The Issue: Author Alice Walker’s request that musician Alicia Keys cancel a performance in Israel.
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Ido Aharoni is wasting his time in writing to Alice Walker (“When Artists Scapegoat Israel,” PostOpinion, June 19).
The quote, “When people criticize Zionists they mean Jews. You’re talking anti-Semitism,” has often been attributed to Martin Luther King Jr.
What is clear is that Walker and Dr. King have nothing in common.Richard Sherman
Brooklyn
Kudos to Aharoni for his blunt open letter to Walker.
Walker’s call for an artistic boycott against Israel only scratches the surface of her extreme and hostile views.
In her most recent book, “The Cushion in the Road,” Walker devotes 80 pages to a vicious screed replete with fervently anti-Jewish ideas and explicit comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany.
Among other hateful tropes, she makes the anti-Semitic accusation of Jewish “supremacy,” suggesting it was something she “learned from my Jewish lawyer former husband.”
It is time for the literary world to face up to the fact that, despite her credentials as a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, Walker is infected with the disease of anti-Semitism.
Abraham H. Foxman
National Director
Anti-Defamation League
Manhattan
How sad that Aharoni was put in a position of having to respond to Walker.
When did the so-called heirs to Martin Luther King Jr. forget who stood beside them in the march to their own civil rights and freedoms? Whose children’s blood lies beside theirs in the fields of Mississippi and Selma?
And for these crimes in today’s America, the Jews hear foolishness about being behind America’s slave trade, while Jesse Jackson and others supported dictators like Moammar Khadafy.
There’s no point in getting into the number of times Jews have been insulted and defamed by Al Sharpton and others. The Jews have spent their money and their blood, only to be slandered by the Alice Walkers of the world.
It’s sad how easily they are falsely blamed for the ills of the world.
Bruce Weinstein
The Bronx