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June 24, 2011
Flotilla Participant Alice Walker: The United States and Israel are the Greatest Terrorist Organizations
Pulitzer prize winning author Alice Walker is one of the recognizable figures taking part in the Gaza Flotilla planned for late June, 2011. Associated with the radical anti-Israel group, Code Pink, Walker stated in an interview with the on-line magazine, Foreign Policy, in June, 2011:
I think Israel is the greatest terrorist in that part of the world. And I think in general, the United States and Israel are great terrorist organizations themselves.
She has equated Israeli measures towards the Palestinians with the genocides in the Congo and Rwanda. Curiously, she makes no mention of the on-going genocide against black Christians in Sudan by Arabs, and most inconveniently, the openly genocidal intentions of Hamas. Walker has a blind spot for Middle Eastern genocidal groups because, in her view, Israel and the United States are the source of what ails the Middle East and the world as a whole.
From her own blog, we learn that "Jesus, a Palestinian – is still being crucified." She repeats false canards like the existence of "Jews Only roads" and describes the "apartheid wall " as ubiquitous, stating "it is everywhere, and it is indescribably ugly." Actually 95 percent of it is fence. She never delves into why it was built; the suicide bombings and terrorist infiltrations into Israel that killed more than a thousand Israelis from 2000-2005 don't figure at all in her narrative.
It would not be accurate to describe Walker as a misguided peace activist since she claims on her blog "I have never believed in the Israeli/Palestinian peace talks." She sees the Jews strictly as usurpers who have no right to the land.
How ironic that a CNN piece by Walker, on June 21, makes mention of two Jewish youths murdered while campaigning for civil rights for African-Americans in the South. Walker claims to be honoring their memory. She does this by demonstrating her solidarity with the Hamas regime in Gaza that invokes religious sanctification for its call to murder Jews.
Walker's harsh view towards Israel may be influenced by her personal life. She frequently mentions her Jewish ex-husband, usually with negative connotations. In a rambling piece she wrote in 2009, she described giving a gift to a Palestinian woman:
I gave her a gift I had brought, and she thanked me. Looking into my eyes she said: May God Protect You From the Jews. When the young Palestinian interpreter told me what she’d said, I responded: It’s too late, I already married one.
So full of hostility is Walker towards Israel that even members of radical rabbi Michael Lerner's congregation couldn't stomach Walker's calumny against the Jewish state. Invited to deliver a key note speech at Lerner's congregation during Yom Kippur in 2009, the audience consisting of pro-Palestinian sympathizers was taken aback by her vitriol. Particularly upsetting to the audience was her charge that the Israeli army rapes Palestinian women. When challenged she offered no evidence.
One congregant, expressing what many in the audience apparently felt, described "the tone of her speech as being hateful and frankly blatantly anti-Semitic." She leveled the charge of "dual loyalty" on American Jews and offended one audience member by "telling us Israel, because of the human rights abuses, should not exist as an actual land for the Jewish people."
Walker's disdain or Israel is long-standing. In the interview with Foreign Policy she admitted that as far back as 1967, she felt that Israel "just seemed so wrong." That was following the Six-Day War, when Israel took possession of lands previously occupied by Egypt, Jordan and Syria in what started as a defensive war.
Walker's pieces appear on web sites displaying extreme anti-Israel and anti-Jewish imagery. One web site carrying her work is called "Stop Raping Palestine." It shows an image of the word Israel with one letter shaped into a swastika. Walker herself makes comparisons between Israel and Germany, with clear connotations to the Nazi period. She seems to view the Jewish inhabitants of Israel in a similar manner as disgraced former White House Correspondent Helen Thomas. She portrays Israeli Jews as the equivalent, or worse, of southern whites during the pre-civil rights era. It is no surprise that Jews from Arab lands do not fit into her narrative.
In the piece appearing on the radical web site Stop Raping Palestine, Walker wrote,
That though all focus appears to be on which Arab nation is likely to strike the United States, in my awareness of the unpredictability of evil, I imagine Israel just as capable of doing us nuclear harm. This is because the United States and Israel, working together (and with Britain) have done terrible things to others in their greed to take resources away from them: And it is the nature of thieves to eventually have a grand falling out. More, Israel, with our help, has the weapons of mass destruction for which Bush looked for in vain in Iraq. One senses, in Israeli rage, unhealed wounds that may well be unhealable. And that, I feel, is ultimately what I am objecting to: the terrorization of the planet by the United States and Israel.
Alice Walker is not the first noted writer to adopt the Palestinian cause in order to heap vitriol on Israel. Several former Nobel Prize winners in literature also journeyed to the West Bank during the height of the Second Intifada, when Israel was suffering frequent suicide bombing attacks, to propagandize against the Jewish state. One of them, Portuguese writer, Jose Saramago used the opportunity to mock Jews over the Holocaust. Walker's chiding of Jews is eerily similar.
As unpalatable as Walker's views may be, it is revealing to learn what a prominent participant in the Gaza Flotilla really thinks.
Posted by SS at June 24, 2011 02:30 PM
Comments
When you call my synagogue pro-Palestinian sympathizers and when you put quotes around my title rabbi, you demonstrate the kind of blindness and extemism which should warn everyone who reads the article above that they are reading an unreliable source. My congregants are pro-Israel, and know that Israel's best interests lie in an end to the Occupation of the West Bank and reconciliation with the Palestinian people. My rabbinical smicha was obtained in the traditional way that all Hasidic-based rabbis obtain it--a 3 rabbi rabbinical court of rabbis who themselves received orthodox smicha. When someone distorts so much in things you know about,don't trust them in other arenas.
Posted by: Rabbi Michael Lerner at June 24, 2011 10:08 PM
Perhaps, then, since she hates her own country so much she will ask the Israelis when they stop her love boat to drop her off in Gaza, where she can feel at home with her Truth and Beauty. That would be good for the US and Israel and another setback for Hamas.
Posted by: fred lapides at June 24, 2011 11:17 PM
There are plenty of people like Walker around. Nothing has really changed since the world turned a blind-eye to the attempted extermination of the Jews in the Shoah. We just can’t wait to drag ourselves out of the gutter of history once more, dust ourselves off and pretend we had nothing to do with it. And you can bet, Walker will be the first one up on the poddium claiming her innocence!
Posted by: Vic at June 25, 2011 05:43 AM
Surely it is the rankest and cheapest of hypocrisy for this contemptible woman to remain in the US while declaiming it as a terrorist entity. She is wealthy, and also enjoys all of the freedoms of the West,INCLUDING HER FREEDOM TO LEAVE IMMEDIATELY. Nothing is constraining her from fleeing the evil terrorist US and joining her favored "oppressed" people.
If she were worth her salt - and we all know well that she is not - she would be in one of the peace-loving places she defends so rabidly and falsely. Or maybe she knows how things go for black women in the Arab world?
I feel dirty even thinking about this awful person.
Posted by: Veritas333 at June 26, 2011 05:58 PM
Sigh! Yet another blind, foolish person. Jesus was a Palestinian!?! Ridiculous! The US and Israel are terrorist states!?! She obviously doesn't understand what terrorism is. I really feel sorry for people like this.
Posted by: Kate at June 27, 2011 08:35 AM
Walker, like other self-proclaimed "anti-zionists" love dead Jews, but hate living Jews. She might be interested in the Hebrew University paper, written in 2007 claiming that the IDF dehumanizes Palestinian women by NOT raping them. http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/124674 Not that it would change her mind, but it would expose her and her allies for the fools that they are.
Posted by: sonofsheldon ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://blog.camera.org/nav-commenters.gif)
at June 27, 2011 10:18 AM
In response to Michael Lerner:
Beyt Tikkun's internet site, Tikkun magazine and activities associated with one or the other have featured anti-Israel activists, like Noam Chomsky, boycott and divestment supporters Lynn Gottlieb and Rebecca Vilkomerson and others. In September 2010, the congregation's internet site published a piece by a flotilla participant who acknowledged his association with International Solidarity Movement radical Paul Larudee and former State Department officer and Israel-defamer Edward Peck. Tikkun community also reportedly sponsored a talk by Mearsheimer and Walt. Then there were the speaking engagements of Alice Walker and Cindy Sheehan during Yom Kippur. Palestinian activist Sam Bahour, featured during your 2010 Passover celebration, accused Jews of looking away, while Israel, "kills and maims in your name, It dispossesses and occupies in your name. It talks peace and wages war in your name... you are acquiescing in the ongoing ethnic cleansing of another people, in your name." There is a pattern of opening up to anti-Israel activists.
Concerning your second complaint, we removed the quotes around rabbi.
Posted by: camera at June 30, 2011 06:40 PM
I don't care how many prizes she has won, she is an ignorant!
She is grabbing attention for her own purposes at the expenses of countries and people who are trying to help bring Democracy to a culture going back two thousand years.
Let those good people of Gaza help their women and children and give them opportunities to reach their true potential, and stop the stealing of the wealth that is given them by UN and other do gooders.
And, how many wives do they need?
Shame on these hate mongers..
Posted by: Z. Fuksman at July 1, 2011 06:56 PM
Ya know this thing with alice walker isn't that weird really. i remember back when i learned that there is such a thing as racism within the gay community. that just never made sense to me but as i got older i discovered that there isn't this "all for one and one for all" attitude among the gay community. all one has to do is look at the evidence to see that walker despite being a black woman who has written about segregation has some serious anti-Semitic baggage. but like so many other anti-Semites today she goes the PC route by just bashing Israel mostly.
and then you've got those within the Jewish community like michael lerner who claims to be a rabbi (i'm not convinced) and is so eager to boost his own notoriety that he'll cozy up with anybody. i still recall walker's rant about IDF soldiers raping palestinian women en masse at beyt tikkun. that's about as believable as that organ harvesting story or the goldstone report. such a progressive pair alice walker and michael lerner.
Posted by: David H. at July 2, 2011 05:09 AM
I like the way CAMERA responded to Rabbi Michael Lerner's comment. I too see an anti-Israel pattern here. Has Rabbi Lerner ever considered the practicality of giving into murderers? We all want peace and negotiable borders, but when the other negotiator "wants it all", what choice is left but to defend oneself? Better to be grounded in reality than to suffer from "wish-thinkitis".
Anyone remember Neville Chamberlain and Hitler?
Posted by: ruth at July 2, 2011 12:24 PM
"Rabbi" Michael Lerner blood libeled the entire Jewish People with the despicable claim that Israel starves Gaza children to death. Just as Stalin allied himself with Hitler, this Marxist "Rabbi" is allied with the Islamo-Fascists who, according to their charter which is taken directly from Sharia-law, intend to murder every Jew on earth.
"Rabbi" Michael Lerner is neither the first Jew to ingratiate himself with genocidal enemies by collaborating in the extermination of his own people, nor unfortunately will he be the last. Only Jews are cursed with such "Rabbis".
Who do I trust; CAMERA which does careful research to expose the existential threat to Jews, or a modern day kapo who aids and abets the Islamists, the allies of the Nazis during the Holocaust? I trust CAMERA. I have greater respect for Alice Walker, the outspoken Jew-hater, than for a deceiver who hides behind the title "Rabbi" while preaching the totalitarian ideology which murdered over 100M humans in the last century.
Posted by: Pharisee at July 9, 2011 09:49 PM
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