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Lawyer: Civil Rights Movement Must Not be Hijacked by Those Who Seek Israel’s Destruction

An increasingly deployed comparison, made by anti-Israel activists, between Israel and the racist Jim Crow era of the United States is “an insult to Jews… [and] an insult to the African-Americans who struggled to be a part of the American dream,” veteran civil rights attorney Andrew Goldman wrote in an op-ed published today in The New York Post.

For starters, the only restrictions imposed on Palestinian Arabs living in the West Bank have to do with security. (The terrorist group Hamas controls Gaza, where other Palestinians live.)

And as for Israel itself, there are no literacy tests for Arabs seeking to vote, no columns of shotgun-wielding Israelis blocking Arabs at polling stations, no vote-rigging to ensure that Arab ballot papers are “lost” on the way to the count.

Goldman witnessed the injustices he recounted as a lawyer for the Council of Federated Organizations, an umbrella group of civil rights organizations.

Goldman not only defended Israel’s behavior, but also pointed out that the grievances of African-Americans are not the same as of the Palestinians. The goal of African-Americans was equality, not the destruction of whites.

We civil-rights workers triumphed when the landmark Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964. As we strove to achieve that goal, we never questioned the right of whites to live in the area, unlike the Palestinian leaders who assert that Jews are an alien presence.

In the American civil rights movement, there was no slogan comparable to “driving the Jews” into the sea  and no terrorism sponsored by foreign countries against whites.

Goldman sums up his argument by saying, “I can no longer be a bystander as the noble legacy of the civil-rights movement is hijacked by a campaign whose goal is the destruction of Israel.”

[Photo: Gershon ELinson/FLASH90 ]