Posted on 10/03/2002 11:03:11 AM PDT by RCW2001
EWARK, Oct. 2 — Amiri Baraka, the state's poet laureate, stood on the podium at a literary festival here today to say that he would not heed Gov. James E. McGreevey's demand that he step down for writing a poem that implied that Israel knew in advance about the attack on the World Trade Center.
Before a mostly supportive crowd of about 200 in a stately hall of the Newark Public Library, Mr. Baraka said his critics were attempting to "repress and stigmatize independent thinkers everywhere."
"I will not apologize, I will not resign," Mr. Baraka said, causing most in attendance to applaud. Others, however, sat silently.
On Friday, Governor McGreevey called for Mr. Baraka to step down because of some passages in his poem "Somebody Blew Up America," which Mr. Baraka wrote in October 2001 and which has been widely disseminated. Mr. Baraka was appointed poet laureate this summer, and the governor has acknowledged that he probably does not have the power to force him to resign.
"We wholeheartedly disagree with what Mr. Baraka is saying," Kevin Davitt, the governor's press spokesman, said today. "Unfortunately, our political hands are tied on this one. The most we can do right now is to continue to urge Mr. Baraka to resign and to explore any legislative possibilities to prevent any such future misfortunes like this."
The poet laureate is chosen by a six-member selection committee appointed by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. State law makes no provision for removing someone from the post.
After the event at the library, Shai Goldstein, the New Jersey regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, said the Newark poet had "added insult to injury" by perpetuating what Mr. Goldstein called a "big lie" that had circulated through many parts of the world that somehow Jews were responsible for the attack on the trade center.
"When you repeat any part of the big lie, you're not part of the solution of getting to the truth, but of perpetuating that lie," he said. "He has disgraced the position and himself."
Mr. Baraka was the keynote speaker for an event marking the library's designation as a literary landmark by the New Jersey Center for the Book. In his address, he spent almost 45 minutes going over his poem almost line by line, and insisting that it had been distorted and subject to "trash propaganda."
"It is a poem that aims to probe and disturb, but there is not any evidence of anti-Semitism," he said.
One part reads:
Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed
Who told 4,000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
To stay home that day
Why did Sharon stay away?
Mr. Baraka insisted that Israel and its prime minister, Ariel Sharon, as well as President Bush, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and many United States allies, knew of the pending terrorist attacks, citing various reports in the news media in the Middle East. Such accounts, however, have been widely discredited.
He noted that the poem also pointed out atrocities committed against many groups, including the Jews.
Mr. Baraka's appearance attracted many supporters. Some said they supported the poet's right to talk about oppression in the world.
The principal of the Morton Street Middle School in Newark, Carl Gregory, brought about 20 of his students and teachers to hear Mr. Baraka.
"His is definitely a poem that gets people to start asking questions at a time when people in power don't want us to ask questions," Mr. Gregory said. "I want our children to be exposed to great literature, and he is a great poet."
Library officials said that while some invited guests canceled their attendance, they did not consider asking Mr. Baraka to call off his speech.
"We know Mr. Baraka, we know the kinds of things he has written," said Charles E. Cummings, a Newark historian who is on the library's staff. "That's what the library is about, the First Amendment. We are totally a bastion of free speech."
Catherine Boback-Kinsella, a former librarian in nearby Harrison, N.J., who now works for a museum in Harrison, said she did not believe Mr. Baraka should have written the poem, but she listened to him politely. "Very, very liberal," she said afterward, shaking her head. "I don't know that there's much truth in it. You could say a person has a right to free speech, but when it comes to times of threatened national security, he should have been more sensitive himself about what he was saying."
The Wundter of It All "There is no counting the doctorates in education that have been awarded to those who have done nothing more than tabulate the answers to questionnaires. That such degrees are so common, however, is not only because the work is easy, bad enough, but also because the supposed objects of study often cannot be known directly. When they can, in fact, they are obviously trivial. "
The Seven Deadly Principles "After sober and judicious consideration, and weighing one thing against another in the interests of reasonable compromise, H. L. Mencken concluded that a startling and dramatic improvement in American education required only that we hang all the professors and burn down the schools. His uncharacteristically moderate proposal was not adopted."
The poet laureate is chosen by a six-member selection committee appointed by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.I have a suggestion. Defund the New Jersey Council for the Humanities and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.
This POS posing as a poet is a prime example of intellectual anti semitism!
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest;
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Not poetry
Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed
Who told 4,000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
To stay home that day
Why did Sharon stay away?
Trajan88; TAMU Class of '88
CHUNG: Joining me now: the man once described by the American Academy of Arts and Letters as one of the most important African- American poets since Langston Hughes: New Jersey poet laureate Amiri Baraka.
BARAKA: How are you?
CHUNG: Thank you so much for being with us.
BARAKA: Thank you.
CHUNG: Why did you write these particular lines that have provoked such controversy?
BARAKA: Well, let's say the rest of the poem is of no consequence? It's just those lines that are important?
CHUNG: Those lines have created quite a firestorm. And you know that.
BARAKA: Well, here's the point. My intention was to show that not only did Israel know, because Israel -- we're talking about 9/11 -- not only did Israel know, but the United States knew. Bush and company...
CHUNG: You're saying that Israel and the United States knew...
BARAKA: And Germany.
CHUNG: ... that these attacks were going to occur?
BARAKA: And Germany and France and Russia and England. And this is confirmed.
CHUNG: And you know that's preposterous.
BARAKA: Do I know it's preposterous?
CHUNG: Yes.
BARAKA: No, it's not preposterous.
(CROSSTALK)
CHUNG: The Israelis did not know. The United States did not know.
BARAKA: You know that's not true.
One of the reasons that what's her name, McKinney, Cynthia McKinney, the congresswoman from Georgia, got put out is because she said the same thing. I have a press release of hers in my bag that says the same thing.
CHUNG: What evidence do you have?
BARAKA: Do you know that the Democratic Party is saying the same thing?
CHUNG: The Democratic Party does not say that, sir.
BARAKA: The Democratic Party does not say that Bush and company knew?
CHUNG: Knew that 9/11, the attacks were going to occur?
BARAKA: Knew that 9/11 was coming, yes. They don't say that?
CHUNG: They don't say that.
BARAKA: That's not what they said last week, two weeks ago.
CHUNG: There have been reports. There have been committee hearings regarding it, but no.
BARAKA: When they were saying they can't connect the dots?
CHUNG: No.
BARAKA: I think, though, you're not reading closely. Maybe you hear what you want to here.
CHUNG: What evidence do you have?
BARAKA: What evidence do the people who have said that have? What evidence does the Democratic Party?
There is any number of articles on the Internet. You can check with any number of Israeli newspapers, "Haaretz", "Yediot Aharonot," Manar TV. You can check the Web site of Shevac (ph), the Israeli security. And what's wild is that people like this company, for instance -- and I'm not singling you out -- you have huge mainframe computers. You can get this stuff with just a few taps of your fingers.
CHUNG: All right, let's put aside for a moment whether or not
(CROSSTALK)
BARAKA: What's interesting to me, the rest of the poem -- they're going to destroy this poem, they think, by trying to deny that the whole imperialist world knew this was going to happen, that Bush and company knew this was going to happen and did nothing. The FBI agents in Minnesota and Arizona will tell you the same thing. One of the FBI agents is suing them about it.
CHUNG: There is no question that there have been reports, and, at the committee hearings, that there were lots of various warnings and no one was able to pull it all together.
BARAKA: That's what they say, right. OK.
CHUNG: However, if we put aside whether or not it is true or not true, even your critics say you have a right as a poet...
BARAKA: Well, why are they trying to beat me up, if I have the right?
CHUNG: Because you are the poet laureate of New Jersey and you have, according to them, a responsibility. You have an obligation not to foment hatred.
BARAKA: My responsibility is to truth and beauty. That's what Keats said and that's what Du Bois said. That's my responsibility.
CHUNG: Do you agree that your poem includes hatred? And should you be fomenting hatred?
BARAKA: Tell me, what is hatred in there? What is hatred? Tell me what's hatred in there?
CHUNG: You don't think that there's hatred in there?
BARAKA: What is it? What is it?
CHUNG: OH, my goodness. Well, should I read you all the lines?
BARAKA: There's a great Chinese author named Lu Hsun (ph) that says if you can't hate, you can't love. I mean, everything is dialectic. There's no up without down. There's no fat without skinny. So I would admit I hate slavery, you understand? I hate murderers. I hate lies.
CHUNG: How do you view your role as poet laureate?
BARAKA: To bring attention to poetry, to give people access to poetry, to network poetry throughout the state. But if they're going to try to censor what I say -- look, the two most praised poets, American poets, by the academy, by these same people, are Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, the worst anti-Semites in the universe. And I certainly can't compare to them.
CHUNG: I know you have said that you're not an anti-Semite.
BARAKA: That's right.
CHUNG: You say you're an anti-Israeli.
BARAKA: Well, let's say this. I'm against Israeli foreign -- policy.
I'm against what they're doing to the Palestinians. I think they're massacring the Palestinians. And I have two communications from Israel, one by Gush Shalom, which is the peace block, another by 95 Israeli academics, all condemning Israel. And the ADL is condemning them. I want to know how does the ADL gets over to Israel condemning -- are they condemning them as anti-Semites, too?
CHUNG: Are you anti-Jewish?
BARAKA: No, of course not. That's bizarre.
See, this is what I'm saying. You mean to tell me I can't criticize Israel without getting called anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish? You think that Israel and Judaism are the same thing? They're not. Do you understand what I mean?
CHUNG: Yes, I know this has always been your position.
BARAKA: Well, people hide behind it. Israel hides behind that. If you attack them for what they're doing to the Palestinians, by the way, you're anti-Semitic.
CHUNG: When you uttered this poem at a festival, "The New York Times" quotes the director of the festival as saying you did apologize for the poem and you actually extracted the offensive lines the second time you read it. Is that true?
BARAKA: What I did was, I apologized to Mr. Habba (ph), because he was very frustrated. People were jumping on him, you understand? Not people were not jumping on him.
Somebody apparently -- and he was upset and he came to me and said something like, "We're trying to pull things together," or, "We're trying to deal with everyone. And you're trying to marginalize this," or something like that.
And I said: "I'm sorry, Jim, because this is your job. I know it's a difficult job."
CHUNG: Well, there you go. Isn't that really essentially what all your critics are asking, that you are, whatever you said, marginalizing or causing a schism?
BARAKA: Well, let me ask you this. Are you concerned about those Palestinians that are getting killed?
CHUNG: Can you answer that question?
BARAKA: Is the ADL concerned about the Palestinians getting killed?
CHUNG: If you apologized to the director of the festival, why not maintain that position now regarding your poem and say, "All right, maybe I shouldn't have, as poet laureate..."
BARAKA: No, no, no. I was apologizing to him for him having to accept all this criticism and attack from people. You know what I mean? And he felt put upon as a result of what I was doing. But as far as people jumping on me, they got a right to do that. If they want to jump on me, I can take it. You understand?
CHUNG: All right, we have someone right now...
BARAKA: I bet.
CHUNG: ... who would happily jump on you at your press conference.
(CROSSTALK)
BARAKA: Is this the same people who attacked affirmative action, who filed a suit against affirmative action?
CHUNG: You challenged the Anti-Defamation League to debate you on national television. Now, the ADL declined to debate you directly.
BARAKA: I'll bet you they did.
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