The Black Lives Matter movement will receive the Sydney Peace Prize, an award given by the Sydney Peace Foundation — part of the University of Sydney — and be honored at an event in the city in November, the foundation announced this week.

Black Lives Matter was chosen for allegedly “building a powerful movement for racial equality, courageously reigniting a global conversation around state violence and racism. And for harnessing the potential of new platforms and power of people to inspire a bold movement for change at a time when peace is threatened by growing inequality and injustice,” the foundation’s website states.

“Giving a peace prize to a group that foments violent demonstrations would be enough to give irony a bad name.”

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Western Australian Labor senator Pat Dodson and former winner of the Sydney peace prize told the Guardian newspaper that Black Lives Matter as a movement stands against “ignorance, hostility, discrimination, or racism.”

Defenders of law enforcement against the often-violent, racially charged and hateful rhetoric of the Black Lives Matter movement, which often openly advocates for violence against police, expressed disapproval.

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“Giving a peace prize to a group that foments violent demonstrations would be enough to give irony a bad name,” said William Otis, a professor of law at Georgetown and a former federal prosecutor.

“Still, I could see it if black lives actually mattered to Black Lives Matter,” Otis told LifeZette. “But if that were so, BLM presumably would want to suppress the thing that poses the most danger to young black lives — murder.”

“We know how to suppress murder, because we did it for an entire generation, from 1991 to 2014,” Otis continued. “And we know how we did it: more police, more aggressive and proactive policing, more restraint on naïve sentencing, and more use of incarceration to keep criminals away from law-abiding people,” said Otis.

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“Tragically, these crime-suppression measures are precisely the things BLM has made a point of opposing,” said Otis

“As the BLM program of reducing incarceration for crime and putting restraints on police has spread, so has murder. In 2015 and 2016, for the first time in decades, murder increased in the United States for two consecutive years,” Otis said. “The victims are disproportionately African-American young men.”

Heather Mac Donald, Manhattan Institute fellow and author of “The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe,” attributes the decision to grant Black Lives Matter an award to the naiveté of western elites.

“Cultural elites in the Western industrialized world outside the U.S. are as committed as American elites are to the myth of ubiquitous white racism and to their own virtue-signaling,” Mac Donald told LifeZette.

“It is therefore no surprise that the left-wing Sydney Peace Foundation has chosen Black Lives Matter as this year’s peace-prize recipient,” Mac Donald said.

“The selection is galling nevertheless. Far from bringing peace to high-crime urban neighborhoods, Black Lives Matter has brought increased violence and death, as the police understandably back off of proactive enforcement under the relentless charge of racism,” Mac Donald continued.

“Homicides in the U.S. rose in 2015 by the largest one-year increase in nearly 50 years; the additional victims were overwhelmingly black,” Mac Donald said. “Nine hundred more black males were murdered in 2015 than in 2014, bringing the black homicide total to 7,000, 2,000 more black victims than all white and Hispanic homicide victims combined. Their killers were not the police, but criminals.”

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The real irony, says Mac Donald, is the tragedy of violence that grows in inner-city communities as police retreat or are forced to pull back.

“The rise in street violence has continued into the present, taking the lives of innocent children as well as of gangbangers—to not one peep of protest from Black Lives Matter activists,” Mac Donald said.

“BLM-co-founder Patrisse Cullors tells The Guardian that high-crime communities do not ‘need police.’ We are testing her claim at this very moment as police decide to stay in their patrol cars rather than getting out to question a known drug dealer loitering on the corner. The results of this tragic experiment are unequivocal: When the police back off in high-crime areas, black lives are lost,” said Mac Donald.