[](/sites/default/files/uploads/2012/06/walker1.jpg)We are currently witnessing the sharp rise of a strong anti-Semitic movement among the Western black elite. The leaders of the American Jewish community, who embraced an ultra-liberal agenda, have in the past worked with the black leaders of the civil rights organizations, like the late Martin Luther King, who was very sympathetic to Jewish concerns and to Israel. But now there is a strong pro-Islamic movement among American blacks, sympathetic to the Arabs, whose participation in the slave trade is overlooked.
Alice Walker, author of “The Color Purple,” just recently refused to authorize a Hebrew translation of her prize-winning book, saying that “Israel is guilty of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people, both inside Israel and also in the Occupied Territories.” Not only did Walker support the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, but she also said that Israeli policies are “worse” than the segregation she suffered as an American youth and said South Africans had told her it was worse than Apartheid.
A complete list of the Afro-American personalities who have embraced an anti-Israel stance is long and exhaustive.
Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s pastor in Chicago, his spiritual father, his guide, his model, compared Israel to Nazi Germany and called the Jewish State a “deformed modern apartheid.” Andy Young and Jesse Jackson reached out to Yasser Arafat’s terrorists and Reverend Jesse Jackson even said that then-Senator Barack Obama, if elected president, would lessen the influence of, quote, “Zionists” on US foreign policy. Gerald Lenoir, executive director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, an education and advocacy group, declared that “as an African-American who was a leader in the U.S. anti-apartheid movement, I see the separate and unequal treatment of Palestinians as a form of apartheid and a crime against humanity.” An Afro-American icon like the writer Toni Morrison charged Israel with “the liquidation of the Palestinian nation,” while Archbishop Desmond Tutu repeatedly condemns “Israel’s apartheid” and recently penned an article in _The Tampa Bay Times_ where he descended into rank anti-Semitism: “The Jews are a peculiar people. They can’t ever hope to be judged by the same standards which are used for other people.”
The new black anti-Semitism finds expression not only in the “Zionism is Racism” indictment, but the further indictment of the Jewish State as “the new apartheid.” In the hands of the black leaders, apartheid has become the most powerful term for demonizing Israel, since it evokes the precedent of sanctions against the white regime in South Africa.
Anyone who has lived in both apartheid South Africa and Israel knows that the analogy is immoral and wicked. Apartheid was a system of governance where a white minority subjugated the black population and the “superior” whites could not mingle with or even sit on a bench with the “inferior” black peoples. In Israel, Jews and Arabs share public spaces, buses and schools. In Israel all citizens – Jew and Arab alike – are equal before the law.
Israel has no Population Registration Act, no Group Areas Act, no Mixed Marriages and Immorality Act, no Separate Representation of Voters Act, no Separate Amenities Act. Israeli Arabs sit in the Supreme Court, even the most anti-Jewish Arab parties belong to the Israeli Parliament, there are Arab cabinet ministers. In all of Israel’s hospitals, Jewish and Arab doctors and nurses work side by side treating Arab and Jewish patients.
International pressure, boycotts and sanctions on South Africa’s apartheid government eventually played a major role in ending its power. Now, in the name of the apartheid charge, the black leaders have convinced city councils, universities, churches and food co-ops in Europe and in the United States to boycott Israel’s goods. This horrible falsehood should not be dismissed as a bad joke. It can be a nightmare for the Jewish people. The apartheid ideology dictates that all the Israeli land must be returned to Islamic rule, by force if necessary.
Do these black leaders remind us of the NY Crown Heights pogrom? It erupted in August 1991, when a Jewish driver in the motorcade of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson accidently ran over Gavin Cato, a seven-year-old child of Guyanese immigrants. Rumors that the boy had been deliberately killed because of his black race quickly spread. Jews were beaten by Afro-American rioters and a Jew was stabbed to death. A band of Black radicals led by Al Sharpton, Sonny Carson and Alton Maddox, notorious for fomenting inter-group hatred, fanned the flames of anti-Semitism among their fellows. Sharpton organized marches through the Jewish third of the neighborhood saying “diamond dealers” (the Jews) were responsible for the death of Cato. That’s why in 2011 a Long Island panel on the riots, after a Jewish protest, was postponed for the inclusion of Sharpton.
Ten years after the Crown Heights pogrom, under the new black apartheid analogy, the World Conference against Racism, held by the United Nations in Durban in 2001, was transformed into a racist conference against Israel and the Jews. In the same city where President Mbeki held his festival of victory against the real apartheid, another death sentence was passed for the Jews. Several weeks later, the Second Intifada broke out in Israel. 1,500 Jewish civilians have since been killed in suicide attacks and shootings; 10,000 have been wounded. Many black leaders were involved in the Durban proto-Nazi saga.
In 1948, except for a few isolated voices, African American opinion was overwhelmingly sympathetic toward the new Jewish State. Ironically, Martin Luther King Jr. on March 25, 1968, addressed the Rabbinical Assembly, saying, “I see Israel as one of the great outposts of democracy in the world, and a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy. Peace for Israel means security.” Now Martin Luther King’s horrible heirs are directing their anti-Semitic vendetta against the Israelis.
Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.
Leave a Reply