Black Lives Matter!  Solidarity against racist brutality and discrimination

“We are full of grief and outrage over the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade and all black lives lost to police brutality and white supremacy. As a multiracial Jewish community committed to racial justice and a better world for all, we mourn together, we protest together, and we recommit ourselves to work together for racial justice within ourselves, our communities, and our country.”

The Jewish Socialists’ Group completely endorses this powerful statement by our sisters and brothers at the Boston Workers Circle Center for Jewish Culture and Social Justice.

Institutional racism runs just as deep here in Britain. We pledge our active solidarity with all who face racist brutality, oppression and discrimination both in our country and in the USA. We support those who are uniting and protesting for equal rights and justice.

We deplore President Trump’s repetition of the incendiary statements made by Miami Police Chief Walter Headley in 1967, and segregationist Presidential candidate George Wallace in 1968, that, “when the looting starts the shooting starts”. 

We are proud of our members’ involvement in anti-fascist struggles, both physical and ideological, over many decades, so we utterly condemn President Trump’s threat to designate “Antifa” as a terrorist organisation, and his description of protesters and rioters in New York as “looters, thugs, Radical Left, and all other forms of Lowlife & Scum”.

We demand that our government unequivocally condemn these statements. The Government must also cease licensing sales of crowd control equipment that US forces are using in violent attacks on protesters, journalists and others.

We are encouraged by the antiracist statements of several Jewish organisations on both sides of the Atlantic in response to George Floyd’s murder, and we urge them to transform that into sustained campaigning and action against institutional racism.

In a time of pandemic, where death rates in BAME communities far outstrip those in the population as a whole, we must speak out but we must protect the wider community and also preserve our health for what will be a long struggle for justice. We encourage people to support safe, socially distant protests and demonstrations in whichever way they can.

Black Lives Matter. Always Antifascist.