Alice Walker was a guest of the NY Times’ By the Book section last week, and when asked, right off the bat, “What books are on your nightstand?” one of the books she mentioned was “And the Truth Shall Set You Free,” by David Icke, because, as she put it, “In Icke’s books there is the whole of existence, on this planet and several others, to think about. A curious person’s dream come true.”
Icke, “a retired soccer player who rants about a world takeover by blood-drinking lizards,” as The Public Eye’s Will Offley described him, published “The Robot’s Rebellion” in 1994, which the British magazine “Left Green Perspectives” wrote “indicated a convergence of New Age thinking with Nazi philosophy. Casting aside his pat concerns about the environment, Icke enthusiastically embraced the classic Nazi conspiracy theory, alleging that the world is controlled by a secret cadre of ‘The Elite.’ He openly endorsed The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Czarist anti-Semitic forgery that informed Hitler’s notion of a global Jewish conspiracy.”
Nice going, Alice.
Icke continued to write after his first Nazi blossom. His next manuscript, “And the Truth Shall Set You Free,” 1995, the one so beloved by the woman who regaled us with tales of Black misery, contained a chapter questioning the veracity of the Holocaust, which was too much for his British publisher, Gateway. They forced him to revise his original draft and from that book on, Icke has been self-publishing, which is the literary world’s equivalent of taking your sister to the prom.
Alice Walker is no stranger to anti-Semitism, of course. Back in 2013, the ADL said Walker “has taken her extreme and hostile views to a shocking new level” in her latest book “The Cushion in the Road.” According to the ADL, the book devotes 80 pages to a “screed on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict replete with fervently anti-Jewish ideas and peppered with explicit comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany.” Twelve essays in the Book’s section “On Palestine” are full of comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany, the ADL said. Walker describes Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians as “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” “crimes against humanity,” and “cruelty and diabolical torture,” the ADL said.
“Alice Walker has sunk to new lows with essays that remove the gloss of her anti-Israel activism to reveal someone who is unabashedly infected with anti-Semitism,” said Abraham H. Foxman, who back then was still the ADL National Director.
Finally, here’s some of what Icke wrote in the book that Walker keeps on her nightstand, presumably to read whenever she’s in the mood for some Nazi:
“The same attitude that suppressed the challenge to the manipulation of World War Two, today sees people vilified and jailed for questioning some of the official versions of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. If you do that, no one listens to the evidence because this is lost in the tidal wave of vilification and condemnation. If people want to believe that all those who question the official line are Nazis and apologists for the Hitler regime, or anti-Jewish, then they must go ahead and do so. But I’ll tell them this. They are kidding themselves, because that isn’t true. It simply isn’t.” (p.127)
“I strongly believe that a small Jewish clique which has contempt for the mass of Jewish people worked with non-Jews to create the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the Second World War. This Jewish/non-Jewish Elite used the First World War to secure the Balfour Declaration and the principle of the Jewish State of Israel (for which, given the genetic history of most Jewish people, there is absolutely no justification on historical grounds or any other). They then dominated the Versailles Peace Conference and created the circumstances which made the Second World War inevitable. They financed Hitler to power in 1933 and made the funds available for his rearmament.” (p. 130)
“After the war, the Nuremberg [sic] trials sat in judgement on the Germans. When you look beyond the sanitized history books, you see that those trials were a farce, a calculated exercise in revenge and manipulation, often punishing those without influence to cover the tracks of those who had it… like the Americans on the boards of the U.S.-Nazi cartels and parent companies.” (p. 137).