Black Lives Matter Wins Sydney Peace Prize

Every November the Sydney Peace Foundation in Australia awards its peace prize to someone “who has made significant contributions to global peace.” The foundation flies the winner to Sydney to deliver a lecture and collect the prize: $50,000 and a sculpture with a dove on it. Past winners include Noam Chomsky, Desmond Tutu, and other uplift artists, with a heavy emphasis on names such as Shiva, Maung, Otunnu, Ashrawi, Gusmão, Yunus.

This year’s winners have just been announced: the three founders of Black Lives Matter. It’s not clear what they have contributed to “global peace,” but 2008 prize-winner and Australian Labor politician Pat Dodson explained that BLM fights “ignorance, hostility, discrimination, and racism.” He added that “this movement resonates around the globe and here in Australia, where we have become inured to the high incarceration rates and deaths in custody of our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. It’s as if their lives do not matter.”

A committee of seven people at the Sydney Peace Foundation just spent three months choosing this year’s winners, so they must know a lot about Black Lives Matter. They apparently agree with founder and soon-to-be-recipient Alicia Garza that “black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise,” and that “black poverty and genocide is state violence.” Presumably they agree that “Trayvon Martin was posthumously placed on trial for his own murder.” Like Miss Garza, they must believe it is wrong to say “all lives matter” because that would “perpetuate a level of white supremacist domination.”

No doubt the committee knows that another founder, Patrisse Cullors, says that if BLM demands are not met “we’re gonna shut shit down,” and that in 2014, Miss Garza did so: She and other BLMers chained themselves together so a San Francisco subway car could not move, and shut down the line for an hour and a half. It is hard to understand how this furthered “global peace,” any more than shutting down the 405 Freeway in Los Angeles, Interstate 95 in Virginia, Interstate 35 in Minneapolis, and the Interstate 40 bridge in Memphis, where an ambulance with a desperately sick child was among the blocked vehicles.

And the committee must think Miss Cullors is right when she calls those who disagree with her “gun-toting white racists,” and when she urges followers to “rise the fuck up” and “burn everything down.” Perhaps she will repeat these contributions to global peace when she delivers her Syndey Peace Prize lecture.

It would be hard to think of any movement anywhere that has been both so wrong-headed and done so much to hurt blacks. Despite BLM’s crazed vision of racist police hunting blacks as if they were rabbits, blacks were only 266 of the 1,092 people killed by officers last year. A policeman is 14 times more likely to be killed by a black person than he is to kill an unarmed black.

Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi. (Credit Image: © Shotwell/Rex Shutterstock via ZUMA Press)

As police pulled back in the face of BLM-inspired scrutiny of effective tactics, the murder rate rose sharply after 20 years of decline. As Heather Mac Donald has pointed out, “homicides in the U.S. rose in 2015 by the largest one-year increase in nearly 50 years; the additional victims were overwhelmingly black.” She notes that 900 more black men were murdered in 2015 than in 2014, which brought the black homicide total up to 7,000, which was 2,000 more than all white and Hispanic victims put together. 2016 saw another jump in murders. If blacks lives matter, surely BLM would have more to say about those 7,000 than about the 266 killed by police — virtually every one of whom was a threat to an officer.

Miss Cullors must not care about the 7,000. When she learned she was getting the Sydney prize, she explained that, for blacks, the problem is the police: “Do we need police? . . . In our opinion, no, police are not going to give us safety. We’ve seen time and time again that actually what they do is provide death . . . .”

It would be mean spirited to hope Miss Cullors’s gets her wish, and that the police withdraw from all black neighborhoods. But if they did, it would probably take even Miss Cullors no more than half an hour realize that it is black people — not the police — who “provide death.”

But there is nothing new about blacks blaming whites for their own problems. This has been a well beaten path to notoriety and even fortune ever since W.E.B. Du Bois showed the way at the turn of the 20th century. This is what black people do.

Far different and far more contemptible are the whites who fall for this racket. BLM’s lurid fantasies about “racism” are easily proven wrong. Time after time, their tales of white viciousness fall apart when the facts become known. Why are the people of the Sydney Peace Foundation willing to believe obvious untruths? I can think of only two reasons.

First, they must get an intense feeling of virtue from helping and promoting people as unlike themselves as possible. If it is generous to adopt a child, it is saintly to adopt an African. In an era in which “racism” is the cardinal sin, gushing over blacks is an unmistakable sign of virtue.

Second, they must take joy in feeling superior to others of their own race. Liberal whites suffer from a unique disease. Its main symptom is an addiction to righteous indignation — but not just any kind of indignation. Whites must never be indignant at the viciousness of Islam, the criminal violence of blacks, the corruption of Third-Worlders, or the ethnic triumphalism of Hispanics. These are problems for which we must seek “root causes,” which are sure to include our own alleged failings.

Only whites can be targets of truly bracing, ecstatic indignation. It must be deeply satisfying for the Sydney committee to feel superior to brutish American police who torment black people. It must be thrilling to look down from a great height on ordinary white Americans who don’t understand that “silence is violence.” I can think of no other explanations for why they chose to believe the patently unbelievable and to proclaim that thugs and swindlers “have made significant contributions to global peace.”

Surely, there has never been, in the history of the world, elites whose highest form of virtue is mixed with contempt for their own people.