Which Black Lives Matter?

The message in the photo above is commendable, but does it reflect the Black Lives Matter movement in its present form? Do all black lives matter to the BLM leadership, from what an outside observer can tell? Clearly not. Only black lives lost in confrontations with law enforcement officers seem to count, because BLM can manipulate those deaths as a tool to seek the destruction of America’s present system of law and order in favor of some new system they haven’t yet unveiled. Given the fact that BLM’s founders have made no secret of their Marxist leanings, the USA they envision bears little resemblance to that of our Founding Fathers.

The fiction that black lives matter to the BLM movement is belied by the silence coming from its leaders regarding the deaths of blacks in any other context than police encounters. For example, did BLM bemoan the murder of retired police captain David Dorn on June 2^nd in St. Louis by rioters? No. Did it condemn the black-on-black gun violence in Chicago over Fathers’ Day weekend culminating in 15 deaths and 105 injuries, or that occurring last weekend where 18 were killed (including three children) and 47 injured? No. Sadly, this epidemic of black-on-black violence has a stubborn history in our nation’s recent past, and is being replicated in many cities across this country. But BLM is not interested in these deaths, for they carry little political potency for radical change of our republic.

My point in all this is not to minimize the evil of true cases of police brutality against blacks by pointing to the much larger reality of black deaths at the hands of black perpetrators (or murderers of any color, for that matter). I firmly believe that officers committing homicide must be investigated fully and fairly, and if found guilty of unjustified homicide should face the appropriate judgment for their crime. The issue at hand, however, is the hypocrisy of Black Lives Matter, claiming to fight for justice on behalf of all black victims but in reality ignoring most black deaths. And of course, BLM limits its scope to a small segment of black victims only in the United States, as if the black race ends at our national borders. If all black lives truly matter, one would expect BLM to be grieved and angered by the wholesale slaughter of blacks taking place elsewhere, particularly on the African continent, perpetrated primarily by Muslim protagonists.

For example, in just the last month, 17 villagers were slaughtered in Macomia, Mozambique (5/30) when jihadis stormed their town. That same day in Burkina Faso, Muslims attacked two villages, Barsalogho and Loroum, killing 13 and 15 noncombatants respectively. The next day, at a livestock market in Kompienbiga (also Burkina Faso), Muslim militants fired into the crowd, killing 30 innocents. That same day (5/31) in Itakpa, Nigeria, jihadis with machetes hacked 13 locals to death in their homes. On June 3^rd in Kujuru, Nigeria, Fulani mercenaries dismembered 9 women and children attempting to flee their attackers. Three days later in Auno, Muslim insurgents overran a military base and killed six local soldiers. On June 9^th, also in Nigeria, 81 villagers are gathered from the nomadic village of Faduma Kolomdi by Muslim radicals and executed. On June 11^th in Cabor, Mozambique, 10 members of a family are beheaded by jihadis. Also on that day, in the border post town of Kafolo, Ivory Coast, a Muslim militant attack takes the lives of 13 guards. On June 13^th in the two towns of Nganzai and Monguno, Nigeria, the Islamic State of West Africa massacred 61 locals for the crime of interacting with Westerners. The next day, in Bouka Were, Mali, two dozen local security guards were killed by Islamic State affiliates. Over the weekend of June 20-21, the Islamic State affiliated group ADF in the Democratic Republic of Congo killed “at least twenty civilians) in separate attacks on two villages. And this last Saturday, in Damboa, Nigeria, the Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram ambushed and killed 11 local security guards.

These represent the attacks with larger casualty rates in Africa over the past month, but many more lethal attacks on smaller numbers over the same period could be listed, all carried out by Muslim militants. Did BLM take notice of any of them, expressing grief or anger over the senseless killing of more black lives? Hardly. Apparently these black African individuals are of equally little value to BLM leadership as the multitudes of black Americans killed at the hands of anyone other than law enforcement.

We’ve been told that it is impolitic to say “All lives matter” in response to the race-specific claim that “black lives matter.” I disagree. In point of fact, it is a racist statement to imply that black lives matter more than those of any other race. From a Christian vantage point, all lives matter equally before God regardless of the color of one’s skin, and all are to be treated equally and provided the same opportunities in life, as much as is possible in any imperfect society. Where that doesn’t happen, we must work to rectify it both in our hearts and in our institutions.

But even for those committed to the rallying cry of “Black Lives Matter!”, I’d be more inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt and listen compassionately to their arguments if they really believed and acted as though all black lives really did matter. Unless and until that happens, all this protest noise, attended by violence and mindless destruction, is simply adolescent political theater. I pray it either matures into something substantive and positive for human society, or dissolves into the fog of oblivion where all juvenile dreams find their ultimate end.