Monday, September 28, 2009

ALICE WALKER - VERY PROGRESSIVE BIGOTRY

Far be it from me to kick someone when they're down. Fortunately, Alice Walker is far from down, having been put on a pedestal and worshipped by the multitudes.
Even rabbi Michael Lerner sits up and yips when Alice Walker speaks.

Or so one would think, given that he has given her writ to write for Tikkun Magazine, which conflicted 'Jewish' persons read for stimulating self-doubt, candy-floss spirituality, and an unhealthy but oh-so-delicious dose of Jewish self-loathing.

Tikkun Magazine is probably the most objectionable and pretentious waste of printing technology on the West Coast. Michael Lerner panders to the weakest and least intellectually able segment of Jewry with a fetid mix of new-age nonsense, guilt, insecurity, cottonwool politics, and tendentious superficiality. Suffice to say that both readers and writers of that thing are beyond shame.
[Excepting, as always, the intellectually curious with a strong stomach, or literate masochists. As always.]


Not surprising, therefore, to find Alice Walker in that company.

Quote:
Known for his far-left views on Israel, Lerner lurches completely off the charts by assigning a Yom Kippur sermon to Walker, who offers up a defense of terrorism against Israelis in the latest issue of Lerner's magazine, Tikkun.
In her Tikkun essay, "Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters ‘the Horror’ in Rwanda, Eastern Congo, and Palestine/Israel," Walker calls suicide bombings "last-ditch resistance," and says it’s dishonest to engage in "blaming the oppressed for using their bodies where the Israeli army uses armored tanks."

End quote.

Source:
http://blogs.jta.org/telegraph/article/2009/09/22/1008054/defender-of-terrorism-against-jews-to-spea


While I hesitate to give any linkage to anti-Semites and bigots, I nevertheless feel that you should read her exceptionally long and dysfocussed rant yourself.
http://www.alicewalkersblog.com/2009/07/overcoming-speechlessness-poet.html
At least try to wade your way through some of it - I'll understand if you give up in boredom or disgust one quarter of the way through. It's only natural.


Other people have also made the struggle to read Alice Walker's poofle.
They have been repulsed. And have blogged as much.


READER: STEFFY

Quote:
"Coz if you are Jewish, Ms. Alice Walker sincerely wishes you to understand that you are the paradigm of whiteness and maleness."
End quote.

Source:
http://infectiousasian.blogspot.com/2009/09/alice-walker-cannibal-goddes.html
[Personal blog: http://infectiousasian.blogspot.com/ ]



READER: VICIOUS KITTY

Quote:
"You HAVE spoken to them, haven't you, Ms. Walker? Because to simply castigate the Jews, as if the actions of Israel happen without reason or provocation, and entirely in a vacuum, would be dishonest, hypocritical, and fundamentally racist."
And:
"Do you know what the phrase 'double standard' means?"
End quote.

Source:
http://proisraelbaybloggers.blogspot.com/2009/09/alice-walker-in-touch-with-her-inner.html
[Personal blog: http://prolongedfeline.blogspot.com/ ]

Further quote:
"It seems you are obsessed with Jews."
End quote.



READER: BBJ

Quote:
"Why are Alice and her friends boycotting the International Film Festival? Because the film festival plans to showcase films from Israel in honor of the 100th anniversary of the city of Tel Aviv, "as if Gaza was not recently besieged and bombed, and as if no Palestinians ever lived in Tel Aviv." "
[CUT] "... if you read a little more deeply on the subject, you will learn that the city was built on land purchased from its Bedouin owners. Israeli Arabs have lived, and do live in Tel Aviv, but to invoke Palestinians, whom Walker no doubt believes were kicked out of their ancient sand dune by those invaders --- , is deliberately misleading and meant to delegitimize any Jewish presence in Israel."

End quote.

Source:
http://proisraelbaybloggers.blogspot.com/2009/09/yes-indeed-boycotts-must-come-from.html
[Personal blog: http://balabustabluejeans.blogspot.com/ ]

Further quote:
" ...one thing that becomes very clear is that Walker knows nothing but what she has been told by very dubious companions--and has accepted it wholesale. She's probably no more misinformed than the average knee-jerk Israel hater, but she is more influential, and more dangerous. (She really is comically dim. At one point she alleges that Ariel Sharon led the attack on Sabra/Shatila, which strongly suggests to me that she has never actually read an account of what happened there, unless it was given to her by Cynthia McKinney)."
End quote.


"True to my inner Goddess of the Three Directions... "
Alice Walker, a spiritual being.


Perhaps most significantly, what all bloggers cited above express is a sense of personal betrayal. Alice Walker, a feminist and progressive, and herself familiar with the spiritual disease of bigotry, should have been the last person to engage in anti-Israel activism.


Quote:
"...anti-Zionism is a form of racism more dangerous than classical anti-Semitism "
[CUT]
"Anti-Zionism earns its racist character from denying the Jewish people what it grants to other collectives (e.g. Spanish, Palestinians), namely, the right to nationhood and self-determination."

End quote.

Source:
http://www.zionismontheweb.org/Anti-Zionism_is_racism.htm

Further quote:
"As a form of racism, anti-Zionism is worse than anti-Semitism. It targets the most vulnerable part of the Jewish people, namely, the people of Israel, who rely on the sovereignty of their state for physical safety, national identity and personal dignity. To put it more bluntly, anti-Zionism condemns 5 million human beings, mostly refugees or children of refugees, to eternal statelessness, traumatized by historical images of persecution and genocide.
Anti-Zionism also attacks the pivotal component of our identity, the glue that bonds us together — our nationhood, our history. And while people of conscience reject anti-Semitism, anti-Zionist rhetoric has become a mark of academic sophistication and social acceptance .. "

End quote.


Perhaps Alice Walker isn't an 'academic sophisticate' striving for 'social acceptance'.
Maybe she has become comfortable, and conscious of the need to play well with others, in the progressive milieu.
What is clear is that she has become an anti-Israel activist.

She is NOT a classical anti-Semite.

2 comments:

Woolly Banshee said...

What is clear is that she has become an anti-Israel activist.

She is NOT a classical anti-Semite.


Oh come now. Those are not mutually exclusive terms. And many febrile intellectuals are multi-facetted enough to be both.

Anonymous said...

It seems that Alice Walker's 15 minutes of fame have evaporated and she's now trying to grasp onto another issue in hopes of being relevant again for another 15 minutes. Of course, if one wishes to be apudit and an activist, it also always helps to actually know SOMETHING about the issue. It appears that the entirety of Ms. Walker's expertise on the Arab-Israeli conflict comes from one,recent "guided tour" of Gaza. Her involvement makes it clear that this has become a "fashionable issue" among our Ivory Tower elites.