Susannah Luthi writes for the Washington Free Beacon about one of the groups back antisemitic activity in the United States.
The People’s City Council of Los Angeles launched in 2020 with a pledge to support the Black Lives Matter movement, attracting a flurry of large-dollar donations in the process. After years of fundraising inactivity, the self-described “abolitionist” group is now using its budget to target local Jewish leaders.
The council—which bills itself as an “abolitionist, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist collective”— raised more than $2.5 million in the summer of 2020 thanks to a viral GoFundMe campaign to support BLM protesters. But the group never registered as a nonprofit or reported how it spent the money, prompting the California Department of Justice to bar it from raising and disbursing funds last year.
That decision did not stop the People’s City Council from participating in the infamous Thanksgiving Day attack on AIPAC president Michael Tuchin’s Los Angeles home, which saw far-left activists throw smoke grenades, scatter fake blood and infant body bags, and display signs saying, “FUCK UR HOLIDAY BABY KILLER!” After posting videos of the scene on social media, the group in a Monday statement defended the “protest,” saying it will “keep applying pressure to any entity complicit” in Israeli “violence.” Los Angeles police are investigating the incident as a hate crime involving “assault with a deadly weapon,” a spokesman told the Washington Free Beacon.
The People’s City Council’s pivot from BLM supporter to anti-Semitic agitator aligns the group with local BLM chapters across the country. BLM Chicago, for example, posted graphics in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 assault on Israel that said the terrorist group had the “legal right to resist.” Black Lives Matter Grassroots, which represents 26 BLM chapters, similarly justified Hamas’s terror attack as a “desperate act of self-defense.”
