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.”
