The Black Hebrew Israelites is a hate group that isn’t necessarily a new organization, but entered the mainstream spotlight during the media frenzy that was the Covington Catholic student story. The hate group went largely ignored by the mainstream media, only being mentioned in passing with the target being the MAGA hat earing children, but now the New York Times has directed its spotlight on the hate group and that light is disgustingly soft.

The New York Times released a piece from John Eligon on Wednesday titled “Hebrew Israelites See Divine Intervention in Lincoln Memorial Confrontation,” and the first sentence within the article sets the watered down tone it uses to describe the hate group. 

“They are sidewalk ministers who use confrontation as their gospel,” writes Eligon.

Eligon goes on to describe the hate group as sidewalk preachers who dress in flashy garb and “practice a theology that says God’s chosen ones — black, Hispanic and Native American people — have strayed and need to be led back to righteousness.” Eligon describes the hate group’s approach as “blunt and sometimes offensive language.”

Eligon doesn’t describe the kind of language used by Black Hebrew Israelites within his article, so I will.

During the two-hour video that was released divulging the entirety of the events that transpired during the story, the hate group can be heard calling the Covington students “crackers” and telling black students among them to “get out, n**ga” in reference to the horror movie of the same name. They also referred to Donald Trump as a homosexual, and screamed about America being concerned with “f**gots rights.” They also accused the students of being school shooters due to their white skin. They also called a nearby Catholic preacher a “f**got child molester.”

You can watch the entire exchange from the perspective of the Black Hebrew Israelite hate group in the video below.

“We use certain tactics,” Shar Yaqataz Banyamyan told the New York Times, who went on to say that if you don’t confront them with offensive rhetoric “they don’t respect you.”

To Eligon’s credit, he does mention that the hate group is recognized as such by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and is anti-LGBT alongside their racism and bigotry of other religions, namely Hebrew. However, he does include a quote from Heidi Beirich of the SPLC noting that while the group is intimidating, they do not engage in physical violence.

That is demonstrably false. Aside from threatening to enslave white people, and torture and rape women, they on video assaulting a woman who got in front of one of their cameramen by pushing her to the ground.

The following video shows this scene near the beginning, but be warned, it’s filled with some of the worst things the hate group says.

Eligon describes the group as “harmless” for the most part, and notes that while black communities find them alarming presence, they fear white people in MAGA hats more:

To many black people, Hebrew Israelites are a harmless part of their communities, said Todd Boyd, a professor of race and pop culture at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, one of many cities where the group can be seen working the streets. More alarming to many African Americans, he said, is “seeing a white guy in a ‘Make America Great Again’ hat.”

Ultimately, I find the Black Hebrew Israelites group worth a smirk at best when they’re not actually assaulting women. They breed a special kind of stupid that comes with intense hatred like the kind seen from Westboro Baptist Church. They threaten that soon they’ll rule the world and cast white people into slavery, and that UFO’s are actually angels who will descend from the heavens to assist them in their retaking of the world from white people. If they’ve commented on the Barbary slave trade, or the fact that Africans sold their fellow Africans into slavery consistently, I’ve not heard it yet.

The real trouble here is the New York Times who handled the hate group with the softest gloves they could excuse when speaking about this group, while they went on a full-bore attack against the MAGA hat wearing kids who were largely innocent in the entire story.

This is why no one trusts the media.