I had been a Palestinian all along”.

In a 2014 essay, co-authored with anti-Israel activist Sa’ed Atshan, the authors wrote about “the work of reciprocal solidarity between Black Americans and Palestinians”, and revealed that “the purpose of the [2012 LGBTQ] delegation was not only to connect queer Americans and Palestinians….but also to further establish networks to undermine pinkwashing campaigns, and the cooptation of queer Western movements by the Israeli state’s political project.”

The authors accused Israel of “blackwashing” — “a term employed by Palestinian solidarity activists to describe the campaign on the part of the Israeli state to co-opt Black Americans to support Israeli policies.” The authors also accused Israeli consulates of using “African-Americans… as strategic targets in a similar manner as LGBT communities.”

The authors then accused Israel of appropriating “[b]lack bodies” and instituting a “pervasive anti-Black racism and a racial hierarchy in Israel” to abuse Israel’s Ethiopian community, and repeated a libel that Israel forcibly injected Ethiopians with birth control, a claim that was based on a flawed report by Ha’aretz. 

In August of 2015, Moore signed a statement accusing Israel of “ethnic cleansing”, “apartheid”, “settler colonialism” and repeating the libel that Israel sterilized Ethiopians.  
Moore has also used Twitter and Facebook to demonize Israel.

BDS

The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement was founded by Omar Barghouti in 2005 to challenge “international support for Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism.” BDS is an allegedly “Palestinian-led movement,” although leading BDS activists have admitted [00:01:01] this is not true. 

One of the demands of BDS includes [point 3] what is generally known as the “right of return,” a demand discredited as a way to eliminate Israel. Barghouti said the “right of return” is a means to “end Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.”  

Barghouti has said that BDS “aims to turn Israel into a pariah state, as South Africa once was.”

In his activism, Barghouti has also said [00:05:55] regarding Israel: “Definitely, most definitely, we oppose a Jewish state in any part of Palestine. No…rational Palestinian, not a sellout Palestinian, will ever accept a Jewish state in Palestine.”

The movement has been linked to numerous terrorist organizations and received a public endorsement from Hamas in 2017.

BDS initiatives include calling on institutions and individuals to divest from Israeli-affiliated companies, promoting academic and cultural boycotts of Israel, and organizing anti-Israel rallies, protests and campaigns.

The movement’s most notable achievement has been the infiltration of university campuses through lobbying for “BDS resolutions.” In these cases, student governments and student groups, backed by their own anti-Israel members and affiliates, have proposed resolutions on some form of boycott of, or divestment from, Israel and Israeli-affiliated entities.

Boycott resolutions, although non-binding, have been passed by student governments on numerous North American campuses.

BDS activity is often aggressive and disruptive. It has been noted that universities that pass BDS resolutions see a marked increase in anti-Semitic incidents on campus. On one campus, when the student government debated a BDS resolution, reports emerged of violent threats against those opposing it.

Social Media and Weblinks

Website:http://darnellmoore.squarespace.com/home/