Alice Walker as a reader of David Icke? Jew-hatred for the 21st century

[I wrote the below in 2019, during a previous occasion when we were all reminded of Alice Walker's career as a Jew-hater].

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I've wanted to see a defense of Alice Walker by an unalloyed anti-Israel publicist since the scandal broke.

And here it is: "In defence of Alice Walker" by Susan Abulhawa.

The writer says Walker should not be denounced for books she reads; people should be free to read things others do not like and not be accused of endorsing unsavory authors. 

Fair enough. But what if the book Walker peruses meshes more than casually with her political viewpoint and activity over decades? 

Pointing out this fact is hardly unjustified and cynical guilt-by-association.

Abulhawa also writes: 

....Only weeks before the Zionist machines began clawing at Ms Walker, they were trying to skewer Professor Marc Lamont Hill.

Before them, there was Jimmy Carter, Jeremy Corbyn, Desmond Tutu, Roger Waters, John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, Helen Thomas, Richard Falk. And before them was a whole generation of black revolutionaries….

Walker's claw-machine Jewish critics – quite a word picture, ain't it? Just like the rapacious grasping Jews depicted in the Protocols, in the work of Icke on Walker's bedside table, and in the statements and actions of the current leaderships of Hezbollah, the PLO, and Hamas.

Abulhawa spends about half her article writing about Israeli religious scholars using religious texts to rationalize the killing of Palestinians. Is Abulhawa suggesting the Jewish religion is responsible for the Israeli treatment of Palestinians?

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Susan Abulhawa claims Walker's treatment at the hands of pro-Israeli media is the same as treatment meted out to Corbyn, Walt, and Mearsheimer.

These are three interesting examples to pluck from the dung-heap of 21st century 

"antizionism." 

Corbyn is an ally of Hamas, a capitalist organization that unapologetically works to get Palestinians killed as cannon fodder in their dead-end attempts to shame the Israeli capitalist class into concessions. 

(Illuminating political analysis of Corbyn here and here).

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt are also presented by Abulhawa as victims of clawing Israeli hate-propaganda. Their scholarship fits right in with old-fashioned Protocols-style Jew-hate Walker undoubtedly recognized in Icke's book.

Their book The Israel Lobby claimed that Israel (i.e. the Jews) made all significant U.S. foreign policy decisions. This canard about Jews running your government, given an anti-Israel facade, is attractive to the middle class left internationally. It is in fact the only globally consistent ideology of the middle class left.

In a 2006 article exposing John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's poison, Sam Manuel wrote:

….the paper by Harvard academic dean Stephen Walt and University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer, entitled "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," promotes "the false and reactionary theory that U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is manipulated by a Jewish lobby with support from a network of 'neoconservative gentiles.'" It also noted that others, like the editors of the London Review of Books, a biweekly oriented to the bourgeois left; Perry Anderson, editor of the New Left Review; and left-wing academic James Petras, who is widely published here and in Latin America, have endorsed this view.

James Petras outlined a similar view, only more starkly, earlier this year in an article headlined "The Tyranny of Israel over America," written for PalestineChronicle.com and reprinted in the Spanish-language daily Granma in Havana. "The onset and immediate aftermath of the Iraqi war and the subsequent occupation was the highpoint of Israeli tyranny over Washington," he said. In the May 15 article we pointed out that Petras expressed views bordering on Jew-hatred….

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Abulhawa presents Walker as an ally of the struggle for Palestinian liberation. Sadly, there is no such struggle today, and there will not be until Palestinian workers and farmers, and their toiling Jewish allies, can construct a leadership worthy of their cause. It has never been clearer than it is today that reliance on Jew-hating capitalist groups and parties is a dead end.

Jay

5 January 2019