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.