Public Comment

On 15 July, Alice Walker posted an essay in the Guardian, in which she ruminated on the slaying of Trayvon Martin. She reposted the text in her blog, with further comments, one among them alluding to George Zimmerman: “Of course if we are dealing with descendents of the Chitauri…we can expect more of what we are experiencing.” This oracular utterance speaks volumes about her recent profession of faith in the doctrines of David Icke.  

Alice Walker is an internationally respected African American feminist writer, human rights activist, Buddhist – cultural icon to many, even venerated in some circles; and David Icke is a man she hails as “a rare gift to the planet.” Icke has gained international notoriety for preaching a dizzying and totalizing farrago of conspiracy theory, pseudoscience and sci-fi mingled with old-school occultism, New Age spirituality, Iron Age religion, and whatever else he can toss into the mix. Larded throughout is a strain of anti-Semitism drawn from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other Aryan supremacist thought. All this is made cohesive by Icke’s ‘unified field,’ meta-conspiracy theory, which has it that the world is controlled by a diabolical cabal of ravening, blood-guzzling, shape-shifting reptilians from the constellation Draco, along with their equally sanguinary, miscegenated progeny, which establish the bloodline of the Illuminati and the “Rothschild Zionists.” (The terms become interchangeable; and Icke’s protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, the term “Rothschild Zionists” is nothing but a synecdoche for the Jewish people.) According to Icke, these mischlinge lust especially after the blood of blue-eyed, blond-haired Aryans, children, and menstruating women. In Icke’s modern-day iteration of the medieval blood libel against the Jews (in which Jews allegedly require the blood of Christians to make Passover matzos), now amped up to cosmic proportions, the reptilians and their Illuminati/Rothschild Zionist spawn transmogrify into monstrous lizards and engage in frenzied, orgiastic rituals of sparagmos and exsanguination. These are the teachings of the man Alice Walker hails as “a rare gift to the planet” whose thought she calls “stunning, profound.” This is a man she defends as a “courageous,” misunderstood genius and savior; and as evidenced in her blog posts, her zealotry grows by the day.  

To preclude uncomfortable questions about her adherence to Icke, she muses in one of her posts: “Do I believe everything? I don’t think it matters.” Yes, it does matter. The question is crucial. Her espousal of David Icke’s doctrines is exceedingly disturbing for a number of reasons; and she must be called to account. In order to legitimize her soi disant status as a “teacher, elder, guide, voice,” to present herself as a spiritually évolué truth-speaker, someone whose words should be listened to and heeded, she trades on her personal history and civil rights activities, her advocacy for Palestinian rights, her “womanism,” and her Buddhism. But her credentials and accomplishments grant her no monopoly on truth and wisdom. So when she declares herself an apostle of this so-called messiah, it matters very much just what she believes.  

In recent blog posts she gives every indication that she’s already swallowed his preachments whole-hog. Her ignorance even of basic scientific principles and logical argument leads her to surrender uncritically to Icke’s pseudoscience and pseudo-scholarship, and it seems that she does indeed believe everything. More ominously, she regurgitates Icke’s declaration that there exists an ancient ET reptilian “Illuminati [Rothschild Zionist] bloodline” which controls human affairs. This becomes highly problematic in light of her role as a prominent voice for Palestinian rights. Now she asserts that George Zimmerman is a reptilian hybrid. If Alice Walker truly possesses the strength of her convictions in Icke’s “profound” vision, it is patently dishonest and craven of her to speak out of both sides of her mouth, play coy and equivocate about just what she believes; while in the same breath she seeks to convert others to this paranoid, delusional belief system – when, beyond the absurdity of this sottage, such repugnant and pernicious visions are at the core of Icke’s doctrines. It damned well matters very much just what Alice Walker believes.  

She dances around Icke’s anti-Semitism by parroting the red herrings he flings at his interlocutors when so accused. And she’s given to using the appellation “Chitauri” (put forth by Icke’s Zulu ‘shaman’ sidekick) when speaking of these monstrous reptilians which infest her mind, as if Africanizing the term makes it palatable to African Americans and the multicult; yet she conveniently ignores the fact that Icke not only draws deep from the well of anti-Semitism, but has demonstrable ties to neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups that would just as well exterminate blacks as Jews. These are Alice Walker’s new bedfellows?  

Equally troubling is the fact that Progressives and Leftists (many of whom are Jewish) who laud her for her social activism are deafeningly silent on this matter. The policies of Israel with respect to the Palestinians are utterly reprehensible, a national shame; and there is enough poisonous rancor on both sides. Yet those who rally to defend her work for Palestinian rights ignore her alarming turn of mind and heart. When they continue to sing her praises and allow her proselytizing of Icke’s doctrines to go unchallenged, they play straight into the hands of an extremist claque which equates the slightest criticism of Israel, especially with regard to Palestinians, as tantamount to an avowal of Nazism and Holocaust denial. Likewise, her invocation of reptilians as the agents of Trayvon Martin’s killing is so grotesque and offensive that it completely trivializes every aspect of that tragedy. 

If Progressives, her Buddhist associates, those who work for human rights and social justice, whoever they might be, consider Alice Walker a voice for social change and a champion of human rights – and they have scruples but do not speak out and demand a public accounting from her, and also do not repudiate any association with this dangerous rubbish, they are nothing but self-serving cowards, crass epistemological relativists – or perhaps they share these detestable delusions.