Friday, July 6, 2012
Whose an anti semite? Alice Walker
Alice Walker: The Color of Anti-Semitism
In
what must be considered among the most egregious acts of discrimination against
Israel by leftist intellectuals, author Alice Walker is not allowing her
Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The
Color Purple to be translated into
Hebrew because of her opposition to the Jewish state. The book, which was made
into a popular 1985 movie directed by Steven Spielberg, is a story about racism
and misogyny in the American south.
The
Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports that in a letter posted on a site supporting
the boycott of Israel, Walker said she was refusing to allow the translation in
order to boost support for the movement to boycott, divest and sanction (BDS)
the Jewish state because of its alleged mistreatment of Palestinians. But in
saying she doesn’t even wish her work to appear in Hebrew, Walker is making a
broader statement than a mere critique of Israeli policies. This sort of a
boycott is an attempt to treat Jews and Hebrew, which is the national language
of the Jewish people, as beyond the pale. In doing so, Walker has illustrated
how hatred for Israel can erase the line between political opinion and outright
anti-Semitism.
As
JTA points out, Walker’s jihad against the language of Israel is mere symbolism.
A Hebrew version of her book appears to already have been published in the
1980s. But however futile her efforts to prevent Hebrew readers from reading her
prose, the decision to expand the boycott of Israel from products and investment
in companies to actually seeking to isolate a language shows just how
deep-seated the hatred of the country has become. In Walker’s world, Israelis
are not just the bad guys in a fictional morality play in which the Palestinians
are victims, but the very language they speak — the language of the Bible and
the foundation of Western religion, values and morality — is to be treated as
unworthy of being spoken or read.
Walker’s
past diatribes against Israeli policy and her support for the Hamas terrorists
in Gaza are ill-informed and rooted in ideological bias. Her belief that
Israel’s measures of self-defense against Palestinian terror are not merely
wrong but worse than American racism or South African apartheid is a calumny
based on lies that can be refuted. But to discriminate against the language of
the Jewish people in this manner is pure anti-Semitism.
It
is possible to criticize Israel without being an anti-Semite. But Walker has
crossed the line from an already indefensible economic war against the Jewish
state to a cultural war against Jewish identity. Such boycotts will not convince
Israelis to give up their country or their right to defend themselves against
the ongoing efforts of Palestinians to destroy it. But they do serve as a
warning that Walker and others who support her efforts have already crossed the
line between the demonization of Israel and open expressions of
Jew-hatred.
Rather
than Israel being isolated, it is Walker who must now be treated by decent
people everywhere as being as radioactive as anyone who supports racist
incitement against African-Americans.
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