A small group of literary darlings, along with rabid anti-Israel activists like Max Blumenthal, whose work was cited by the Kansas City Jewish Community Center gunman, signed a letter to PEN endorsing BDS.
PEN seems like the wrong forum for attacking freedom of association, but it's the one that they picked. The letter complains about Israel's campaign against Hamas after the brutal kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers. There's no mention on what Hamas' policies on free expression and freedom of the press might be.
The letter calls on PEN to "honor" a BDS boycott against Israel.
Signatories include the usual assortment of discredited hate groups, JVP, Code Pink, along with a few more prominent writers, Richard Ford, Russel Banks, China Miéville, Junot Diaz and Alice Walker, whose blatant anti-Semitism nobody in this glamorous company of literary darlings seems interested in commenting on.
Walker, the ADL statement went on, “suggests that Israeli settlements are motivated by the concept that ‘possession is nine-tenths of the law,’ which she claims is a lesson she ‘learned from my Jewish lawyer former husband. This belief might even be enshrined in the Torah.’”
A meeting she describes with an elderly Palestinian woman in the territories is telling about the impetus behind Walker’s hostile attitude towards Jews and Israelis. The woman, upon accepting a gift from Walker, says “May God protect you from the Jews” to which Walker responds, “It’s too late, I already married one.”
So Alice Walker hates her ex-husband and Jews in general. Her daughter has already discussed what a terrible person she was, so I don't see the need to delve into that, but it's clear that none of the signatories have a problem with her blatant bigotry.
Should Jews boycott some of these BDS writers because of their hostility to the Jewish State and solidarity with blatant bigots? It's hard to boycott writers whom no one really buys except to display on their shelves as a status symbol or who are assigned reading for college students, but for those who are interested, here's part of the shameful roll of BDS bigots.
Geoff Dyer, Richard Ford, Deborah Eisenberg, Selina Hastings, Nancy Kricorian, China Miéville, Patricia Eakins, Louise Erdrich, Mary Jo Bang, Mark Haskell Smith, Maryvelma O'Neil, Eileen Myles, Lucy Lippard.
It's a stretch to call most of the signatories, writers. The majority are activists, bloggers and academics, people loosely involved in the publishing world without ever having produced anything that anyone would care about. But that's exactly the type of person drawn to a hateful cause.