Is Antifa an African-American Organization? CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin assumes that it is. Prison Planet’s Paul Joseph Watson invokes empirical evidence to refute that assumption:

CNN Analyst Jeffrey Toobin says criticizing Antifa is racist because “Antifa is widely perceived as an African-American organization.”

That’s odd, because every time I see Antifa, it’s full of runty, privileged, white trust fund babies.pic.twitter.com/SrB2qtuNb7

— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) August 29, 2018

As I read of their dispute, I thought of what some call the Freedom Summer murders of civil rights activists Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney. The Wikipedia article about their deaths tells us that they “were associated with the Council of Federated Organizations and its member organization the Congress of Racial Equality.”

The latter included the NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee. All these organizations may rightly be called African-American. Does the fact that two of the three murdered activists were white mean that it is wrong to do so?

On the other hand, if the record shows that Antifa’s membership, or that of any other organization, is predominantly white, what sense does it make to assert that they are, nonetheless, African-American? It only makes sense if one can show that they espouse aims and purposes African-Americans espouse and that they act accordingly.

Antifa wants to erase every sign that, in some parts of the United States, some people revered the defenders and practitioners of slavery. CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin appears to think that this is enough to prove that they are African-American. After all, African-Americans hate the enslavement of their ancestors and are offended by any sign of reverence for the enslavers and their proponents.

Now, it may be true in certain circumstances that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” But even when it is true, it doesn’t mean that the enemy of my enemy is synonymous with me.

The ancient Romans ended up displacing the rulers of many tribes, cities and territories who foolishly accepted their military aid without taking account of this the difference. In the brief interlude between their fall from power and their death (or powerless existence in Roman captivity), these rulers regretted the failure to scrutinize Rome’s motives and purposes more comprehensively.

They should have considered the implications of allowing their would-be conquerors to act in their name. This mistaken tolerance for Rome’s presumption invited people in an ill-fated ruler’s domain to mistake the appearance of the Roman sovereign’s power for their own.

Often, such people only realized their mistake when some Roman commander—after assuring that that his forces had secured their territory — informed them of the difference, in a proclamation convincingly inscribed in blood upon what was, erstwhile, their territory.

Thus, “the enemy of my enemy becomes my conqueror.”

With this in mind, Americans who abhor the enslavement of our ancestors should care less about Antifa’s staunch opposition to evils killed and buried in the past; and more about what words that accompany their actions, words that proclaim Antifa’s agenda for America’s future. That agenda is epitomized in the arresting mantra Antifa’s cowardly masked vandals chant as they vandalize the ghosts of slavery past: “No borders! No walls! No USA at all”

Do African-Americans characteristically support the goal of erasing the United States of America?

My decidedly black and American father had a long career in the Armed Forces of the United States. Unlike the hoodlums in Antifa, he did not show purported opposition to fascism by fighting past shades of totalitarian enslavement. He did so — at the risk of death, and the price of serious wounds — in battles in Europe, Asia, Korea and Vietnam, which the USA fought against the oppressive, living, murderously real totalitarian enslavement of peoples during the 20th century.

It offends his memory (and the pride I take in in it) to hear Antifa’s masked vandals proclaiming their mission to destroy the nation he served. Like him, I undertook to serve in the government of the United States. So, I swore an oath to the Constitution of liberty that informs the moral heart of the American people. How can an organization be called “African-American” when it espouses the goal of eradicating America, and boisterously foresees the day when the United States thereof will be no more?

Eradicate the United States and what becomes of those who live now as representatives, in these United States, of people from every region, nation, and kind in the world? We not only represent their fleshly heritage. We represent their heartfelt commitment to do right and be just, according to the law and will of our Creator.

We represent the hope that human beings may learn to work together, in freely given allegiance to the sense of human worth that transcends our fleshly and material differences. We represent the goodwill of all who join in the Spirit we have in common, reflected in the decent love we show for the good of our families, and our communities; and the mutual respect that love inspires toward any and all of God’s creation determined, as we are, to live by His laws.

I fully understood what John Kennedy meant when he defiantly challenged the hateful significance of the Berlin wall, with the declaration “I am a Berliner. All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin.”

Like President Kennedy, I acknowledge that I am of one race and kind with all people who share in the common sense of right and justice that informed the founding premises of the United States. Those premises triumphed in the war against American slavery. They triumphed in the World’s war against enslavement to totalitarian dictators and ideologies.

I pray that they will triumph now, against the violent forces of the new totalitarianism, which masks itself with opposition to fascism so as to use fascist methods to erase the United States, and the hope of decent human community we still strive to preserve and represent.

Does the desire to destroy my country mean make Antifa an African-American organization?

Even as they fought against the injustices that betrayed America’s principles, people like Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King appealed to those principles. In the name of our Creator, God and his justice, they invited all Americans to help strengthen and build our nation by heeding that appeal. More than this, they proclaimed the same vocation, as Americans, that Kennedy’s famous words evoked — the vocation to extend the principles of God-endowed right and justice as we strengthen and build the identity of humankind throughout the earth.

It makes no sense to identify an organization as African-American when it boisterously proclaims the ill will to destroy the United States of America. That ill will abandons America’s vocation. It enacts the violent, hate-filled spirit of those who oppressed my enslaved ancestors, and those in today’s world who seek to preserve and extend the enslavement of all humanity.

In the meanwhile, it seeks to set Americans at one another’s throats, using race, religion, economic hardship and any other excuse available to urge us toward mutual self-destruction. There’s nothing “African-American” about such an agenda. It is and ought to be repugnant to all Americans who have the eyes to see it for what it is. Pray God they use them now.