“I have a dream” for peace in the Middle East

John Lewis is a Democratic Party Congressman. He, like everyone else, saw what the Zionist lobby (with their capitalist allies and labor-bureaucrat pawns) did to Black Congresspersons Cynthia McKinney and Earl Hilliard. He knows that his bread is buttered on the Zionist side, and not on the Palestinian side. See the discussion at <http://indybay.org/news/2003/01/1560029.php>.

As for King, there's no indication that he knew anything about what was actually happening in Palestine. And he probably didn't want to know, since Jewish money and Jewish political power were very important to the non-violent, reformist branch of the civil rights movement. All he would let himself know was that Jews had been persecuted and that Israel was a "Jewish state". If he knew anything about the ongoing violent dispossession of the Arabs of Palestine by the Zionist state, he apparently didn't let on.

Remember that King didn't oppose the U.S. aggression against Vietnam until it had been going on for years -- and he had a lot more information about the U.S. and Vietnam than he had about Israel and Palestine.

January 20, 2003
By Tim Wise

Rarely am I considered insufficiently cynical. As someone who does anti-racism work for a living, and thus hears all manner of excuse-making by
those who wish desperately to avoid being considered racist, not much surprises me. I expect people to lie about race; to tell me how many black
friends they have; to swear they haven't a racist bone in their bodies.

And every January, with the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday just around the corner, I have come to expect someone to misuse the good doctor's words so
as to push an agenda he would not likely have supported.

As such, I long ago resigned myself to the annual gaggle of fools who deign to use King's "content of their character" line from the 1963 March on
Washington so as to attack affirmative action, ostensibly because King preferred simple "color-blindness."

That King actually supported the efforts that we now call affirmative action--and even billions in reparations for slavery and segregation--as I've
documented in a previous column, matters not to these folks. They've never read King's work, and they've only paid attention to one news clip from one
speech, so what more can we expect from such precious simpletons as these?

And yet, even with my cynic's credentials established, the one thing I never expected anyone to do would be to just make up a quote from King; a quote
that he simply never said, and claim that it came from a letter that he never wrote, and was published in a collection of his essays that never existed.
Frankly, this level of deception is something special.

The hoax of which I speak is one currently making the rounds on the Internet, which claims to prove King's steadfast support for Zionism. Indeed, it
does more than that.

In the item, entitled "Letter to an Anti-Zionist Friend," King proclaims that criticism of Zionism is tantamount to anti-Semitism, and likens those who
criticize Jewish nationalism as manifested in Israel, to those who would seek to trample the rights of blacks. Heady stuff indeed, and 100% bullshit, as

any amateur fact checker could ascertain were they so inclined.

But of course, the kinds of folks who push an ideology that required the expulsion of three-quarters-of-a-million Palestinians from their lands, and then
lied about it, claiming there had been no such persons to begin with (as with Golda Meir's infamous quip), can't be expected to place a very high
premium on truth.

I learned this the hard way recently, when the Des Moines Jewish Federation succeeded in getting me yanked from the city's MLK day events: two
speeches I had been scheduled to give on behalf of the National Conference of Community and Justice (NCCJ).

Because of my criticisms of Israel--and because I as a Jew am on record opposing Zionism philosophically--the Des Moines shtetl decided I was unfit

to speak at an MLK event. After sending the supposed King quote around, and threatening to pull out all monies from the Jewish community for future
NCCJ events, I was dropped.

The attack of course was based on a distortion of my own beliefs as well. Federation principal Mark Finkelstein claimed I had shown a disregard for
the well-being of Jews, despite the fact that my argument has long been that Zionism in practice has made world Jewry less safe than ever. But it was
his duplicity on King's views that was most disturbing.

Though Finkelstein only recited one line from King's supposed "letter" on Zionism, he lifted it from the larger letter, which appears to have originated
with Rabbi Marc Schneier, who quotes from it in his 1999 book, "Shared Dreams: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Jewish Community." Therein, one finds

such over-the-top rhetoric as this:

"I say, let the truth ring forth from the high mountain tops, let it echo through the valleys of God's green earth: When people criticize Zionism, they mean
Jews--this is God's own truth."
The letter also was filled with grammatical errors that any halfway literate reader of King's work should have known disqualified him from being its
author, to wit: "Anti-Zionist is inherently anti Semitic, and ever will be so."
The treatise, it is claimed, was published on page 76 of the August, 1967 edition of Saturday Review, and supposedly can also be read in the
collection of King's work entitled, This I Believe: Selections from the Writings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. That the claimants never mention the
publisher of this collection should have been a clear tip-off that it might not be genuine, and indeed it isn't. The book doesn't exist.
As for Saturday Review, there were four issues in August of 1967. Two of the four editions contained a page 76. One of the pages 76 contains
classified ads and the other contained a review of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's album. No King letter anywhere.

Yet its lack of authenticity hasn't prevented it from having a long shelf-life. Not only does it pop up in the Schneier book, but sections of it were read by
the Anti-Defamation League's Michael Salberg in testimony before a House Subcommittee in July of 2001, and all manner of pro-Israel groups (from
traditional Zionists to right-wing Likudites, to Christians who support ingathering Jews to Israel so as to prompt Jesus' return), have used the piece on
their websites.

In truth, King appears never to have made any public comment about Zionism per se; and the only known statement he ever made on the topic, made
privately to a handful of people, is a far cry from what he is purported to have said in the so-called "Letter to an Anti-Zionist friend."
In 1968, according to Seymour Martin Lipset, King was in Boston and attended a dinner in Cambridge along with Lipset himself and a number of black
students. After the dinner, a young man apparently made a fairly harsh remark attacking Zionists as people, to which King responded: "Don't talk like
that. When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You're talking Anti-Semitism."
Assuming this quote to be genuine, it is still far from the ideological endorsement of Zionism as theory or practice that was evidenced in the phony
letter.

After all, to respond to a harsh statement about individuals who are Zionists with the warning that such language is usually a cover for anti-Jewish bias

is understandable. More than that, the comment was no doubt true for most, especially in 1968. It is a statement of opinion as to what people are
thinking when they say a certain thing. It is not a statement as to the inherent validity or perfidy of a worldview or its effects.

Likewise, consider the following analogous dualism: first, that "opposition to welfare programs is forever racism," and secondly, that "when people
criticize welfare recipients, they mean blacks. This is racism."

Whereas the latter statement may be true--and studies would tend to suggest that it is--the former is a matter of ideological conviction, largely
untestable, and thus more tendentious than its counterpart. In any event, as with the King quotes--both fabricated and genuine--the truth of the latter
says nothing about the truth or falsity of the former.

So yes, King was quick to admonish one person who expressed hostility to Zionists as people. But he did not claim that opposition to Zionism was
inherently anti-Semitic. And for those who criticize Zionism today and who like me are Jewish, to believe that we mean to attack Jews, as Jews, when
we speak out against Israel and Zionism is absurd.

As for King's public position on Israel, it was quite limited and hardly formed a cornerstone of his worldview. In a meeting with Jewish leaders a few
weeks before his death, King noted that peace for Israelis and Arabs were both important concerns. According to King, "peace for Israel means
security, and we must stand with all our might to protect its right to exist, its territorial integrity."

But such a statement says nothing about how Israel should be constituted, nor addresses the Palestinians at all, whose lives and challenges were
hardly on the world's radar screen in 1968.

At the time, Israel's concern was hostility from Egypt; and of course all would agree that any nation has the right not to be attacked by a neighbor. The
U.S. had a right not to be attacked by the Soviet Union too--as King would have no doubt agreed, thereby affirming the United States' right to exist. But
would anyone claim that such a sentiment would have implied the right of the U.S. to exist as it did, say in 1957 or 1961, under segregation? Of course
not.

So too Israel. Its right to exist in the sense of not being violently destroyed by hostile forces does not mean the right to exist as a Jewish state per se, as

opposed to the state of all its citizens. It does not mean the right to laws granting special privileges to Jews from around the world, over indigenous
Arabs.

It should also be noted that in the same paragraph where King reiterated his support for Israel's right to exist, he also proclaimed the importance of
massive public assistance to Middle Eastern Arabs, in the form of a Marshall Plan, so as to counter the poverty and desperation that often leads to
hostility and violence towards Israeli Jews.

This part of King's position is typically ignored by the organized Jewish community, of course, even though it was just as important to King as Israel's
territorial integrity.

As for what King would say today about Israel, Zionism, and the Palestinian struggle, one can only speculate.

After all, he died before the full tragedy of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza would be able to unfold.

He died before the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel; before the invasion of Lebanon and the massacres at Sabra and Shatilla; before the 1980's
intifada; before Israel decided to serve as a proxy for U.S. foreign policy--funneling weapons to fascist governments in South Africa, Argentina and
Guatemala, or helping to arm terrorist thugs in Mozambique and the contras in Nicaragua.

He died before the proliferation of illegal settlements throughout the territories; before the rash of suicide/homicide bombings; before the polls
showing that nearly half of Israeli Jews support removing Palestinians via "transfer" to neighboring countries.

But one thing is for sure. While King would no doubt roundly condemn Palestinian violence against innocent civilians, he would also condemn the
state violence of Israel.

He would condemn launching missile attacks against entire neighborhoods in order to flush out a handful of wanted terrorists.

He would oppose the handing out of machine guns to religious fanatics from Brooklyn who move to the territories and proclaim their God-given right to
the land, and the right to run Arabs out of their neighborhoods, or fence them off, or discriminate against them in a multitude of ways.

He would oppose the unequal rationing of water resources between Jews and Arabs that is Israeli policy.

He would oppose the degrading checkpoints through which Palestinian workers must pass to get to their jobs, or back to their homes after a long day
of work.

He would oppose the policy which allows IDF officers to shoot children throwing rocks, as young as age twelve.

In other words, he would likely criticize the working out of Zionism on the ground, as it has actually developed in the real world, as opposed to the world

of theory and speculation.

These things seem imminently clear from any honest reading of his work or examination of his life. He would be a broker for peace. And it is a tragedy
that instead of King himself, we are burdened with charlatans like those at the ADL, or the Des Moines Jewish Federation, or Rabbis like Marc
Schneier who think nothing of speaking for the genuine article, in a voice not his own.

Tim Wise is an antiracist activist, writer and lecturer. He can be reached at timjwise [at] msn.com

Source: ZNet at http://www.zmag.org

I'm half "Jewish" and have been harrassed by Zionists since my open opposition to the 1991 Gulf War - yet another war for the transnational
petro-banking-weapons complex to keep Americans addicted to the oil that Zionists lust to control.

My father, who works within the Anglo-American Establishment (CFR/UN), has been harrassed since his opposition to Zionism in the 1940s.

We have copies of letters from Zionist terrorists that make any of those so-called "Islamic terrorist" threats seem like cotton candy. Not to mention
numerous records of Zionists' acts of terrorism.

I've posted copies of Zionist terrorist letters and have then been accused of being "anti-Semitic" by Zionists and so-called "Jews".

Zionists - most of whom are not even Semitic or real Jews - are the most racist, hypocritical, ignorant fools I've ever had the misfortune of knowing.

As Apartheid was ended, so must Zionism.

Beyond that, we must reconstruct our world to provide equal rights and equal responsibilities for all.

Martin Lucifer King would certainly support Palestinian suicide bombers attacking schools and discos. He orchestrated the bombing of the church in Birgmingham which injured three black girls (the media lied that four were killed). He decided to attacks the church and blame Whites since he thought it would attract sympathy to his campaign for power and money. He and Arafat are two of a kind. Hopefully Arafat will soon join King in hell.

Why don't you all look up MLK's speech called "I Have a Dream". In it he talks about he had a dream that blacks and whites would be sisters and brothers, etc. Obviously, the worst conflict today is between the Jews and Muslims / Christians in Palestine-Israel. I am sure MLK would say today that he has a dream that Jews, Muslims and Christians would live as sisters and brothers. Go ahead. I dare you to read the speech. Just do a Googe-search. He would be ashamed at the Israelis and their Zionist supporters in America for the Apartheid Wall that is now being built in Israel/Palestine! He would be ashamed of the ethnic cleansing that Israel is committing against the Palestinian people! He probably didn't even know that 92% of the land in Israel is designated for JEWS ONLY! Most people aren't aware of that , or of the fact that Israel does not even have a Constitution! And that there are roads for JEWS ONLY going to settlements for JEWS ONLY on illegally confiscated Palestinian land! DUH! And for anyone to even try to claim that MLK would approve of all this if he know about it is out of his or her mind!

If most Americans only knew the truth about Israel, they would not want one penny of their tax $ to support Israel.
"Origin of the Palestine-Israel Conflict" at http://www.cactus48.com should be required reading for every single American citizen.

I Have a Dream Too
By Wendy Campbell

Just as Martin Luther King, Jr., said I have a dream. I have a dream that Jews, Muslims and Christians will be able to join hands as sisters and
brothers, not only here in America but in Palestine-Israel, and around the world as equals. And let's not leave anyone out. The Hindus, Buddhists, and
all religions and races.

I have come here today to share with you the truth about the shameful way in which our U.S. tax dollars are being spent in Israel and the Occupied
Territories, otherwise known as Palestine. Our tax dollars are given in such magnitude to Israel, it is more than we give to the entire sub-Saharan
continent of Africa, Central America and South America combined. This money is used largely to fund Israel's military, the fourth largest in the world,
which has long been engaged in an unethical campaign of ethnic cleansing, slow genocide and continual persecution of the indigenous people of the
land, the Palestinians, because they are not the "right" religion. They are mostly Muslim, with a Christian minority. Please note, the Palestinian Jews
were readily accepted into Israel as citizens.

It is true that when Israel was created in 1948, the Jews were escaping one of the worst episodes of persecution in modern history, which was the
Holocaust. However, ethnic cleansing can never be justified no matter who commits it against whom. Ever since the European countries of the United
League of Nations gave away Arab land that really wasn't theirs to give away in the first place to Zionist Eastern European Jews for the Jewish
supremacist state of Israel, there has been ethnic cleansing and dispossession of the indigenous Palestinian people.

Israel is not and has never been a democracy as its propaganda machine and the corporate media here in the United States tries to tell us. In fact
Israel does not have even a constitution or a Bill of Rights. Did you know that 92% of the land in Israel is designated for use by Jews only, leaving only
8% for non-Jews? In Israel, no one is allowed to run for office if their platform is to challenge that Israel should be anything other than a Jewish state,
rather than even a secular democracy like we have here in the U.S. with equal rights for all regardless of religion, race or sex, by law and our
Constitution.

In Israel, there are roads for Jews-only which go to settlements for Jews-only on illegally confiscated Palestinian territory, where nearby the
Palestinians are virtually imprisoned in their own homeland surrounded by Israeli checkpoints and barbed wire surrounding them. This is clearly
apartheid. Yet our Pro-Israel corporate media shields us from these realities. If we found this out, they figure, we might protest all the aid our
government gives to Israel! Because somehow our government sees fit to give Israel over $4 billion of our tax dollars a year in forgiven loans that are
interest free, with us paying the interest. This all goes to a country which even one of its own soldiers who is now a conscientious objector states is a
"racist, anti-democratic, apartheid regime".

My fellow Americans, in this world, human rights must have no borders. We must not allow for double standards in our policies. I believe that we the
American people must speak out against our tax dollars being spent on any country that has a racist, anti-democratic, apartheid regime, such as
Israel, the largest recipient of our foreign aid by far and also the 16th richest country in the world. After first taking care of our own economy, education
and healthcare needs, our money would be much better spent for instance on sub-Saharan Africa which is in desperate need of medical and
economic help, than on aiding Israel's unjust war against the Palestinian people.

We the American people must demand an end to any racism dominating our foreign policy and Zionism is blatant racism. We must now insist to an
end of all US aid to Israel until it transforms into a true democracy and even if that means sending in international peace-keeping troops to oversee the
transformation. The Israeli military occupation is the longest in modern history. To quote Martin Luther King, "Now is the time to make real the promise
of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial (and religious) justice. Now is the time
to make justice a reality to all of God's children."

He goes on to say basically that there can be no peace without justice: "The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation
(and our world) until the bright day of justice emerges."

Finally he says "We need to hold these truths to be self-evident that all men (and women) are created equal".

Therefore, we the people, must hold our leaders to the ideals our country was founded on. As the only super-power in the world right now, we must
seek to lead with morality NOT with just monetary and military might.

This bit of news I am going to tell you about has not been reported in the mainstream corporate US news, like even our own San Francisco Chronicle
but it has been reported in British and Israeli papers. It's the fact that at this time, Israeli delegates are in Washington DC asking for another $12 billion
or more in US aid--- our tax money. Somebody doesn't want American citizens to know about this! If it's important enough news for the British and the
Israeli papers, it is certainly important enough news for American citizens to know about. But obviously they are afraid we might complain about it since
we are reading about the $21 billion deficit here in California's budget!

Now that you know, I believe that we must demand that our leaders JUST SAY NO to Israel's request for more aid! Not until it transforms into a true
democracy with equal rights for all regardless of religion, race, ethnicity or sex, and that includes for all 5 million Palestinian refugees who must be
allowed their right to return to their ancestral homeland of Palestine-Israel, as is their right according to UN Resolutions, International Law and world
opinion.

"Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children."

Hey they faked a diary of a girl by the name of Anne Frank,
What was to stop them from faking a letter of
Our Beloved
Civil Rights Leader?Nothing.

The Truth About "Martin Luther King, Jr."

King's Brazen Cheating

The first public sermon that King ever gave, in 1947 at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, was plagiarized from a homily by Protestant clergyman Harry Emerson Fosdick entitled "Life is What You Make It," according to the testimony of King's best friend of that time, Reverend Larry H. Williams.

The first book that King wrote, "Stride Toward Freedom, - -was plagiarized from numerous sources, all unattributed, according to documentation recently assembled by sympathetic King scholars Keith D. Miller, Ira G. Zepp, Jr., and David J. Garrow.

And no less an authoritative source than the four senior editors of "The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.- - (an official publication of the Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, Inc., whose staff includes King's widow Coretta), stated of King's writings at both Boston University and Crozer Theological Seminary: "Judged retroactively by the standards of academic scholarship, [his writings] are tragically flawed by numerous instances of plagiarism.... Appropriated passages are particularly evident in his writings in his major field of graduate study, systematic theology."

King's essay, "The Place of Reason and Experience in Finding God," written at Crozer, pirated passages from the work of theologian Edgar S. Brightman, author of "The Finding of God."

Another of King's theses, "Contemporary Continental Theology," written shortly after he entered Boston University, was largely stolen from a book by Walter Marshall Horton.

King's doctoral dissertation, "A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Harry Nelson Wieman," for which he was awarded a PhD in theology, contains more than fifty complete sentences plagiarized from the PhD dissertation of Dr. Jack Boozer, "The Place of Reason in Paul Tillich's Concept of God."

According to "The Martin Luther King Papers", in King's dissertation "only 49 per cent of sentences in the section on Tillich contain five or more words that were King's own...."!

In "The Journal of American History", June 1991, page 87, David J. Garrow, a leftist academic who is sympathetic to King, says that King's wife, Coretta Scott King, who also served as his secretary, was an accomplice in his repeated cheating. ("King's Plagiarism: Imitation, Insecurity and Transformation," The Journal of American History, June 1991, p. 87)

Reading Garrow's article, one is led to the inescapable conclusion that King cheated because he had chosen for himself a political role in which a PhD would be useful, and, lacking the intellectual ability to obtain the title fairly, went after it by any means necessary. Why, then, one might ask, did the professors at Crozer Theological Seminary and Boston University grant him passing grades and a PhD? Garrow states on page 89: "King's academic compositions, especially at Boston University, were almost without exception little more than summary descriptions... and comparisons of other's writings. Nonetheless, the papers almost always received desirable letter grades, strongly suggesting that King's professors did not expect more...." The editors of "The Martin Luther King Jr. Papers" state that "...the failure of King's teachers to notice his pattern of textual appropriation is somewhat remarkable...."

But researcher Michael Hoffman tells us "...actually the malfeasance of the professors is not at all remarkable. King was politically correct, he was Black, and he had ambitions. The leftist [professors were] happy to award a doctorate to such a candidate no matter how much fraud was involved. Nor is it any wonder that it has taken forty years for the truth about King's record of nearly constant intellectual piracy to be made public."

Supposed scholars, who in reality shared King's vision of a racially mixed and Marxist America, purposely covered up his cheating for decades. The cover-up still continues. From the "New York Times" of October 11, 1991, page 15, we learn that on October 10th of that year, a committee of researchers at Boston University admitted that, "There is no question but that Dr. King plagiarized in the dissertation." However, despite its finding, the committee said that "No thought should be given to the revocation of Dr. King's doctoral degree," an action the panel said "would serve no purpose."

No purpose, indeed! Justice demands that, in light of his willful fraud as a student, the "reverend" and the "doctor" should be removed from King's name.

Up until a year or so before his murder, King served the ruling class well by helping limit the Black liberation struggle to a non-violent, anti-revolutionary fight for formal racial equality. When he started to attack ruling-class interests by opposing their war against Vietnam and supporting workers' struggles, such as the sanitationworkers' strike in Memphis, his days were numbered.

As sections of the ruling class move to further revoke the limited gains that Blacks made in the 1960's and 1970's, we can expect to hear more about King's real and imagined sins, while other sections will continue to try to use him -- leaving out his more radical last years -- as an icon of reformism and pacifism.

P.S. I'm now writing my name as 'Aaron S.' to differentiate me from the 'aaron' who often posts to indymedia and who doesn't give an email address.