In the past few months the Black Lives Matter organization has managed to largely hijack the Democrat primaries by strong-arming both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders into vouching for the movement, despite its radical calls for violence against the police and divisive rhetoric against putative white supremacy. Democrat spokespeople and the main-stream media routinely brush this aside as unrepresentative of the organization in general, though no BLM leader has condemned the incitement. On FOX, Bill O’Reilly has repeatedly confronted the media, Democrat operatives and leftist intellectuals for excusing BLM’s divisiveness and calls for violence.

The mainstream left’s refusal to condemn the BLM movement is based on premise that those calling for violence are outliers, while the movement itself is supposedly about non-violent protest against (imaginary) disproportionate police misconduct against African-Americans. That claim was critically undermined on Saturday, when long-time Washington Post columnist Colbert I. King approvingly compared the BLM movement to radical the Palestinian terrorists randomly murdering Israeli citizens in the streets. Equating BLM with a notional Palestinian Lives Matter movement, King aligned these African-American activists with murderous Islamist assailants and the invective spewing, openly anti-Semitic Palestinian leadership.

Of course, King claimed to be personally a “…longtime supporter of Israel…” but also, like President Obama, a believer that “…Palestinians have a right to be a free people on their own land…” Interestingly, and perhaps honestly, King associated Obama only with his second statement, not his statement of lukewarm support for Israel.

The point of King’s diatribe is that African-American support for Israel is supposedly on the wane due to Israeli actions against Palestinians in self-defense, and the denial of “Palestinian rights.” But his argument is, unsurprisingly, a marvel of intellectual dishonesty and obfuscation, wholly typical of the BLM movement, and the similarly deceitful BDS movement against Israel.

King notes that Jeremiah Wright (Obama’s longtime pastor) spoke recently at the 20^th Anniversary of the Million Man March on Washington, inveighing against Israel, claiming it is an apartheid state, linking “…the youth in Ferguson and the youth in Palestine…” and absurdly accusing the Israelis of perpetrating the “…one of the most egregious injustices…” of the past two centuries against Palestinian Arabs. Nowhere does King note that Obama was forced to disassociate himself from Wright, in part because Wright has been spewing anti-Semitic and anti-Israel garbage his whole career, with Obama sitting in his pews agreeably for a good twenty of them.

King cites polls that African-Americans support Israel in much smaller numbers than whites, but neglects to point out that this is not a new thing, that Democrats in general voice tepid support for Israel, or that women (who are also disproportionately Democrats) tend to be less supportive of Israel than men. Basically, black support of Israel mostly just tracks with that of Democrats. He also ignores the obvious fact (as demonstrated by preachers like Wright) that anti-Semitism has long been endemic in the African-American community, and has little or nothing to do with Israel or Palestinian Arabs.

But as a prominent and ostensibly moderate African-American pundit, King’s gratuitous linkage of the BLM movement with Palestinian Islamist terrorism helps to put paid the idea that the former is peaceful protest movement in the tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr., as opposed to a radical, violent, and divisive movement as O’Reilly and other critics maintain.