Showing posts with label Alice Walker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alice Walker. Show all posts

Sunday, February 26, 2023

My post about Jimmy Carter's antisemitism last week prompts a question: but what about all the wonderful things he has done?

One cannot argue that Carter has not been sincere when he works with Habitat for Humanity, for example. His Middle East work may be influenced by his antisemitism, but he has worked on many other worthy causes. How can those things fit together?

But one can ask the same thing about lots of other antisemites. Alice Walker is a gifted poet and storyteller, but that doesn't make her immune from antisemitic attitudes. Roger Waters was a good songwriter in the 1970s, but that doesn't mean he doesn't harbor antisemitic attitudes. Roald Dahl wrote fantastic children's books, but also hated Jews. 

Then again, we can go back in history and ask the same questions. Voltaire was a groundbreaking philosopher, but he was also a racist and antisemite. Martin Luther was a brilliant theologian and an obsessed Jew-hater. 

If theology can coexist with hate, perhaps that invalidates the theology. But pioneers in theology and philosophy and humanitarianism and progressivism and socialism and science and even medical ethics have been found to be antisemites - and these are all fields that, in theory, if you believe their self-definitions, should be immune to antisemitic thought.

Obviously, theory is very different from practice.

Some people say that antisemitism is a conspiracy theory. Or that it relegated to the Right. Or that is is a form of bigotry that is part of a larger group of discriminations against race or sexual preference or age. 

Yet it fits in no clear category. It morphs into new forms every few decades. 

It is a virus with new strains coming out all the time. 

Viruses have only one imperative - survive by adaptation. Right now the most virulent strain of antisemitism spreads by pretending to be outraged at how Jews act in Israel - and it cloaks itself by insisting that this current hate of Jews in Israel has nothing in common with the previous instances, despite the obvious parallels.  

This is hardly the first time antisemitism pretended to be the opposite. In 1873, the Southern Baptist Convention issued a resolution on antisemitism that pretends to be philosemitic - but ends up wishing that all Jews should convert to Christianity.

Is this any different than modern antisemites who wish just as fervently that the Jewish state be destroyed, that Jews should live as second class citizens in a Muslim majority state and most of them should be ethnically cleansed? Is the Southern Baptist desire that all Jews see the light different from those who want all Jews to be "good Jews" who shed all nationalism and all attachment to the land of their ancestors? 

And both of them claim to be doing it because they care so much about Jews. 

The other strains of the antisemitic virus didn't die out. The Middle Ages strain is still there, the Christian strain still thrives in many places, the Nazi strain stays stubbornly alive and spreading. Social media has been a huge boon to the virus, allowing it to spread at the speed of light. People can work very hard for years to come up with a way to minimize the threat of one strain but another one can emerge and propagate in days. 

Today, we hear people arguing against accusations of antisemitism. How can Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch be antisemitic when their entire organizations are based on human rights? How can  Jeremy Corbyn be antisemitic when he is an avowed anti-racist?

The virus doesn't care what philosophy you have. Whatever you hate most in life can be linked to Jews, and usually is. 

Instead of reflecting on the history of antisemitism that shows that anyone can catch the virus of antisemitism, many pretend that they are immune. Worse, they pretend that their progressivism or humanitarianism or anti-racism inoculates them from antisemitism - that they aren't and cannot be antisemitic because their worldview does not allow it. 

On the contrary, the virus can grow in any medium. The anti-racists become antisemites by accusing Jews/Israelis of racism. The humanitarians become antisemites by accusing Jews of inhumanity. The very ideas that people believe make them immune to infection are the ones that spread it.

Just like before, they justify their hate as being based on facts, unlike all of their predecessors. even though those predecessors said the exact same thing. They write their articles and posts and tweets that show the exact same kind of irrational, obsessive hate that previous centuries of antisemites had. 

As we know from recent experience, viruses are hard to eradicate. We still need to try. But we need to understand that the virus does not avoid anyone because of their belief system. On the contrary, it often uses that very belief system as a means of spreading further. 

Beware of anyone who says they cannot be antisemitic because of their worldview. Instead, teach them about the history of antisemitism, and show that they have very prominent Jew-hating forebears, who were the world's leaders in theology, the arts, philosophy, science and the Enlightenment. 




Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Wednesday, October 19, 2022

From Ian:

Why I think the Golden Age for Jews in America is coming to its end - opinion
The New Antisemitism is becoming violent
The decline in the favorability of mainstream American views toward Israel has coincided with a rise in antisemitic violence, particularly in large metropolises, promoted by Islamo-Leftist groups. In New York City, more than half of hate crimes in 2019 targeted Jews. During the last major conflict between Israel and the Palestinians in May 2021, terror groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad launched more than 4,000 rockets and mortars at Israeli civilians. At the same time, we witnessed stunning and unprecedented scenes in New York, Los Angeles, and other American cities of Jews being assaulted by mobs of anti-Israel activists. This surge of anti-Jewish hate also included harassment, vandalism and online abuse.

With many Jews in America now fearing walking the streets in their kippot or wearing other items that identify them as Jewish or Zionist, or even speaking Hebrew in public, we are sliding in the direction of our European Jewish brethren—in fear and under siege, requiring more and more layers of security.

Meanwhile, many American Jews serve willingly as useful idiots for groups that despise us, divided our community, and weaken our resolve, under the pretext of legitimate critique of the Israeli government policies.

The end of the story for American Jewry?
While we undoubtedly face grave challenges as American Jews, we must not give up. Until now, due to lack of information and fear of rejection and persecution, many American Jews have been complicit as anti-Zionism morphs into the new antisemitism. Now is the time to stand up, fight back with all our remaining might and hold antisemites accountable.

We must form alliances with groups that share the same Judeo-Christian values of freedom and democracy, inspire today’s Jewish youth to be proud of their people and the Jewish homeland, and bring Israel back to the center of our Jewish life in the diaspora.

We must embrace Zionism as an integral part of our Jewish identity. We must engage in renewed efforts to strengthen the homeland of the Jewish people, ask Israel to empower and defend Jewish communities worldwide, and take stock of the strength our community possesses.

We must collectively demand a rejection of all forms of antisemitism, including and especially anti-Zionism.


James Kirchick: Calling Out an Antisemite
When I learned that Alice Walker and I would both be speaking at the same literary festival, I seized the chance to expose her views.

Fully a third of the Freedom Riders who risked life and limb to desegregate interstate bus travel in the early 1960s were Jews. So were many of the young men and women who took part in the 1964 Freedom Summer campaign to register black voters in Mississippi. The town of Philadelphia will always be remembered as the place where Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, two such Jewish activists from New York, and James Chaney, their black colleague from nearby Meridian, were murdered by white supremacists. President Barack Obama posthumously awarded them the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014. An individual about whom I knew nothing until visiting the museum is Rabbi Perry Nussbaum, a civil-rights activist who earned the distinction of being the first white clergyman to have his home and congregation bombed by white supremacists in 1967.

The history and contemporary state of black-Jewish relations has been weighing on me since August, when I visited Jackson as a guest of the Mississippi Book Festival. I was there to present my book, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, as part of a panel entitled “(Re)shaping Public Discourse,” alongside professors Eddie Glaude and Imani Perry, both of Princeton University, and the authors of books about James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry, respectively. Also invited to address the festival, immediately after our panel, was Alice Walker, one of America’s leading African-American writers, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple—and a well-known antisemite.

Walker evinces her antisemitism primarily not through her own words, but in her enthusiastic promotion of David Icke, the ex-footballer and prominent proponent of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion who simultaneously denies the Holocaust while claiming that the Jews perpetrated it against themselves. In 2013, Walker told the BBC’s Desert Island Discs that if she could keep only one book it would be his Human Race Get Off Your Knees, which purports to reveal the “sinister network of families and non-human entities that covertly control us from cradle to grave.” Asked by the New York Times what books were on her nightstand in 2018, she included in her response Icke’s And the Truth Shall Set You Free. In an exhaustive inventory of Walker’s antisemitism published in Tablet magazine, Yair Rosenberg observed that this tract alone contains the word “Jewish” 241 times and “Rothschild” 374 times. “These references are not compliments,” Rosenberg wrote.
John Ware: Rewriting history: Corbyn’s Labour Party, antisemitism and ‘Panorama’
The UK is facing economic meltdown. The world may be heading for nuclear Armageddon. Supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, meanwhile, have been preoccupied with salvaging his reputation over the antisemitism crisis that dogged his leadership for more than four years.

Did Corbyn or his office interfere politically in antisemitism disciplinary cases when he was Labour leader — or did they not?

Disciplinary cases were meant to be determined by officials at Labour Party HQ independently of the Leader or his political advisers.

In April 2020 Corbyn supporters found vindication in a leaked internal report by Corbyn staffers which, perhaps unsurprisingly, concluded allegations of interference were “entirely untrue.”

Six months later, the statutory investigation into Labour by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) concluded there had been interference: “We found evidence of political interference in the handling of antisemitism complaints throughout the period of the investigation”, thereby unlawfully discriminating against Jewish members. The EHRC blamed a “lack of leadership” within Labour “which is hard to reconcile with its stated commitment to a zero-tolerance approach to antisemitism.”

Then, last summer, Corbyn’s supporters were buoyed up by a report by the barrister Martin Forde KC which accused the mainstream media of being “entirely misleading” in how we reported allegations of interference.

So where, in this attritional battle for the truth, does the truth actually lie?

I must declare an interest because I presented the programme most often mentioned in the Forde Report: BBC Panorama’s “Is Labour antisemitic? ”transmitted in July 2019

A fortnight ago, the “Investigation Unit” of the Qatari-based Al Jazeera TV network piled in. Its central allegation against the BBC came from Corbyn’s Director of Strategic Communications, James Schneider.

He claimed to have “exposed” how Panorama had misleadingly presented evidence to suggest there was “unwarranted meddling” by Corbyn or his office “in antisemitism cases.”
Days after killing soldier, fugitive gunman shot dead attempting another attack
A Palestinian gunman suspected of killing an Israeli soldier in East Jerusalem earlier this month was shot dead on Wednesday evening, after opening fire at security guards near the entrance to the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim.

Police officials confirmed that Udai Tamimi, who they say killed Sgt. Noa Lazar, 18, and seriously injured a civilian guard on October 8 at a checkpoint near the Shuafat refugee camp in East Jerusalem, was killed while carrying out another attack.

A security guard, 24, was taken by the Magen David Adom ambulance service to the Shaare Zedek hospital in Jerusalem, with an injury in his hand. He was listed in light condition, the hospital said.

Security camera footage of Wednesday’s attack showed a lengthy exchange of gunfire between Tamimi and the security guards.

Tamimi, 22, fled the scene of the attack earlier this month. He was thought by police to have been hiding in the Shuafat refugee camp since then.

Prime Minister Yair Lapid hailed the killing of Tamimi, and sent well wishes to the guard wounded in Wednesday’s attack, in a statement published by his office.

Sunday, April 03, 2022

Yair Rosenberg writes in his Atlantic "Deep Shtetel" column that a Tablet magazine piece he wrote in 2018 about how writer Alice Walker spouts crazed antisemitic conspiracy theories went viral and ended up, to some extent, "canceling" her.  

Now she is about to release her last 50 years of journals, and Rosenberg is ambivalent about his role on sort-of but not really "canceling" Walker:

In essence, the public has responded to her prejudice by either completely sidelining her over her bigotry or completely ignoring that bigotry. I don’t think either of these approaches is constructive, and not just in this case.

What would a better response look like?

It would start by recognizing two principles. First: Human beings are complex and broken, and can rarely be reduced to their best or worst attributes. This means that great wisdom can coexist with great ignorance, and we should try to access the former while discarding the latter. Second: Accountability requires actually confronting the offense, rather than avoiding it.

In practice, this means that organizations and outlets should not deplatform Walker. Instead, they should refuse to give her an uncritical platform. Every time she appears at a public event or is interviewed by a publication, she should be asked at the outset to account for her anti-Semitic utterances. These questions should be posed in specific and concrete terms, making explicit reference to the ugly ideas she has written and recommended. If she is unwilling to submit to this line of questioning, she can withdraw from the engagement herself. If she is willing, audiences will be made aware of her profound flaws and be able to take them into account when consuming her other output. They will be better equipped to tap into the good in Walker’s work while rejecting the bad.

... If a person is never pushed to answer for their prejudice, they are unlikely to reconsider it. This is not just true for Walker, but for many analogous cases. Forgiveness requires accountability and genuine contrition. But while our society today is very adept at imposing punishment, it is very poor at providing a path to rehabilitation.

I am not a fan of cancellation, but this strikes me as naive, something one rarely sees from Rosenberg. 

Let's see what his plan would look like in the real world, knowing what Walker has written about Jews over the years:

"Welcome, Ms. Walker. It is a real honor to have you on my show."

"Glad to be here, Clive."

"Tell me about your new book...."

"I'd love to...."

(adoring conversation follows)

"Now, you have written some controversial views about Jews and Israel that has been criticized by the Jewish community. You have been accused of antisemitism."

"No, Clive, I am not against Jews at all. I am being criticized because I am pro-Palestinian. Lots of people who criticize Israel are accused of antisemitism. It isn't true! I am only against Zionist Nazis, not Jews."

"But you have written things like the Jewish Talmud says that gentiles should be killed and young boys may be raped. Don't you see how that is offensive?"

"No, Clive, I am simply asking questions about the Talmud. I have seen evidence that the Talmud says all those things and worse. Rabbi Brant Rosen has verified my quotes. No one has refuted them. Why can't I ask questions? Do you know the Talmud better than Rabbi Rosen?"

And poor Clive will be left stuttering, and the audience adoring Walker for her bravery. 

In short, allowing Walker to have a platform allows her to spew her lies, and unless a rabbi is invited to each of her talks, any challenge to her views will be turned around with the audience not knowing whom to believe. 

To think that Walker can become contrite over her views, when she has been unrepentant about them even as they have been refuted, is dizzyingly optimistic. The person who proudly says that her knowledge of the Talmud somes from watching YouTube videos of antisemites is not about to start caring about facts.

Walker is an antisemite. There is no reason to sugar-coat it or excuse it because of her writings or skin color or political views. She should be treated exactly as a unrepentant racist would be treated on a book tour - and nowadays, that means that her hosts would want to be very careful not to be associated with someone whose views are so repugnant. 

If that is cancellation, so be it. 

Walker has had years to revisit her views. Her slanderous, patently false poem on the Talmud remains on her website, today. Even beyond the fake Talmud quotes, her poem considers all Jews the enemies of "us":

Are Goyim (us) meant to be slaves of Jews, and not only
That, but to enjoy it?
Are three year old (and a day) girls eligible for marriage and intercourse?
Are young boys fair game for rape?
Must even the best of the Goyim (us, again) be killed?
Pause a moment and think what this could mean
Or already has meant
In our own lifetime.

You may find that as the cattle
We have begun to feel we are
We have an ancient history of oppression
Of which most of us have not been even vaguely
Aware. You will find that we, Goyim, sub-humans, animals
-The Palestinians of Gaza
The most obvious representatives of us

At the present time – are a cruel example of what may be done
With impunity, and without conscience,
By a Chosen people,
To the vast majority of the people
On the planet
Who were not Chosen.

The only person she listened to was an anti-Zionist Israeli whose knowledge of the Talmud is nearly as poor as Walker's. And Walker's response was...more antisemitism.

This has nothing to do with Israel. This is a seething hatred of Jews. Perhaps it is because of Walker's hate of her first husband, who was Jewish. Who knows? It isn't important.

What is important is that this noxious, hateful person is about to be celebrated for her "journals."  Her publisher will call her a genius who must be read. She will do the talk show circuit. And even well-meaning interviewers will not know enough to confront her intelligently without ending up legitimizing her and her hate.

The proper response to antisemitism and racism is not always so clear. Some people who spout offensive opinions can be educated. Alice Walker is not one of them. 

 


 



Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

Tuesday, January 01, 2019



On Alice Walker's blog, the author and poet publishes a letter from anti-Zionist Israeli Nurit Peled-Elhanan that pretends to defend the Talmud from Walker's antisemitic essay:

Dear Alice
I read your poem and the criticism of it and I must react.
The people who torture and kill Palestinian have never studied the Talmud. It is not studied in Israeli state schools. And no one can read it on their own. The ones who study it are the ultra-orthodox Jews such as the pro-Palestinian Neturei Karta in NY.
Really? Professor Peled-Elhanan, who has previously published lies about Israeli textbooks supposedly being "racist," is another academic fraud if she thinks that Talmud is only taught among the haredim.

In order to buttress her arguments she says that the disgusting Neturei Karta, rejected by every Orthodox Jewish group, study Talmud!

The quotes (whether true or false) are surely partial and do not characterize this 12 volume work (thousand pages in every volume) whose writing ended thousands of years ago.
Peled-Elhanan, as an academic, should have researched the Talmud a bit herself before giving Walker an out by saying her quotes might be true. She could have done a great service by informing Walker that she was repeating lies in her poem.

She chose not to, and allowed Walker to believe the lies she was hearing.

(And there are far more than 12 volumes of Talmud, none of which have a thousand pages.)

The rest of Nurit's letter is not too inaccurate, although there are errors.
The Talmud is not a prescriptive book. It is an endless interpretation of the Torah, always adapting the Torah to present times so that people can live by it. Ethiopian Jews never studied it and lived by the Torah as is.

In these volumes you read discussion and polemics between different sages about every tiny aspect of human life. And the discussions are brought as they happened, more or less because it was all discussed orally.

But the main thing is that each such discussion ends with: “and so they disagreed” and people would choose the interpretation they wanted. Every argument that is brought is immediately countered by an opposite argument and the discussion that ensued. It is always open ended.

In my time we learned a bit of it and I loved it, because it is Logic, like reading Plato. Today schools don’t teach it anymore.
So in order to know what is in the Talmud – which none of the non-orthodox Israelis or Jews know – you have to read at least a whole chapter, pros and cons etc.

One of the most discussed subjects in the Talmud as in the Torah is the treatment of foreigners, workers, slaves etc. Extremely human and enlightening.

I don’t want you to be trapped in superficial propaganda of ignorant people. And again: the reason for the ruthlessness and violence towards Palestinians is not to be found in ancient writings but in Modern ones. It is Modernity and European Enlightenment that brought slavery, colonialism, Fascism and Totalitarianism, national movements such as Zionism and the way to treat people as superfluous. Auschwitz was not prescribed in any ancient scripture, neither is Israeli colonialism.

Much love
Nurit


Prof. Nurit Peled-Elhanan

Walker responds with a newer poem where she repeatedly refers to "Zionist Nazis" as not representing all Jews, but those "Zionist Nazis" are pretty evil. An excerpt:
Zionist Nazis are not the Jews I know; terrorists who would and do kill anyone and anything to get what they want: Control over everyone.      
(When you take out the random line breaks that make this drivel "poetry" the hate is much clearer.)

Walker is saying that "Zionists" want to control the world and everyone in it, and are willing to do any immoral act to achieve their aims.

Which is exactly what the Protocols of the Elders of Zion says! 

Since over 90% of Jews support the existence of a Jewish state, Walker is saying that nearly all Jewish people are terrorist killers hellbent on world domination. But, no, she's not antisemitic, because she loves the other Jews.

Even after this explicit antisemitism, Walker pretends to be righteous:
I will never be divided from my friends, no matter how bad Zionist Nazis are making Jews look.
She can distinguish between good and evil Nazi Jews, but sadly, many others (on her side!) cannot. Which means that when Jews are shot dead for being Jews, from Pittsburgh to Paris to "Palestine," you can give the murderers the benefit of the doubt because they really hate Zionism and Zionists are to blame for making all Jews look bad.

A rough analogy would be for a white person to say "I will never abandon my black friends, no matter how bad the welfare queens and gangbangers and muggers make all black people look."

Then Walker addresses the Talmud specifically to Nurit:
As someone ignorant (yes, this is true) of what is in the ancient texts in their totality, I am, millions of us are, still wounded by the parts that have been inherited by word of mouth, over generations, and millennia, and are recognized as active in human behavior today.  I don’t see how we will ever have peace without examining the deep past, and letting go of those parts that mean endless contention and war and suffering.
Walker's response is that the evil Talmud is in the DNA of all Jews and her extensive exposure of it using neo-Nazi YouTube videos helps excise the poison from the Jewish DNA.

THIS IS ANTISEMITISM.

Her letter talks about love but one doesn't have to scratch very much beneath the surface to see the hate and ignorance that fuels Walker.





We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Thursday, December 27, 2018



Mondoweiss publishes Sarah Schulman, the academic fraud who popularized the term "pinkwashing," to explain to their audience how Alice Walker's blatant antisemitism is sort of okay once you contextualize it.

Like many of us, Walker has tried to understand the source of Israeli cruelty, violence, self-righteous racism, and supremacy ideology. She has risked her life for Palestinian liberation on the Flotilla, and has been in deep confrontation with the Israeli state for years. Being in that place is shocking, it reveals behaviors and beliefs of the Israeli state that are almost impossible to comprehend.
According to Schulman, Walker claiming that rabbis have taught generations of Jews to enslave "goyim" and to kill the best of them isn't antisemitic - it is a reflection of her deep pain at the plight of the Palestinians and her honest attempt to understand how Jews can be so cruel.

At no point does Schulman admit that Walker's hate for Jews is antisemitic.

Schulman admits that Walker is wrong. Not offensive, mind you - just mistaken. Not because Walker is trading in Nazi-style Jew-hatred, but because she falls for conspiracy theories and doesn't understand that Judaism isn't the issue, but religion altogether.
By looking to the Jewish religion as the source of Israeli cruelty, Walker is making two significant errors. 1. Pathologizing Judaism itself, instead of the larger problem of religions in general and how they are used to justify supremacy ideology. and 2. Ascribing religion as the central motive for apartheid when many Jews who support the Zionist state are not religious, and many Jews who stand with Palestine are religious.
Notice that purported scholar Schulman does not say that Walker's description of the Talmud and Judaism is completely wrong. No, Schulman sort of agrees that Walker is correct in saying that the Talmud teaches Jewish dominance over "goyim," but by singling out Judaism and not generalizing it to all religions, Walker fell into the trap of allowing people being able to call her antisemitic - which detracts from the wonderful work she does.
That Alice Walker has chosen conspiracy theory tools to address important questions discredits some of her thinking. But it does not discredit all of her thinking. Sometimes people who do good things also do bad things. And that can be disappointing, or devastating, but that is life and here we are. 

When a supposed scholar like Walker freely admits and even brags that her method of researching the Talmud is by watching YouTube videos made by neo-Nazis, and when she then takes that information and publishes poetry that could have been published in Der Sturmer, and when she refuses to apologize but doubles down on her hate for Jews, it doesn't discredit her at all, according to Schulman.

She's just misunderstood and human.

Really.

This is very funny coming from someone whose bogus "pinkwashing" charge is meant to tell the world that Israel does only bad things, and never does good things. When Israel treats women, minorities, LGBTQ, the disabled in ways that are more liberal than many other Western democracies, Schulman doesn't say that "sometimes people who do good things also do bad things" - she says that when Israel does good things it is by definition a bad thing.

The hypocrisy of Schulman is astounding. But not surprising.

(h/t Andrew)


We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Friday, December 21, 2018

At History News Network, professor of social studies and history at NYU Robert Cohen states flatly that Alice Walker is not an antisemite:

Whatever the merits of Walker’s reading of Icke, her life history has been one in which she has consistently and eloquently battled bigotry since her teenage college years at Spelman College where she was active in the Atlanta movement against racial discrimination and the Jim Crow system. As one who has studied Walker’s history of political activism, I find no trace of anti-Semitism, but instead find a humane identification with the oppressed, including Palestinians, and a dedication to battling war, poverty, and hatred. 

... I know this because this year I published a book on Howard Zinn, Spelman, and the Atlanta student movement, Howard Zinn’s Southern Diary: Sit-Ins, Civil Rights, and Black Women’s Student Activism, and Walker wrote a foreword to it that described in moving terms how her and her family’s love of education and reverence for teachers, along with her passion for freedom, and justice, motivated her to stand up for her beloved [Jewish] teacher.  
Wow. Just wow.

A supposed scholar who has spent a great deal of time studying Walker not only brushes off her defense of David Icke, chooses not to mention Walker's antisemitic poem, on her website today, about Jews and the Talmud, based on her meticulous research of watching YouTube videos.

Walker says that for centuries Jews have been taught by their rabbis that they should enslave "goyim." Walker says that Jewish rabbis have taught generations of students that Jesus is burning in hell because he stood up for the poor. Walker claims that Jews are taught from birth to kill "goyim" (which she helpfully defines as "us," since Jews are clearly The Other.)

This isn't "support for Palestinian rights." This is Nazi-level Jew-hatred, Protocols of the Elders of Zion-level filth, far worse than what I see in the worst of Arabic media.

To excuse this hate and these lies is to be complicit in them. 

Walker's poem should exclude her from any respectable circles. Full stop. Anyone who disagrees because of the good work she has done is enabling antisemitism in academia and intellectual circles. It is beyond immoral - it is dangerous.

The most charitable thing one can say about Cohen is that he is unaware of Walker's antisemitism in her poem and her earlier books (where she says that Israeli  Jews have used the dictum, that  "might even be enshrined in the Torah," that possession is nine tenths of the law.) If that is so, he is not a scholar - he is a hack and a fraud.

The least charitable thing you can say is that Cohen is aware of Walker's antisemitism (as he is clearly aware of her full throated support for Icke's Jew-hatred) and that he consciously decided to defend her anyway.

Either way, if he doesn't pull this article, he has been proven to have no intellectual honesty.

This is twice in one week that History News Network has published ridiculous defenses of antisemites. In the previous article, Jews who felt that someone who accuses Jews of poisoning Palestinian wells of antisemitism are the real racists.

HNN needs to employ some fact checkers, because what used to be a good and useful site is in danger of being subverted by "academics" whose goals are anything but the truth.

(h/t Phil)



We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Thursday, December 20, 2018

 I have criticized Alice Walker in the past for her adoration of David Icke as well as for the borderline antisemitism in one of her books:


But until the Tablet coverage of New York Times interview where she idolizes Icke I had no idea that last year she had written a completely sickening anti-Jewish "poem" that sounds exactly like neo-Nazi propaganda.

Here's the crux of what she "learned" about Jews and the Talmud

Is Jesus boiling eternally in hot excrement,
For his “crime” of throwing the bankers
Out of the Temple? For loving, standing with,
And defending
The poor? Was his mother, Mary,
A whore?

Are Goyim (us) meant to be slaves of Jews, and not only
That, but to enjoy it?
Are three year old (and a day) girls eligible for marriage and intercourse?
Are young boys fair game for rape?
Must even the best of the Goyim (us, again) be killed?
Pause a moment and think what this could mean
Or already has meant
In our own lifetime.

You may find that as the cattle
We have begun to feel we are
We have an ancient history of oppression
Of which most of us have not been even vaguely
Aware. You will find that we, Goyim, sub-humans, animals
-The Palestinians of Gaza
The most obvious representatives of us
At the present time – are a cruel example of what may be done
With impunity, and without conscience,
By a Chosen people,
To the vast majority of the people
On the planet
Who were not Chosen.
Not chosen to receive the same dubious
“Blessing” of
Supremacy over the Earth,
Humans, and Beasts of this realm. As is
Stated plainly in the first chapter
Of the Bible we all read.
The Unchosen who, until now,
Were too scared of being
Called names
To demand to know why.

Why, a year after she published this, does she still command any respect whatsoever?

Not nearly as sickening, but very telling, is how Walker claims she learned all this stuff. Google was too objective, and she decided that YouTube neo-Nazi channels is the best way to learn about Jews and the Talmud:


She is proud that she uses Nazi-sourced videos as her research source material, and she encourages her fans to do the same, and she is convinced that by watching so much hate that contradicts itself, she can determine which is real and which is false!

Notice that she doesn't even think about asking a rabbi or scholar anything about the Talmud - people who would return her call in an instant. Why is that?

Because she thinks that all Jews would lie about the Talmud - and she trusts the Nazis to be more accurate!

This is beyond vile. This is stuff that should make her works unacceptable, period. I don't care how wonderful The Color Purple is - it should be tainted forever by someone who is clearly so filled with hate.

She should not be given a pass.



We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Sunday, September 03, 2017

From CBC News:

A British conspiracy theorist known for his outlandish ideas about lizard people and "Zionists" controlling the world is set to perform in a Vancouver civic theatre this weekend, provoking outrage from Jewish groups.

David Icke, a former sports broadcaster, is scheduled to give a full-day presentation at the Orpheum Theatre on Saturday. The theatre is operated by the city, and officials have denied requests to cancel the show from groups like B'nai Brith Canada and the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs.

Aiden Fishman of B'nai Brith Canada described Icke's views as "classic anti-Semitic ideas" and said the booking should never have been allowed.

"It's totally, totally incompatible with the City of Vancouver's role as an open and tolerant multicultural municipality to allow Mr. Icke to speak at a city-owned facility, after we've brought all these concerns to their attention," Fishman told CBC News.

Deep concern from Jewish groups

In an interview Thursday, Icke was furious about the campaign against his show, describing the claims made by Jewish groups as "libellous."

His presentation, according to his website, will cover everything from "reptilians" — shape-shifting alien-human hybrids — to the truth about the moon, which he believes is a hologram projected from Saturn.

"If what they say is true, why will I spend 10 hours talking on Saturday and not even mention Jewish people once? They need to explain that," Icke asked.

But in videos of his lectures posted online, he frequently uses another phrase, "Rothschild Zionists." These are the people he suggests are responsible for causing the 2008 financial crisis, staging the 9/11 attacks and generally controlling the world's banking and political systems.

That phrase, according to Fishman, is pretty obvious code for Jewish people.
Icke claims that he is not against Jews at all, but only "Rothschild Zionists".

In this 2010 essay on his site, he says
Ask most people about Zionism and they will say ‘that’s the Jews’, but while this is the impression the Rothschild networks in politics and the media have sought very successfully to ‘sell’ as ‘common knowledge’, it is not true. It represents only a minority of them and many others who are not Jewish.
Yet when he goes through a list of who he considers "Rothschild Zionists" in positions of power, surprise, they all happen to be Jews (with many of them unknown to be Zionists at all.)

So Icke says with a straight face:
[T]he Rothschild Zionists control the mainstream media; Hollywood and the movie industry; governments, not least in the United States; and crucially in the light of current events, they control global finance and commerce....
Nah, nothing to do with Jews.

Hilariously, Icke quoted a 2008 humor column by Joel Stein, about how proud he was that Jews control Hollywood, to prove that "Rothschild Zionists" control Hollywood - but then he lamely says it has nothing to do with Jews:
The Los Angeles Times columnist, Joel Stein (Rothschild Zionist), wrote an article proclaiming that Americans who don’t think Jews (Rothschild Zionists) control Hollywood are just plain ‘dumb’:

‘I had to scour the trades to come up with six Gentiles in high positions at entertainment companies. But lo and behold, even one of that six, AMC President Charles Collier, turned out to be a Jew! … As a proud Jew, I want America to know of our accomplishment. Yes, we control Hollywood.’

I emphasise again that we are not talking here about ‘the Jews’ owning the media, Hollywood, politics, banking and big business, but a tiny clique answering ultimately to the secret society that I call Rothschild Zionism.
The City of Vancouver is saying that as long as Icke only talks about "Zionists" controlling the world and being responsible for 9/11, then there is no violation of Canadian laws:

 In an email, a spokesperson for the City of Vancouver wrote that it cannot infringe on Icke's freedom of speech without evidence that his presentation will include illegal hate speech.
"The City has explicit requirements in its theater rental agreements that govern the conduct of renters and has confirmed with Mr. Icke and his team their obligation to comply with all Canadian laws relating to the content of their presentation," the email reads.
A simple replacement of the word of "Jews" with "Zionists" in any Nazi text would ensure that they can be read in public in Vancouver without violating hate laws.

Come to think of it, this is exactly how the "pro-Palestinian" crowd thinks, too.

And remember that Alice Walker, the prize-winning novelist of the "anti-Israel" crowd, believes in Icke's theories as well.



We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Thursday, November 12, 2015

From the list of movies being screened this semester by the Amnesty International Club/ Political Science Club, Mt. San Jacinto College, Menifee Valley Campus:

Wednesday, November 18 4:30pm - 6:30pm, Room 927 (MVC) Roadmap to Apartheid: Ana Nogueira, a white South African, and Eron Davidson, a Jewish Israeli, draw on their first-hand knowledge of the issues to investigate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Narrated by Pulitzer Prize winning author, Alice Walker, this award winning documentary is as much a historical document of the rise and fall of apartheid in South Africa, as it is a film about why many Palestinians feel they are living in an apartheid system today, and why an increasing number of people around the world agree with them. The film compares the many similar laws and tools used by both Israel and apartheid-era South Africa. The audience will see what life is like for Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and inside Israel while gaining a deeper understanding of the conflict with the help of respected analysts on the subject. Combined with archival material and anecdotes from South Africans, the film forms a complete picture as to why the analogy is being used with increasing frequency and potency.

Amnesty's idea of fairness is to screen a film that takes a South African that hates Israel, an Israeli that hates Israel and a narrator that not only hates Israel but is a deluded nutcase and borderline antisemite.

Why do I say that? Here is a section from Alice Walker's book, The Cushion in the Road:


So the Torah enshrines the idea of Jews being allowed to steal land. This is from Amnesty's role model.

The parts of the book that I could see are filled with hate and ridiculous assertions. Here's one that struck me as a perfect example of how Alice Walker would believe the most ludicrous, obvious lies as long as they were making Israel look evil.


Yes, Alice Walker believes that an old Jew who was born in British Mandate Palestine is treated like dirt when he returns to Israel because of the word "Palestine" in his passport. Um... he is still using his British Mandate Palestine passport to enter Israel?

Not only that, but every single non-Jewish tourist to Israel is dehumanized as they enter! It is a wonder that the 1.7 million Christians who visit Israel every year haven't noticed what "most of us are aware of."

Walker's grasp of reality has always been less than solid. After all, she's the one who believes that  the world is run by shape-shifting reptilian aliens who practice mind control from the Moon.

But to Amnesty, she is an expert on Israel and very well qualified to weigh in on calling it an apartheid state.

Which shouldn't be surprising, since Amnesty shares with Walker the belief that any accusation against Israel must be true as well as her contempt for facts.

The Israeli protagonist in the film, Eron Davidson - no surprise - has written for Electronic Intifada.

Amnesty eagerly pushes this film as a wonderful piece of fact-finding. Which goes to show, yet again, how far Amnesty will go to demonize Israel.

I mean, how biased do you have to be to support a film as factual that is narrated by someone who literally cannot distinguish fantasy from reality?

This is not the first time an Amnesty branch has raved about this piece of Israel-hating propaganda. They have sponsored showings in San Jose and University of Florida.

And despite their half-hearted attempts to pretend that they aren't directly calling Israel an apartheid state in the description here, Amnesty has sponsored Israel Apartheid Week on college campuses as well as this poster for an event at Rutgers in 2013 shows.



(h/t Andrew)



This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For over 11 years and over 22,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Alice Walker, the author of "The Color Purple" who was also a "jurist" in the kangaroo court "Russell Tribunal on Palestine,"  believes that Israel is an apartheid state.

She also believes that the world is run by shape-shifting reptilian aliens who practice mind control from the Moon.

I'm not sure which opinion is more bizarre.

On her blog, she waxes poetic over the book that taught her so much about the aliens:that control our world:
Earlier I wrote that David Icke reminded me of Malcolm X. I was thinking especially of Malcolm’s fearlessness. A fearlessness that made him seem cold, actually, though we know he wasn’t really. All that love of us that kept driving him to improve our lot; often into quite the wrong direction, but I need not go into that. What I was remembering was how he called our oppressors “blue eyed devils.” Now who could that have been? Well, we see them here in David Icke’s book as the descendants of the reptilian race that landed on our sweet planet the moment they could get a glimpse of it through the mist that used to cover it (before there was a moon). No kidding. Deep breath! Yes, before there was a moon! (Oh, I love the moon; can I keep it? Please?). Anyway, there they came, these space beings (we’re space beings too, of course, not to forget that). But they looked…. different than us. And they were.

They wanted gold and they wanted slaves to mine it for them. Now gosh, who does this remind us of? I only am asking. You do the work. Apparently their own planet needed this metal to continue its, apparently, long life. Credo Mutwa, Zulu shaman – and I am on my knees here in gratitude that he held on long enough to tell us about this – calls them the Chitauri, which has become my favorite word of all time (well, of this time that I’m learning all this): my partner and I go around saying Oh, Chitauri, whenever we get a glimpse of one or two of the Chitauri offspring, aka Illuminati bloodline families and their puppets, on the telly. It’s quite the stress reliever, just knowing what we’re looking at. And I like saying “telly” too, because it sounds so English and David Icke-esque. Truthfully our “telly” is our laptops.

It’s an amazing book, HUMAN RACE GET OFF YOUR KNEES, and reading it was the ultimate reading adventure. I felt it was the first time I was able to observe, and mostly imagine and comprehend, the root of the incredible evil that has engulfed our planet. A lot of it is how shall we say: shocking, beyond belief (but not really, if you don’t get too scared), stunning, profound. The deconstruction of language is breathtaking, the interrogation of symbols startling. Magical, in a way. I kept going: Oh, so that’s why…. You will too.

The Reptilian space beings whose hybrid (part human, part reptile) descendants make our lives hell in Paradise were blue eyed devils to Malcolm X, the devil himself to my Christian parents, who never talked about eye color, which I think was not only prudent but wise, although they seemed clear enough about his sex, and as demons in many other religions, including the non-religion, Buddhism, where the advice is often to invite them in until they go away. But maybe these were other kinds of demons. Not the ones controlling not just you, but everything.

Wikipedia summarizes Ickes' theory that enthralls Walker:
Icke introduced the reptoid hypothesis in The Biggest Secret (1999), which identified the Brotherhood as descendants of reptilians from the constellation Draco, who walk on two legs and appear human, and who live in tunnels and caverns inside the earth. He argues that the reptilians are the race of gods known as the Anunnaki in the Babylonian creation myth, Enûma Eliš.[42] According to Barkun, Icke's idea of "inner-earth reptilians" is not new, though he has done more than most to expand it.[43]

The Draco constellation from Uranographia by Johannes Hevelius, 1690. Icke's "reptoid hypothesis" posits that humanity is ruled by descendants of reptilians from Draco.[44]

Icke has accused many prominent people of being "reptoids," including Brian Mulroney, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Queen Elizabeth II, The Queen Mother, Al Gore, Kris Kristofferson, Boxcar Willie, and the steering committee of the Bilderberg Group.[45][46] It is Icke's contention that none of these people are suing him for his statements because they are all, in reality, twelve-foot lizards. [47]
Walker is of course worshiped by the Mondoweiss crowd. Then again, their grasp of reality is about as tenuous as Walker's.

(h/t Max S)

UPDATE: BlazingCatFur illustrates the theory:



UPDATE 2: On a more serious note, Walker's daughter wrote an extensive essay describing just how sick a human being Alice Walker is.

All this was known when she was honored for her anti-Israel stunts.

Sunday, June 26, 2011



Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker has been getting a lot of publicity for joining the latest planned flotilla to Gaza, and she has also gotten a bit of much-deserved criticism.

Something she said over the weekend shows just how skewed her thinking is:
I grew up in the South under segregation, under the state terrorism of apartheid. When I was in the West Bank and Gaza recently, it was like stepping back into that.
While segregation in the 1950s and 1960s was reprehensible, characterizing it as "state terrorism of apartheid" is ridiculous.

But even more absurd is this simple fact: The areas of the West Bank and Gaza that she visited did not have a single Jewish resident, and neither would "Palestine."

She is supporting the creation of a state that would be founded upon ethnically cleansing every Jew from its borders. A state where selling land to a Jew invokes the death penalty. A state whose nascent constitution says explicitly that its laws are based on Islamic Shari'a law. A state where Christians have been persecuted by their Muslim neighbors, where tens of thousands have already fled and where the remainder are cowed into silence rather than standing up for equal rights.

She is traveling to Gaza with groups that have met with and supported Hamas, whose charter explicitly calls for genocide against Jews and that offers an Islamic supremacist vision of the world. She is traveling with groups that have supported terrorism against Israelis


Apparently, Alice Walker enthusiastically supports Palestinian Arab apartheid. 

AddToAny

EoZ Book:"Protocols: Exposing Modern Antisemitism"

Printfriendly

EoZTV Podcast

Podcast URL

Subscribe in podnovaSubscribe with FeedlyAdd to netvibes
addtomyyahoo4Subscribe with SubToMe

search eoz

comments

Speaking

translate

E-Book

For $18 donation








Sample Text

EoZ's Most Popular Posts in recent years

Hasbys!

Elder of Ziyon - حـكـيـم صـهـيـون



This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For over 19 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.

Donate!

Donate to fight for Israel!

Monthly subscription:
Payment options


One time donation:

subscribe via email

Follow EoZ on Twitter!

Interesting Blogs

Blog Archive