Nylah Burton
A PROTESTOR INTERRUPTS U.S. PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN DURING A CAMPAIGN EVENT AT EMANUEL AME CHURCH ON JANUARY 8, 2024 IN CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA. THE CHURCH WAS THE SITE OF A 2015 SHOOTING MASSACRE PERPETRATED BY A WHITE SUPREMACIST. (PHOTO: SEAN RAYFORD/GETTY IMAGES)
Watching Mother Emanuel AME congregants shout down pro-Palestine demonstrators showed that Zionism is alive and well in the Black church. It was one of the most despicable and heartbreaking things I’ve ever seen from my own people.
On January 8, three pro-Palestinian protestors were escorted out of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, known as Mother Emanuel, for protesting President Biden’s presence there. The protestors interrupted Biden’s speech to confront him about the U.S. funding of and refusal to stop the genocide against the Palestinian people, where over 20,000 people in Gaza have been killed by Israel (an estimated 10,000 are stuck under the rubble and presumed dead), and kidnappings, illegal arrests, and shootings occur daily in the West Bank.
While Biden was about to acknowledge the victims of the 2015 attack on Mother Emanuel, where supremacist Dylann Roof gunned down nine Black congregants, one non-Black protester stood up and said, “if you really care about the lives lost here, then you should honor the lives lost and call for a ceasefire in Palestine!” She and the protestors with her (one of whom was Black) were escorted out of the church as some members of the audience shook their heads or even yelled at them.
The most shocking moment was when the room responded to the protestors’ chants of “Free Palestine!” with a counterchant of “Four More Years! Four More Years!,” standing up and clapping for Biden, the very man who had been called to accountability for genocide mere moments later. As a Black person with maternal roots in the South, it was one of the most despicable and heartbreaking things I’d ever seen from my own people. A holy place used to call for four more years of genocide.
But it didn’t surprise me, because I know that Zionism is alive and well in the Black Christian community. Even amid the powerful solidarity we’ve seen between Black and Palestinian freedom fighters, the insistence on supporting a colonial apartheid state, unfortunately, is present in places one would assume would reject it the most. Christianity is at the heart of this cognitive dissonance, and Zionism and Islamophobia that too often goes unchecked.
For Zionists in the Black Christian community, support of Israel is usually not even deeply emotional. Unlike many synagogues, Black churches rarely hold fundraisers for the IDF, say prayers for Israel when they’re attacking Palestinians, or show up to pro-Israel events. Their complicity shows up most here, in the realm of politics, where they close their eyes to the sight of severed limbs of Palestinian children and close their ears to the cries of Palestinian parents out of loyalty to whatever Democrat is in office — even if they, like Biden, are a genocidaire. Even when fellow Black Democrats try to hold politicians accountable for their violence against Muslims — like Obama’s infamous bombing of the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia, ten times the amount of drone strikes than under George W. Bush – they’re often shot down with excuses like “They would have gotten rid of him if he didn’t do that,” or “He’s just doing what every president does,” or now with Biden, the intellectually lazy “Trump is worse.”
What I witnessed at Mother Emanuel also reflected a deep sense of entitlement that can only come from desiring to model oneself from the violent individualism in white communities. Although children were being killed or starved to death by Biden’s orders as they sat there, their pain and perspective took importance above all else. Several people online attacked the protestors for “disrespecting a house of worship,” noting they found it even more reprehensible because of Dylann Roof’s mass slaughter in the same building and the fact that two of the three visible protestors were white or non-Black.
“Mother Emanuel AME is hallowed ground in the AME church community and in Charleston especially. The shock of people in the crowd at protesters yelling out while President Biden was speaking from the pulpit cannot be overstated. I too couldn’t believe it,” Symone Sanders-Townsend, former national press secretary for Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2016 Presidential campaign and former Chief Spokesperson to Vice President Kamala Harris tweeted.
As an organizer myself, I would not have had a non-Black person or white-presenting person (the ethnicity or race of the protestor is unknown) speak first or loudest. ot because it’s morally wrong, but rather it handed them a talking point that Black Christian Zionists used everywhere as a convenient excuse for why they were permitted to look away from genocide, to campaign and vote for the man who made it all happen. But the most unholy thing that occurred in that church was Biden being there in the first place. When I went to Charleston last summer, I went on a tour that passed by Mother Emanuel, where our guide proudly told us this house of worship was born from holy protest. The African Methodist Episcopal denomination was created when Black Methodists broke off after experiencing racism and segregation by white Methodists. In 1822, Denmark Vesey, a free person of color, planned a slave rebellion in 1822 at Mother Emanuel. Vesey was hanged for his rebellion, and the church was set aflame and burned to the ground. Sanders-Townsend is right that Mother Emanuel is sacred ground. So why invite the Devil into it?
Referring to the carnage Roof brought into Mother Emanuel, from the pulpit, Biden said to the crowd, “The word of God was pierced by bullets of hate and rage propelled by not just gunpowder, but by a poison. Poison that has for too long haunted this nation. And what is that poison? White supremacy … This has no place in America — not today, tomorrow or ever.” Although I am well-versed in the hypocrisy of this country, him saying that while continuing to fund apartheid and genocide in occupied Palestine was a new level of evil.
And other pro-Palestinian Black organizers see it, too. Lead Charleston Black Lives Matter organizer and member of Mother Emanuel Marcus McDonald, who was denied entry into the church because of his known affiliation with the Palestinian Liberation Movement, said in a statement, “We find it so disrespectful that President Biden has come to the place of a massacre while actively benefiting and promoting a genocide and a massacre in Gaza.”
McDonald continued, expressing how Biden’s presence went against his religious and spiritual teachings and beliefs. “My church missed the mark. It missed the call of Jesus to choose the oppressed- the orphan, the widow, and the refugee over the empire. President Biden has no place speaking from our pulpit to invoke the lives lost at Emanuel while simultaneously ignoring the thousands of lives lost in Gaza, the bombing of Bethlehem, and apartheid in the Holy Land. I stand in the heritage of protest that birthed the AME church to issue the only righteous call: to ‘study war no more.’”
As a young child, I knew Christianity wasn’t for me, and in my mid-twenties, I left the Jewish community for Islam due to racism, family reasons, and a spiritual connection to the faith’s tradition of resistance. But the Black church is a place I still find sacred to my sense of self. It is the place I associate with survival and resistance, with art and beauty, with the soul of a nation rising up to fight its oppressors. Seeing the Black church crumble along with the American Empire has caused a whirlwind of emotions — mainly rage and a deep grief.
Much has been made of Black antisemitism, some of it legitimate, like Kanye West publicly saying he loved Adolf Hitler, and some of it ridiculous and racist, like Jamie Foxx being attacked for simply referring to the “Judases” in his life that was reported falsely by the press. But Black Islamophobia has long gone uninterrogated as a dangerous form of religious discrimination in the Black Christian church. It is dangerous not because Black Christians have a tendency to bomb mosques or attack Muslims on the street like white domestic terrorists but because they will sit there silently while their Democratic leaders do so in other countries. They will silence dissent under the guise of racial progress, and they will either gleefully work alongside those doing the killing, coveting positions in the cabinets of murderers of Black and brown Muslims. We have seen this with Obama, and we are seeing it again with Biden.
I comfort myself, though, by knowing that Black solidarity with Palestine is more powerful than those who choose to abandon this alliance. Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Angela Davis, and so many more of our Black luminaries and freedom fighters stood and still stand completely with Palestine. Globally as well, the Black Diaspora feels the pain of those attacked in the Holy Land. This was detailed in “The Pen and the Sword: Conversations with Edward Said” by David Barsamian and Edward W. Said, detailing the links between the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa and the anti-occupation movement in Palestine, a solidarity that was reaffirmed by South African’s recent historic suit against Israel on genocide charges to the ICJ.
“While the ANC was in its worst moments in the 1960s and 1970s, they were getting help from us, and from the Algerians and others…” Said explained. “So that suggests an understanding of our own place in history, that we’re not just an innocent, pastoral people, that we are part of this big movement.”
Why would many Black Christians in this country forego their place in such a large, holy, global movement? Would they not want to be remembered for standing tall as trees in this fight against oppression, rather than bending to whatever Democrat gets the nomination? Some might say the fear of the outwardly racist Republican Party is the main factor, but I think it’s something else.
I think Black Islamophobia is, in many ways, a form of self-hate. When we were stolen from Africa, many of us were Muslim. We had names like Musa and Warsan, changed into Peggy and Franklin. The cultural genocide we endured nearly succeeded in wiping out Islam in the U.S., or occupied Turtle Island, until the Nation of Islam helped revive it during the Civil Rights Movement, with most of their adherents moving on later to more traditional forms of Sunni Islam. Black Islamophobia in the Christian community is, to me, a desperate attempt to be validated by whiteness by participating in its violence, by distancing yourself from the Muslim roots of your ancestors, by cooly chanting “Four More Years!” to bombing a predominantly Muslim country. It is like whiteness is a club they want admission into, and if Muslim lives — or even Arab Christian lives — are the price, then so be it.
This is why while Black Islamophobia may be, philosophically, a rejection of the self, it is functionally an attack on an out-group and should be seen as such because it results in the community’s complicity in death. People join the military and go kill Black and brown Muslims, or they support the leaders who do and harass anyone who even suggests not voting for them. This, too, is Zionism. Perhaps a passive brand, but Zionism all the same — and still deadly and unholy. Forgiveness for these sins should not come so easily, and should not be granted with a feeble “I didn’t know,” or “I was full of self-hate.” I don’t know how those who chanted “Four More Years!” at Mother Emanuel will find redemption, but that’s not my concern.
It was Biden himself who desecrated Mother Emanuel, decrying white supremacy from the pulpit of a church where a white man butchered Black congregants because they were Black, while he sends billions of dollars in aid to Israel so they can bomb infants, children, women, and men just because they are Palestinian. It was Biden who desecrated Mother Emanuel, speaking about the poison of white supremacy when he advocated for, compromised with, and befriended segregationists during Jim Crow. His pals were the same people who sanctioned the lynchings of my family, of the family of Black people all around the South. His presence was unholy, not the protest. His words were no sermon, they were a campaign speech, given because he is terrified of losing the election due to the genocide, while also refusing to end the genocide. The serpent condemned the poison dripping from its own fangs, the serpent was given the highest position to spew this hypocrisy in a holy place, a position given to him by those entrusted with upholding the dignity and sanctity of that holy place. That is what I weep over.
INTERNATIONALIST 360° 