One of the many reasons Christians must overtly and explicitly distance themselves from socialism and any form of Leftist utopianism is the Left’s belief that the end justifies the means. When you believe you are ushering in utopia, any crime is easily justified. Even terrorism.
This “principle”—if you can call it that—was most famously stated by Walter Duranty, a New York Times reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for lying to his American readers by minimizing (or, in many cases, ignoring) the crimes of Stalin and the Bolsheviks in 1930s Russia. Of those crimes, Duranty said: "But – to put it brutally – you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs.” In other words, the murders we commit are justified by the Leftist utopia we are building. Whenever and wherever socialism is seriously tried, terror becomes the order of the day, and socialists often resort to terror to try move a country toward socialism.
A case in point is Susan Rosenberg, who sits on the board of Black Lives Matter’s parent entity. Rosenberg is a genuine communist terrorist who served 16 years in prison for a five-year terror spree that included multiple bombings and killings.
The Relationship of Black Lives Matter and Thousand Currents
Black Lives Matter is not itself a tax-exempt corporation. It was formed seven years ago in response to the (fully justified) police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, but it never bothered to secure tax-exempt status with the IRS. To handle its fundraising and finances, Black Lives Matter associated with a tax-exempt corporation called “Thousand Currents”:
“In 2016, BLM Global Network approached Thousand Currents to create a fiscal sponsorship agreement. Thousand Currents, a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt nonprofit organization, provides the legal and administrative framework to enable BLM to fulfill its mission. Fiscal sponsorship is a common structure utilized by nonprofit organizations. Oftentimes, nonprofit initiatives seek fiscal sponsorship to be able to have the fiscal sponsor handle administrative operations while the organization focuses on its programs and builds up its own organizational infrastructure. In this capacity, we provide administrative and back office support, including finance, accounting, grants management, insurance, human resources, legal and compliance.”
Susan Rosenberg is the vice-chairman of the board of Thousand Currents.
The Radical Journey of Susan Rosenberg
Rosenberg was born in 1955 into a middle-class Jewish family in Manhattan; her father was a dentist and her mother a theatrical producer. She attended the progressive Walden School and later went to exclusive and prestigious Barnard College, the all-female counterpart to Columbia that was established back when the Ivy League schools admitted only men.
As a teenager, Rosenberg participated in anti-Vietnam war demonstrations and was active in the group “Students for a Democratic Society.” SDS was the student branch of the League for Industrial Democracy, a pro-worker and pro-trade union but anti-communist organization. During the course of organizing protests against the Vietnam war, however, the SDS drifted Leftward and became Marxist. SDS broke up in 1969, and one of its more radical factions, which Susan Rosenberg joined, became the Weather Underground.
The Weather Underground was founded by Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Mark Rudd, and a few other radicals; they issued a "Declaration of a State of War" against the United States government, and published a document detailing their Maoist revolutionary aims:
The most important task for us toward making the revolution, and the work our collectives should engage in, is the creation of a mass revolutionary movement, without which a clandestine revolutionary party will be impossible. A revolutionary mass movement is . . . akin to the Red Guard in China, based on the full participation and involvement of masses of people in the practice of making revolution; a movement with a full willingness to participate in the violent and illegal struggle.
The Weather Underground conducted a bombing campaign targeting government buildings and several banks. They telephoned warnings of where and when the bombs would explode, and no one was killed. (However, three members of the group were killed in an explosion in a Greenwich Village townhouse, apparently when a bomb they were assembling prematurely detonated.) The Weather Underground started to fall apart after the United States reached a peace accord with North Vietnam in 1973, and by 1977 it was defunct.
The May 19th Communist Organization
But several of radicals in the Weather Underground, including Susan Rosenberg, joined with members of the “Black Liberation Army”—the most violent elements of the Black Panthers—to form the “May 19th Communist Organization” (M19CO). They chose May 19th for their name because it was the birthday both of Ho Chi Minh, the communist leader of North Vietnam, and also of Malcom X (Malcom Little), the civil rights activists who was in the “Nation of Islam” and was assassinated by members of that group after he had a falling out with the group’s then leader, Elijah Muhammad (Elijah Robert Poole).
The goal of M19CO was to "take up arms for the liberation and self-determination of black people in the United States" and wage war against the United States government. M19CO’s combination of black militancy with hard-Leftism/Marxism is eerily similar to today’s Black Lives Matter, except that BLM is far more sophisticated and adept at manipulating “woke” corporate America. Another similarity is the prominence of women in the group’s membership and leadership.
Rosenberg and the May 19th Communist Organization soon began a spree of crime and terror. In 1979, three M19CO members smuggled pistols into a prison, took two guards hostage, and freed Assata Shakur (JoAnne Chesimard, née Byron), a member of the Black Liberation Army who was serving a life sentence plus 26 years for the murder of New Jersey state trooper Werner Foerster after troopers pulled over the car in which Shakur was riding. The M19CO prison break-out allowed Shakur to escape justice for the murder because, in 1984, Shakur was granted asylum in communist Cuba, and has lived there ever since.
Several months later, M19CO arranged for the escape of William Morales, a member of the Puerto Rican separatist group FALN, from Bellevue Hospital in New York City, where he was recovering after a bomb he was building exploded accidentally.
The Brink’s Robbery
But by far the most notorious incident planned and executed by M19CO was the robbery of a Brink’s armored car at the Nanuet Mall in Rockland County, New York, near the town of Nyack. The robbery was carried out by several of the “Black Liberation Army” as well as by David Gilbert, Judith Alice Clark, Kathy Boudin, and Marilyn Buck of M19CO.
Kathy Boudin left her infant son at the babysitter's before taking the wheel of the getaway vehicle, a U-Haul truck. She waited in a nearby parking lot as her heavily armed accomplices drove a red van to the Nanuet Mall, where an armored Brink’s truck was making a pick-up. As guards Peter Paige and Joseph Trombino emerged from the mall to load the bags of money onto the truck, the robbers stormed out of their van and attacked. One fired two shotgun blasts into the van's bulletproof windshield, while another opened fire with an M16 rifle.
Peter Paige was hit multiple times and killed instantly. Trombino was able to fire a single shot from his handgun, but was struck in the shoulder and arm by several rifle rounds, nearly severing his arm. The truck's driver, James Kelly, fired several rounds at the robbers through a gun port but, coming under heavy fire, took cover underneath the dashboard; he was hit in the head by glass and shrapnel.
The communists grabbed $1.6 million in cash and fled the scene.
The robbers then drove to a parking lot where a yellow Honda and the U-Haul truck, manned by members of the M19CO, were waiting. But an alert college student in a house across the street spotted them as they switched vehicles with the money bags; she called the police and identified the vehicles the gang were now using.
Police units from all over the area were converging on the mall, and trying to cut off all escape routes. At an entrance ramp to the New York State Thruway, Nyack Police officers Edward O'Grady, Waverly Brown, Brian Lennon, and Artie Keenan spotted and pulled over the U-Haul truck, with Boudin in the front seat. The police were unsure if they had pulled over the right truck, because police radio had reported that the robbers were all black but the occupants of this vehicle were white (this confusion was was part of M19CO’s plan).
The officers cautiously approached with guns drawn. Feigning innocence, Kathy Boudin convinced the officers to lower their guard. Then, six men armed with automatic weapons and wearing body armor emerged from the back of the truck and began firing upon the four police officers. Officer Waverly Brown (who was black) was hit repeatedly by rifle fire and fell to the ground. One of the gang then walked over with a pistol and executed him at close range. Officer Edward O'Grady lived long enough to empty his revolver, but as he was reloading he was shot several times with an M16. He died on a hospital operating table.
The $1.6 million M19CO killed three men to steal was intended to create a black ethno-state in the American south, to be named, "New Afrika." But most of the perpetrators were caught, and the money was recovered.
The M19CO’s Terror Spree Continues
Although several of the M19CO group were captured after the Brink’s robbery, Rosenberg was not, and her crime spree continued.
On January 28, 1983, M19CO bombed the federal building on Staten Island, N.Y. On April 25, 1983, the group was responsible for a bombing at the National War College at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C. On November 7, 1983, the group triggered a bomb explosion at the US Senate. On August 18, 1983, it bombed the Washington Navy Yard Computer Center. On April 5, 1984, it bombed the Israeli Aircraft Industries Building. On April 20, 1984, M19CO committed a bombing at the Washington Navy Yard Officers Club. On September 26, 1984, the South African consulate was bombed.
Rosenberg Finally Captured
Susan Rosenberg’s reign of terror finally came to an end on November 3, 1984, when she and another M19CO member, Timothy Blunk, were arrested at a storage unit in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Rosenberg had rented the unit with a stolen ID, and the suspicious facility manager called the police. Investigators found 740 pounds of explosives, including 100 blasting caps, nearly 200 sticks of dynamite, more than 100 cartridges of gel explosive, 24 bags of blasting agent, and multiple firearms, including an Uzi submachine gun, an M-14 rifle, a rifle with a telescopic sight, a sawed-off shotgun, and three 9-millimeter pistols.
U.S. Attorney (and later New York City mayor) Rudolph Giuliani prosecuted Rosenberg. During her trial she expressed regret—not for her crimes, but because she, “hadn’t had the courage to shoot it out with police.” In May, 1985, Rosenberg was found guilty of federal explosives and firearms charges; U.S. District Court Judge Frederick Bernard Lacey sentenced her to 58 years in federal prison, the maximum available sentence.
Although Rosenberg was indicted for planning and driving one of the getaway cars in the Brink’s robbery, Giuliani declined to pursue that indictment. He felt it was superfluous, given the long sentence she had received on the weapons and explosives charges, and he did not want to put the surviving family of Paige, Brown and O’Grady through the trauma of another trial. In 1997, however, Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew McCarthy stressed Rosenberg’s role in the Brink’s robbery in arguing she should be denied parole.
In her parole application, Rosenberg blamed her terror spree on, “the political ethos of the 1960s and how it had led me and my associates into thinking our activities were acceptable,” but the 1960s ethos did not extend into the 1980s, which were a broad societal reaction against 1960s Leftism, and a return to Americanism. Conservative Ronald Reagan was re-elected by a 49-state landslide in 1984, the year Rosenberg’s spree was finally ended.
Her parole application was denied.
Domestic Terrorism
The abjectly Leftist “fact checking” website, Snopes, acknowledges that everything I’ve just told you about Susan Rosenberg and her connection to Black Lives Matter is true and correct, but quibbles over the term “domestic terrorism” because there was no domestic terrorism statute back in the simpler days of the 1980s.
But the May 19th Communist Organization’s program was clearly one of political violence, that is, using violence to achieve political ends. In a 1988 indictment relating to the bombing campaign, prosecutors accused Rosenberg and others in M19CO of trying “to influence, change and protest policies and practices of the United States Government concerning various international and domestic matters through the use of violent and illegal means,” language that is similar to the current domestic terrorism statute. Clearly, M19CO’s crime spree was a campaign of domestic terrorism, per common sense and as defined in current federal law.
Clinton Commutation
On Jan. 20, 2001, his last half-day in office, President Bill Clinton commuted Rosenberg’s 58-year sentence to time served; for a five-year crime spree that involved multiple bombings, prison breaks, and murders, she served 16 years in prison, about one fourth of her sentence.
As recently as June 24, the Thousand Currents website listed Susan Rosenberg as vice chair of the corporation’s board of directors, describing her as a “human and prison rights advocate and writer.” But the entire “board of directors” page has since disappeared from the site, doubtless because having a genuine domestic terrorist on the board of directors of the corporation that handles the finances for Black Lives Matter—which feckless, “woke” corporate America is lavishing with hundreds of millions of dollars—is not good publicity.
Implications
Many Adventists want to signal their disapproval of police brutality, but the Black Lives Matter movement is not an appropriate vehicle to identify with, or through which to communicate that sentiment. The people behind Black Lives Matter, including Susan Rosenberg, are hardcore Marxist revolutionaries; their agenda is one of social destruction that no Christian could endorse.
Sadly, some in the SDA Church seem to be supporting Black Lives Matter. The July issue of the Pacific Union Recorder, the official magazine of the Pacific Union Conferences, features three (3) very prominent pictures of Black Lives Matter signs as article illustrations.
Walla Walla has an unofficial Black Lives Matter chapter, and, according to the Gleaner, the university administration has pledged to, “work closely with organizers of Black Lives Matter Walla Walla on projects and events in the community that address the relationship of the community to indigenous groups and people of color.”
But what Ellen White wrote about the feminist movement of the late 19th Century applies equally to the Black Lives Matter movement:
Those who feel called out to join the movement in favor of woman’s rights and the so-called dress reform might as well sever all connection with the third angel’s message. The spirit which attends the one cannot be in harmony with the other. The Scriptures are plain upon the relations and rights of men and women.
Those who feel called out to join the Black Lives Matter movement might as well sever all connection with the third angel’s message. The spirit which attends the one cannot be in harmony with the other. The Scriptures are plain in condemning covetousness, theft, murder, and the revolutionary utopian worldview.
It is time for the SDA Church to publicly repudiate Black Lives Matter.
But I do not expect this to happen. Unfortunately, many in our church’s administration seem to believe—just as corporate America and the professional sports leagues seem to believe—that by embracing Black Lives Matter, they will ingratiate the church to people of color without alienating others. They are mistaken and misled. Encouraging racial grievance in non-white members of the SDA Church will not strengthen their grip on the Advent message. At the same time, embracing BLM will alienate Adventists who do not loathe and despise the United States nor wish to see its form of government replaced by communism, and who see through BLM’s thin veneer of racial justice posturing to the revolutionary Leftism beneath.
Bonus coverage:
A short interview with former NYC police commissioner Bernie Kerik about Rosenberg and BLM.
Tucker Carlson interviews former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik; Kerik discusses Susan Rosenburg, the May 19th Communist Organization, and Rosenberg’s connections to Black Lives Matter. 7/08/20
Postscript on the Brink’s Robbery
Joseph Trombino survived his wounds and continued to work for the Brink's Company for the next 20 years; he was nearly killed in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and was killed in the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center attacks while making a delivery in the North Tower.
Kathy Boudin pleaded guilty to one count of felony murder in exchange for a single twenty year-to-life sentence; she was paroled in 2003 after serving 22 years. In 2008, she was hired as an adjunct professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work, where she is now the co-director and co-founder of the “Center for Justice at Columbia University.” The son she had with David Gilbert (who is still in prison for the Brink’s robbery) and dropped off at the babysitter on the way to commit mayhem was Chesa Boudin.
Both his parents serving hard time, Chesa was raised by Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, the communist radicals who founded the Weather Underground but left the violent struggle to join the peaceful Marxist takeover of American academia. (They also launched Barack Obama’s political career in their living room.) Chesa Boudin is now the elected District Attorney for San Francisco, in which office he declines to prosecute a plethora of low-level crimes such as vehicle burglary, petty theft, shoplifting, drug use, public intoxication, and public defecation—and is rapidly turning America’s most beautiful city into a vast, stinking outdoor toilet.