The ADL attacks so it can confuse people and show me as just another Anti- Semitic attacker of their absolutely false depictions of Israel as a victim of Palestinian Terrorism. This is absolutely in tune with the Bush administrations
Frenzied "destroy Iraq regime change "Jones" (a street word for narcotics addiction) that the administration is chanting around us like cheer leaders at a football game! So that US imperialism can transform the whole of the Middle East, the Arab world into a gas station (See "Bushwacked: A Counterfeit President for a Fake Democracy", Baraka)
So that we are supposed to believe that if a little girl blows herself up in a Israeli Pizza Parlor, she is a terrorist, but when Israeli Jets, made in the USA, destroy whole sections of Palestinian cities, bulldoze neighborhoods, all but destroy the Palestinian Center of Governance, with its President, Yasser Arafat, inside sitting in the dark, it is the Israelis who are victims and the little Palestinian girl or boy or young man or young woman or even elder, they are the terrorists. We are supposed to be intimidated by demagogues like the Anti Defamation League (who shd be called the Anti Anti Defamation League) so that Israel as a jr. partner of the Bush led US goosestep to world military domination can commit ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in the name of fighting terrorism.
It is the ADL, which is actually guilty of what its leader, Abraham Foxman calls the Hitlerian "Big Lie", and ironically it is the ADL, which is "spewing anti-Semitic venom". The same ADL which became aware of "Black Anti Semitism", which it had earlier said has never been a threat, until Stokely Carmichael and SNCC began to support the PLO and the Palestinian Struggle as a Liberation Struggle and condemn Israeli Imperialism and Zionism. That is when, as Stokeley Carmichael says in the APRP's "Smash Zionism" the ADL smashed SNCC instead.
As Israel drew closer to South Africa, politically, economically, militarily in the 60's (Op Cit, above & others) the Black Liberation Movement and African Nations became more and more guilty, according to the ADL, of "Black Anti-Semitism".
This is the same ADL who opposed Affirmative Action, even though many Jews benefited by the Civil Rights Struggle, and the most notable white comrades in that struggle were young Jews. The same ADL that filed an Amicus Curiae (friend of the court brief) in the historic and reactionary Baake Decision which challenged & defeated the University of California's affirmative action as "racist" and was explained by the ADL as its opposition to quotas. So that the university's could now enforce a quota on Black students of none!
This is the same ADL, which in league with the American Israel Political Action Committee, just a few weeks ago sent millions of dollars into Atlanta, Georgia to defeat progressive Black Congress woman Cynthia McKinney, because she called for a more balance American view of the Palestinian -Israeli Conflict.
These same forces defeated in Alabama, another progressive Black incumbent Congressman, because he too dared to support the Palestinians. (See New York Times), Amsterdam News, Star Ledger).
Very much like the way Bush touts "Regime Change," recently even hinting at an attempted Assassination of Saddam Hussein, if the American People rise up and force our congress to deny the Bush juggernaut of terror to attack Iraq. ADL and their " bagman" AIPAC didn't like these black politicians stance on Israel, so in a minute and a few million dollars, they are gone!
So now, it's my turn. Using my poem, Somebody Blew Up America" they are
Going to spread the Big Lie, distort what poem says. Cover the fact that this poem actually is an attack on Imperialism, National Oppression, Monopoly Capitalism, Racism, Anti-Semitism. I challenge ADL to show anywhere in this poem that is Anti-Semitic in the least. In their press release they say talk about "Jews being scapegoated throughout history...' then "conspiracy mongers of the Arab world...have taken Anti-Israel propaganda to a new level " (Mr. Foxman, what is the Arab World? Alan Dershowitz in his "Chutzpah" says the basis of bigotry is "overgeneralization," so where is the "Arab World"? Is Detroit included? Asscraft thinks so.
Earlier the press release mentions "the Muslim World" does that include Lyons Ave, Newark? But then from "Anti-Semitism" the release goes to Israel, not Jews, and Israeli Mossad as those victimized. So they fight Anti Semitism
Mainly by "defending" Israel. In fact they defend Israel like Joe McCarthy "defended" the US against Communism. Included in my package is a communique from an Israeli Peace Organization ": Gush Shalom", "Israeli Peace Block (see Defamation from the Anti Defamation League Answered" (<info at gush-shalom.org>) This was first published 7/11/2000 as a press release. "In the past 24 hours, an attack is being mounted against Gush Shalom. Knesset Member Collette Avital (Labor) has actually lodge a complaint with the police, claiming that cartoons presented on our website constitute "incitement". And the powerful American Jewish organization Anti -Defamation League found time, even on election day, over there, to disseminate a message of defamation against "Gush Shalom", which already resulted in hate e mails being sent our address"
In a following message signed by Adam Keller Gush, Shalom Spokesperson. The organization defends itself from an ADL pres release s "expressing outrage at Gush Shalom's portrayal of Prime Minster Barak as a killer of Palestinian children in a caricature on its web site, stating that the image of Barak standing on the bleeding bullet ridden body of a Palestinian child is abhorrent."
Gush Shalom replies, "Still after consulting with my fellow activists I am in a position to make an offer. Should a complete week - seven days pass in which not a single unarmed Palestinian is killed by the Israeli armed forces which are answerable to Mr. Barak, we would remove the above mentioned cartoon from our website.
The Gush Shalom statement ends "As for the ADL- an organization which claims to "counter hatred prejudice and bigotry" can you truly find no other places to search for such, with Israeli society in its present condition, except at our modest website. Was the ADL attacking these Israelis for being Anti Semitic or criticizing rather forcefully the continuous murder of the Palestinians. So in Israel itself, ADL is still covering for and attacking anyone, even Israeli citizens themselves who oppose the Bush Zionist Plan to de-Palestinianize Palestine!
Another communication from Israel (<robertoj69 at yahoo.com>). This signed by 95 Israeli Academics (copy included in pkg), Sept 23, 2002 that begins "URGENT WARNING: THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENT MAY BE CONTEMPLATING CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY" It goes on, "We members of the Israeli academe are horrified by US buildup of aggression towards Iraq and by the Israeli political leadership's enthusiastic support of it. We are deeply worried by indications that the "fog of war" could be exploited by the Israeli government to commit further crimes against the Palestinian people, up to full-fledged ethnic cleansing."
One striking description of the Israeli Military by these professors is that in an interview found in Ha'aretz Sept 19, 2002, Israeli Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon describe the Palestinians as a "cancerous manifestation" and equated the military actions in the Occupied territories with "chemotherapy"
Certainly the ADL will have to go after these "Anti Semites" using the "Big Lie" and "Spewing Anti-Semitic Venom"! And the growing list of progressive democratic people around the world who will have opinions about Israel and Political Zionism independent of the ADL, the ADL will have to attack and slander them as well
I challenge the ADL to set up a national television program so that we might debate this issue. We can project the poem on a wall and go down line by new and discuss it. If not that then why not a forum or debate some place like NYC Town Hall or at Symphony Hall in Newark.
Why not take a survey of those who heard the poem at the Dodge Festival? Those who registered and the students brought by schools could be contacted and a survey taken to reflect just the majority of people hearing the poem thought, not just some shadowy surrogates of Imperialism who are trying to convince people that I and my poem are the enemy not US and Israeli Imperialism.
I have already gotten a great many communications praising the poem. A great many E-mail letters and phone calls not only praising the poem, and the poet for writing it, but also opposing the attempt to violate my first amendment rights by this oft repeated ADL skin game of calling critics of imperialism Anti Semites.
I have already said, in answer to what Governor McGreevey is quoted as demanding that I apologize and that I resign as NJ Poet Laureate. And I have said repeatedly that I will do neither. It is unfortunate that Governor McGreevey has been stampeded by paid liars, and apologists for ethnic cleansing and white supremacy, bourgeois nationalists and the dangerously ignorant, to be panicked into joining in the ADL's slander, belittling my intelligence, and insulting not only my person, my family, my fellow artists and activists who know all this is just the feces of a very small cow. But they are also attacking my work in the arts and my social political views. By demanding that I apologize to Evil and Submit to some fundamentally racist and politically motivated call for me to resign as New Jersey's Poet Laureate, he is insulting the broad group of people who know he is incorrect and who have read and celebrated and valued my work. And that is a grave mistake, one I am hoping he will correct.
"Somebody Blew Up America!" was written Oct 1, 2001. A month after the terror attack. Almost immediately I circulated it around the world on the Internet.
In addition, I have read this poem in Spain, Portugal, Africa, Switzerland, Italy, Finland and it was translated into German and read on German radio, at Universities and other venues across this country. It has become one of the most circulated of my poems.
Yet it was not until I read the poem at the Dodge Poetry Festival that I got negative response from three people that I know of. The overwhelming response was an almost thunderous applause. I even had to come out and take a second bow at one performance. So why now and Who, as the poem asks, is behind it? Perhaps the forces which have dishonestly tried to characterize the poem as "venom" or merely "a harangue" (just as they called John Coltrane's music "Barbaric Yawps") are simply, the Charlie McCarthy voices for Bush & Sharon's Edgar Bergen's. Empty-headed devilish dummies constructed of wood and painted and costumed to look like it is real people speaking, when all the time it is imperialism is the ventriloquist speaking through their mouths,
NO, I WILL NOT APOLOGIZE, I WILL NOT RESIGN. In fact I will continue to do what I have appointed to do but still have not been paid to do. Publicize and Popularize poetry and poets throughout this state. To set up new venues and new networks for poetry reading and workshops, in the state's libraries and schools and other institutions. Hopefully initiated and given paradigm right here in the Newark Public Library, its branches and throughout the school system. Therefore giving more of our citizens access to poetry, involving poets of all nationalities, both male and female, of diverse experience and styles. I have already begun to enlist coordinators of poetry programs throughout the state, so that we can network a tour of poets, hopefully beginning in January, throughout the state.
To do this I will be approaching local, county, state, federal and private funding. And expand our budget with the cooperation of these other existing programs. We will ask that poets POET-ON! That they begin to produce at least one poem or publish a poem monthly, in the most modest forms, Kinko style, and give them away if they have to. That they begin to set up readings not only in the places we mentioned but also in parks and restaurants and in neighborhoods.
We say this because we feel that this state and indeed this nation and this world is desperately in need of the deepest and most profound human values that poetry can teach. That is what Keats and Du Bois called for the poet to do, to bring Truth and Beauty. To be like the most ancient paradigmythic image of the poet. To be like Osiris and Orpheus, whose job it was to raise the Sun each morning with song and story. To illuminate the human mind, and bring light into the world. POET ON!
Amiri Baraka is the poet laureat of New Jersey. Visit his website at: http://www.amiribaraka.com/
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