Tel-Chai Nation

Ruthie Blum tells how the followers of Black Lives Matter basically reject Martin Luther King's belief that you shouldn't judge by the color of skin, but rather, by ideology. To the point where they'd damage the career of an academic who supported MLK's viewpoint:

A petition demanding that accounting professor Gordon Klein be fired from his position at UCLA’s Anderson School of Business, where he has been teaching for nearly four decades, has garnered more than 21,000 signatures since it began circulating earlier this month. In the meantime, the university has suspended him until June 24, as death threats against him and his family multiply.

Klein’s transgression? Rejecting a request by students—self-described as “non-black allies” of their African-American peers—that he extend the blacks under his tutelage extra leniency on their final exams.

The stated reason for the plea was the trauma that black students are suffering in the wake of George Floyd’s killing on May 25 by a Minneapolis police officer and in the face of ensuing civil unrest throughout America.

Klein responded to the June 2 e-mail asking that he forego normal standards and procedure by invoking Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech.

“Thanks for your suggestion … that I give black students special treatment, given the tragedy in Minnesota,” he wrote. “Do you know the names of the classmates that are black? How can I identify them since we’ve been having online classes only? Are there any students that may be of mixed parentage, such as half black-half Asian? What do you suggest I do with respect to them? A full concession or just half? Also, do you have any idea if any students are from Minneapolis? I assume that they probably are especially devastated as well. I am thinking that a white student from there might be possibly even more devastated by this, especially because some might think that they’re racist even if they are not … One last thing strikes me: Remember that MLK famously said that people should not be evaluated based on the ‘color of their skin.’ Do you think that your request would run afoul of MLK’s admonition?”

Rather than appreciating their professor’s aversion to discrimination, the students in question called Klein’s decision “extremely insensitive, dismissive and woefully racist.”

Such charges are so ridiculous that they barely warrant a rebuttal. Another of their accusations, however—that he was being “tone deaf”—is worth taking seriously. For what it reveals is that MLK’s legacy is out of fashion, if not obsolete.

Though obfuscated by the noise of the Black Lives Matter movement, King’s lifelong dream—that his children “one day [will] live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character”—has become his successors’ nightmare.

Yes, the sad fact is that BLM members and supporters now scoff at such a notion, even while paying lip service to King as a paragon. Indeed, if they weren’t in the process of renouncing his philosophy, Professor Klein would be hailed for his moral stance, not persecuted and placed on leave.

Nor is the aspiration to an America that puts character over color the only aspect of King’s ideology that the current climate has eradicated. His views on Israel, too, are ignored or denied by BLM anti-Zionists and their Jewish fellow travelers.

It's hugely regrettable we've reached a point where MLK's been rejected by modern ideologues desensitized to violence, who believe it's even valid to destroy black-owned businesses, as has happened in my native Philadelphia, to get their "point" across, and enable murder of innocent pedestrians. The devastation that occurred post-George Floyd is horrific, taking one man's murder and using the ends to justify the means. This is becoming one of the worst periods in US history, and the left's approach to the whole issue is embarrassingly bad. And all this time, MLK's legacy is being shunned as though it had never been. It's very sad.

Labels: anti-americanism, anti-semitism, Israel, Moonbattery, racism, United States