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Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle · 8 May 1970

CP-1970-003

Black Panthers Hit Jews, Zionism and Racism as Same

Party Decline Charged in Diatribe; Assails “Zionist” Judges in US

Jewish Telegraphic Agency, San Francisco

Black Panthers Hit Jews, Zionism and Racism as Same — Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle, 8 May 1970
Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle · 8 May 1970

Transcribed from the clipping

“SAN FRANCISCO — (JTA) — The Black Panthers have discarded their barely concealed anti-Semitism, insisting in the past they were not against Jews but only against Zionism, and have now declared that Jewishness, Zionism and racism are identical. Connie Matthews, international co-ordinator of the Black Panther Party, now blames dwindling support for the organization since it ‘took its stand on the (support of) the Palestinian people’s struggle’ on the ‘fact’ that the ‘white left in the USA is comprised of a large percentage of the Jewish population.’ Miss Matthews observes that since the BPP’s stand the white left ‘started floundering and became undecided. This leaves us with no alternative than to believe that a large portion of these people are Zionists and are therefore racists.’ This venomous diatribe by Miss Matthews appears in the latest issue of the BPP official organ, The Black Panther. As evidence of the basic Jewish-Zionist-racist character of the white left, she notes that a ‘Zionist judge, Judge (Julius J.) Hoffman’ allowed ‘Zionist’ defendants in the ‘Chicago conspiracy’ trial to go free while jailing Bobby Seale to four years for contempt of court… The BPP official reiterates the organization’s support of the Palestinian people’s struggle ‘against Israeli imperialism and Zionism aided and abetted by U.S. imperialism,’ and declares: ‘The one-eyed bandit from Tel Aviv (General) Moshe Dayan must be hunted down and killed.’ Miss Matthews does not elaborate further on this… What Miss Matthews did not state was that only two of the remaining seven defendants — Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin — were Jewish.”

Context added by this archive

A wire service for the Jewish press, reporting one official’s article in one issue of one party paper, and checking her arithmetic in the last paragraph. The piece carries plain antisemitism: the claim that judges ruled as Zionists, and a call to kill a named man. It is here because the standard account of the 1975 resolution says the Soviet Union invented the formula, and this is an American paper watching the same words move through American politics five years earlier.

Cite this item

"Black Panthers Hit Jews, Zionism and Racism as Same," Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle, 8 May 1970. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1970-003. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1970-003

Elsewhere in the archive

This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American and Anglophone newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1812 to 2022. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.

The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the wire service that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary.

Something wrong here, or something you know about this clipping? The archive is still being built and corrections are wanted: maria@rozumstudio.com, quoting CP-1970-003.

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