The obituaries for Amiri Baraka, the former poet-laureate of New Jersey, until that position was eliminated because of his anti-semitism, call him “controversial”.
Somehow I doubt that a white conservative poet who wrote lines like “We want…dagger poems in the slimy bellies of the owner-Jews” would have gotten a pass as being considered merely “controversial.”
“I got the extermination blues, jew-boys. I got the Hitler syndrome figured… So come for the rent, jewboys, or come ask me for a book, or sit in the courts handing down your judgements still I got something for you, gonna give it to my brothers, so they’ll know what your whole story is, then one day, jewboys, we all, even my wig wearing mother gonna put it on you all at once.”
Later in “Confessions of a former Anti-Semite,” Baraka explained these lines as meaning “Jews had stolen Black secrets and then said that Hitler disliked Jews because he could smell the contact with Black on them.”
He wrote, “I got the extermination blues, jew-boys,” meaning Jews should be killed for the exploitation of blacks. “ Despite the title “former”, Baraka never did stop being a bigot.
When he wrote “Confessions of a former Anti-Semite” in the Village Voice, Baraka aka Leroi Jones defended his bigotry as an intellectual error of ideology. He never disavowed it, instead he began claiming that he wasn’t anti-semitic, now he was anti-zionist.
“A favorite game of Zionists is to drop the label ‘anti-Semitic’ on anyone who opposes Zionism or upholds the Palestinians’ right of self-determination,” Baraka wrote in the Village Voice.
The difference between Amiri Baraka the anti-semite and Amiri Baraka the anti-zionist was hard to tell. It consisted mainly of Baraka clumsily replacing Jews with Israelis so that when after September 11, he repeated the usual Jewish Truther conspiracies in “Who Blew Up America”, he wrote, “Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers To stay home that day.”
There weren’t 4,000 Israeli workers there, but Baraka was using Israelis to mean Jews.
In “The Black Man in Making New Gods,” Amiri Baraka reached new heights of deranged anti-semitism, denouncing Jews, the way some Nazis did, for Christianity. “Atheist jews double crossers stole our secrets crossed the white desert to spill them,” Baraka ranted. “The fag’s death they gave us on a cross… they give us to worship a dead jew and not ourselves.” “The empty jew betrays us, as he does hanging stupidly from a cross, in an oven, the pantomime of our torture, so clearly, cinemascope the jews do it… the little arty bastards talking aritmetic they sucked from the arab’s head. Suck your pricks. The best is yet to come. On how we beat you and killed you.”
But Amiri Baraka hated white people as much as he hated Jews. Baraka was an overt disgusting and despicable racist. And it is inconceivable that any white people who wrote with the hate, venom and illiteracy that he did would have been honored the way he was.
“We are all beautiful (except white people, they are full of, and made of shit),” Amiri Baraka wrote. “Come up, black dada / nihilismus. Rape the white girls. Rape / their fathers. Cut the mothers’ throats,” he wrote.
Recently Paula Deen was lynched in public for once using a racial slur long ago. Meanwhile the man who wrote, “Another bad poem cracking steel knuckles in a jewlady’s mouth…” is being treated with the greatest honor as an artist and a visionary.
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