Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, October 28 2002 @ 02:43 AM CST

Apropos the constant barrage of attacks, Amiri Barka has written a defence of his poem and himself:

http://www.amiribaraka.com/speech100202.html

If you have not read the poem already, you can find it here:

http://www.amiribaraka.com/blew.html

Autonomedia\'s website posted the poem not long ago and supposedly an internet discussion of the poem ensued, but the discourse was hijacked into talking about anti-semitism.

http://slash.autonomedia.org/article.pl?sid=02/09/30/1936215&mode=nested

Will the Anti Defamation League conquer Infoshop, next? Stay tuned!

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, October 28 2002 @ 09:28 AM CST

Sorry, but setting up the conflict between Baraka vs. the ADL doesn\'t address the poem\'s Jew-baiting libel of the \"4,000.\" If this is truly a battle between Poetry vs. Censorship or even Baraka vs. the ADL then the injured party is obvious: Baraka and Poetry must win hands down.

Yet the article above doesn\'t even address the criticism of Baraka\'s quoting of the popular rumor that 4,000 Jews were told to stay home from work on the day of September 11th. Almost as if this criticism had nothing to do with the struggle against Poetry vs. Censorship; Baraka vs. the ADL.

I don\'t support the ADL or Censorship and certainly not the people pressuring McGreevey to get Baraka to step down. But I do believe the poem does incite hate and rumor and any amount of shoving Rosa Luxemburg, the Jewish holocaust, or the Rosenbergs into the mix doesn\'t alter this problem.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, October 28 2002 @ 10:09 AM CST

Dear jackass,

If you read Amiri defence of himself, which I linked you would have seen:

http://www.amiribaraka.com/speech100202.html

... \"The most offensive phrase in the poem to my various attackers is,

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, October 28 2002 @ 10:16 AM CST

back when he was leroi jones, mister baraka was infamous for a poem in which he rejoiced over the sound of his knife being shoved into the belly of his jewish landlord. not his landlord, but his jewish landlord. the continuity of his hatred of jews is depressingly clear. this is a totally separate issue from his access to public forums for his poetry. censorship, being a statist project, should be condemned outright. but baraka should be confronted on his bigotry.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, October 28 2002 @ 11:26 AM CST

Another jew, and jew are quite obviously the same person.

http://www.amiribaraka.com/blew.html
The portion that troubles you so much:
\"Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
To stay home that day\"

All this poem is doing as getting people to ask questions and think.

Here are my answers to a short portion of the questions he poses:


\"Who the Devil on the real side\" [The rich.]
\"Who got rich from Armenian genocide\" [The founders of the Republic of Turkey and muslims who participated in the genocide and helped looting the Armenians, even killing them for the opportunity to loot. Many Turkish and Kurdish oligarchic families first obtained their large accumulation of wealth necessary for entering the class that buys and sells the labor of others from genocide and looting.]

Who the biggest terrorist [The most terroristic and thuggish country is the United States, the biggest terrorist class is the most wealthy.]
Who change the bible [The various Christian denominations.]
Who killed the most people [The US and the wealthy.]
Who do the most evil [The US and the wealthy.]
Who don\'t worry about survival [The wealthy.]

Now I would imagine when Jew heard this line he was thinking:

\"Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
To stay home that day\" [Jew\'s thought process: Surely this bigot is alluding to the fact conspiracy theory that Jews or Israeli caused 9/11.]

Well this is your problem not Amiri\'s, he is just dropping questions, you thought the answer to that line involved anti-semitism. Just a guess but you are probably one of those Jews that interperts Jewish history as to some claim to unique persecution.

As to your claim about his past bigotry he was bigoted in the past. But you should not talk as you are lying right here on this very forum. He was bigoted against whites too at one point, but you do not see him being lobbed with allegations of hating whites. Ideoligically Americans of European descent do not interpret their history as some continual unique oppression, so we are not so up tight if Amiri did not like us much in the past, we can forgive him. Of course his old ways were wrong, but he seems to have reformed.

Anyway, I am trying to establish a intelligent discourse, this is the point where you respond with more allegations of anti-semitism to destroy all intelligent discourse and turn this into people feeling the need to defend allegations instead of engaging in productive dialogue.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, October 28 2002 @ 12:53 PM CST

\"Another jew, and jew are quite obviously the same person.\"

Actually, we\'re not. But you know we all think alike so don\'t worry about trying to distinguish one Jew from another jew.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, October 28 2002 @ 02:22 PM CST

Anti-semitism and all aside, I just don\'t like the poem. I don\'t like explicitly political poems, for one, and for another, and I realise this isn\'t in keeping with the times, I rather like poems to rhyme and have good metre. I really like Poe, for instance.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, October 28 2002 @ 02:38 PM CST

Look, I have a great deal of respect for Baraka and I think the current spate of attacks on him are cynically motivated, BUT ...

When he writes: \"Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers To stay home that day\" he is not simply asking a provocative question, he is making a statement that this actually happened. In his defense he throws out a bunch of references to the foreknowledge of Israeli intelligence (which is in fact well documented) but the leap from this to the assumption that the story of 4,000 is true is enormous. If the story of Zim American-Israeli Shipping is true it is interesting, but not quite the same as 4,000 Israelis being told to stay home fom the WTC on September 11.

The latter claim is clearly anti-Semitic because it is FALSE and obviously intended to promote the idea of mass Israeli complicity. People conspire. Conspiracy theories should always be treated with skepticism, but sometimes there is something to them, because in fact people conspire to do things all the time. But in examining conspiracy theories there are some giveaways when you know you are dealing with a falsehood. Conspiracies that require the silence and active complicity of large numbers of people should rightly be regarded as implausible. Consider for a moment how difficult it is to keep a good secret when half a dozen people know about it and you should be able to undertsand why a claim that 4,000 Israelis were told not to show up for work on September 11 and that none have come forward to report this experience is simply ridiculous on its face. That is unless you are an anti-Semite who believes in the conspiratorial nature of Jews. It is this widespread belief that contributed to the receptivity of so many to this obvious lie.

Including the question about the 4,000 in his poem undermines all the other questions Baraka asks that are based on truth. It is a disservice to the poem and as someone who cares about the power of poetry he should acknowledge it and apologize for promoting a lie in a poem.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, October 28 2002 @ 02:43 PM CST

Lets hear it for Google!
Some facts on Zim-American Israeli Shipping
http://yesvirginia.org/newsitem.asp?ID=377

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, October 28 2002 @ 03:56 PM CST

http://www.nocturne.org/~terry/wtc_4000_Israeli.html

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, October 28 2002 @ 06:21 PM CST

i didn\'t really care for the poem, either...

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, October 28 2002 @ 08:36 PM CST

Yah, the poem isn\'t very good in my opinion. The style is really contrived and sorta conceted. It brings to mind rich kids who buy gap clothes then rip them up and say they\'re punks. I dunno, maybe I\'m missing something.

About the 4000 Israeli\'s, if it is true, than it\'s just a valid fact, and something that should be investigated. (It was the CIA damn it). I have heard about this before, but never have I seen it backed up by any solid fact. That said, I think it deminishes the poem, not because it\'s anti-semetic, which it isn\'t, but because it isn\'t true.

The poem is about imperialism and racism, something that the Isreali government is extremely guilty of. I don\'t think the quote is anti-semetic or pointing to some big jewish conspiracy or anything stupid like that, it\'s just another (albeit badly researched and badly thought out) example of imperialism.

Damning this quote is the same as saying that
Palestinian sympathizers are anti-Jew, when in fact they\'re anti-Isreal/authoritarian/state.

I think it\'s time people stop treating the Isreal situation like they\'re walking on glass. Ethnic cleansing is evil shit. It happened to the Jews (repetedly) and now it\'s happening to the Palestinians. To me its like saying, \"oh, it\'s okay that he beats his kids, cause his parents used to beat him.\"

Just my two cents.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, October 28 2002 @ 10:52 PM CST

damn, i thought this was going to be about the mortal kombat 2 character

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Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, December 01 2002 @ 08:13 PM CST

Saw this & thought I\'d post it.


http://www.urbanlegends.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://slate.msn.com/%3Fid=116813

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