I pit Alice Walker

The BBQ Pit
1

Alice Walker has pissed me off. She was on City Arts and Lectures on KQED (the SF bay area NPR station) and was talking about Israel and Palestine, and she presented her anti-Israel views in such a condescending and obnoxious fashion that I just wanted to punch her in the face.

There are plenty of legitimate and reasonable criticisms one can make of the way Israel has acted in the past years, and it’s a terrible situation overall… but claiming that Israel’s entire attitude is like that of a child, or that Israel is now as scary as German used to be, or that the problem with the settlements is that it’s all those German Jews, seriously got my goat.

2

I promised myself I wouldn’t get involved in any more Israel threads, but “German Jews”? This I got to hear.

3

I attended a lecture by her once and she painted Castro’s Cuba as such a total paradise that you wondered why the innertubes and rafts and boats didn’t all go from Florida to Cuba. She’s one of those celebrities in love with the sound of their unopposed own voice.

4

You listened to her on an NPR station in San Francisco and you’re surprised at her views?

5

Be glad you did not hear, as I did, a random woman in Berkeley say that Israelis were holding Palestinians in “concentration camps.”

It was all I could do not to verbally confront her on the street.

6

Here’s a link (if you really want to sit through 52 mins of her babbling).

7

Eh, from my (***clearly ***objective and unbiased, yes…? :p) point of view, I’ll take a screeching, hate-spewing, batshit-crazy opponent of Israel over a cogent, calm and reasonable one any day of the week… They’re a lot easier to dismiss! :smiley:

8

I just want to know what she has against the Yekkim.

9

Well, maybe she didn’t like the song.

10

How did I know what song that would be, before I clicked the link?

11

It’s a small country – you’re probably physically close enough to me for telepathy to work… :smiley:

12

If that kind of tone bothers you, you’d probably better cancel your internet account right now and save yourself a lot of heartburn.

13

Who’s Alice Walker? Was she on some sitcom back in the '70s?

14

Writer most famous for The Color Purple.

15

I saw the movie – almost every character was brown, not purple! WTF?! :confused:

16

You know Grange Copeland didn’t really have a Third Life, right, and you can’t really say To Hell With Dying, right?

17

Hey, why would a groundbreaking bay area chef and foodie be lecturing about Israel and Palestine?

Oh, Alice Walker.

Never mind.

18

I always wonder how her anti-semitism (because she goes beyond anti-zionism) goes down with her daughter.

Who is a Jew.

But then again, she disowned her daughter several years ago, so I guess it doesn’t matter to her.

Alice Walker is a miserable person.

19

While Alice comes across as the most self-serving of mothers and grandmothers (supposedly she said something to the effect of “I couldn’t care less” when told her only child was expecting a baby), in fairness her daughter seems kind of a piece of work herself. She wants nothing to do with her mother, so she legally changed her name to Walker (from Leventhal) and makes a comfortable living writing “my famous mommy was a scumbucket” books and articles. Get over it, kid… the best revenge is to make it on your own as Rebecca Leventhal and then tell her to go screw in an interview that isn’t totally focused on your mother.

20

We’re all purple on the inside, was the point, I think.