You can’t keep
a good jihadist sympathizer and Jew-hater down. Less than a month
after being (sort of) officially chided by the House of
Representatives for her repeated use of anti-Semitic tropes, freshman
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who took that whole episode not just in her
stride but as a sort of joke, went to California to give the keynote
speech at a CAIR banquet.
This is a woman
who, as Michelle Malkin noted
recently,
says Trump is not “human.” On an Arab-American talk show, she mocked a college professor who treated terrorist organizations al-Qaida and Hezbollah with gravity. She cackled at how he named them with a sternness in his voice and questioned why the words “Army” and “America” are not uttered with equal contempt.
Hussam Ayloush, head of CAIR-LA
However many news
media may continue to treat CAIR – the Council on American Islamic
Relations – as a legitimate civil-rights organization, it was an
unindicted co-conspirator in the 2007 trial of the Holy Land
Foundation, which was found guilty of financing terror. CAIR has been
tied to the Islamic Association for Palestine, a front for Hamas, and
CAIR itself is considered a terrorist organization by the United Arab
Emirates. CAIR officials have been found guilty in court of
laundering funds directed at Hamas and of training with a terrorist
group and conspiring in terrorism. CAIR played a role in promoting
the “Clock Boy” charade. After any terror attack, CAIR is quick
to try to use charges of “Islamophobia” and “racism” to
silence anyone who dares speak the truth about jihadist ideology. Yet
to acknowledge any of this is still considered inappropriate at many
of our more respected newspapers and cable news networks.
So it is that
even a Congresswoman who’s been criticized for wearing a hijab in
Congress and who’s been in hot water for her comments about Jews
can get away with addressing a CAIR confab. In fact, this is no
first: Omar spoke
at a banquet for CAIR San Francisco in December 2017. Last month, she
spoke at an event sponsored by Islamic Relief, which Sweden considers
a Muslim Brotherhood front and which the UAE considers a terrorist
group.
Hassan Shibly
In
any case, this time around the event
was held by CAIR’s Los Angeles chapter. It was entitled “Advancing
Justice: Empowering Valley Muslims,” and the purpose of the evening
was to present the 2019 Champion of Justice award to Jewish Voice for
Peace, a radical anti-Israel group posing as an organization for
peace-loving Jews. Omar’s co-keynoter was CAIR-Florida executive
director Hassan Shibly, who, according
to the Jerusalem Post, is
“vehemently anti-Israel” and denies that Hezbollah and Hamas are
terrorist groups.
This time, at
least, there was protest. Signs and banners read “Omar equals
hate,” “CAIR hates Jews,” and “Ilhan hates Israel.” Well,
that certainly sums it up.
We’ve written about a few spies on this website, but Richard Sorge, the subject of a new biography by Owen Matthews, was not just any spy. As Joseph Bottum wrote in a recent review of Matthews’s book, An Impeccable Spy, Sorge was “possibly the greatest spy who ever lived.” A German nationalist in his youth, he emerged from World War I (and a subsequent doctoral program in political science) as a diehard Communist. Moving to Moscow, he was hired by the Soviets as a spy and sent back to Germany to work undercover as a journalist and pretend to be a loyal Nazi even as he was spying not only on the Nazis but on their Japanese allies.
He was so good at posing as a Nazi that
Goebbels became a friend, or at least a friendly acquaintance.
Joseph Goebbels
That wasn’t all. He infested the social and professional circle of Japanese prime minister Fumimaro Konoe with fellow Soviet
agents. The German ambassador to Japan, Herbert von Dirksen,
trusted him so much that he became a fast friend, appointing Sorge to
an intelligence post, and giving him “the run of the German
embassy.” (Apparently the ambassador didn’t know that Sorge had
bedded his wife.) For eight years, as Bottum puts it, Sorge “managed
to convince the Germans that he was working for them, the Japanese
that he was an important Nazi to whom secrets could be revealed, and
the Soviets that he was their man.” It was thanks to him that the
Kremlin learned about the establishment of the Axis alliance, about a
German-Japanese pact banning the Comintern in those countries, about
the Japanese decision not to attack the USSR through Manchuria, and
about the planned German invasion of Russia in 1941. Meanwhile Sorge
led a social life that makes at least a few of the James Bond movies
look tame and unimaginative.
It all had to come crashing down
eventually, and so it did. After the Japanese secret police heard one
of his secret radio transmissions to te Soviets, they arrested and
tortured him, wringing from him a confession before he was hanged in
1944. Although he had provided the Soviets with an extraordinary
amount of useful information, and although he proclaimed his undying
loyalty to the Communist cause even as he was being executed, the
Kremlin repaid his intense devotion by arresting his wife after his
death on charges of being a German spy, which she almost certainly
was not.
East Germany issued a commemorative stamp hailing Sorge as a hero of the Soviet Union
Whether Sorge really was the greatest
spy ever seems doubtful. Does the best spy ever end up being caught
and hanged by the enemy? Never mind: if not the greatest spy, he was
surely one of the most colorful ones. There’s enough material here
for a thrilling spy movie. It has sex and skullduggery, drinking and
carousing, Nazis and Commies, glimpses of two world wars and a
gallery of famous historical figures, plus a whole bunch of
picturesque international settings. There’s everything, in fact,
except somebody to cheer for: Sorge was, after all, spying against
two of the most loathsome regimes in history on behalf of another of
the most loathsome regimes in history. What, after all, to make of a
German who spied against Hitler to help Stalin? The Soviets, in later
years, made him a national hero; to those of us today who despise
both Hitler and Stalin equally, he remains one of those puzzling
figures whose contempt for one form of totalitarianism was equaled
only by his adoration for another form of it.
We have to admit that we misinterpreted
the headline
at the Fox News website the other day. “Samuel L. Jackson,” it
read, “doesn’t care if his Trump stance costs him fans.” Given
that virtually everybody in Hollywood these days is an open, all-out,
full-throated, full-time critic of President Trump, we assumed that
Jackson must be an exception. Nope! He’s a member of the chorus,
accusing Trump of “ruining the planet” and comparing him to a
plantation owner.
It’s not clear why this is suddenly
news, because a little research shows that Jackson, in addition to
being an big Hollywood movie star known for such films as Pulp
Fiction, Jackie Brown, and Django Unchained, has been
pursuing something of a side career as a dyspeptic political
commentator for a long time.
Stokely Carmichael
And before he was an actor, he wasn’t
just a man of words – he was a man of action. At Morehouse College
in the Sixties, he was a real live student radical. In 1969, he and
several confrères held some of the college’s trustees hostage –
yes, you read that right – in an effort to force the administration
to make curricular changes. Later he got involved with Black Power
leaders like Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown. “I was in that
radical faction,” Jackson toldPeople magazine in 2008. “We were buying guns, getting ready
for armed struggle.”
H. Rap Brown
Fortunately for Jackson, his mother
slapped some sense in him. He ended up studying drama and “decided
that theater would now be my politics.” So instead of ending up in
prison, like H. Rap Brown, he now lives in the gated community of
Beverly Park, California, in a Tudor-style house that’s been
profiled
in Architectural Digest, and until last year also owned
an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that was listed for
$13 million. Now, instead of armed struggle, his personal revolution
takes the form of political rants delivered via Twitter or in media
interviews.
Back in 2012, for example, he toldPolitico that he’d voted for Barack Obama in 2008 “because
he was black.” But in the end Obama hadn’t proven to be black
enough for him. “Because, what’s a [N-word]? A [N-word] is scary.
Obama ain’t scary at all. [N-words] don’t have beers at the White
House. [N-words] don’t let some white dude, while you in the middle
of a speech, call [him] a liar. A [N-word] would have stopped the
meeting right there and said, ‘Who the **** said that?’”
Too black, or not black enough?
In an interview
the next year, however, Jackson seemed to feel that Obama had become
too black. According to The Independent, he“took
issue with the US President dropping the ‘G’s at the end of his
words.” Jackson offered the President this advice: “stop trying
to ‘relate’. Be a leader. Be ****ing presidential.” He went on:
“Look, I grew up in a society where I could say ‘I ain’t’ or
‘what it be’ to my friends. But when I’m out presenting myself to the
world as me, who graduated from college, who had family who cared
about me, who has a well-read background, I ****ing conjugate.”
Jackson also predicted that “If Hillary Clinton decides to run,
she’s going to kick their ****ing asses, and those mother****ers” –
the Republicans – “would rather see the country go down in flames
than let the times change.”
P.T. Barnum?
When Donald Trump stepped onto the
political stage, Jackson was quick to compare
him to P.T. Barnum. There ensued a Twitter war between the actor and
the real-estate mogul, who in more congenial times, it turned out,
had been golf buddies. Appearing
on Jimmy Kimmel Live, Jackson said that “If that
mother****er becomes president, I’m moving my black [posterior] to
South Africa.” (After Election Day 2016, however, he said he wasn’t
moving anyplace.) Visiting Dubai in December 2016, Jackson expressed
concern that Trump would “destroy Hollywood.” Yes, destroy
Hollywood. “Hopefully we will be able to keep working and he won’t
shut Hollywood down,” he said. “You know he could say, ‘Hollywood
didn’t support me,’ so that’s it. Who knows what could happen.”
There was no sign that Jackson was kidding.
In an April 2017 ad for a congressional
candidate in Georgia, Jackson said:
“Stop Donald Trump, the man who encourages racial and religious
discrimination and sexism.” Last June, the actor sent
the President a sarcastic happy-birthday tweet in which he implied
that Trump and several of his closest associates, including Rudy
Giuliani, were gay. In other tweets, Jackson has called Trump a
“Hemorrhoid,” a “Busted Condom,” and a “canker sore.”
Lying Fratboy?
People with a connection to Trump have
also incurred Jackson’s wrath. During the Brett Kavanaugh hearings,
Jackson tweeted
about the judge’s “Lying Fratboy [Posterior].” He’s also
harsh on black conservatives, comparing
his character in Django Unchained, a house slave who believes
in slavery and loves his master, to Supreme Court Justice Clarence
Thomas.
Jackson poses as a tough-talking,
street-smart guy who’s saying the gutsy things that nobody else
dares say. In fact, nothing that he says about politics deviates in
the slightest from the Hollywood party line. Nothing he says will
ruffle the feathers of any of the friends and colleagues whom he
encounters on movie sets and at awards ceremonies and at chic Beverly
Hills eateries. But of course he’s not just another Tinseltown
robot: he’s a guy who came frighteningly close to having a short
and sanguinary career of beating people up and killing cops. So
Donald Trump, and others whom Jackson despises, should count
themselves lucky that his weapon of choice these days is not a
12-gauge shotgun and a Twitter account.
When we glance at the Guardian, the favored newspaper of Britain’s left-wing elites, we’re used to seeing nonstop demonizing of moderates, libertarians, and conservatives alongside articles in which the virtue of socialism is taken for granted and out-and-out Communism is whitewashed. So it came as something of a shock, last Saturday, to encounter a more than 3,000-word essay in the Guardian that presented a sane and sober view of Maoism. The author, Julia Lovell, whose book Maoism: A History has just been published, began by referencing “the strange, looming presence of Mao in contemporary China,” which, despite its radical economic changes over the past few decades, is, she explained, “still held together by the legacies of Maoism.” Even though the sanguinary utopianism of the Cultural Revolution era has been replaced by authoritarian capitalism, wrote Lovell, the ghost of Mao still hovers over the nation of one billion-plus, and can be found in, among other things, “the deep politicisation of its judiciary; the supremacy of the one-party state; the intolerance of dissident voices.” Moreover, Xi Jinping has resurrected the long-dormant personality cult of Mao.
Xi Jinping
And the West, warns Lovell, has largely
failed to notice. For decades, observing China’s economic success
from afar, many Westerners have assumed that China has been gradually
changing, that it has been becoming a place less alien to us, a
nation more like our own. Wrong, insists Lovell. “The opposite has
happened,” she writes. She points out – and this hadn’t even
occurred to us – that if the Chinese Communist Party is still in
charge five years from now, it will have outlasted the reign of its
Soviet counterpart.
But you don’t have to go to China to find Maoism. You never did. Maoism, Lovell reminds us, has inspired revolts in countries ranging from Cambodia to Peru – revolts in which, as she admirably underscores, millions of people died. For eight decades, Maoist thought has been “a pivotal influence on global insubordination and intolerance.”
Julia Lovell
And what is Maoism, as opposed to Soviet-style Marxism? Lovell is helpful here. Unlike Stalin, Mao presided over “guerrilla wars deep in the countryside.” He preached “revolutionary zeal” and “anarchic insubordination” and “a pathological suspicion of the educated.” Stalin was no less evil and bloodthirsty than Mao, but the USSR never had an equivalent to Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The most radical ’68ers in the West looked not to the Kremlin but to Mao, especially his “message to his youthful Red Guards that it was ‘right to rebel.’” Mao posters adored dorm rooms in American college; copies of The Little Red Book abounded. In fact, the Black Panthers – that terrorist group celebrated, then as now, in chic leftist circles in the U.S. – “sold Little Red Books to generate funds to buy their first guns.” In West Germany, the violent but trendy Red Army Faction (also known as the Baader-Meinhof group) parroted lines from Mao, such as “imperialism and all reactionaries [are] paper tigers.” Today, Maoist insurgents threaten peace and freedom in 20 of India’s 28 states, and “self-avowed Maoists” now rule Nepal. So much for Francis Fukuyama’s declaration after the fall of the Iron Curtain that “the end of history” was at hand. “Write Maoism back into the global history of the 20th century,” emphasizes Lovell, and you get a “different narrative from the standard one in which communism loses the cold war in 1989.” Bottom line: with China now challenging America’s economic superiority and global power, it makes no sense whatsoever to pretend that Communism lost out to capitalism thirty years ago.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Rashida Tlaib. Ilhan Omar. Among the many things that this callow, determined, and dangerously fanatical trio of high-profile freshman House members have in common is an undisguised anti-Semitism.
Ilhan Omar
But if at this
point you had to single out one of these young women for her
Jew-hatred, it would have to be Omar, the hijab-wearing Gentlelady
from Minnesota. Posting on Twitter in 2012, Omar expressed the wish
that Allah would “awaken the people and help them see the evil
doings of Israel.”
Later, while serving in the Minnesota
state legislature, Omar compared Israel to apartheid South Africa and
stood up for the BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) movement,
which uniquely targets Israel for punishment for its purported
human-rights offenses.
House of Representatives
During her 2016 campaign for the U.S.
House, Omar denied supporting the BDS movement. Not long after her
election, in an interview with a Muslim publication, she affirmed her
support for it. In Islam there is a word for lying to the infidel in
the service of Allah: taqiyya.
In 2018, when someone dug up her 2012 tweet about Israel’s evildoings, she was widely criticized and apologized for it – kind of. But before long she was at it again. In a mid February tweet about the pro-Israel Beltway lobby, she hinted at stereotypical notions of Jewish avarice, thereby crossing a line that used to be respected by politicians of both parties on Capitol Hill. There ensued more criticism – and another sort-of-apology.
Rashida Tlaib, current runner-up in the House anti-Semitic sweepstakes
Days later, she essentially took the apology back. At a bookstore appearance on February 27, Omar told her audience that she considers it important to talk about the divided national loyalties of some political operatives and complained that those accusing her of anti-Semitism were just trying to keep her from introducing that discussion. Yet again Omar was in hot water: accusing American Jews of double allegiance is an old and familiar anti-Semitic trope. In any event, while concerned about the political influence of American Jews, she showed no interest in the powerful Washington lobbies of countries like Saudi Arabia.
Nancy Pelosi
By this point, Democratic Party leaders may or may not have been genuinely upset by Omar’s manifest anti-Semitism, but they were definitely concerned about its impact on the party’s fortunes. With that in mind, Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that a resolution condemning anti-Semitism would be put to a vote in the House on Wednesday, March 6.
The resolution was apparently a lame
piece of work to begin with: in a draft that circulated on March 5,
Omar wasn’t even mentioned by name. Even so, it turned out that the
leaders couldn’t scrape together enough votes. New York Times
reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote
that while “older House Democrats” deplored Omar’s remarks
about Jews, “their young liberal colleagues” felt that Omar was
“being singled out for unfair treatment.”
Eliot Engel
On March 5, Pelosi and company announced a postponement: at the behest of the House Progressive Caucus, the resolution would be rewritten to condemn Islamophobia as well. As for Omar’s prized seat on the powerful House Foreign Affairs Committee – an appointment that was indefensible to begin with – the chairman of that committee, Eliot Engel of New York, told CNN’s Erin Burnett that he wasn’t even “close to” taking it away. “I’m looking to get rid of anti-Semitism, not looking to punish anybody,” said Engel, who himself is Jewish. Early on March 7, it appeared that the whole resolution thing had totally fizzled. That night, by a vote of 407-23, the House passed an anti-hate resolution that was so absurdly broad that Omar herself was able to support it. During the vote she was seen in the House chamber sharing a laugh with a colleague.
So it was that this lame, half-hearted
effort to respond to Ilhan Omar’s Jew-hatred only underscored, in
the end, just how devoid of backbone the Democratic Party has become
on what should be the most clear-cut of moral issues.
Colonel Harlan David Sanders (1890-1980), KFC founder
We’ve criticized the New York
Times frequently enough on this site for its readiness to
soft-pedal the evils of Communism, to sentimentalize the enduring
devotion of aging Stalinists, and to assert that in some ways the
ideology that gave us the Gulag, the Killing Fields, and the Cultural
Revolution was, quite simply, preferable to our own.
But we have to give credit where it’s
due, and the Times did deserve a thumbs-up when, in April of
last year, it ran a piece
by Alexandra Stevenson about the ominous way in which the Chinese
Communist Party is asserting its power over international firms doing
business within its borders.
Even more ominous is the alacrity with
which the firms are knuckling under.
A display of some Cummins products
Stevenson provided some specifics: “Honda, the Japanese automaker, changed its legal documents to give the party a say in how its Chinese factories are run.” When Cummins, an engine manufacturer based in Indiana, named a new manager for one of its Chinese subsidiaries, Beijing put the kibosh on the appointment, and Cummins obediently agreed to new “articles of association” with the Communist state.
A KFC in China
Since Stevenson’s article appeared,
things seem to have gone from bad to worse. At least that’s the
impression one gets from a recent Associated Pressstory
about Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC). On March 5, according to the
report, the fried-chicken empire opened a new restaurant in the city
of Changsha in the province of Hunan that is specifically dedicated
to the memory of its local hero, Lei Feng.
You may have heard of Horst Wessel, the
storm trooper who died at age 22 and who was thereafter transformed
into the center of a Nazi personality cult. The official anthem of
the Nazi Party was called the “Horst Wessel Song.”
Some images of Lei Feng by Chinese children
Think of Feng, who coincidentally also
died at age 22, as Communist China’s answer to Horst Wessel. After
his death in 1962 when a telephone pole fell on him, he began, at the
direction of Mao himself, to be officially celebrated as the perfect
embodiment of Communist virtue. As one Guardian reporter has
put
it, he was depicted as “the epitome of selflessness, socialist
spirit and devotion to Mao.”
A Lei Feng propaganda poster
The problem is that even ordinary
Chinese citizens recognize the whole thing as a crock. Feng’s
published “diary,” a book-length paean to the virtues of Mao, is
said to be an obvious posthumous forgery. Also fishy, to quote the
Guardian, are “the numerous, professional-quality
photographs that mysteriously captured every good deed by a then
anonymous soldier.”
But who cares about the truth when you’re out to make a buck? KFC, like other international companies in love with Chinese cash (it has some 6000 restaurants in the People’s Republic), has decided to go along with the Party propaganda. “Lei Feng has been the role model for generations of Chinese,” KFC’s Hunan honcho, He Min, told the Xinhua News Agency, adding that the new KFC branch “will spare no effort to promote his spirit.”
The date of the KFC branch opening was
no coincidence: in China, March 5 is Lei Feng Day.
Here at Useful Stooges, we call Roger
Waters “Old Reliable.” Heaven knows there are plenty of useful
stooges in show business. Some of them adore the Castro regime in
Cuba. Some hate Israel and want to see its Jewish inhabitants driven
into the sea. Some speak of burning down the White House. Some
support Antifa vandalism and the violent closing down of the free
speech of people with whom they disagree. Some blindly follow
hijab-wearing “feminist” leaders with histories of defending
Islamic gender apartheid.
Robbie Williams
Roger Waters, the 75-year-old rocker and former Pink Floyd front man, put almost all of them in the shade. He’s spoken up for Hamas, painted Iran as a victim, and served as a member of the UN’s discredited Russell Tribunal. He’s not only compared Israel to Nazi Germany but also accused it of “apartheid” and “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and held concerts featuring a large, airborne “pig-shaped balloon adorned with Jewish symbols, including a Star of David.” He’s such a fierce enemy of Israel that he’s written accusatory open letters to other entertainers, such as Robbie Williams and Bon Jovi, trying to browbeat them into canceling gigs in Israel and telling them that, if they didn’t obey, they had the blood of children on their hands.
Last November, we reported on a new
wrinkle: Waters, it turned out, was part of a shady campaign to shake
down Chevron to the tune of billions of dollars.
Jair Bolsonaro
Now Waters is at it again. As Marcelo
Duclos put it last month in an article
for the Panam Post, he’s “always on the same side: the
wrong one.” Namely, the side of totalitarianism. Performing last
year in Brazil, he told his audiences that Jair Bolsonaro, the
anti-Marxist who was then running for president and is now in office,
represented the “resurgence of fascism.” While he presumably
expected his fans to cheer, many of them booed.
Jon Guaido
Not that he learned a lesson from it.
On February 3, Waters took to Twitter to offer his two cents on the
current developments in Venezuela. As readers of this site well know,
most of the democratic countries of the Western Hemisphere have
supported the claim of National Assembly leader Juan Guaido to be the
legitimate president of that country; only Cuba, Nicaragua, El
Salvador, Bolivia, and three small Caribbean island nations have
stuck by the incompetent Marxist dictator Nicolas Maduro – along
with such stellar international players as Iran, Belarus, Russia,
China, Syria, and Equatorial Guinea. No points for guessing which
side Waters is on.
Nicolas Maduro
In his February 3 tweet, Waters told
the U.S. to “LEAVE THE VENEZUELAN PEOPLE ALONE” and claimed that
Venezuela, under Maduro, enjoys a “REAL DEMOCRACY” superior to
those of the United Kingdom and United States. He added the hashtag
#STOPTRUMPSCOUPINVENEZUELA. Duclos quoted a reply by one of Waters’s
fans: “I’m crying. My biggest musical idol has just defended the
government that ruined my country and my family, which forced me to
leave my own country to seek a better quality of life. Roger, you
have no idea what is happening in Venezuela.” This fan was not
alone in chiding Waters for his ignorance and his unconcern for
Maduro’s victims.
Will he listen? There is no reason to
expect him to. “Tho[ugh] his lyrics routinely decry
authoritarianism, government power, and assaults on freedom,”
Duclos pointed out, “it seems these things receive a pass from
Waters when a left-wing government is the culprit.”
In the view of CNN, the news amounted to a triumph for Kamala Harris. In an “analysis” posted on February 14, Nia-Malika Henderson, the news network’s Senior Political Reporter, said that the just-announced endorsement of the first-term California senator by Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-CA) was the presidential candidate’s “biggest endorsement to date” and represented “an undeniable boost.” Lee, noted Henderson, had not only thrown her support to Harris but also agreed to co-chair her California campaign.
Rep. Barbara Lee
To underscore the
importance of Lee’s backing, Henderson described Lee as an
“all-around anti-war and social justice activist star” and
“progressive icon” and observed that she “has been called ‘the
House’s lefty conscience.’” She was, Henderson pointed out, “the
only member of Congress to vote against authorization for the use of
force in the days after 9/11.” By teaming up with Harris, Lee was
helping the senator to “burnish her progressive credentials.”
Moreover, Lee’s announcement “might also foreshadow a show of
force” by other “progressive stalwarts” such as Maxine Waters.
The tone of
Henderson’s “analysis” of the Lee endorsement was not unique.
Other mainstream news media also depicted it as a great leap forward
for Harris, and described Lee in similarly glowing terms.
What Henderson
omitted, and what many other media reports also chose not to mention,
was the – shall we say – complex reality behind the carefully
cultivated image of Lee as “icon” and “conscience” and
“star.”
Armed Black Panthers at the State Capitol in Sacramento on May 2, 1967
For one thing,
this is a woman who began
her career as a member of the Black Panthers – and who, as recently
as 2017, supported the use of funds from the National Park Services
(NPS) budget to pay tribute to the Panthers’ memory with something
called the Black Panther Party Research, Interpretation & Memory
Project. When the NPS decided not to spend its resources on the
project, Lee issued a livid statement that described the Black
Panther Party – that violent group of murderous revolutionary thugs
– as “an integral part of the civil rights movement.”
Judge Richard Goldstone
Lee also voted
against condemning the so-called Goldstone Report, that scandalous
United Nations document that whitewashed Palestinian terrorism while
falsely accusing the Israeli Defense Forces of deliberately targeting
Arab civilians. Even the report’s lead author, South African judge
Richard Goldstone, ultimately withdrew his imprimatur from it – but
not Lee.
Perhaps most
appalling, Lee has been a stalwart supporter of the Cuban Communist
regime and was personally chummy with Fidel Castro. Over the years,
she visited Cuba more than twenty times and met with Fidel on eight
of those occasions.
The now infamous picture of Elian Gonzales being removed by U.S. federal agents from the home of his Miami relatives on April 22, 2000, so that he could be retuned to Cuba.
It was Lee who
played the key role
in the reprehensible return to Cuba, in the year 2000, of
six-year-old Elian Gonzales, whose mother had perished at sea in her
effort to bring him to freedom in the U.S.
The San
Francisco Chronicle reported in 2014
on a 2009 memo by Fidel documenting a five-hour meeting at his Havana
home with Lee, who was there to serve as a liaison with the new Obama
administration.
“We need to stop and pause and mourn his loss.”
When Fidel died in November 2016, Lee said that she was “very sad for the Cuban people” and claimed that Fidel had brought “social improvements” to the island. Yes, she admitted, Cubans had experienced hard times, but Lee put a bright face on them: gasoline rationing forced them to ride bikes, and that brought down “their rates of diabetes and high blood pressure.” Calling Fidel “a smart man” and a “historian,” Lee said: “We need to stop and pause and mourn his loss.”
But that wasn’t
all: when then President-elect Trump issued a statement calling
Castro “a brutal dictator” whose “legacy” was “one of
firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial
of fundamental human rights,” Lee lit into him, saying his comments
on Castro were “not presidential at all….This not how you react
as a world leader.”
This, then, is
the “icon” who has now joined up with the presidential campaign
of Kamala Harris. Make of that development what you will.
