I wrote here about the scores of demands made by a multitude of organizations associated with the Black Lives Matter movement. The demands combined the cant of the old “Black Power” movement and worldwide “liberationist” ideology with that of Bernie Sanders. It confirmed that Black Lives Matter isn’t about reforming the police in order to reduce shootings by cops, but rather about transforming America across-the-board in the interests of Black-centric socialism.

I focused on two sets of demands. One was for the massive transfer of money and land to African-Americans. The other was a laundry list of leftist agenda items — e.g., “universal health care,” “free education for all,” and “divestment from industrial multinational use of fossil fuels”.

One of the many sets of demands I didn’t discuss pertains to Israel. As Chloe Valdary at Tablet notes, the BLM demands include a section that calls for a divestment from the Jewish state on the theory that it is “complicit in the genocide against the Palestinian people.”

The authors of the demands don’t even bother to claim that Israel’s policies have anything to do with black lives. Nor, for that matter, do they offer any assertions (never mind facts) that might support their claim of an Israeli “genocide against the Palestinian people.”

Moreover, as Valdary points out, the authors of the BLM demands ignore the fact that the Palestinian fighters with whom they express solidarity actively engage in the African slave trade:

In 2013, CNN Berlin correspondent Frederik Pleitgen detailed Hamas’ involvement in the African slave trade in a piece titled, “Human Trafficking in the Sinai: To Fight It We Need to Know It.” According to Pleitgen, “Some of the major traffickers, including Abu Ahmed and Abu Khaled, have declared in interviews reported in the media, to be part of Hamas.” Pleitgen also reported that arms caches owned by Hamas have been “bought with profits from the slave and human-organs trade” in the Sinai Peninsula, according to EveryOne Group, an Italian based nongovernmental organization working for the preservation of human rights.

Naturally, black lives matter to Hamas; they are a source of revenue.

Valdary continues:

In a 2014 article in the Times of Israel, [human rights activist Calev] Meyers relayed how, according to Israeli court documents, Sudanese and Eritrean men and women were kidnapped near the Israeli border, and tortured by Bedouin tribesman. Being freed required that they pay ransom money to their kidnappers. Hamas officials were complicit in extorting funds from the victims. “Israeli court records describe a complicated network built to smuggle the funds out of Israel and into the hands of the traffickers,” Meyers wrote. “Once the family members pay up, the ransom funds move to the hands of Hamas operatives in the West Bank towns of Jenin and Nablus. From there, the funds flow into the Gaza Strip to Abu Jamil, a Hamas operative who pockets a tax and smuggles the funds. Jamil helps move the funds through Hamas’ network of underground tunnels running under the border between Gaza and Sinai, with the tunnels reaching within a few kilometers of the very buildings in which the abductees are held.”

Israel has a much more benign view of black lives. Valdary writes:

Israel puts its money where its mouth is by cultivating social and economic innovation in Africa through direct foreign investment and people-to-people outreach in addition to state-to-state ties. [This] is one big reason why Benjamin Netanyahu was greeted so warmly by African heads of state and by ordinary people during his recent visit to the continent.

Again we see that Black Lives Matter is not about black lives. It’s about the fact that “Occupy Wall Street” fizzled, requiring the radical left to find another hobbyhorse, this time one with a racial hook.