Black Lives Matter Extended Their Support To Palestinians And Not Hamas

Articles and social media posts -- one of which received more than 100,000 likes on Facebook -- claim that Black Lives Matter tweeted support for Hamas, the Islamist rulers of Gaza, who are designated as a terrorist group by the United States. The claim is false; BLM expressed solidarity with Palestinians but made no mention of supporting Hamas, and analysts said conflating the two is a deliberate distortion.

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"Black Lives Matter Declares 'Solidarity' With Hamas in Israel Conflict," said the headline of a May 18, 2021 article published by The Daily Wire, a conservative news website that has previously been fact-checked by AFP.

With its declaration, BLM was "effectively backing the Hamas terror organization in its ongoing conflict with Israel," The Daily Wire wrote.

An article published by Fox News carried a similar headline. It was later revised and tweeted by Jenna Ellis, a former senior legal advisor to Donald Trump. 

"BLM, Inc is literally endorsing terrorism," Ellis said, without naming Hamas.

The claims were made in several other articles and were also shared on Facebook as well as on Instagram and Twitter.

Fighting between Israel and Palestinian armed groups, the most powerful of which is Hamas, began on May 10 when rockets were fired from the coastal Gaza strip into the Jewish state, prompting retaliatory air strikes from Israel's military.

The exchanges follow weeks of tension in Jerusalem, particularly over planned expulsions of Palestinians from their homes in east Jerusalem to make way for Jewish settlers, and Israeli police moving in on worshippers at the Al-Aqsa mosque compound, one of Islam's holiest sites.

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The death toll stands at 243 in Gaza, according to the local health ministry, and 12 in Israel, medics there said. A truce brokered by Egypt appeared to be holding after it took effect on May 21.

The clashes sparked pro-Palestinian protests around the world, including in the United States, and Black Lives Matter (BLM) tweeted a statement in response to the Gaza conflict, expressing "solidarity with Palestinians."

The BLM movement gained increasingly broad support after the death of George Floyd, a Black man, in Minneapolis police custody in May 2020, which sparked nationwide demonstrations against police brutality and racism.

An Instagram account from BLM in Paterson, New Jersey, issued a similar statement of solidarity, saying: "Our struggles are connected in many ways."

But the BLM declarations were only general claims of support for Palestinians. They made no mention of Hamas, which the US, European Union, Israel and the Organization of American States consider a terrorist organization.

AFP made repeated attempts to reach BLM for comment but had not received a response by the time of publication.

Khaled Elgindy, a senior fellow and director of the Program on Palestine and Israeli-Palestinian Affairs at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC, said the claims "conflate all Palestinians with Hamas" and are "totally inaccurate and misleading… deliberately so." 

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"It seems to me a very obvious and transparent attempt to tarnish all Palestinians as terrorists," and anyone who supports them also as backers of terrorism, Elgindy, a former advisor to the Palestinian leadership on negotiations with Israel, told AFP.

Nathan Brown, a Middle Eastern law and politics scholar at George Washington University said of the claim: "It is not just misleading; it is simply false. Hamas represents a portion of the Palestinian population, but its support in recent polls has placed it in a position less popular than the British Labour Party today.

"The large majority of those -- Palestinians and not Palestinian -- who have expressed support for Palestinians in the conflict are not supporters of Hamas."

AFP Fact Check has debunked other claims about the Black Lives Matter movement here, as well as numerous false or misleading claims in English about the latest Gaza conflict.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by BOOM staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)