THE New York Times’s has a front-page obituary today of the former New Jersey poet laureate Amiri Baraka, who in addition to being a self-described “Marxist-Leninist-Maoist,” was a hater of whites, a Nazi sympathizer, a Muslim convert and one of the worst poets ever published. There are two reasons why Baraka’s poetic junk reached the light of literary day — the color of his skin and his hatred of white civilization.

But even liberals had a hard time loving him — not because of his sympathies with genocidal Communism, but because he ranted against Jews. The New Jersey legislature eliminated the position of poet laureate purely in an effort to fire Baraka for his poem “Somebody Blew up America,” which blamed 9-11 on Israel. See John Derbyshire’s literary analysis of the poem.

Lawrence Auster wrote in 2002:

What the mainstream media has not mentioned is that, apart from those four lines attacking Israel, the rest of the 292 line poem, which I found at the black web site bet.com, is a ceaseless invocation of hatred against whites as the source of virtually all the evil in the universe. Needless to say, no one has demanded that Baraka/Jones resign over that.

There would be something comical about millions of white suburbanites turning to their newspaper over breakfast coffee today and reading approving commentary about this breathtakingly hateful poetic garbage that blames every conceivable evil in the world on them — it would be funny, if it was not true.

— Comments —

Diana writes:

I could say a lot about Jones/Baraka, as I remember the era of his greatest notoriety with clarity, but for now I won’t.

I would simply like to point out that the expression on J/B’s face in the photo in the link you provided is the facial expression of every black “intellectual”  of the post-60s era: smug, hostile, entitled — and dumb as a box of rocks.

You see it on Michelle and Barack Obama.

Laura writes:

I agree about the smugness and hostility, but I don’t think he looks particularly dumb.

Pete writes:

You write:

“The New York Times’s has a front-page obituary today of the former New Jersey poet laureate Amiri Baraka, who in addition to being a self-described “Marxist-Leninist-Maoist,” was a hater of whites, a Nazi sympathizer, a Muslim convert and one of the worst poets ever published.”

Quite right, of course – but it is important to note that, in Baraka’s life, the links between Islam and Nazism are not simply circumstantial – but founded in deep similarities between the two ideologies.

Except perhaps among certain historians, it is not common knowledge that the National Socialists of Hitler’s Germany expended significant resources, time and money reaching out to Muslims not only in the Middle East but in the Balkans. Perhaps the most-notorious Muslim leader identified with the senior Nazi leadership was Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem – who spent most of the Second World War living in a Berlin suburb as an honored guest of the Nazi Party. The Mufti was in Berlin in part because he was on the run from British authorities for his part in trying to overthrow the British colonial government in what is now Iraq – but he was also there because his views, especially on the Jews, aligned very closely with those of Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler and other top Nazis. In particular, al-Husseini got on famously with the sadistic architect of the “Final Solution,” SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhardt Heydrich, the notorious “Butcher of Prague.”

Husseini was provided with a generous stipend paid by the party, and a residence and driver. He was also put to work broadcasting Arab language propaganda on a radio show the party sponsored for him. The Mufti was notorious for badgering the SS-Gestapo about the progress of the planned killing of the Jews and was known for hectoring them to work faster. Husseini assisted the regime by helping to raise and form the all-Muslim 13th Handschar Division of the Waffen-S.S., which later committed numerous atrocities in the Balkans.

After the war, some of the high-ranking survivors of the Nazi regime made it out of Europe and fled continental and many resurfaced in the Middle East. Closing the circle, many ex-German military officers secured posts as military advisors to Arab regimes in places like Egypt.

Al-Husseini survived the war and became something of an elder statesman figure in the Pan-Islamic movement. One of his foremost acolytes was terrorist Yasser Arafat, the Founder of PLO/Fatah and the fountainhead of groups like Black September.  Arafat wept openly at Husseini’s funeral.

As many of your readers know, Hitler’s magnum opus “Mein Kampf,” remains a best-seller in the Middle East in its translation into Arabic.

Of course, it is improbable that a figure like Amiri Baraka knew of these links between Islam and Nazism – or that the Nazis regarded brown-skinned people as untermenschen. Islam provided a convenient conduit for his hatred of whites and Judeo-Christian civilization generally – and the so-called “outreach” efforts of Muslims among black radicals (in prisons, poor neighborhoods, etc.) is now well-known.

Please follow and like us: