When legitimate grievances are co-opted and hijacked by opportunists seeking support for their own causes — under the guise of intersectionality — problems will inevitably arise. The callous murder of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, by a Minneapolis policeman, Dennis Chauvin, sparked grassroots outrage and widespread protests against police brutality and racial injustice in the U.S. — under the general banner #BlackLivesMatter. But the justifiable anger and protests were quickly exploited by Israel-hating opportunists as a vehicle with which to demonize the Jewish state thousands of miles away.
Within days of the killing, a cartoon posted on Fatah’s Facebook page depicted a white American police officer (Chauvin) kneeling on the neck of an African-American victim (Floyd) side by side with an Israeli soldier similarly kneeling on the neck of a kaffiyeh-draped Palestinian, the aggressors embracing one another. The caption was #BlackLivesMatter. The same cartoon subsequently ran in the official PA newspaper, Al Hayat Al-Jadida.