Elder of Ziyon: Martin Luther King Proves Palestinian Intellectuals Never Cared About Human Rights
Historian and scholar Martin Kramer writes:
Not a year goes by without an attempt by someone to associate the name of Martin Luther King, Jr. with the Palestinian cause. It’s particularly striking because while he lived, no one had much doubt about where he stood. Here, for example, is the late Edward Said, foremost Palestinian thinker of his day, in a 1993 interview:
With the emergence of the civil rights movement in the middle ’60s – and particularly in ’66-’67 – I was very soon turned off by Martin Luther King, who revealed himself to be a tremendous Zionist, and who always used to speak very warmly in support of Israel, particularly in ’67, after the war.
Kramer goes on to show how King was an unabashed Zionist even though today the anti-Israel crowd tries to steal his legacy.
The Edward Said quote is fascinating, though. It seems to indicate that all of the good King did – all of the progress he made towards equal rights for all people – is worthless to Said because of this one position. Never mind that King’s position of support for Israel is entirely in line with his support for equal rights for all; after all, King saw the justice of having a Jewish state which in fact allowed Jews to be considered equals with other peoples in the world. But to Said, all of MLK’s legacy seems to be worthless because of his Zionism.
Further reading into Said’s writings show that this is in fact consistent. He addresses King briefly again in his memoirs, where he says:
Eleanor Roosevelt revolted me in her avid support for the Jewish state; despite her much-vaunted, even advertised, humanity I could never forgive her for her inability to spare the tiniest bit of it for our refugees. The same was true later for Martin Luther King, whom I had genuinely admired but was also unable to fathom (or forgive) for the warmth of his passion for Israel’s victory during the 1967 war. (141)
Said didn’t just disagree with these icons of human rights. He was revolted by them if they also were sympathetic to Jews and Jewish aspirations to self-determination.
Dr. King’s Clarion Call for Soviet Jewish Freedom Remembered on MLK Day
A 1966 speech by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. urging justice for the persecuted Jewish communities in the USSR has been reissued to mark the annual US holiday honoring the civil rights leader, who was tragically murdered in 1968.
The speech by Dr. King was delivered to the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry on what was billed as a “nationwide telephone hook-up” on Dec. 11, 1966.
On Monday, the National Coalition Supporting Eurasian Jewry (NCSEJ) — a US NGO supporting Jewish communities in the former Soviet Union — distributed the speech online in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Day.
Opening his remarks with a famous John Donne quotation — “No man is an island entire of himself” — King said that these words affirmed “the interdependence and interrelatedness of mankind … particularly when we think of the plight of three million Jews in the Soviet Union.”
“Jewish communal rights are deprived by the Soviet government of elementary needs to sustain even a modest level of existence and growth,” King said.
King noted that while “Jews in Russia may not be physically murdered as they were in Nazi Germany, they are facing every day a kind of spiritual and cultural genocide.”
He argued that African-Americans could “well understand and sympathize with” the plight of Soviet Jews.
The naked pleading for domestic surveillance + censorship is breathtaking. The man manages to keep a straight face while drawing direct comparisons to 9/11.
— Kmele (@kmele) January 18, 2021
How could this end badly? One timely example: America’s domestic surveillance apparatus was once directed at ppl like MLK. https://t.co/p59ZMGxIRC
Anti-Semitic propaganda is not news
Accusing democratic Israel of committing "apartheid" against its Arab community, which enjoys full equality under the law and has been seeing an unprecedented rise in the number of working women (up 5%) and students in universities (up from 10% to 18%), while being highly represented among the country's doctors (17%) and pharmacists (47%), is patently absurd.
Finally, CNN echoes the outrageous position that Israel's identity as the homeland of the Jewish people, guaranteeing a Jewish majority and encouraging the "ingathering of exiles," should be considered racism. This reflects an attempt to apply globalist and racialist theories to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, fundamentally considering the world as an ethnic struggle between "oppressors" and "oppressed," and rejecting the very concept of religious and national identity – yet only when it comes to Jews.
B'Tselem attempts here to fawn on world progressive movements, creating an artificial parallel to the common trope of "white supremacy," by considering the Jewish affinity to Israel a form of "Jewish superiority."
The recent example of this "fashion" on social media to refer to "Jewish privilege" as a parallel to "white privilege" proves how anti-Semitic sentiments traditionally and still apply to these groups' credo. This is not only an insult to the historic yearning of Jews worldwide, but also to Israel's recognition and endorsement by the international community – in the 1920 San Remo Conference, in the 1947 Partition Plan, preceding Israel's foundation a year later, and on countless other occasions.
It is regretful that CNN has chosen to cooperate with the attempt to subvert Israel's very existence. Far from covering news, it cherishes distortions.
Israel is not an identity-free immigration hub; it has always been intrinsically bonded with Judaism as an inseparable part of Jewish existence while preserving equality under the law of all of its citizens, as is stated in its Declaration of Independence.