16 Oct 2023 Companies Aligned With BLM Must Respond to Hamas Atrocities
For the last several years, representatives of both our Free Enterprise Project (FEP) and our Project 21 black leadership network have warned corporations as well as the general public that if they wanted to support justice, racial equality and the betterment of black Americans, Black Lives Matter (BLM) was the wrong recipient for their generosity.
FEP has directly confronted companies ranging from Amazon to Mastercard to Disney to Netflix, cautioning them that their sponsorship of BLM meant that they were “effectively financing the war against law enforcement that has helped lead to the destruction of businesses large and small in our towns and cities.”
Despite FEP’s alarms, large corporations have collectively donated almost $100 billion for the organization that is now siding with Hamas in its bloody crusade against Israel.
These companies can’t say they weren’t warned. And now they must answer for the way they have invested their shareholders’ dollars — not in increasing value for their companies, but in political virtue-signaling that has done nothing for black Americans and that has instead propped up violence both here and abroad.
Stefan Padfield
FEP Associate Stefan Padfield says:
The Free Enterprise Project of the National Center for Public Policy Research has for some time now been pushing corporations to get back to neutral and focused on the bottom line, as opposed to destroying value by pushing a radical leftist agenda.
Accordingly, some might argue that we should be pleased with the muted response of at least some corporations to the crisis in Israel – but there are at least two problems with that view.
First, staying silent now effectively amounts to just more corporate knee-bending to the radical left. We simply can’t give corporations credit for getting back to neutral when they only do so selectively in a left-leaning manner.
Second, the contrast between the corporate response to the killing of George Floyd in 2020 and the killing of hundreds of Israelis in 2023 is simply too stark to be ignored.
Corporate executives and directors will have much to answer for, given the lack of corporate outrage in the face of atrocities not seen since the Holocaust.
The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) has been singling out individual CEOs and board members on X (formerly known as Twitter), calling on them to renounce their companies’ ties to Black Lives Matter.
At the Washington Free Beacon, Aaron Sibarium writes that corporations’ choice to choose NOW as the time to remain silent on human rights is telling: “Companies across the Western world were quick to issue statements condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the killing of George Floyd. As Israel reels from the worst terrorist attack in its history, many of those same companies are less outspoken.”
At The Federalist, the Claremont Institute’s John Cohen urges Americans to “shame and punish the unrepentant corporations that redistributed their wealth to BLM and its allies. The companies in the BLM Funding Database are a good place to start.”