Shvartzeh Anti-semitka honored by PBS

PBS, America’s Public Broadcasting Service, broadcast a Master's Series episode about Alice Walker on February 7th, entitled Beauty and Truth.

The program, reports media monitor CAMERA, is a tribute to Walker, an author who gained fame from her 1982 novel, "The Color Purple." In recent years, however, Walker has slid ever deeper into the worlds of anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories -- an trend that PBS seems willing to ignore.

Though she has written little of note recently, CAMERA states that her championing of the lesbian lifestyle and agitation against Israel have kept her fashionable among segments of the media and academia: "

A review in the Femenist Wire describes how 'In Walker’s life... beauty exists within a mosaic of truths alongside rabid institutional racism, patriarchy, misogyny, colonialism, heterosexism, and so much else.'"

Much of that "so much else" seems to revolve around her hatred for Israel. Toward the end of the PBS program, Walker discusses at some length her commitment to the Palestinian cause. She showed her support for Hamas-ruled Gaza, she says, by planning to participate in the 2011 Gaza Flotilla.

Though other controversial aspects of Walker’s life and outlook are dealt with candidly, Walker makes numerous unsubstantiated charges against Israel, which PBS allow to go unexamined and unanswered.  

Walker compares the plight of the Palestinians to the black civil rights movement in the South -- but in her opinion, Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is worse. She denounces Israel's separation barrier -- which she calls an "apartheid" wall -- and maintains that the Palestinians are "just daily humiliated... ground in the dirt." 

She has defended suicide bombings, finding it “dishonest… that people claim not to understand the desperate, last ditch resistance involved in suicide bombings, blaming the oppressed for using their bodies.”

PBS did not enlighten viewers about Walker’s history of issuing hateful statements about Israel and Zionism [and Jews]. In 2011, she accused Israel and the United States of being "great terrorist organisations" and has used blatantly anti-Semitic religious imagery to whip up hatred of the Jewish state. She has called Jesus, a Galilean Jew, “a Palestinian" and claimed he "is still being crucified."

Walker made headlines in Israel last year by refusing to authorise a Hebrew translation of ”The Color Purple.”  She also published an open letter urging singer Alicia Keys to cancel her scheduled July concert in Israel and play in Gaza instead. In a 2012 interview, Walker accused Israel of “stealing so much Palestinian land, they have essentially stolen all of Palestine.” 

Walker's first husband was a Jewish civil rights lawyer. She has recounted a meeting with an elderly Palestinian woman in the territories. The woman, upon accepting a gift from Walker, said, "May God protect you from the Jews" to which Walker responded, "It’s too late, I already married one."

Her grip on reality has been called into question -- also ignored by PBS. She has endorsed the writings of David Icke, who maintains that the human mind is controlled from the moon. The moon, he claims, is actually a “gigantic spacecraft” which sends us a “fake reality broadcast.”

Black Anti-Semite Writer, author of "The Color Purple" writes book full of hate against Israel

The Black Jew Hater, Alice Walker

Alice Walker, the American writer who has long made clear her antipathy toward the state of Israel, “has taken her extreme and hostile views to a shocking new level” in her latest book of meditations on life and her personal activism, according a review of the book by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
Walker’s “The Cushion in the Road” (The New Press, 2013) devotes 80 pages to a screed on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict replete with fervently anti-Jewish ideas and peppered with explicit comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany.
The 12 essays of the section, titled “On Palestine,” which make up a quarter of the book, are rife with comparisons of Israelis to Nazis, denigrations of Judaism and Jews, and statements suggesting that Israel should cease to exist as a Jewish state.  Walker’s book also attempts to justify terrorism against Israeli civilians, claiming that the “oppressed” Palestinians should not be blamed for carrying out suicide bombings.

 

“Alice Walker has sunk to new lows with essays that remove the gloss of her anti-Israel activism to reveal someone who is unabashedly infected with anti-Semitism,” said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director.  “She has taken her extreme and hostile views to a shocking new level, revealing the depth of her hatred of Jews and Israel to a degree that we have not witnessed before.  Her descriptions of the conflict are so grossly inaccurate and biased that it seems Walker wants the uninformed reader to come away sharing her hate-filled conclusions that Israel is committing the greatest atrocity in the history of the world.”

Walker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning African-American writer, essayist and poet, has a long history of biased statements against Israel. She has traveled repeatedly to the West Bank and Gaza to protest Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people. In June 2012 she refused to allow an Israeli company to publish a Hebrew edition of her classic novel, “The Color Purple,” in protest of what she described as Israel’s “apartheid” policies and “persecution of the Palestinian people.” Most recently, Walker wrote a letter calling on the singer-songwriter Alicia Keys to cancel her upcoming July 4th concert appearance in Tel Aviv in protest of Israel’s policies.
In “The Cushion in the Road,” Walker describes Israel’s actions vis-à-vis the Palestinians as “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” “crimes against humanity,” and “cruelty and diabolical torture.”
Some selected excerpts from the book:
Speaking of Black churches whose leaders recount Biblical stories about the Israelites’ various triumphs and travails, Walker writes, “It amazes me, in these churches, that there is no discussion of the fact that the other behavior we learned about in the Bible stories: the rapes, the murders, the pillaging, the enslavement of the conquered, the confiscation of land, the brutal domination and colonization of all ‘others’ is still front and center in Israel’s behavior today.”
Walker analogizes the Palestinians’ situation with the civil rights era and discrimination against Blacks in the American South.  She writes: “It is because I recognize the brutality with which my own multibranched ancestors have been treated that I can identify the despicable, lawless, cruel, and sadistic behavior that has characterized Israel’s attempts to erase a people, the Palestinians, from their own land.”
On several occasions Walker seems to indicate that the purported evils of modern-day Israel are a direct result of Jewish values, alleging that Jews behave the way they do because they believe in their “supremacy.”  She suggests that Israeli settlements are motivated by the concept that “possession is nine-tenths of the law,” which she claims is a lesson she “learned from my Jewish lawyer former husband.  This belief might even be enshrined in the Torah.”
When discussing Israel’s alleged theft of Palestinian land, she writes, “Can people who hunger so desperately for what other people have ever have enough? One thinks of Hitler, of course, and Napoleon….”  She writes of the inclusion of Israeli films in the 2009 Toronto Film Festival that it was comparable to “festivals in the past, festivals leading up to World War II,” which were designed to “make the bully look more respectable.”