A quick follow-up to my previous post: in the comments, a friend has reminded me about this lovely photo (scroll down) of Cynthia McKinney posing with her new pal, the raving antisemite and borderline sociopath Israel Shamir, who is arguably worse than Gilad Atzmon. In addition to falsifying his name and his background, “Shamir” has advocated coalition-building between Palestine activists and the neo-Nazi National Alliance:
The world is full of bad guys, and things are good only if and when the bad guys balance each other. Saddam would balance Sharon, while the White supremacists would balance the Jewish supremacists. If indeed these men are not supremacists, but cultural separatists, as they claim, we certainly can do things together with them, and with another group of cultural separatists, the Black Muslims, too.
This is close to McKinney’s view as well, if we can judge from her
recent friendly appearances on radio programs of the racist far right. Let that sink in for a moment: an African-American former member of Congress, the standard-bearer for the Green Party in the 2008 presidential election, is all but a declared ally of the white supremacist fringe. Noam Chomsky, a near-deity to many on the radical left, endorsed McKinney’s presidential run.
It’s not news that some sectors of the radical left are in the antisemitism business. And then there are those who are more offended by justified accusations of antisemitism than by the antisemitism itself. So it remains the responsibility of the left’s more intelligent voices, people like Glenn Greenwald, to raise the red flag on this issue. McKinney, by the way, is another person who gets a
free pass when she’s interviewed by Greenwald’s pal Amy Goodman.
To quote Greenwald again: “[C]heapening the charge of anti-semitism through frivolous and politically manipulative uses weakens the ability to combat actual, real anti-semitism, which does still exist.”
If he’s so very concerned about the ability to combat antisemitism, let him act on it, instead of recycling the tired claim that it’s all a neocon witch hunt.
