Hope of Israel Ministries (Ecclesia of YEHOVAH):

Jewish Susan Rosenberg and Black Lives Matter

If there were any question whether Black Lives Matter has ideological ties to the Communist terrorists of the 1960s, the story of Susan Rosenberg should put that issue to bed. The long and the short of Rosenberg’s involvement with Thousand Currents is that numerous Black Lives Matter organizers have ties to extremist movements of the past, and are not some brand new movement simply fighting for marginalized people today. And that the goal of destruction and violence is more of a political tool than a reaction to injustice.

by Scott Walker

Some conservatives have begun speculating that the unrest in American cities -- even as late as Monday night in Washington, DC, as “protestors” unsuccessfully worked to tear down a statue of Andrew Jackson and set up an autonomous zone across the street from the White House -- may in part be an attempt to affect the upcoming presidential election, with the chaos and violence intended to make it as difficult as possible for Donald Trump to win a second term.

Lending credence to this idea is the fact that at least one board member of Thousand Currents -- the group fiscally sponsoring the most organized part of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, who have been involved in most of the activity surrounding the current unrest -- tried the same thing almost 40 years ago during Ronald Reagan’s reelection campaign. And it landed her in federal prison for 16 years.

Are BLM Leaders "Trained Marxists?"

The Black Lives Matter movement began after the 2013 shooting death of Trayvon Martin, 17, in Sanford, Florida, and picked up steam after the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown, 18, in 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri.

The group’s co-founders are Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Opal Tometi, and Alicia Garza, all of them black women.

“The first thing, I think, is that we actually do have an ideological frame,” Khan-Cullors said in a 2015 interview with Real News Network. “Myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists.”

Khan-Cullors continued:

"We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories. And I think that what we really tried to do is build a movement that could be utilized by many, many black folk. We don’t necessarily want to be the vanguard of this movement. I think we’ve tried to put out a political frame that’s about centering who we think are the most vulnerable amongst the black community, to really fight for all of our lives."

Khan-Cullors, who serves as strategic adviser to the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, is an artist and organizer from Los Angeles, according to the group’s website.

Khan-Cullors, 36, is also the founder of Dignity and Power Now, a group that advocates for incarcerated people and their families. A Fulbright scholar, she is the New York Times best-selling author of the book When They Call You a Terrorist.

Garza, an organizer in Oakland, California, is also special projects director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance, an advocacy group for domestic workers.

Garza, 39, was named to The Root’s 2016 list of 100 African American achievers and influencers and is the recipient of the 2016 Glamour Women of the Year Award and the 2016 Marie Claire New Guard Award. She was recognized as a Community Change Agent at the BET’s 2016 Black Girls Rock Awards.

While two founders of Black Lives Matter are on the West Coast, Tometi works out of New York. The group’s website describes her as a “Nigerian-American writer, strategist, and community organizer” and a “transnational feminist.”

Tometi, 35, created online platforms and social media strategy during the early days of the movement.

She also is executive director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration and, according to the website, is featured at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.

What’s the Official Organization?

More than one Black Lives Matter appears to exist, but the one primary associated with its best-known founders, and that receives the largest level of donations, is the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. 

According to the group’s website, the organization has a national network of about 40 chapters. 

The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation didn’t respond directly to questions from The Daily Signal. After two days of inquiries, spokesman Jordan Jackson said in an email that the organization was “inundated” with media requests.

“Should someone be available to fulfill this request,” Jackson wrote, “I will circle back here as soon as possible.”

In 2016, the left-leaning grant-maker Thousand Currents, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit group, became the financial sponsor of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. 

As a result, the foundation doesn’t have its own tax-exempt status and is instead a project of Thousand Currents that doesn’t yet have to file what are called 990 forms with the Internal Revenue Service. 

Thousand Currents reported $3.35 million in donations earmarked for the BLM Global Network Foundation in 2019, according to Capital Research Center, a watchdog group for nonprofits. Pledges of donations skyrocketed after the May 25 death of Floyd, a handcuffed black man, in police custody in Minneapolis. Those donors include major corporations.

“Thousand Currents has been a fiscal sponsor of BLM since 2016, and serves as the back office support, including finance, accounting, grants management, insurance, human resources, legal and compliance. Donations to BLM are restricted donations to support the activities of BLM,” Thousand Currents said in an email to The Daily Signal. 

It deferred other questions to the BLM Global Network Foundation.

Thousand Currents reportedly gave a total of $90,130 in grants to the Santa Clarita, California-based Black Lives Matter Foundation, according to its tax filings for fiscal years 2017 and 2018.

This second organization, according to BuzzFeed, is a one-man operation separate from the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. After Floyd’s death, the foundation in Santa Clarita raked in $4.3 million in donations, BuzzFeed reported. 

To add to the mix, a separate Movement for Black Lives has financial sponsorship from the Alliance for Global Justice.

The W. K. Kellogg Foundation gave a three-year $900,000 grant through Thousand Currents to help organize local BLM Global Network Foundation chapters, according to Capital Research Center.  More recently, several major corporations announced they were donating to Black Lives Matter.

Amazon announced it would give $10 million to 12 groups, including BLM Global Network Foundation, while Microsoft vowed to give $250,000 to it. Airbnb announced it is giving a total of $500,000 to the NAACP and the BLM Global Network Foundation. 

The George Soros-backed Open Society Foundations reportedly contributed about $33 million to groups associated with the Black Lives Matter movement. However, it isn’t clear whether that money made it to the BLM Global Network Foundation, according to Capital Research Center.

What Does the Organization Want?

Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation doesn’t hide its more out-of-the mainstream views, although many of them are stated in broad terms.

“We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable,” the organization says on its website.

The website uses the word “comrades” several times, in one instance to say: “We practice empathy. We engage comrades with the intent to learn about and connect with their contexts.”

Although the organization states that “We are unapologetically Black in our positioning,” it focuses heavily on something that traditionally has not been part of African American activism -- sexual orientation and gender identity:

"We make space for transgender brothers and sisters to participate and lead.…We are self-reflexive and do the work required to dismantle cisgender privilege and uplift Black trans folk, especially Black trans women who continue to be disproportionately impacted by trans-antagonistic violence.…"

"We build a space that affirms Black women and is free from sexism, misogyny, and environments in which men are centered."

Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation says it is a “queer-affirming network.”

“When we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking, or rather, the belief that all in the world are heterosexual (unless s/he or they disclose otherwise),” it says.

It also fights age discrimination, stating: “We cultivate an intergenerational and communal network free from ageism.”

If there were any question whether Black Lives Matter has ideological ties to the Communist terrorists of the 1960s, the story of Susan Rosenberg should put that issue to bed.

Susan Rosenberg and Thousand Currents

Thousand Currents, which underwrites the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, describes itself as an organization that “envisions a world where humanity thrives as a creative force that is in reciprocal [sic] and interdependent with nature, and creates loving, equitable and just societies.”

Notably, the vice chairwoman of the board of directors for Thousand Currents is Susan Rosenberg, a convicted felon who participated in bombing buildings in the Northeast and Washington, D.C.

In an email Wednesday, The Daily Signal asked Thousand Currents about Rosenberg’s position on the board of directors. That morning, the organization’s webpage about the board included a short bio of Rosenberg. By late afternoon, that page no longer was available and a message said: “Ooops. Sorry. This page doesn’t exist.”

Rosenberg was part of M19, short for May 19th Communist Organization. Her memoir An American Radical, details her 16 years in federal prison.

Rosenberg, who started out as a member of the 1960s revolutionary group Weather Underground, graduated into even more violent, and arguably successful, forms of terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s -- including bombings at an FBI field office in Staten Island, the Navy Yard Officers’ Club in Washington, DC, and even the U.S. Capitol building.

M19’s bombings reportedly were for the sake of causing enough disruption to prevent President Ronald Reagan’s reelection in 1984. Rosenberg was a member of the Weather Underground in the 1960s. Doesn't this sound eerily familiar?

At her sentencing hearing in 1984, Rosenberg urged supporters to “continue to fight for the defeat of U.S. imperialism.”

She currently serves as human and prisoner rights advocate and a vice chair of the board of directors of Thousand Currents.

According to Capital Research Center, Thousand Currents also is a grant-making organization that assists various other left-of-center causes and has focused heavily on opposing genetically modified organisms.

Donors include the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the NoVo Foundation, and the Libra Foundation. It had annual revenue of $6.8 million in 2018.

As Robert Stilson reiterates here, BLM Global Network Foundation has been a fiscally sponsored project of Thousand Currents, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, since 2016. That means the BLM group, which runs the BlackLivesMatter.com website, does not have its own IRS tax-exempt status but is operating as a “project” of an organization that does. In the case of 501(c)(3) fiscally sponsored projects, this allows tax-deductible donations to be made to the project.

Marxist Connections

When “Black Lives Matter” is used to refer to an organization, it typically means the BLM Global Network Foundation that traces its beginnings to the “three radical Black organizers -- Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi” mentioned earlier.

This leads to confusion when people express their support for “Black Lives,” because they may not realize this organization is ideologically tied -- to the point of having Rosenberg on the board of the central group -- with trained Marxists with a history of extremism and violence. As we have seen, Rosenberg was a member of the May 19th Communist Organization (M19). It was, according to this New York Post article from January 2020, “the nation’s only woman-run terror group,” as recounted by William Rosenau in his book Tonight We Bombed the U.S. Capitol.

Some of the key members of M19 were veterans of the Weather Underground Organization, a group that emerged from the ashes of Students for a Democratic Society, the nation’s largest anti-Vietnam War group. Weather described its raison d’être in a 1974 manifesto: "to disrupt the empire…to incapacitate it, to put pressure on the cracks." The group was responsible for scores of bombings of government buildings and other targets (including an accidental one, when members destroyed a Greenwich Village townhouse and killed three of their own with a bomb intended for a US Army noncommissioned officers’ dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey).

In New York, the Bay Area of California and other parts of America, the Black Liberation Army, an offshoot of the Black Panthers, assassinated at least 15 policemen. Two of the most notorious of these murders took place on May 21, 1971, when New York Police Department officers Joseph Piagentini and Waverly Jones responded to a call from a public housing complex beneath Coogan’s Bluff in Upper Manhattan. Three BLA gunmen -- Herman Bell, Anthony Bottom and Albert "Nuh" Washington -- ambushed them. Rounds smashed in Jones’s head and back, killing him almost instantly. The BLA men took their time with Piagentini, slowly firing 22 rounds into his body.

This is just some of the atrocities committed by these groups.

According to the Post, M19 spent two years engaged in bombings in New York and Washington, DC, that were meant “to cast a cloud over what President Ronald Reagan’s re-election campaign was promising: a sunny, prosperous ‘Morning in America.’ Reagan’s election in 1980 told the remnants of America’s radical left that the country had rejected their call to revolution.”

Middle-class and college-educated, M19’s members shared a disdain for their own whiteness. To prove they weren’t merely “mouthing revolution,” they allied with the Black Liberation Army to break cop-killer Joanne Chesimard (aka Assata Shakur) out of prison in 1979. Two years later they assisted in the notorious Brink’s robbery of 1981, which killed two Nyack police officers and a bank guard.

In an eerily familiar incident on November 7, 1983, they even managed to pose as tourists at the U.S. Capitol building, planting a duffel bag with a bomb under a bench outside the Senate chamber, and cratering a wall and shattering chandeliers that ultimately damaged a portrait of 19th-century Senator John C. Calhoun.

Rosenberg and another M19 member, Tim Blunk, were arrested in November 1984 in Cherry Hill, NJ, in front of a storage unit containing 740 pounds of unstable dynamite stolen from a Texas construction firm four years earlier.

Writes William Rosenau:

"Late on the afternoon of November 29, 1984, Susan Rosenberg and Timothy Blunk were loading boxes into a blue Oldsmobile Cutlass sedan and a U-Haul trailer parked at a self-storage facility in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, not far from Philadelphia. The boxes were heavy, so despite the autumn chill and the wind, Rosenberg and Blunk were working up a sweat. Both wore glasses as part of their disguises. Blunk had an ill-fitting wig that he barely managed to keep on his head.

"An FBI wanted poster called Rosenberg armed and extremely dangerous, and the Bureau wasn’t wrong. On the front seat of the Olds, purses held semiautomatic pistols -- an Interarms Walther PPK .38 caliber and a Browning Hi-Power 9mm. They were both fully loaded.

"A Cherry Hill policeman, Mark DeFrancisco, pulled up at 5:52 p.m. The facility’s night manager had called, reporting suspicious goings-on. Moving towards the pair, the policeman asked to see identification. Blunk’s driver’s license said he was William J. Hammond. Rosenberg then handed over hers.

"DeFrancisco asked her what her birth date was. Her answer didn’t match the license. DeFrancisco asked if she had any other identification. Maybe it was just a simple mistake. Rosenberg told him she could go back to her car and get another ID. DeFrancisco said no: ‘Something told me I’d better not let her get to the car,’ he recalled.

"Officer Craig Martin arrived as backup. Inside the trailer and locker, the patrolmen found what the press would call a ‘terror arsenal’: an Action Arms 9mm semi-automatic Uzi, complete with replacement barrels; hundreds of rounds of ammunition; sawed-off shotguns; rifles; a Sturm Ruger .357 magnum revolver with its serial number filed off. And lots of paper: weapons manuals; hundreds of fake FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and state police IDs; 10,250 phony Social Security card blanks. Before long, Rosenberg and Blunk were in handcuffs.

"One cop lit a cigarette. ‘Put out the fucking cigarette,’ Rosenberg said. The patrolman quickly got the point. She and Blunk had been trying to move 740lb of explosives, including 199 sticks of Hercules Unigel Tamptite dynamite and 110 cartridges of DuPont Tovex 210 water-gel explosives, plus electric blasting caps, detonating cord, and Hercules Slurry Hp-374, a blasting agent. They called it ‘combat material’.

"The dynamite was in horrible shape. You were supposed to rotate the sticks every 30 days, but somebody hadn’t been doing their job, and the dynamite was breaking down. Nitroglycerin was oozing from the cylinders -- ‘weeping’, in technical parlance. A stray spark could have set off a terrifying blast.

"Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agents and cops from the Philadelphia bomb squad were called in to recover the stuff. They piled up the dynamite and the other material, but then realized they would have to divide it up before hauling it over the Ben Franklin Bridge to the disposal site in Philadelphia. The explosives were unstable, and if they moved it all together, it might have detonated and dropped the bridge, or taken out a city block. Indeed, at the federal trial of Rosenberg and Blunk the following year, the judge compared the explosive potential of their storage locker load to the truck bomb in Beirut that had flattened a four-story military barracks and killed 241 US military personnel in 1983.

"Rosenberg and Blunk, self-described ‘revolutionary anti-imperialists’, were part of a terrorist formation called the May 19th Communist Organization. Founded by radical women in 1978, May 19th was named after the birthday shared by two of their idols, Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh. Between 1979 and 1985, May 19th robbed banks and armored trucks, participated in audacious prison breaks, and bombed targets in New York City and Washington, DC. It had several hundred members, most of whom operated openly or as part of May 19th-controlled front groups. The inner circle responsible for the group’s violent action was tiny, numbering perhaps a dozen people at the most" (The Spectator, April 2020, US edition).

Rosenberg was also wanted in connection with the 1981 Brink’s robbery. She was never charged in those crimes.

After 16 years in prison, she was released in 2001 when President Bill Clinton commuted her sentence on the last day of his presidency, an act that outraged even the left-leaning New York Times.

Rosenberg’s Revolutionary Ideology

National Review columnist and former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy described her trial this way in a 2008 column:

"Rosenberg turned her New Jersey terrorism trial into a circus, posturing as a political prisoner. At her sentencing, she urged her supporters to continue their war against the United States. ('When we were first captured we said, we’re caught, we’re not defeated, long live the armed struggle. We’d like to take this moment to rededicate ourselves to our revolutionary principles, to our commitment to continue to fight for the defeat of U.S. imperialism.') She expressed remorse about only one thing: she hadn’t had the courage to shoot it out with the police who’d apprehended her."

Rosenberg has written a book about her exploits in which she justifies her actions this way:

"I pursued a path that seemed to me a logical step beyond legal protest: the use of political violence. Did that make me a terrorist? In my mind, then and now, the answer is no. I say this because no act in which I was involved ever had violence against persons as its object or consequence."

The “Protestors”

Would the “protestors” destroying statues say the same about their behavior over the last several weeks? It’s a fair bet they would. In fact, Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the factually erroneous New York Times “1619 Project,” proudly claims her project served as inspiration for the current iconoclastic destruction happening around the nation.

The long and the short of Rosenberg’s involvement with Thousand Currents is that numerous Black Lives Matter organizers have ties to extremist movements of the past, and are not some brand new movement simply fighting for marginalized people today. And that the goal of destruction and violence is more of a political tool than a reaction to injustice.

The Bottom Line

BLM claims they care about black lives, but are blind to the collapse of the inner city culture. Young black men in the city are far more likely to be killed by other young black men than by white cops. Yet there is no attempt or even a care to fix it. The hypocrisy of BLM is dramatic. If major players in the BLM movement really care about black lives, then they ought to focus on reforms that can improve the quality of life for black Americans.

It could not be clearer that the Black Lives Matter Foundation cares nothing about black lives. We know this because the Foundation never mentions or addresses the overwhelming cause of threat to black lives: black-on-black crime. It never mentions the underlying reasons for black-on-black crime: the absence of fathers for boys and the long term corrupt governance of all major cities by Democrat politicians. And it never advocates a cure for black-on-black crime: more police and more community cooperation with police. Presently, however, several activists have been recommending that states defund the police force. But the effect of this policy will be the reverse of what lobbyists desire. Defunding or abolishing the police will make it harder for officers to police crime-ridden inner-city communities, mainly occupied by blacks Americans.

 

Hope of Israel Ministries -- Courage for the Sake of Truth is Far Better Than Silence for the Sake of Unity!

Hope of Israel Ministries
P.O. Box 853
Azusa, CA 91702, U.S.A.
 www.hope-of-israel.org

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