Black Community News News and Commentary for Christians
Basketball is back, so is the politics of ignorance. The National Basketball League’s (NBA) has come out swinging in support of “Black Lives Matter,” but its statements of support show a strong ignorance of the movement’s Marxist orientation and goals that include the abolition of Capitalism – the league’s IMHO.
The co-founders of the “Black Lives Matter” movement Alicia Garza and Patrisse Khan-Cullors each have made open statements affirming Marxism and their commitment to its ideals that blame Capitalism for racism. Co-founder Opal Tometi has ties to Venezuela’s brutal Communist dictator Nicolas Maduro, whose police brutality exposes the hypocrisy of the movement. The Left-leaning Human Rights Watch condemned Venezuela in 2017 for engaging in acts of violence and brutality.
“With Fidel’s passing there is one more lesson that stands paramount: when we are rooted in collective vision, when we bind ourselves together around quests for infinite freedom of the body and the soul, we will be victorious,” the official Black Lives Matter Global Network organization wrote in a statement following the Communist dictator’s death.
The Black Lives Matter Syllabus recommended by New York University Professor Frank Leon Roberts endorses the manifesto of the Maoist Black Panther Party; 1979 Lenin Peace Prize winner Angela Davis’ book “Are Prisons Obsolete?” that advocates prison abolition; and works of noted Marxist Princeton professor Cornell West among others.
Telegram channels associated with the movement likewise champion Marxist propaganda. A video posted on Twitter and shared by the Marxist group “Red May” Thursday on a Telegram channel run by “Black Lives Matter” activists described the riots that have plagued the country since Floyd’s death as an “insurgency.”
The NBA has gone full “Useful Idiot.” It has become a propagandistic billboard for this Marxist movement and a conduit for disinformation about the movement’s true goals and aims. (“Useful Idiot” was a term coined by economist Ludwig von Mises as a reference to Liberals who help Communists achieve their aims.)
The NBA’s court at Disney World where the remainder of its games are being played is emblazoned with “Black Lives Matter.” The phrase appears on player uniforms, and its players have knelt during the playing of the national anthem in the wake of George Floyd’s tragic death in May.
The league’s 2020 handbook states the season’s “Central goal” is to “bring attention and sustained action to issues of social injustice, including combating systemic racism, expanding educational and economic opportunities across the black community, enacting meaningful police and criminal justice reform and promoting greater civic engagement.”
This rhetoric rings hypocritical in the light of the Houston Rockets’ recent kowtowing to the People’s Republic of China. (Kowtowing was a gesture of submission to the Chinese emperor shown by his vassals.) Last October, Houston Rockets General Manager David Morey tweeted “Fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong.” Immediately the Chinese Basketball Association that has the $1.5 billion exclusive right to broadcast NBA games in China cut ties with the Rockets.
Quickly, Rockets owner Tilman Fertita tweeted that Morey did not speak for the Rockets and that “we are NOT a political organization.” Fast forward almost a year, now players for the Rockets are wearing shirts with “Black Lives Matter” inspired social justice messages in reaction to allegations of widespread police brutality against blacks.
But Fertita apparently had a problem with Morey showing his support for the Hong Kongers who have been brutalized by Chinese police. The NBA hasn’t shown the same willingness to pullout of China in light of its placing Uighur Muslims in its northwestern Xinjiang region into concentration camps, subjection of prisoners to involuntary medical experiments and other horrific human-rights violations.
“We are dedicated to using the collective resources of the 30 teams, the players and the league to drive meaningful economic opportunities for Black Americans,” People magazine quoted NBA Commissioner Adam Silver as having said.
But the “Black Lives Matter” movement has nothing to do with any of this. By endorsing the movement and boasting its paraphernalia the NBA in effect has endorsed its platform of the abolition of the black family; the abolition of police departments; and the dodging of the epidemic of violence among black Americans.
Talking points used by the movement say that black Americans are disproportionately the victims of police violence. Blacks account for 13 percent of the population yet are shot and killed by police at a rate twice that of white Americans as a comparative percentage of the population, movement supporters say.
But that also is linked with what some in the “Black Lives Matter” movement call the “hyberbolic media myth of ‘black on black’ crime.”
However, FBI statistics from 2018 show that blacks accounted for 38.6 percent of all homicide perpetrators in this country in 2018, despite being 13 percent of the population. Whites for comparison comprise 72 percent of population accounted for 29.8 percent of all murderers. Also, blacks also accounted for 52.4 percent of all homicide victims nationwide in 2018 compared with 43.1 percent for whites.
Police face increased danger and frequently face PTSD due to shooting incidents, which may contribute to violent acts by officers.
This also correlates with the widespread fatherlessness in black America, which the “Black Lives Matter” movement champions following in the tradition of Karl Marx who championed the “abolition of the family.” Sixty-five percent of black Americans grow up in single-parent households, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Social science has found a close link between fatherlessness and violent criminal activity.
A 2004 study published in the “Journal of Research on Adolescence” found that boys fatherless from birth are 3.061 times were as likely to go to jail as peers from intact families. Boys who did not have their father depart until they are 10 to 14 years old were 2.396 times as likely to go to jail as peers from intact families
Marxists have advocated police abolition since Marx as a way of gaining control. They accomplished this in the world’s first Marxist revolution in 1871 in France when the Paris Commune was established. Vladimir Lenin did likewise before taking power.
“The real work is to bring about the abolition of the standing army, the bureaucracy, and the police, and to arm the whole people,” Lenin said.
The NBA gives this Marxist movement undeserved legitimacy and has de facto endorsed ideas that will only hurt black Americans. It should get off the Communist bandwagon.
Photo credit: Tony Webster (Creative Commons) – Some rights reserved
John Rossomando was a Senior Analyst at The Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) for eight years. He also served as senior managing editor of The Bulletin, a 100,000-circulation daily newspaper in Philadelphia and received the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors first-place award in 2008 for his investigative reporting.
