Can Harry Belafonte get any more disgustingly racist and bigoted?
Betsy's Page
You might remember that he called Colin Powell Bush's "house slave."
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In an interview on San Diego radio station KFMB-AM last Tuesday, Belafonte compared Powell to a plantation slave who moves into the slave owner's house and says only things that will please his master.
"There's an old saying," Belafonte said in that interview. "In the days of slavery, there were those slaves who lived on the plantation and there were those slaves that lived in the house. You got the privilege of living in the house if you served the master ... exactly the way the master intended to have you serve him."
Powell last week called the comments "unfortunate" and said he is "proud to be serving" his nation and his president.
"I think it's unfortunate that Harry used that characterization," Powell told "Larry King Live" last Tuesday. "If Harry had wanted to attack my politics, that was fine. If he wanted to attack a particular position I hold, that was fine. But to use a slave reference, I think, is unfortunate and is a throwback to another time and another place that I wish Harry had thought twice about using."
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Apparently, the outrage that he generated with that comment was not enough and his objectionable similes have just grown more objectionable. Comparing blacks who support Republicans to house slaves was not enough, now he has compared them to Jews who supported Hitler.
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Earlier this week, in an interview with Cybercast News Service, Belafonte used a Nazi analogy to attack black officials in the Bush administration. "Hitler had a lot of Jews high up in the hierarchy of the Third Reich," he said.
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Then Jews undertandably objected that there were not "a lot of Jews high up in the hierarchy of the Third Reich." Belafonte backed down....slightly.
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"I do regret the sentence was not structured more accurately," Belafonte told the 'Post' in a telephone interview from the United States. "I, too, agree that Jews weren't 'high up'."
He added, however, that "Jews did have a role, some did, in the demise and brutal treatment of the Jewish people." He pointed to the book Hitler's Jewish Soldiers as just one example supporting his statement. The book, recently profiled in the 'Post', tells of part-Jewish soldiers who fought for the Wehrmacht.
"Was it rampant? Absolutely not," he said. "But, these things happen and people are not exempt from their behavior."
He added, "Let's not be dishonest about all of us. The more we know the truth, the better we'll be [at] improving humanity."
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The author of the book that Belafonte cited is not pleased with Belafonte's use of his work.
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"Belafonte continues to distort history. My book Hitler's Jewish Soldiers shows that a number of people of partial Jewish ancestry served in the German military, but they did not even consider themselves Jews. Moreover, the vast majority of them were drafted--they were forced to serve Hitler just as other Jews were forced to become slave laborers in Auschwitz and elsewhere. In fact, many of them were later dismissed from the German military and sent to forced labor camps where they themselves were persecuted and some were murdered. Belafonte should take the trouble to read the books he cites, before claiming they support him. My book doesn't support him."
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But, in retracting his remarks, Belafonte can't resist a few cracks at Israel and Jews.
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He was surprised by the reaction his comments provoked, though he stated that "sometimes the Jewish people have laid claim to such a high and pure morality" that they take great exception to facts which challenge that claim, despite that theirs "is a DNA that sits within the entire human family."
But, he said, "I can understand why Jewish leaders would be prone to protect the image of George Bush and his administration."
He continued that the administration fully supports Israel "even when there are questions of the humanitarian, the moral, and the political [motivation] of things that are done to Palestinians."
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So, Jews who object to his remarks saying that Jews helped Hitler are just protecting Bush because he supports Israel despite all those terrible things that Israelis are doing to the Palestinians. Nothing about what the Palestinians do to the Israelis. That would ruin his metaphor, wouldn't it? And of course Belafonte denies that he is anti-Semitic because his wife is Jewish and he once met Moshe Dayan and sang Hava Nagila.
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"I still sing Hava Nagila," the 78-year-old declared in a voice raspy from a lifetime spent onstage, "and I still do the best version of it."
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The non sequitur is humorous. Would Belafonte excuse someone who said that blacks were high up in the Confederacy simply because that person sang a great version of "Follow the Drinking Gourd?"
Of course, to a bigot like Belafonte, any egregious simile is acceptable when trying to keep blacks back on the plantation of liberal thought. Any attempt by an African American to think for him or herself is totally unacceptable. All blacks must hew to the political line that Belafonte supports and no diversity of thought is allowed. To do so is comparable to supporting Hitler.
Belafonte came to fame singing about gathering up bananas. He worked in the civil rights movement for years. But that doesn't give him the right to dictate what every single African American should think and believe. The implication is that blacks are unable to think for themselves. What a diminution of their thinking abilities. Belafonte is the one who is displaying a racist attitude and belittling the reasoning abilities of all African Americans.
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