“They’ll Vote for Us Anyway”

Last week, the Senate, on an almost straight party-line vote, confirmed Kristen Clarke to head the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. There were many good reasons to oppose her confirmation on policy grounds — her support for investing less in the police, i.e., defunding; her organizing a conference as a law student in support of a number of cop-killers as “political prisoners”; and, most relevant to her new position, her expressed belief that the race of the applicant should be a factor in all hiring decisions, even for heart surgeons and airline pilots.

As a Harvard undergraduate, Clarke wrote an opinion piece in the Harvard Crimson, asserting that blacks have “superior physical and mental abilities,” citing the “melanin” thesis of Dr. Carol Barnes that because of their higher levels of melanin, blacks are endowed with greater mental, physical, and spiritual abilities. Clarke told the Senate Judiciary Committee that her op-ed was a satire. But the editors of the Crimson at the time found not the slightest “trace of irony” in her piece, which they retracted. She refused their request to specifically repudiate the pseudo-science she quoted.

Not only that, as head of the Black Students Association, Clarke invited as a speaker Professor Tony Martin, a proponent of many of the same black supremacy theories that Clarke had cited, and, for good measure, an outspoken anti-Semite and author of The Jewish Onslaught: Dispatches from the Wellesley Battlefront. In his speech, Martin denounced the Torah, Talmud, and Maimonides as racist texts. Subsequently, Clarke defended Martin to the Harvard Crimson as “an intelligent, well-versed Black intellectual who bases his information on indisputable fact.”

Of even greater concern — at least to those of us living in Israel — is President Biden’s appointment to senior policy-making positions of a veritable all-star team of officials hostile to Israel. Chief among them is Assistant Secretary of State for Israel-Palestine Hady Amr, the senior State Department figure setting policy with respect to Hamas and the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Amr previously served as the national coordinator for the anti-Israel Middle East Justice Network, which has criticized Israel for “ethnic cleansing” and “apartheid.” Within a year of 9/11, he wrote that the US should not be surprised that its military assistance to Israel and support for Israel in the UN Security Council came back to haunt it. (Even Osama bin Laden did not claim that support for Israel was his primary grievance against America.) At the time, Hadr described himself as inspired by the Second Intifada, which had unleashed a two-year run of terror attacks on Israeli civilians.