by SHERRY WOLF
Hucksters for Israel attempt to make up for in chutzpah what they lack in facts.
On opening night of the eighth annual Israeli Apartheid Week at NYU — at an event featuring Omar Barghouti and Noura Erakat, leading Palestinian figures in the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign — apologists for Israel’s crimes showcased one of their more curious myths. Defenders of Israel repeatedly argued in the Q & A section that America’s foremost Black icon, Martin Luther King Jr., was an arch defender of the Jewish state.
Let’s explore the evidence.
Pro-Israel Web sites, politicians and campus activists often reference the source of their claim about MLK’s defense of Israel by citing King’s “Letter to an Anti-Zionist Friend,” supposedly published in an August 1967 edition of the Saturday Review. Here’s the quote they cite:
“… You declare, my friend; that you do not hate the Jews, you are merely ‘anti-Zionist’ … And I say, let the truth ring forth from the high mountain tops, let it echo through the valleys of God’s green earth: When people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews… Anti-Semitism, the hatred of the Jewish people, has been and remains a blot on the soul of mankind. In this we are in full agreement. So know also this: anti-Zionist is inherently anti-Semitic, and ever will be so.”
This quote even made its way into an excellent exposé of Israel’s deadly decades-long relationship with apartheid South Africa, Sasha Polakow-Suransky’s The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa. In fact, I repeated part of the quote in my own review of the book, much to my regret. Later I discovered that the MLK letter was a hoax.
Antiracist activist Tim Wise published an article on Znet in 2003, “Fraud Fit for a King,” in which he documents the fact that no such letter appears in any of the 1967 issues of the Saturday Review.
The alternative source provided by Zionists for this apparently nonexistent letter is a nonexistent book by King, This I Believe: Selections from the Writings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. According to the authors of Electronic Intifada’s 2004 piece that further details this bamboozle, “Israel’s Apologists and the Martin Luther King Hoax”: ”No such book was listed in the bibliography provided by the King Center in Atlanta, nor in the catalogs of several large public and university libraries.”
Electronic Intifada goes on to discredit another “patchwork of plagiarism” attributed to King, this one by Dr. Andrew Bostom, a Brown University medical professor who wrote an article for Front Page Magazine in 2003 citing yet another fictitious quotation from King.
Sherry Talks Back for more
via Counterpunch