“…think about the fact that just a week or two before September 11th, you had this major conference on global racism and intolerance happening in Durban, South Africa. How many Americans knew 1) That is was going on? or 2) That the American delegation walked out of the country when the thorny issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was brought up, from the perspective of people of color?”—Kevin Powell
Today came “news” that Congressional candidate and Hip-Hop Philosopher Kevin Powell would be meeting with 200 Hasidic leaders in Williamsburg and accepting their endorsement for Congress.
Will Matisyahu, the hip-hop Hasid, be providing the entertainment?
Bad idea. In Williamsburg, they don’t let Lubavichers go south of North Sixth Street; Chabad is strictly for the hipsters. The last Chabadnik caught on Lee Avenue was later found stripped to his phylacteries, badly beaten and wandering dazed through an industrial area of Bed-Stuy. Of course, this would no longer happen, because those industrial areas are now Satmar residential communities and strictly off limits to the Schneersonistas.
The Powell campaign would neither confirm or deny the rumor, which came from an unnamed source in the Hasidic community.
For the uninitiated, an “Unnamed Source” in Hasidic Williamsburg, means that Isac Weinberger, the community’s Cindy Adams, is telling such an outrageous lie that even he refuses to put his name on it.
Usually, Isac is a great source for rumors. If it’s out there, he’s heard it, and he’s spreading it; accuracy never enters into the equation, but sooner or later he tells you something true and different way before anyone else has even heard it. Plus, he has political analytical skills which rate at least a B minus.
But when it comes to having his finger on the pulse of the Hasidic community Isac would be slightly less useful than Clarence Thomas would be in Brownsville.
Yes, the Satmar are now divided into two warring factions, but the political leader of one of those factions, David Niederman, is on Ed Towns’ payroll, while the political leader of the other faction, Leib Glanz, is Towns’ Finance Chair.
In Williamsburg, Ed Towns is the Shabbes Goy who brings home the pastrami, and there’s enough to feed everyone at the banquet, even if they insist on separate tables.
In reality, it appears that Powell is holding a meet and greet, with a free buffet, at a large local catering hall. Hopefully, someone will inform him that each of the beggars expects a dollar bill before they leave.
Why Powell thinks he’s got a shot at any votes in such a controlled environment is anyone’s guess. Perhaps he’s heard the Satmar Hasidim are anti-Zionist and feels an affinity with them. If so, he’s under a grave misapprehension. Every Satmar is anti-Zionist until the third shot of Slivovitz, when they become fanatical Herutniks (Herut is the Israeli party that thinks Likud is too dovish).
Satmars all have relatives in Israel, and they all think they have the right to live there, if they want, without worrying about a bomb exploding in the marketplace.
And the district’s large Orthodox Jewish population in the Midwood area doesn’t even need a drink to start feeling ornery about Israel; they are proudly and openly right-wing Zionists.
But, even a bleeding heart Yitzhak Rabin worshipping peacenik like myself has to do a double take when reading Kevin Powell’s troubling words about the Durban Conference.
Now don’t get me wrong; I’m not criticizing Kevin Powell for objecting to the US walkout from the Durban Conference.
In Israel, both the opposition on the left (Yossi Sarid’s dovish Meretz) and on the right (Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud) objected to the Israeli delegation walkout led by then Foreign Minister Shimon Peres (then of the center-left Labour Party).
Netanyahu, who I find about as palatable as a day old cup of urine, actually put it quite eloquently, criticizing the government for "abandoning the arena", and noting "Imagine what would have happened if then Israeli ambassador to the UN Chaim Herzog had come home instead of tearing the UN resolution equating Zionism with racism to shreds?" Good point, although I suspect if Peres had stayed, Netanyahu would have called him a traitor for doing so.
The thing that bothers me is that Mr. Powell seems to believe that there is a “colored people’s perspective” on the Israel-Palestinian conflict and that what came out of Durban exemplifies that perspective. He also seems to imply empathy for that perspective.
What then is that perspective?
Israel and the United States pulled out of the UN's World Conference Against Racism after efforts to soften the anti-Israel language of the conference's draft summary statement failed.
Shimon Peres, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and Israeli dove, who as Foreign Minister had helped negotiate a plan to restore Israel to its narrow 1967 borders, including a divided Jerusalem, only to have it rejected by Yassir Arafat, said "The Durban conference is a farce," terming the conference's activities an "unbelievable attempt to smear Israel."
Peres continued, "We regret very much the very bizarre show in Durban. An important convention that's supposed to defend human rights became a source of hatred."
Peres said the Arab League had led a concerted effort to single out Israel and blame it in unacceptable terms for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "The Arab League, all of it, has come out against peace," said Peres, obviously somewhat peeved over being blamed for Yassir Arafat’s idiotic refusal to take yes for an answer.
Peres thanked the US and the 43 countries that "saved the world's honor" by taking "a clear position against this unbelievable attack to smear Israel with false colors." These nations included Russia, the European Union, most of eastern Europe, most of Latin America, India, Japan, Singapore and some African states (who apparently missed the news about the perspective of peoples of color).
US Secretary of State Colin Powell (not related, but someone who Kevin is normally elated to point out that he once interviewed), condemned the conference’s attempt to single out "only one country in the world, Israel, for censure and abuse," complaining of "hateful language" akin to the days when the United Nations equated Zionism with racism.
The draft text termed Israel's treatment of Palestinians "a new apartheid" and a "crime against humanity," stated that the conference "recognized with deep concern the increase of racist practices of Zionism" and said that Zionism is based on racial superiority.
Never considered was the salient fact that actions undertaken against Palestinians may have been taken not because of their racial status (virtually indistinguishable from that of a majority of the country’s Jews, who were born in or are descended from those born in Arab lands), but because of their status as belligerents in a de facto war zone.
Israel was the only country mentioned specifically in the document, and the objections to it, seemly clearly aimed not at its actions (undertaken by perhaps the most dovish government in its history), but its very existence.
And so it continues today. The town of Sderot faces daily missile showers from the Gaza. This cannot be in response to any crimes of the occupation, because Israel no longer occupies Gaza. If these attacks are in response to any occupation, it is to Israel occupation of Israel, which seemed the concern at Durban as well.
Is this your concern, Mr. Powell?
The Israeli-American withdrawal from the Durban conference followed days of intensive efforts to convince Arab and Muslim delegates to remove the anti-Israel statements from the draft resolution and replace them with a general statement calling on all parties in the Middle East to end the violence and return to negotiations and stressing the right of all peoples in the region to self-determination.
Though Israel had initially objected to any reference to its conflict with the Palestinians in the document, it had agreed to this compromise.
But, it soon became clear that the this effort had no chance of being accepted by the Muslim bloc. "we reached the conclusion that the efforts had been exhausted, so we decided to leave," said Deputy Foreign Minister Michael Melchior, leader of Israeli’s Meimad Party, usually described as “Peace Now with a kippah (yarmulke)”.
Melchior added, "From the beginning, we debated over whether to attend the conference at all…Our decision to participate stemmed from intensive pressure by friendly states, who wanted to try to remove the Arab proposals during the conference itself."
Shimon Samuels of the Simon Weisenthal Center said "The Egyptians returned to ground zero regarding the equation of Zionism with racism, the Syrians denied the existence of the Holocaust, and the Iranians objected to any mention of anti-Semitism in the conference resolutions, on the grounds that the conference is dealing with the problems of the present, and anti-Semitism is not a problem nowadays."
Samuels said that Jesse Jackson, who attempted to mediate on this issue, shared his assessment; guess no one advised Jesse of the “colored perspective” either.
Said Congressman Tom Lantos (D-California), an outspoken supporter of human rights in every corner of Africa and the world, "A conference that should have been about horrible discrimination around the world has been hijacked by extremist elements for its own purposes…The conference will stand self-condemned."
What then is the perspective of people of color? Perhaps we should consult Martin Luther King.
“After 2000 years of exile, the Jewish People has emerged traumatized. The source of that trauma has been the constant insecurity and fear that characterized most of the Diaspora, in most parts of the world. It is a product of landlessness, massacres, periodic expulsion and flight, persecution by tyrants and abuse by the Church and Mosque who encouraged antisemitism to satisfy their own insecurities and political desires. …Physical security for the Jews has traditionally been improved in a number of ways: usefulness, mobility, bribery and assimilation. Psychological responses to this insecurity and trauma are well known: self-hatred and blame, identification with and appeasement of abusers, obsessive fantasy of a future paradise on earth. These solutions and responses are so integrated into the Jewish psyche that they have been passed down from generation to generation, displaying themselves even in relatively free societies, even in America and the recently liberated homeland, Israel….Despite its significance to the Jewish Nation, the State of Israel has failed to alleviate most of this trauma, and has not reduced the levels of antisemitism – it has simply allowed antisemites to masquerade themselves under the new banner of "anti-Zionism". We cannot expect antisemitism to disappear – Jewish existence and Jewish philosophy will always be threatening to its children: Christianity, and Islam… The trauma and insecurity, on the other hand, is within our power to diminish – should we decide to do so…And what is anti-Zionist? It is the denial to the Jewish people of a fundamental right that we justly claim for the people of Africa and freely accord all other nations of the Globe. It is discrimination against Jews, my friend, because they are Jews. In short, it is antisemitism….The antisemite rejoices at any opportunity to vent his malice. The times have made it unpopular, in the West, to proclaim openly a hatred of the Jews. This being the case, the antisemite must constantly seek new forms and forums for his poison. How he must revel in the new masquerade! He does not hate the Jews, he is just 'anti-Zionist'!…"
Well, obviously King was just buck-dancing for his Jewish masters to put some chump change into his cup.
I could add pro-Zionist statements from W.E.B. Dubois and Paul Robeson, but their unyielding support for Menachem Begin’s militant Revisionists (as opposed to Ben-Gurion’s sellout Haganah, buck-horah-ing for their British masters) was then part of the Communist Party line, and Marx was nuthin but a dead white European male (and half a Jew to boot), so why believe them either?
No, it’s obvious, I need an example with some black nationalist street cred. Since Powell’s website includes a platform plank I’m still trying to decode which states “Propose American and multi-lateral action to end Black genocide in the Sudan; the rest of Africa and the Diaspora”, it’s a cinch that Kevin’s a sucker for Marcus Garvey.
So, how about Marcus Garvey?
[WARNING: THIS SECTION IS VERY LONG, and has only two jokes. You don't need to read it all, but it is good to know it is all there. For those without stamina, I've provided this Executive Summary: Marcus Garvey really liked Zionism a whole lot; YOU CAN NOW SKIP TO THE SECTION'S END, WHICH WILL ALSO BE MARKED IN CAPS].
According to UCLA’s African Studies Center, Garvey's philosophy was influenced by the Zionist movement. At the Fourth United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) International Convention in New York in August 1924, a reporter for a Hebrew Zionist newspaper was heard to exclaim across the press table, "This is Negro Zionism.". The Dahomean protonationalist Kojo Tovalou-Houénou declared at the same convention that "your association, Mr. President . . . is the Zionism of the Black Race."
Identification of Garveyism with Zionism is a theme that runs throughout commentaries on the Garvey phenomenon. In a November 1922 interview, Claude McKay stated that the Garvey "movement has all the characteristic features of the Jewish Zionists."
In the classic statement of the theory and practice of postwar pan-African liberation, Pan-Africanism or Communism, George Padmore addresses the prehistory of the movement and describes the phenomenon of what he defines as "Black Zionism or Garveyism." Amy Jacques Garvey also described Garveyism in her 1963 memoir as "Black Zionism."
Many find the political parallels between Garveyism and Zionism quite remarkable, and both movements achieved popularity during the same era. When interviewed by Jewish Communist journalist Michael Gold in August 1920, Garvey informed Gold, "Many white men have tried to uplift them [the Negroes], but the only way is for the [N]egroes to have a nation of their own, like the Jews, that will command the respect of the world with its achievements.“
At Garvey's mail-fraud trial, the former UAL head Emmett L. Gaines was asked by the government prosecutor whether the UNIA had a military branch. He answered, "It has a uniform rank . . . like the Masons and Odd Fellows and any other organization." To elucidate the character of his African legion, Garvey then interjected the simple declaration—"Zionists."
Garvey launched a series of construction loans in 1920 that were analogous to the Palestine Restoration Fund promoted by the Zionist Organization of America for the avowed purpose of developing the "Jewish commonwealth of Palestine." The various reconstruction funds that formed so intrinsic a feature of the organizing efforts of both movements were a reflection of their shared concepts of exodus and preparation.
The Negro World of 8 August 1922, in providing a summary of one of Garvey's speeches, reported that Garvey asked his audience "if the Jews could have Palestine, why not the Negroes another Palestine in Africa?" The hoped-for African Palestine, as conceived by Garvey, was to have been Liberia. "We are asking the world for a fair chance to assist the people of Liberia in developing that country," he announced, "as the world is giving the Jew a fair chance to develop Palestine."
Similarly, a proposal presented at the September 1919 Chicago convention of the Zionist Organization of America to transfer "all central Zionist Administrative Institutions and activities" to Palestine was mirrored by Garvey's announcement, in a Liberty Hall speech on 14 December 1919, that "after the [UNIA] convention to be held next August the headquarters of the association must be transferred to Monrovia, Liberia."
Garvey made frequent calls for black people to emulate the economic successes and national ambition of Jews. "The Jew has something the Negro hasn't got," Garvey averred, "he has racial stamina.". "We want to work out a plan like the Zionist so as to recover ourselves," Garvey advised readers of the December 1937 Black Man. In an editorial penned in mid-1936, at the outbreak of civil war between Arabs and Jews in Palestine, Garvey drew out the following moral for black people:
"The Negro, primarily, like the Jew, needs money, but he also needs simultaneously a strong nationalism. Let the Negro couple the urge for money with that of nationalism, so that in another hundred years when he arrives he will not have the difficulty the Jew is now having in Palestine, but he will have a formidable and well-established nation to protect him anywhere he happens to find himself with his wealth. There is no better place than Africa, his original home. The Negroes of the world, therefore, should concentrate on making money and in using a part of it for helping to establish an independent nationalism in Africa."
Not that Garvey was always so enamored with the Jewish people. He became increasingly anti-Semitic in his rhetoric following conviction on mail-fraud charges in 1923, when he became convinced that Jewish and Catholic jurors and Judge Julian Mack, a leading Zionist and former head of the Zionist Organization of America, had been biased in the hearing of the case because of their political objections to his meeting with the acting imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
Not surprisingly, the Klan saw much to admire in a plan to move people of color back to Africa.
But even in 1933, Garvey strongly denounced discrimination against Jews as a minority group and ascribed anti-Jewish prejudice to racism motivated by jealousy of Jewish economic success.
"The Jewish race is a noble one," he wrote in a 28 March 1933 New Jamaican editorial, and "the Jew is only persecuted because he has certain qualities of progress that other people have not learnt." He then drew a direct analogy between the persecution of Jews and the prejudice directed against black people in the United States, and strongly denounced Nazi racial intolerance.
Garvey specifically denounced Hitler's and Mussolini's designs on African colonies, and linked Nazi prejudice against black people with the persecution of Jews, describing both as racist policies that presented dangerous ramifications for world affairs.
So, there you have it–two movements of national liberation involving involuntarily dispersed peoples who comb their hair with picks.
[END OF MARCUS GARVEY SECTION; YOU MAY NOW RESUME READING]
As such, I’ve always been puzzled by the idea that there was a “black position” on Israel that was anything but pro-Israel; what gives?
Is there something that makes some blacks identify with Arabs?
Perhaps Jewish involvement in the slave trade? Can’t deny that there were Jews as well as Christian buying and trading black slaves from Africa, but as often as not, they were buying then from an Arab.
The difference is that Jewish involvement in the African slave trade ended hundreds of years ago, but Arab involvement continues to this day in Sudan and probably elsewhere, while Jews are at the forefront of exposing and attempting to eliminate this evil; just ask the Congressional Black Caucus (who should build a shrine to the late Tom Lantos for this reason and others).
I’m not saying condemn all Arabs, but it would be nice if they weren’t given extra credit they haven’t earned.
Do blacks such as Powell (Kevin, not Colin) identify with Arabs as “Third World People of Color”?
Well, as I’ve already noted, a majority of Israeli Jews are from Arab nations and are generally physically indistinguishable from other Arabs.
And, an increasing number of Israelis are black Africans, Jews and the descendants or relatives of Jews, rescued from starvation and persecution in Ethiopia. It is that non-racial element of Jewish nationalism that perhaps best stands in refutation of the idea of Israel as a racist state.
To the extent that any ethnic or religiously based nationalism is racist, Israel is a racist state, as is every state in the entire Arab world. Just ask a Kurd or a Christian.
Condemn ethnic based nationalism if you want; I may even join you, but if the only ethnic based nationalism you condemn is that of the Jews, then you have a Jew problem.
Do you have a Jew problem, Mr. Powell?
If not, what exactly did your strange remarks mean?
(The “author” acknowledges that great portions of this piece were outright plagiarized from UCLA’s African Studies Center and the Israeli newspaper, Ha’aretz.)
UPDATE: It turns out that the star of Powell's Hasidic soirre was none other than Isac Weinberger's cousin, Isaac Abraham. Together, these formidable operatives were responsible for delivering Joan Millman eight votes not otherwise within her grasp during her 1991 race for City Council against Ken Fisher; over the years they've since expanded their network and should be capable of delivering at least twice that number.
Abraham and Weinberger, who once led an effort to close down a day care facilty at a local housing project which Hasids chose not to utilize, now have their sights set on electing Abraham, a vociferous right winger who invariably suports conservative Republicans , to the City Council against a field of five candidates from the Brownstone and hipster communities who range in ideology from moderate liberal to wildly left.
It is easy to understand why Abraham sees a benefit from associating with Powell (although apparently not one sufficient to actually merit conveying an endosement); there are five housing projects in the 33rd Councilmanic with black populations ranging from somewhat notable minority to slight majority.
Clearly, Abraham would like to be able to show there is at least one black person willing to have his picture taken with him (Abraham being perhaps the one constituent of Towns' besides Powell who the Congressman refuses to pose with).
As such, Abraham, apparently without being asked to do so,, took pains to defend Powell on his history of abusing the opposite gender, which is regarded in much of Abraham's community as part of the bundle of rights one obtains when acquiring property. Perhaps both of them can hook up with Assembly candidate and child abuse advocate Andre Soliel and run together on a promise of potching the staus quo smack in the tuchis.