Juan Williams wrote an utterly incoherent essay this week alleging that Speaker Boehner is dealing in racism by supporting Bibi Netanyahu, given that his recent victory, Williams apparently feels, was boosted by supposedly racist fear-mongering about efforts of getting out the Arab-Israeli vote en masse. According to Williams, Boehner is dividing Americans by race over U.S.-Israeli relations by giving his imprimatur to a supposedly racist Netanyahu. Williams notes, “The racial division is the most troubling of all to me, as a black American.”
But as many commentators have immediately noted, unlike Netanyahu, who apologized if his criticism of community-organizing-type voter turnout efforts was seen as racist, and who has been an object of derision by the White House (“coward”, “chickensh**”), Obama in general and liberal candidates in particular seem to offer no apologies about racial and ethnic fear-mongering at election time.
The president’s call to “punish our enemies” was a direct call to Latinos to turn out en masse on the basis of collective ethnic fears and resentments. Politicians as diverse Joe Biden and Loretta Sanchez have all tried out racist tropes to gin up their bases — involving various warnings about scary white would-be slave-holders and clannish Southeast Asians. But if Williams is sincerely worried that racialism may be endangering bipartisan support for Israel at home, especially among minorities, and if he sees the problem largely through the lens of being “a black man,” then he might not look to the stars but just as eagerly review a long history of patently anti-Semitic statements from black public figures and celebrities who have counseled the president and are frequent visitors to the White House (well beyond fringe figures like a Leonard Jeffries or Louis Farrakhan), and who have nothing to do with either Bibi Netanyahu or John Boehner:
Jesse Jackson? (“Hymies” and “hymie-town.”)
Al Sharpton? (“Diamond merchants” and “if Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin on their yarmulkes and come over to my house.”)
Reverend Jeremiah Wright? (“Them Jews ain’t going to let him [Barack Obama] talk to me.”)
When Cynthia McKinney lost her congressional election, whom did her father blame? The “J-E-W-S.”
Multimillionaire rappers from Ice Cube to Scarface often peddle the old slur that Jewish lawyers and shifty producers conspire against them. And scarcely had the new replacement for Jon Stewart arrived than his long history of anti-Semitic crudity surfaced, from sick references to the purported sex habits of Jewish women to anti-Jewish jokes about the Holocaust.
I don’t know whether this disturbing pattern in part explains what Williams implies is a lack of minority support for Israel during the Obama tenure, but I do know that, if true, divisiveness here in the U.S. over Israel has little to do with a recent Israeli election, or what John Boehner or Bibi Netanyahu may or may not have said. Juan Williams should know better and might wish to consult recent anti-Defamation League polls on disparate and long-held ethnic patterns of anti-Semitism that predate the recent election.