At the same time, several pro-Palestinian BDS groups have applied violent terms such as intifada (Arabic for “uprising”) to the current eruption of protests in the wake of Floyd’s death.
The term was the name given to the first and second Palestinian bouts of violence in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and then from 2000 to 2005, which witnessed daily terror attacks, including suicide bombings, stabbings and shootings against Israeli civilians, claiming thousands of lives.
In a Facebook post, the group Samidoun, which advocates for Palestinian prisoners and has ties to the U.S.-designated terror group the Popular Front of the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), called the Floyd protests an “intifada.”
“We support the uprising in Minneapolis, the intifada of people subjected to an ongoing, vicious and structural racism, inheriting a lengthy and rich tradition of Black resistance, organizing and struggle,” wrote the group.
In a statement, PFLP also expressed its solidarity with the protests.
“It is not surprising for a country like the United States, which has a strategic alliance with the Zionist entity [Israel], to intersect with it in the discrimination, racism and repression that embodies its treatment of Palestinians,” the terror group wrote on its site.
‘There is no connection between the struggle’
Meanwhile, far-right neo-Nazi individuals and organizations have also been blaming Jews for the violence associated with the protests.
Andrew Anglin, founder of the Neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, wrote in a blog post about the protests, saying “Fear not the blacks who can burn your city, but fear the Jews who can release the blacks to burn your city and lock you in your house in hell.”
Similarly, the far-right is also claiming that the violent protesters are being controlled by Jewish money.
“They [Jews] Are Starting a Race War So People Don’t Rally Against ZOG [Zionist Occupation Government],” wrote neo-Nazi Kyle Hunt, according to the Canary Mission.
Hunt, who is also a supporter of the BDS movement, has previously joined anti-Israel groups IfNotNow (INN) and Al-Awda in protesting against the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in 2017, according to the Canary Mission.
At the same time, pro-Palestinian activists have also sought to link and draw parallels between police violence in America and violence against Palestinians by Israel.
In what has been termed “intersectionality,” these groups posit that no form of discrimination if distinct from one another.
Following the killing of Floyd, anti-Israel activists immediately began drawing comparisons with what they describe as systematic and deadly Israeli brutality against Palestinians. Those comparisons were given further impetus in the wake of the May 30 killing of Iyad Halak, an autistic Palestinian from eastern Jerusalem, by Israeli police in Jerusalem’s Old City.
Drawing on this, several social-media posts depicted U.S. and Israeli police as one and the same on social-media imagery.
