Black Lives Matter exploiting the good intentions of ‘useful fools’ to spread its radical ideology

Black Lives Matter organiser Paddy Gibson is arrested for protesting in Sydney last week despite a ban. Picture: Jane Dempster

They used to be called “useful fools”: people used by Kremlin agents in the West through various peace groups and friendship societies that were really just fronts for advancing Soviet interests at the expense of the US.

Ditto today’s global network of Confucius Institutes on Western universities and business networks pushing the barrow of the Chinese for personal financial gain.

Perhaps the most sinister manifestation of the phenomenon of using people of good intention for political purposes they often don’t even understand is the global Black Lives Matter movement. After all, what right-thinking person does not agree black lives do indeed matter?

One of the leaders of BLM in the US, Patrisse Cullors, who founded the group in 2013 with Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi, told Morgan State University Professor Jared Ball in an interview in 2015 that the group had “a clear ideological frame”.

“Myself and Alicia in particular are trained organisers. We are super versed on … ideological theories,” she said. Of course most people who support BLM do not share the anti-capitalist and socialist ideals of its leaders.

Protests in Sydney under the BLM banner have been motivated by the death of Kempsey man David Dungay in Sydney’s Long Bay Jail in late 2015. They raise an important question: do BLM organisers really care about advancing the interests of African-Americans and Australian Aboriginals? Or are they using Black identity and white guilt to hurt the political and business establishments they despise? If you think that’s a bit far-fetched, just read the Trotskyist Platform rant on Dungay.

This column on June 8 and June 15 pointed out the flaws in the BLM argument in the US. The violence since the shocking killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25 has disproportionately hurt African-Americans, especially the hundreds of young Blacks who have been killed after violent BLM protests. And the facts show in the US and here African-Americans and Aboriginal Australians are not more likely to be killed by police but are far more likely to be killed by other Blacks.

The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1991 showed conclusively, despite much recent media misreporting, that Aboriginal people are not over-represented among deaths in custody in Australia. This column on June 15 quoted Australian Catholic University Aboriginal academic Anthony Dillon, “The best way of reducing Aboriginal deaths in custody is to focus on reducing the rates of Aboriginal deaths. Full stop.” It quoted Alice Springs Councillor Jacinta Price saying 70 per cent of Indigenous people in jail were there for crimes of violence against their loved ones. The left media and local BLM organisers know all this but they just don’t care about the truth of Aboriginal disadvantage. Their politics is about blaming and changing the political system rather than lifting up First Australians. They are using Aboriginal victims in a political power play.

Noel Pearson nailed it talking to this column last Wednesday: “There are two forms of racism and prejudice. First is the hard bigotry of which the conservative right is often accused, sometimes wrongly, sometimes fairly. Second is the soft bigotry of low expectations for which progressives are responsible. BLM is alive to the first, blind to the second.”

He said organisers of local BLM rallies “are a scourge” because “their bigotry is influential on poor social outcomes”.

“The first kind of racism is rarely official policy that determines the life outcomes of our people. The second is the default policy of Indigenous affairs. Progressive policies prevail in relation to welfare, education, criminal justice, etc. We are reaping the bitter harvest of progressive policy preferences that oppose the reforms needed in our communities. BLM are right about the problem. But they are dead wrong about the solution.”

It’s tricky for people who are not Aboriginal to point out the problem, but Australia is lucky to have many Aboriginal leaders who are prepared to bell the cat on the failed solutions of the left and to advocate for better economic and education outcomes for aboriginal people. Leaders like Warren Mundine want to see young Aboriginal people take their rightful place in society rather than destroy society. And the vast majority of Indigenous people I have spoken to agree.

Mundine wrote on Thursday morning in The Daily Telegraph, “The Black Lives Matter movement talks about 434 Indigenous deaths in custody since 1991 as if (they were) … killings … by police and corrective services offices. That is not true. Most died of natural causes or at their own hands (including accidents). … BLM … ignores … 951 homicides with Indigenous victims between 1989 and 2012, 13 per cent of all homicides in Australia. They also ignore the fact Indigenous Australian women are 35 times more likely to be hospitalised due to non-fatal family violence-related assaults than other Australian women.”

Andrew Bolt in the News Corp tabloids that morning singled out Sydney BLM protest organiser Paddy Gibson, whose Twitter feed is well worth a look. Bolt wrote, “He’s an activist from the Marxist Solidarity movement who’s tweeted that police are pigs and his “whole life is dedicated to campaigning against Australian values’’ which he defines as “genocide, apartheid, imperialism (and) white supremacy’’.

Gibson is an academic researcher at University of Technology Sydney’s Jumbunna Institute. Jumbunna is headed by Professor Larissa Behrendt who famously tweeted that watching Price’s mother Bess, a former Northern Territory politician, was more offensive than “watching a man have sex with a horse”.

The rallying point for BLM Sydney and its media supporters at the ABC, Guardian Australia and Channel 10’s The Project is Dungay, a young man who died tragically in custody at Sydney’s Long Bay Jail on December 29, 2015.

His mum Leetona’s struggle for what she sees as justice for her dead son is heartbreaking, but media backers of the case must know the coroner’s report on Dungay’s death is nothing like the allegations being thrown about by BLM campaigners and reported without scrutiny by gullible journalists.

The 100-page report makes it clear mistakes were made the day Dungay died, but nothing was done to deliberately injure Dungay, who was facing intervention because he refused to stop eating biscuits despite his soaring blood sugar levels. The report’s description of Dungay’s life, crimes, battles with diabetes going back to early childhood and deepening mental health issues is a harrowing read. But Dungay was not killed deliberately. The coroner details years of interventions by the health authorities in the criminal justice system to save him.

Aboriginal Australians have agency. They are real people with real lives, hopes and dreams. They are not all victims and they have personal responsibility. Journalists need to get to know the Aboriginal world as it is and report it factually rather than parade their own moral virtue. Journalists who refuse to engage with the facts about Aboriginal lives and deaths are being used as political pawns, and could be using Aboriginal stories the same way.

Chris Mitchell is an Ambassador for the Australian Indigenous Education Foundation.