Man, it just gets worse every damn day. All the lefties are cheering on Alice Walker [4] for urging Alicia Keys [5] to cancel her upcoming concert in Israel, calling on the singer to honor the boycott and visit Gaza instead. (Ha'aretz [6], May 29) But just a few days earlier, asked by a BBC reporter what book she would take with her to a desert island, she named David [7]Icke [7]'s Human Race Get Off Your Knees: The Lion Sleeps No More. Yes, David Icke—the same crypto-fascist conspiranoid freak who I was sacked from WBAI for opposing [8]. As The Independent [9] notes in its report on Walker's endorsement of the evil little twit, Icke's book purports that the world is secretly ruled by "shape-shifting reptilians" from outer space, that the Moon is actually a "gigantic spacecraft" which sends us a "fake reality broadcast," and that we live in a manipulated reality "in much the same way as portrayed in the Matrix movie trilogy." On her own website [10], Walker gushes:
I have been dragging along David Icke's monumental book: Human Race Get Off Your Knees for the last month. [Sic] ...Earlier I wrote that David Icke reminded me of Malcolm X. I was thinking especially of Malcolm's fearlessness... how he called our oppressors "blue eyed devils." Now who could that have been? Well, we see them here in David Icke's book as the descendants of the reptilian race that landed on our sweet planet the moment they could get a glimpse of it through the mist that used to cover it (before there was a moon). No kidding. Deep breath! Yes, before there was a moon! (Oh, I love the moon; can I keep it? Please?). [Sic] Anyway, there they came, these space beings (we're space beings too, of course, not to forget that). But they looked…. different than us. [Sic, incorrect ellipses in original.] And they were.
They wanted gold and they wanted slaves to mine it for them. Now gosh, who does this remind us of? I only am asking. You do the work.
Yet after thusly admonishing us to "do the work," she refers in the very next paragraph to "Illuminati bloodline families and their puppets." Are we supposed to ignore this sinister wackiness and pretend that Alice Walker is on the side the angels because she supports the Israel boycott? Really?
The invocation of Malcolm X is particularly nauseating. Malcolm espoused the blue-eyed-devils rhetoric when he was still in the thrall of Elijah Muhammad, who also promulgated theories that the human race's oppressors are non-human beings and mixed up his ideas with UFO-ology. Malcolm repudiated all that in the final year of his life, and embraced a more rational, humanistic and universalist militancy (as Walker should know!). That is, a more truly revolutionary stance. In Malcolm X Speaks [11], he famously stated:
I believe that there will ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those who do the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the system of exploitation. I believe that there will be that kind of clash, but I don't think it will be based on the color of the skin...
And it probably isn't a coincidence that he was assassinated months after he spoke those words. This is the kind of vision that truly threatens the system. It isn't threatened at all by obscurantist pseudo-mystical bullshit of the David Icke variety. And until Alice Walker repudaites this toxic crap, she isn't doing the Palestinians any favors by speaking on their behalf.
