Contempt
This is Prof. AbuKhalil about Martin Luther King:
If Martin Luther King did not exist, the White Man would have invented him. The funny thing is that when he was alive, he was chased as a communist by the same White Man, before he realized that he could be useful for his cause.
According to AbuKhalil, MLK was an Uncle Tom:
The phrase "Uncle Tom" has also become an epithet for a person who is slavish and excessively subservient to perceived authority figures, particularly a black person who behaves in a subservient manner to white people; or any person perceived to be a participant in the oppression of their own group.[1][2]
I was wondering what could have caused this type of overflowing contempt from the professor of California state University (or whatever). And then it occurred to me that the professor automatically reserves contempt for anybody who is anybody who does not hate Israel. What was it in MLK's
record that might have provoked this animus? Could it be this quote?
“When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking anti-Semitism!”
And for those who think this MLK's quote was fabricated, they should read the provenance of these words and their veracity, as investigated by a real academic and intellectual:
In fact, the evening’s significance would only become evident later, after King’s death. For the dinner was attended by Peretz’s senior Harvard colleague, Seymour Martin Lipset, and it was then and there that Lipset heard King rebuke a student who echoed the SNCC line on “Zionists”: “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking anti-Semitism!” Peretz would later assert that King “grasped the identity between anti-Israel politics and anti-semitic ranting.” But it was Lipset who preserved King’s words to that effect, by publishing them soon after they were spoken. (And just to run the contemporary record against memory, I wrote to Peretz, to ask whether the much-quoted exchange did take place at his Cambridge home on that evening almost 45 years ago. His answer: “Absolutely.” I’ve written twice to Andrew Young to ask whether he has any recollection of the episode. I haven’t yet received a response.)
Corroborated
Little more than five months after the Cambridge dinner, King lay dead, felled by an assassin in Memphis. (Peretz delivered a eulogy at the remembrance service in Harvard’s Memorial Church.) There’s plenty of room to debate the meaning of King’s words at the Cambridge dinner, and I’ve only hinted at their context. But the suggestion that King couldn’t possibly have spoken them, because he wasn’t in or near Cambridge when he was supposed to have said them, is now shown to be baseless. Lipset: “Shortly before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King, Jr. was in Boston on a fund-raising mission, and I had the good fortune to attend a dinner which was given for him in Cambridge.” Every particular of this statement is now corroborated by a wealth of detail. We now have a date, an approximate time of day, and a street address for the Cambridge dinner, all attested by contemporary documents.
So will the guardians of Wikiquote redeem this quote from the purgatory of “disputed”? Let’s see if they have the decency to clear an eminent scholar of the suspicion of falsification, suggested by persons whose own sloppy inferences have been exposed as false.
3 Comments:
Methinks that "prof" is hating MLK for another reason. The mere idea that one could fight for one's rights without applying indiscriminate violence or violence at all, like MLK, fills the little prof's little brain with bile. Which bile fills the rest of his body by now.
You are underestimating the extent to which his anti-Zionist venom pervades each and every nook and cranny in his mind.
Hello. Excellent research.
Truly odd to read a Peretz post from 2009 in the new NR format.
Anyway, AA a-historical rants aside, thought you should know The New Yorker gave "Austenland" an absolute Bad-movie review, an insult to Austen.
btw, MLK, Jr did not pass his Zionism on to the daughter who was my college classmate 1969-1973. May she RIP since her early death in 2007, but I still remember her disdain for the Jews, reinforced by the college administration's disdain.
K2K
Post a Comment
<< Home