Angela Davis

Substack

What I've been doing this this week is portraying some of the Western Academy's leading and most influential figures, such as Edward Said, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Judith Butler. Their ideas have not only shaped the media and most international organizations, but they have also been fueled by both left-wing and Muslim anti-Western funders. Today, I have a few words to say about Angela Davis. In my forthcoming book, The Complete Palestinianization of American Feminism, I expand the discussion to include many more such idols with considerable claws of clay who have dominated our universities for at least four decades. 

When I was much younger and somewhat in the grip of a left-wing cult, I was among those who marched for Angela Davis when she was jailed in Manhattan. Most feminists and feminist magazines featured her as a Black-American feminist hero starting in 1972; this has continued on down through the decades. Feminists did not—and do not—view her as a pro-Soviet apologist. Feminist newspapers idolized her as a Black woman fighting back. They and others glamorized Davis as a feminist, an artist, and a heroic dissident, but she is nothing of the sort. 

Davis is an unrepentant Communist who supported the Soviet Union in every way and refused to criticize it for its persecution of real dissidents and ethnic minorities, including Soviet Jews. The millions of peasants whom Stalin murdered in a state-sponsored famine—not a word from Davis. Stalin's torture cells? His gulag? The rise of a plutocracy? Putin? Ukraine? Again, not a word of reproach. Instead, Davis savagely criticized only America for its history of slavery and for its continued discrimination against Black Americans. She was among those who took the globalized fight against apartheid in South Africa to alleged "apartheid" in Israel.

Although she is a lesbian, thank God, Davis does not identify as "queer." She has falsely compared what happened to Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, with what happens to brown-, black-, and olive-skinned Palestinian Jihadists and terrorists at the hands of Israelis fighting back. Davis has misused the concept of "intersectionality" so as to better create cartoon-level memes, the purpose of which is to scapegoat Israel for the crimes committed by others and to draw false parallels where none exist. For example, in a 2015 collection of her lectures and interviews, she strongly embraced anti-Zionism and, according to Dr. Corinne E. Blackmer, continued to repeat "the major strand of Soviet-era ideological propaganda but has transcended Cold War aporias to remerge in the twenty-first century as pro-BDS advocacy." In a 2017 article titled "The Intersectionality of Fools" in The New Criterion, Dominic Green critiques Davis's 2016 book, Freedom is a Constant Struggle, in which she likens "the recurring shootings or killings of unarmed Black men in the United States, on the one hand, with the deaths of armed Palestinian protestors in Israel/Palestine." I want to thank Corinne E. Blackmer for having led me to this article. "Armed protestors"? Is that how Davis characterizes Arab Jihadist/terrorists who are obsessed with ethnically "cleansing" the Middle East of its remaining Jews in Israel?  As I've noted elsewhere, when I spoke at the University of Santa Cruz, where Davis taught, I personally invited her to attend my lecture on antisemitism or at least to meet with me. Of course, I received no response. Does anyone even remember why Angela Davis was jailed, tried, and exonerated? Does anyone even care? 

In 1970, Davis purchased the firearms that Jonathan Jackson, the brother of the imprisoned George Jackson, used in the kidnapping of a judge, prosecutor, jurors, and two or three African American prisoners in an open court. A police shoot-out ensued, which led to the death of the judge and three African American men. Davis made the FBI Most Wanted List, was jailed, tried, and found innocent by an all-white jury. Support for her was tremendous. She visited Cuba and found it an anti-racist paradise. She visited Soviet Russia to receive the Lenin Peace Prize and ran for vice president of the American Communist Party.

Even before she was found "not guilty," Davis had already become the Che Guevara or the Lila Khaled of the feminist movement.