Watching Mother Emanuel AME congregants shout down pro-Palestine demonstrators showed that Zionism is alive and well in the Black church. It was one of the most despicable and heartbreaking things I’ve ever seen from my own people.
On January 8, three pro-Palestinian protestors were escorted out of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, known as Mother Emanuel, for protesting President Biden’s presence there. The protestors interrupted Biden’s speech to confront him about the U.S. funding of and refusal to stop the genocide against the Palestinian people, where over 20,000 people in Gaza have been killed by Israel (an estimated 10,000 are stuck under the rubble and presumed dead), and kidnappings, illegal arrests, and shootings occur daily in the West Bank.
While Biden was about to acknowledge the victims of the 2015 attack on Mother Emanuel, where supremacist Dylann Roof gunned down nine Black congregants, one non-Black protester stood up and said, “if you really care about the lives lost here, then you should honor the lives lost and call for a ceasefire in Palestine!” She and the protestors with her (one of whom was Black) were escorted out of the church as some members of the audience shook their heads or even yelled at them.
The most shocking moment was when the room responded to the protestors’ chants of “Free Palestine!” with a counterchant of “Four More Years! Four More Years!,” standing up and clapping for Biden, the very man who had been called to accountability for genocide mere moments later. As a Black person with maternal roots in the South, it was one of the most despicable and heartbreaking things I’d ever seen from my own people. A holy place used to call for four more years of genocide. (more...)
Mother Emanuel and the Danger of Black Zionism
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