Explosive: Obama’s Mentor Derrick Bell on ‘Jewish Neoconservative Racists’

Posted on | March 9, 2012 | 61 Comments

John Podhoretz at Commentary on the controversy unleashed by the Breitbart.com video:

Michael Powell of the New York Times reflected conventional opinion in liberal media circles when he tweeted: “Derrick Bell, Radical? We’re to pretend our history cleansed? He fought 4 Civil Rights in Mississippi.”
It is incumbent on Powell and others, if they want to get in on the conversation about Bell, to explain what on earth is mainstream about comments he made in an eye-opening New York Observer interview published on October 10, 1994, that is not available online. Among other remarks, Bell denounced Henry Louis (Skip) Gates for writing a New York Times op-ed condemning black anti-Semitism:

I was furious. Even if everything he said was true, it was inexcusable not to mention what might have motivated blacks to feel this way, and to fail to talk about all the Jewish neoconservative racists who are undermining blacks in every way they can.

Bell went on to say, “Now, that wouldn’t excuse anti-Semitism, which is awful, but it would at least provide a context for this anger…”

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Tom Maguire has a well-researched pushback against Soledad O’Brien’s assertion that Joel Pollak misunderstood or misrepresented Professor Bell’s “critical race theory” (CRT). As previously noted, CRT has been described as “an academic tradition in which race plays the same role as class plays in the Marxist paradigm.” Anyone who doesn’t recognize CRT as a dangerous species of radicalism is naive.

UPDATE II: It is important also to note just how much toxic unfairness is embedded in Bell’s phrase “Jewish racist neoconservatives.” The attempt to make “neoconservative” a sort of synonym for “Jewish Republican” — if not indeed “Zionist warmonger” — was one of the dirtiest smears of the post-9/11 Left, and you see in Bell’s 1994 comments the bitter root of this kind of smear.

In point of fact, arguably the two most influential “neoconservatives” were both Irish Catholics, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Bill Bennett, and if being pro-Israel makes one a “neoconservative” then the word loses all meaning, because such a wide swath of American public opinion is pro-Israel.

As to Bell’s suggestion that “Jewish neoconservatives” are “racist,” this is a smear that dates back to the mid-1960s, when Black Power radicals like Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown took over leadership of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and purged whites from what had been — during the heyday of the civil rights protests — a broad coalition.

This racialist purge at SNCC naturally offended many liberal Jews who had been active supporters of the civil rights movement and who, indeed, counted Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman among Jewish martyrs to the cause of racial equality. Jewish liberals were further offended when the Carmichael/Brown radical axis justified their coup by branded their erstwhile Jewish allies as “racists.”

From this mid-1960s schism can be traced the enduring taint of anti-Semitism that has attached itself to black radicalism. Add in such other elements of political background as the 1967 Ocean Hill-Brownsville crisis over “community control” in New York City schools — when liberals sided with Black Power advocates against the Jewish-led teachers union — and you have the historical subtext for a decades-old enmity.

UPDATE III: Jeff “Outlaw” Goldstein:

Professor Bell’s fidelity to the critical race theory he helped popularize and promote is, historically, beyond dispute. And while the move from the Left now will be to pretend the story has no merit, it is incumbent upon those of us on the right to publicize just who Obama once was (and may very well still be) — if only to allow the American people, rather than a gatekeeper press looking to control the narrative and manufacture a kind of fictional character of “Barack Obama,” to decide who he really is.

Now a Memeorandum thread.

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Category: Barack Obama, Culture, History, Intellectuals, Racism

Comments

61 Responses to “Explosive: Obama’s Mentor Derrick Bell on ‘Jewish Neoconservative Racists’”

smitty
March 9th, 2012 @ 12:27 pm

@rsmccain:disqus “Now, that wouldn’t excuse. . .” is the cue for the media to ignore whatever follows the elipses, no? The Left is always about having it both ways.
richard mcenroe
March 9th, 2012 @ 12:29 pm

Jews have not done a tithe the harm to blacks that’s been done by fine progressive white gentiles like LBJ…
Mikey NTH
March 9th, 2012 @ 12:35 pm

So the point of the video was to introduce everyone to some new old friends of Barack?

That’s a start.
A Guy From Lithia Springs
March 9th, 2012 @ 12:41 pm

What does this have to do with anything? THIS was the big bombshell? You boys missed your shot at portraying BHO as a stealth black nationalist/Muslim/hater of white people. That’s so four years ago. Sorry.
smitty
March 9th, 2012 @ 12:43 pm

It’s almost as though you’re playing the “toothpaste is out of the barn” card as a means of distracting from the election this November.
ThomasD
March 9th, 2012 @ 12:46 pm

Right, because being up for re-election means ignoring everything that came before the present.

Whatever dose you are consuming at the Springs, it’s not quite right…
A Guy From Lithia Springs
March 9th, 2012 @ 12:50 pm

This non-story is not pertinent to anything relevant. The distraction is all on your side. Your Arizona sheriff is rejecting the President’s citizenship, and Breitbart’s remnants are still trying to cast BHO as a black nationalist. You’re fighting the last war, not the current one. Its the road to defeat. Enjoy.
Mo
March 9th, 2012 @ 12:57 pm

Hey, us Jewish folks did a lot to the slaves in the U.S. My grandpappy back in Russia, and his daddy (murdered in the 1905 Revolution) I’m sure would have still owned slaves back in Russia given the opportunity. My dad’s family perished in Auschwitz and my dad literally worked as a slave for the Nazis, before he was liberated…I’m SURE he and his family would have owned and beaten slaves had they been here a hundred years or so earlier.

I feel SO guilty that I feel reparation money should be pried from my wallet to expiate said guilt.

I will tell you seriously, when I read about reprehensible pieces-of-dung like Derrick Bell, or Al “Jew murderer” Sharpton, Jessie “Hymietown”Jackson, Farrakhan and JeremiahWrong, and hey, as long as I’m on a roll, a certain POTUS who I suspect agrees with every one of them (except cultivates Jews to give him money because 1) some of my brethren are incredibly stupid and 2) lying is the O way)…I start to feel a bit of hatred towards a certain race that I never felt my whole life. I try to stifle it down to just hating those individuals…I have wonderful neighbors who are black and co-workers who I enjoy and I don’t want to think of them in the same terms…but this is the destructive “reward” of the race-baiting crowd and our Divider-in-Chief; race relations are falling off the cliff because of these black bigots.

That these men (and women, let’s not forget the heinous Sheila Jackson Lee and others) are given huge amounts of exposure…that we have a President who obviously buys into the same CRAP…is a sign of the suicidal end of the U. S. if we don’t put a stop to it and face it and not let go unchallenged.
richard mcenroe
March 9th, 2012 @ 12:59 pm

The point is, every single member of the mainstream media had this information before the election and sat on it. THAT’s the point here. Just like they knew Sarah Fluke was an astroturf’d fake, and hid that knowledge from the public.
EBL
March 9th, 2012 @ 1:02 pm

I linked you to this…
Charles
March 9th, 2012 @ 1:22 pm

It’s a simple equation, under CRT Marxist = Racist. Neocon = Marxist (you do know Neocons are just conservative Marxists, right?). Therefore, Neocon = Racist. Bell is not saying all Jews are Neocon Racists, but that may not be clear from context.

As far as Barack Obama, the Bell connection doesn’t prove he is a CRTist much less a Marxist, just that he may be a fellow traveler. That, of course, is the thesis of the new movie, “The Road We Traveled.”
Pablo
March 9th, 2012 @ 1:26 pm

Anyone who doesn’t recognize CRT as a dangerous species of radicalism is naive.

Let’s not underestimate the power of willful ignorance.
richard mcenroe
March 9th, 2012 @ 1:33 pm

Yep, and I remember my great granpappy talkin’ ’bout how we made them darkies HOP back on the family farm in County Cavan… oh, wait, no we didn’t. No slaves in Ireland but the Irish…
robertstacymccain
March 9th, 2012 @ 1:59 pm

The assertion that neoconservatism is a variant of Marxism – “Trotskyism” is the usual label – is tendentious and difficult to justify. It is true that some of the original neoconservatives began their lives as political intellectuals in the City College leftist milieu. But this is merely a way of saying that neoconservatism is a movement dominated by urban intellectuals, nearly all of whom played footsie with the Popular Front back in the day.
Furthermore, it wasn’t just neocons who came to the conservative movement from Marxism: Was the former CPUSA member Whittaker Chambers a “neocon”? Or what about James Burnham, the ex-Trotskyist whose analysis of the “managerial elite” was so influential on the arch-paleoconservative Sam Francis?
To my own way of thinking, the most pernicious of the so-called neocons are the Straussians of the Claremont School, but that is due to their tendency to celebrate Platonic “noble lies,” presenting a view of American history enshrouded by mythical meaning. However, the influence of Strauss and his disciples, like so much else relating to neoconservatism (real and alleged), got twisted into a Gordian knot of anti-Bush propaganda after 9/11, so that it’s impossible to have a reasonable discussion among conservatives about it.
Zombie_Breitbart
March 9th, 2012 @ 1:59 pm

Must get brain…
Another Obama mentor: Derrick “I live to harass white folks” Bell – #vettheprez — mooseandsquirrel.ca
March 9th, 2012 @ 2:05 pm

[…] a race and class-baiting radical and look what you get: Obama’s Mentor Derrick Bell on ‘Jewish Neoconservative Racists’ — and very appreciative of Louis Farrakhan and the Khalid […]
Adjoran
March 9th, 2012 @ 2:30 pm

Then you are free to ignore the story, and go back to Lithia Springs on the whores you rode in on.
Adjoran
March 9th, 2012 @ 2:32 pm

I hear there’s a fountain of it in Lithia Springs.
FenelonSpoke
March 9th, 2012 @ 2:39 pm

Probably should have called his place of residence”Lithium” Springs because his comments, such as”Bell is just another guy on the block; No problem” indicate some sort of liberal mental disorder.
Steve
March 9th, 2012 @ 3:00 pm

I’m not seeing the “explosive” aspect of this. People on the left routinely make nasty – and often rather racist – remarks about their opponents. Are we all supposed to get excited that they mentioned Jews here?
Steve
March 9th, 2012 @ 3:06 pm

>” Was the former CPUSA member Whittaker Chambers a “neocon”? Or what about James Burnham ..?”

It’s not just where a person comes from which makes them a neocon, it’s also where they end up. Chambers ended up in a notably different place than did Irving Kristol, for instance.
Adjoran
March 9th, 2012 @ 3:06 pm

The main point so far is that this close connection was covered up by the media in 2008.

If you understand Breitbart’s modus operandi, the likelihood is that each segment released will be more significant, and the dribbling out is a part of the method because it invites the other side to expose themselves – as with the blatant denials of ACORN, before he released the videos.
Steve
March 9th, 2012 @ 3:15 pm

>” The attempt to make “neoconservative” a sort of synonym for “Jewish
Republican” — if not indeed ”Zionist warmonger” — was one of the
dirtiest smears of the post-9/11 Left”

As you already know, the idea greatly preceded the post 9/11 Left. And it’s an idea which has a sold basis. Commentary Magazine explicitly defines itself as a Jewish and neoconservative publication.

From the “About” section at Commentary.

“Since its inception in 1945, and increasingly after it emerged as the
flagship of neoconservatism in the 1970s, the magazine has been
consistently engaged with several large, interrelated questions: the
fate of democracy and of democratic ideas in a world threatened by
totalitarian ideologies; the state of American and Western security; the
future of the Jews, Judaism, and Jewish culture in Israel, the United
States, and around the world; and the preservation of high culture in an
age of political correctness and the collapse of critical standards.”

Nothing wrong with that, as far as it goes. But it does mean that those people who go all bug-eyed at the phrase “Jewish neoconservative” seem a bit silly and uninformed.

OTOH the “racist” charge, coming from the CRT gang, is mind-blowing hypocrisy.
Quartermaster
March 9th, 2012 @ 4:16 pm

Chambers also repudiated his communism. The more prominent of the Jewish neocons have stated they were proud they’d been Trotskyites.

Some of them, prominently Ron Radish, has not recovered from it, and David Horowitz has only partially made the transition, repeatedly publishing Dershowitz who has never tried to make the transition.
Quartermaster
March 9th, 2012 @ 4:20 pm

The AZ Sheriff did nothing of teh sort. he simply said the BC the Obummer put up was a forgery. Loons like you are the ones making the jump, not us, and not the Sheriff.
SDN
March 9th, 2012 @ 5:33 pm

No, we’re fighting the forever war showing that Leftists like you are too dishonest to actually include in a trust-based society based on the idea of good faith. All your hymns to “diversity” can’t mask the fact of your essential belief in your own superiority and determination that you are justified in using any lie to enslave the rest of us.

Slither along, Copperhead.
K-Bob
March 9th, 2012 @ 6:54 pm

“those people who go all bug-eyed at the phrase “Jewish neoconservative” seem a bit silly and uninformed”

Non sequitur. A nasty one at that.
K-Bob
March 9th, 2012 @ 7:07 pm

Exactly so. There are at least three threads of Neoconservative thinking that are constantly at odds. (Reminds me of libertarian infighting.)

A)The original Jewish guys who called themselves Neoconservatives (and their offspring and friends, no they weren’t all jews, but the big names were);
B)the Clinton/Gore Straussian types; and
C) the folks like Don Rumsfeld and the Bush clan, who are much more pragmatic (some of them decidedly Machiavellian in their pragmatism–and some of those guys were also influenced by Strauss).
Soledad O'Brien
March 9th, 2012 @ 7:09 pm

QUIT PAYING ATTENTION TO THIS STORY! IT’S INCONSEQUENTIAL! YEEEAARGH!
Breitbart Accomplishes Again, What Breitbart Accomplished Before - The POH Diaries
March 9th, 2012 @ 7:09 pm

[…] Wright. He’s just a harmless, black preacher. Don’t pick on Derrick Bell. He was just a harmless black professor at Harvard, no less. Don’t pick on Barack Obama. He’s just a harmless, black […]
K-Bob
March 9th, 2012 @ 7:15 pm

Man this post by Stacy takes me back. Excellent recap. You should get a PAID set of articles at the “Bigs” for covering this. People seem to forget you were newspaperin’ all through this messy time in American history, and were payin’ attention.
AnonymousDrivel
March 9th, 2012 @ 7:18 pm

Totally harmless and irrelevant. It’s so obvious considering Professor Charles Ogletree admitted collaborating in hiding the association and PBS edited the hell out of the innocuous exchange. We have proof of them actually “acting stupidly.”

By all means, walk past this graveyard. It doesn’t matter. Obama now has his record to rely on. It’s the one that will bury him.
Charles
March 9th, 2012 @ 8:58 pm

My view is that the neocons still believe in the class struggle, they’ve just switched to what they believe will be the winning side. They are Das Capitalists if you will.

Since Marx’s view of capitalism is so wrong-headed, the neocon ideology leads to bad outcomes that mirror those you get with orthodox Marxism.
Sarah Palin: Obama Wants to Go Back to 'Pre-Civil War Days' - ScrollPost.com
March 9th, 2012 @ 9:24 pm

[…] (via Memeorandum). And Robert Stacy McCain picks up on that with a beefy entry, “Explosive: Obama’s Mentor Derrick Bell on ‘Jewish Neoconservative Racists’.” So, yeah, Sarah Palin is absolutely correct. President Obama and his progressive defenders […]
Barack Obama:The First American President To Embrace Critical Race Theory « Nice Deb
March 9th, 2012 @ 10:16 pm

[…] Explosive: Obama’s Mentor Derrick Bell on ‘Jewish Neoconservative Racists’ […]
Bob Belvedere
March 10th, 2012 @ 12:08 am

Methinks Charles has been residing on the left bank a little too long.
Saturday Morning Links – Not Enough Hours in the Day Edition | The Lonely Conservative
March 10th, 2012 @ 12:15 am

[…] Hall After Screaming at Governor Christie (Video)We’ve Seen This Resource War Movie BeforeExplosive: Obama’s Mentor Derrick Bell on ‘Jewish Neoconservative Racists’Don’t forget to follow all of the links. I know I’m missing something, but hey, […]
J.M. Heinrichs
March 10th, 2012 @ 4:51 am

Black Irish?

Cheers
Mediaite Simpleton
March 10th, 2012 @ 5:11 am

You are a moderator on Mediaite!
The site where entitlement whores refill their sippy cups with of Kool-Aid!

Andrew Breitbart will haunt you until you get a JOB!

I’ll see you over at Mediaite, where I’ll stupid slap the ignorant while you delete any comment that indicates your Dear Glorious Barack is a socialist turd!
Wombat_socho
March 10th, 2012 @ 7:04 am

The rest of us Hispanics would like you to shut up now. You’re making us look stupid.
1994 Derrick Bell ‘Jewish Neoconservative Racists’ by Macsmind – Politics, Culture and Breaking News and the 2012 Presidential Election!
March 10th, 2012 @ 9:54 am

[…] could hear Obama now, “just words”, but following up with “words matter”. Stacy McCain writes: ” It is important also to note just how much toxic unfairness is embedded in Bell’s phrase […]
Charles_Ulyses_Feney
March 10th, 2012 @ 12:01 pm

Are you busy?
LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL

Just the start sweetie…I’ve RECRUITED, BIG TIME. I’d cancel your weekend plans for the next couple of months…McNulty is gonna be pissed at you!
Zombie_Breitbart
March 10th, 2012 @ 1:35 pm

Must get brain…
Zombie_Breitbart
March 10th, 2012 @ 1:36 pm

Must get brain…
Zombie_Breitbart
March 10th, 2012 @ 1:39 pm

Must get brain…
Hout Bosques
March 10th, 2012 @ 1:45 pm

Rough day at the office honey…better grab a bite to eat, gonna be a looooooooong night sweetie! LOL
Hout Bosques
March 10th, 2012 @ 1:45 pm

Oh ya…Andrew say HELLO! LOL
Zombie_Breitbart
March 10th, 2012 @ 1:55 pm

Must get brain…
Zombie_Breitbart
March 10th, 2012 @ 1:55 pm

Worms ate all of Andrew’s brain…
Zombie_Breitbart
March 10th, 2012 @ 1:57 pm

Must get brain…