By Larry Elder, Apr. 24, 2002
Anti-Semitism in America, according to a survey commissioned by the Anti-Defamation League, stands at an all-time low. But alarmingly, the survey found blacks three to four times more likely than non-blacks to be anti-Semitic.
Black Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, D-Ga., urges America to rethink its support of Israel. Reverend Jesse Jackson, who once called Jews “Hymie” and New York City “Hymie-town,” now demands that George Bush ensure the safety of Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat.
Jackson’s acolyte, Al Sharpton, once referred to Jews as “diamond merchants.” In 1991, Sharpton turned the death of a black child in a traffic accident in Brooklyn, involving a Hasidic Jew, into a racial incident. Sharpton led 400 protesters through the Jewish section of Crown Heights. There were four nights of rock- and bottle-throwing, and a young Talmudic scholar was surrounded by a mob shouting, “Kill the Jew,” and was stabbed to death.
The Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan recently likened the “plight” of black Americans to that of the Palestinians, noting blacks “were in the same position.” Farrakhan also exaggerates the Jewish role in slavery, and once called Hitler a “great man” and Judaism a “gutter religion.”
Black Fox News analyst Juan Williams criticizes Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for behaving like a “bull in a china shop.” Former Harvard professor Cornel West criticized his Harvard president and called him the “Ariel Sharon of higher education,” saying, “he struck me very much as a bull in a china shop.”
In the Palestinian-Israeli dispute, there is a bewildering failure on the part of many people, especially blacks, to differentiate firefighter from arsonist. Given the tremendous historical Jewish support for blacks, this insensitivity toward Jews and Israel suggests ignorance and lack of gratitude.
Fact: Jews helped to fund Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute. Washington asked Julius Rosenwald – a Jewish trustee of Tuskegee – to help, not only with higher education, but also with Southern black elementary schools. Rosenwald funded the building of 5,300 black schools across the South.
Fact: The black monthly magazine Emerge asked people to assess the following statements: Do blacks complain about racism? Do blacks stick to themselves? Do blacks prefer welfare? Are blacks less ambitious, too loud and pushy, not as hardworking, not as honest, have too much power in the U.S.? In every case, Jews were the least likely of any group to answer “true” to those statements. Jews showed less racism toward blacks than any other group.
Fact: In 1984-85 and 1991, Israel airlifted 20,000 black Ethiopian Jews from persecution and famine in Africa.
Fact: During the 1960s, many white Northerners worked as “freedom fighters,” risking their lives to come to the South and encourage blacks to vote. In 1964, of those whites who went to Mississippi to register blacks to vote, three-quarters were Jews.
Fact: Unlike any other group in America, as Jews become more affluent they do not leave the allegedly “pro-minority” Democratic Party and defect to the “pro-wealthy” Republicans. So despite the growing wealth of Jews and the high-tax policies of Democrats, Jews remain in the party out of a sense of empathy, sensitivity and compassion for those less fortunate.
Fact: Jack Greenberg, a Jewish lawyer, was an important legal strategist in helping the NAACP in Thurgood Marshall’s Brown v. Board of Education case, which struck down the doctrine of separate but equal. (When Greenberg tried to teach a civil rights course at Harvard, students protested, arguing a black man should teach the course!)
Fact: 30 percent of Muslims in America today are black, some embracing the religion in order to reject “Western Civilization, culture and religion.” Many blacks also give their kids Arabic-sounding names. But most blacks don’t know that Arab slavers brought more slaves to South America and to the Middle East than European slavers brought to North America. In “Conquests and Cultures,” Thomas Sowell writes, “By the time the Europeans discovered the Western Hemisphere at the end of the 15th century, Muslim merchants already dominated the slave trade in West Africa, as they did in East Africa and North Africa. The Islamic jihads of the 18th and 19th centuries created new Muslim states in West Africa, which in turn promoted enslavement on a larger scale. Altogether, between 1650 and 1850, at least 5 million slaves were shipped from West Africa alone.” And while slavery ended in the West, says Sowell, “In some Islamic countries in Africa and the Middle East, slavery lasted even longer. Saudi Arabia, Mauritania, and Sudan continued to hold slaves on past the middle of the 20th century.”
Fact: When Sidney Poitier accepted his honorary award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, he rattled off a list of persons who stuck their necks out for his career, many of whom were Jews.
So, to America’s “black leaders,” care to reconsider?
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