Alice Walker responds to antisemitism charges with yet MORE antisemitism

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.

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Anti-Zionists justify Alice Walker's antisemitism, saying she's "wrong" - but her heart is in the right place

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)

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Academic fraud of the day defends Alice Walker: "Some of her best friends are Jewish" @myHNN

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)

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The problem isn't the NYT or David Icke - it is Alice Walker herself

 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.

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@Amnesty extols film calling Israel an apartheid state, with antisemitic nutcase Alice Walker narrating

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)

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Prominent Israel hater believes world run by reptilian space aliens (updates)

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.

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Alice Walker supports apartheid

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. 

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