Alice Walker’s acclaimed novel The Color Purple has been adapted as a musical movie, produced by Steven Spielberg. Yet Walker has a long history of antisemitism: “A new ‘Color Purple’ adaptation hits theaters, returning author Alice Walker’s history of antisemitism to spotlight,” by Andrew Lapin, JTA, December 22, 2023:
Walker’s troubles with antisemitism would break into public view the following year, when The New York Times Book Review asked her to list her favorite books for a regular column. Among her choices was “And The Truth Shall Set You Free,” by antisemitic conspiracy theorist David Icke. The book purports to explore the secret forces behind global power, and contains numerous screeds on Israel, the Jews, and familiar conspiracy theories like the Rothschild family….
So Walker chose as one of her favorite books of 2018 one written by a hallucinatory antisemite, David Ickes, who sees Jewish conspiracies everywhere. Icke is full of stories about Jewish “global power,” the secret Jewish cabal that runs the world, the “rich Jews” such as the Rothschild family who are the real puppet-masters, the hidden elite who run the world for the benefit of the Jewish people.
How strange that Alice Walker doesn’t ask the obvious question: if Jews “run the world,” as David Icke claims, how is it that they were unable to rescue six million Jews from murder by the Nazis? How is it that the Jewish state of Israel lives in a condition of permanent insecurity, in which it has had to fight for its very survival four times, in 1948, 1967, 1973, and 2023? If Jews run the world, how is it that they have been unable to prevent the UN from attacking and even demonizing Israel, so that in 2022, for example, Israel was condemned by the UN General Assembly 14 times, while the same General Assembly condemned only 7 times all the other 192 countries combined? If the Jews, as Alice Walker seems to think, are a malignant, secret, and dominating force in the world, they are clearly not going about it in the right way.
Walker had nothing but praise for the book, telling the TImes, “In Icke’s books there is the whole of existence, on this planet and several others, to think about. A curious person’s dream come true.” It wasn’t her first time praising Icke, whom she has also boosted on her website and in other writings; she soon suggested that her critics were merely upset over her pro-Palestinian activism….
David Icke is one of Alice Walker’s most admired authors. She finds in his antisemitic conspiracy-laden books “the whole of existence.” What higher praise could there be? She isn’t offended by his remarks about a secret Jewish elite that controls so much of the world; she appears to share that view, based on her Der-Stürmer-like reading of the Talmud, and the metastasizing of her anti-Israel animus into a full-blown case of uncontrollable antisemitism. And when she was criticized for giving a boost to the otherwise unknown David Icke, she ascribed that criticism to the unhappiness some felt at her pro-Palestinian stance. It was an easy way to dismiss criticism without having to engage with it; simply attribute it to the malice of those who don’t like anyone standing up “for the poor Palestinians.”
In the midst of Israel’s ongoing war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Walker has continued to advocate for Palestinians. Last month she appeared in a webinar hosted by Socialist Action entitled “Palestine Will Be Free From the River to the Sea“ that also featured an editor of the anti-Zionist website Electronic Intifada….
She was happy to contribute to that webinar dedicated to the claim that “Palestine will be Free/From the River to the Sea.” That chant, of course, has only one meaning: the annihilation of the Jewish state, and its replacement by a twenty-third Arab state. Walker hasn’t been put off by the Hamas atrocities. She hasn’t condemned them. Apparently she was unmoved by the reports of what happened to Israeli civilians at the hands of Hamas operatives: the babies beheaded, the children burned to death, the gang-rapes, tortures, and murders of young girls, the breasts sliced off women, the eyes gouged out, and genitalia cut off, the men, the children murdered in front of their parents, the parents murdered in front of their children. Not a syllable of sympathy was expressed by Alice Walker. Perhaps she believes, like so many crazed antisemites, that it was the IDF itself that murdered Israelis on October 7, in order to make Hamas look bad, and give Israel the pretext it needed to invade Gaza.
How does Steven Spielberg, who clearly has strong feelings about the atrocities Hamas committed, as he does about the Nazi crimes, feel about producing a film that provides still more money and fame for Alice Walker, and with a plethora of movie-related interviews, provide many occasions for her to speak her mind? This is the Alice Walker who continues to call for the obliteration of the Jewish state (“Palestine shall be free, from the river to the sea”), who praises to the skies a conspiracy-crazed antisemite like David Icke, who presents the Talmud as a sinister text that teaches Jews that they should rightly be “masters” of the Goyim, and the Goyim should accept the role of being their slaves. And there is much more in that Der Stürmer vein once so pleasing to Alfred Rosenberg.
Really, Mr. Spielberg, aren’t you ashamed of yourself? With five billion dollars, you can’t claim you needed the money. You should have stayed far away from the vicious wicked Alice Walker. When you sup with the devil, you must use a long spoon.
40 rounds says
It’s a race thing for many so-called black intellectuals viewing all Jews as white Interlopers who shoe horned their way back into judea(I refuse to use the word Palestine) thus the colonial bs story. What’s it to American blacks anyway?
Phil Copson says
People who don’t cook buy ready-meals and people who can’t think adopt ready-made opinions.
Like wearing a uniform, it simultaneously empowers them and shields them from the consequences.