Laurent Guyénot – The Unz Review March 30, 2023

On April 4, 1968, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in circumstances not unlike those surrounding the murder of the late President Kennedy. The name, portrait, and profile of the alleged lone sniper were broadcast almost instantly. As William Pepper, King’s friend and attorney, has shown in An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King (2003), the mentally deficient James Earl Ray had been handled by some unidentified “Raul” (possibly connected to Jack Ruby), who had arranged for his housing in a room overlooking King’s balcony at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, and for a gun to be found under his window with his fingerprints on it. The lawyer appointed to Ray’s defense convinced him to plead guilty in hope of getting leniency from the court. Nobody paid attention when Ray recanted three days later, maintaining his innocence thereafter until his death in 1998.

Reverend King had embarrassed Johnson’s government by his stance against the Vietnam War, and still more by his project to gather “a multiracial army of the poor” in a “Poor People’s Campaign” that would march on Washington and camp on Capitol Hill until Congress signed a “Declaration of the Human Rights of the Poor.”

Since it is seldom pointed out, it is worth emphasizing that King had also disappointed the Jewish-Zionist community, who felt he had never paid back an important debt. King had received strong support from American Jews—in money, legal advice, and media coverage—and to that extent he owed them his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize. Many Jews had helped organize his march on Washington, DC, which culminated in his famous “I have a dream” speech of August 28, 1963, in front of the Lincoln Memorial. As Seth Berkman recalled on the fortieth anniversary of that historic landmark: “Arnie Aronson was a little-known but crucial organizer; Rabbi Uri Miller recited the opening prayer; Rabbi Joachim Prinz delivered a stirring speech just before King’s historic words.”He also mentions “Kivie Kaplan, who became president of the NAACP,” “Peter A. Geffen, founder of the Heschel School, in Manhattan,” and “civil rights advocate Hyman Bookbinder.”[1]

The introductory remarks of Rabbi Joachim Prinz, then chairman of the American Jewish Congress, before King’s famous speech on August 28, 1963, offer a telling example of Jewish opportunism: “I speak to you as an American Jew,” Prinz begins.

As Jews, we bring to this great demonstration in which thousands of us proudly participate a twofold experience: one of the spirit, and one of our history. In the realm of the spirit, our fathers told us thousands of years ago that when God created man, he created him as everybody’s neighbor … From our Jewish experience of three and a half thousand years, we say: Our ancient history began with slavery and the yearning for freedom.

There followed a reminder of Jewish suffering from medieval ghettos to the recent Holocaust. Then, just when we would expect a word about the condition of Black Americans, Prinz brushes away the issue: Americans “must speak up and act,” he says, “not for the sake of the negro, not for the sake of the Black community, but for the sake of the image, the dream, the idea, and the aspiration of America itself.”[2]

This Joachim Prinz upholding good neighborhood between all men, is the same Joachim Prinz who in 1934 applauded the Nazi State for being “built upon the principle of the purity of nation and race.” In his Wir Juden (“We the Jews”) published in Berlin in 1934, he wrote:

We want assimilation to be replaced by a new law: the declaration of belonging to the Jewish nation and the Jewish race. A state built upon the principle of the purity of nation and race can only be honored and respected by a Jew who declares his belonging to his own kind.[3][4]

This did not prevent him from being elected, in 1958, president of the American Jewish Congress, the very organization that in 1933 had called for total economic war on Germany. Why would it? In 1934, he later explained, he thought that, it was good for the Jews to support Hitler in Germany. That is what matters.

We must infer that, in 1964, Prinz thought it was good for the Jews to support MLK. So did Charles Silberman, while extending the analysis to other battles:

American Jews are committed to cultural tolerance because of their belief—firmly rooted in history—that Jews are only safe in a society that welcomes a broad spectrum of attitudes and behaviors, as well as a diversity of religions and ethnic groups. It is this belief, for example, and not approval of homosexuality, that leads an overwhelming majority of American Jews to support the rights of homosexuals.[5]

In return for their support, American Jews expected from King some friendly gesture toward Israel. That was badly needed after the Six Days War. King was officially invited more than once to Israel, but always politely declined (“too busy”). According to Haaretz, “Documents that have come to light 45 years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. show Israel’s efforts to woo the civil rights leader—a campaign that never came to fruition.”[6] After 1967, Black civil rights activists became increasingly critical of Israel. Many resented the disproportionate presence of Jews. King’s visit to Israel would have broken the movement apart. So King said no to Israel.

Whether or not King was assassinated for failing to pay his debt (on the order of crypto-Jew Johnson), it is a matter of record that, after his death, Zionists abused his legacy by pretending he had expressed support for Israel in a letter written to an anti-Zionist friend, containing the following passage:

You declare, my friend; that you do not hate the Jews, you are merely ‘anti-Zionist’ …. And 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 … Anti-Semitism, the hatred of the Jewish people, has been and remains a blot on the soul of mankind. In this we are in full agreement. So know also this: Anti-Zionist is inherently anti-Semitic, and ever will be so.

This letter is a hoax. It first appeared in the book Shared Dreams: Martin Luther King, Jr. & the Jewish Community by Rabbi Marc Schneier (1999), an other obscene attempt to capitalize on the legacy of MLK, naively forwarded by Dr. King’s son, Martin Luther King III. Although fully proven fake, this letter has since been reprinted in many books and web pages. The Anti-Defamation League’s Michael Salberg used that very quote in his July 31, 2001 testimony before the US House of Representatives International Relations Committee’s Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights.[7] And so, once dead, King was forced to give Israel the very support he had refused them when alive. In this way, King’s death was good for the Jews.

Notes

[1] Seth Berkman, “The Jews Who Marched on Washington With Martin Luther King,” Forward.com, August 27, 2013, on forward.com.

[2] Prinz’s speech is on www.joachimprinz.com/images/mow.mp3.

[3] Quoted in Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, Pluto Press, 1994, p. 86.

[4] Seth Berkman, “The Jews Who Marched on Washington With Martin Luther King,” Forward.com, August 27, 2013, on forward.com.

[5] Charles Silberman, A Certain People: American Jews and Their Lives Today, Summit Books, 1985, p. 350.

[6] Ofer Aderet, “How Martin Luther King Jr. avoided visiting Israel,” Haaretz, February 23, 2013, https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/2018-04-03/ty-article/martin-luther-king-jr-s-pilgrimage-to-israel-that-never-was/0000017f-db2f-db5a-a57f-db6f89ca0000

[7] Fadi Kiblawi and Will Youmans, “Israel’s apologists and the Martin Luther King Jr. hoax,” January 18, 2004, on electronicintifada.net.

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