The New Age writer David Icke has been used to condemn Alice Walker, one of America’s most important and courageous authors. The organizers of the Bay Area Book Festival disinvited Walker, who won the Pulitzer prize for fiction for The Color Purple, after receiving complaints charging that Walker embraced the anti-Semitic writing of the New Age author David Icke, who she has praised for being “brave.” The festival organizers also attacked her poem “It is our (Frightful) Duty to Study the Talmud” for being anti-Semitic, blaming it on Icke’s influence. I wrote a column denouncing the smearing of Walker, her disinvitation and called for the public and presenters to boycott the festival over her blacklisting.
Icke was accused of being anti-Semitic and allegedly promoting the forged and rabidly anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion in a December 17, 2018 article in The Tablet,which describes itself as an “online magazine of Jewish news, ideas, and culture.” The article by Yair Rosenberg was titled “The New York Times Just Published an Unqualified Recommendation for an Insanely Anti-Semitic Book.” The charges made by The Tablet appear to have been accepted uncritically by numerous critics of Walker, few of whom appear to have read Icke’s book.
I don’t allow my students at Princeton, Columbia, Rutgers, or any other college I teach at, to engage in class discussions about the assignment unless they have done the reading.
— source scheerpost.com | Chris Hedges | Apr 30, 2022