Richard Silverstein trashes Jesse Jackson, Jr. for being too pro-Israel
Seattle-based blogger Richard Silverstein has published a racially charged attack on Jesse Jackson, Jr. and several other African-American congressmen currently visiting Israel. The post bears the odd headline ‘Whorin’ and Shnorin’ Jesse Jackson Jr. Style’. (Read here.) That Silverstein apparently attempts to use black dialect to mock these congressmen, dropping the terminal ‘g’ twice in the headline and twice in the post’s first sentence, shows a shocking lack of sensitivity. It seems that Silverstein is willing to make gratuitous use of a racial stereotype to mock black people whose support for Israel he finds objectionable.
The content of Silverstein’s column, which attempts to paint Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr. as an ignorant opportunist willing to sell out his principles for cash, strikes a similarly harsh tone. Silverstein bases these charges on the slimmest of evidence: that Rep. Jackson purportedly received an $8,000 campaign donation from AIPAC. Based on that and on Jackson’s participation in the fact-finding tour of Israel, Silverstein writes that Jackson
knows what he’s told to know. And you know who tells him what he knows? His rich pro-Israel Jewish friends in Chicago who are filling his campaign coffers.
Silverstein also harshly condemns Jackson, who has met with a number of Palestinian leaders, both official and otherwise, for not visiting Gaza to meet with representatives of Hamas to hear directly from them their positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The apparent inspiration for Silverstein’s intemperate attack was his reading a column by Rep. Jackson in the Jerusalem Post, a column which Silverstein condemns as being ‘fawning’ and ‘pro-Israel’. In his column, Jackson calls on Palestinians to renounce violence in pursuing their goals, and turn instead to the non-violent resistance preached by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. Silverstein argues that, while non-violence may have worked in fighting Jim Crow, it would be pointless for Palestinians to use against Israel.
The gist of the JPost piece is that the only way for the Palestinians to gain true success in their quest for justice is to swear off violence and embrace non-violence. Which is all well and good if you’re fighting for civil rights in Alabama in 1967, since the only weapons used against you were German shepherds and fire hoses (with the rare assassination thrown in for purposes of intimidation). Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson’s dad never had to face F-16 jets and Apache attack helicopters in their day. If they had, I’d guess they’d have had to adopt a different set of tactics to gain their freedom.
Thus Silverstein belittles the oppression experienced by African-Americans during their struggle for civil rights, casts Israel as being worse than the segregationist South, and disparages support for non-violence as being unrealistic. Silverstein’s throwaway comment about African-American civil rights activists ‘only’ being subjected to ‘German shepherds and fire hoses (with the rare assassination thrown in for purposes of intimidation)’ speaks volumes about the illogic underlying his argument against non-violence. Silverstein clearly doesn’t appreciate just how bad Jim Crow was. Moreover, Silverstein’s argument that Jackson’s consideration of Israeli views and advocacy of Palestinian non-violence show that Jackson is in the pocket of wealthy Jews is the product of a very confused mind.
By contrast, Rep. Jackson’s views about these subjects seem so much more reliable than those of Silverstein. Jackson writes in his column that Israeli leaders expect that, if the U.N. were to recognize a Palestinian state in September, the Palestinian leadership would follow this up by sending tens of thousands of civilians to storm checkpoints. They worry that this centrally planned imitation of a grassroots Arab Spring uprising would set off a confrontation unlike any yet seen in the conflict’s long and bloody history.