When people criticize Israel they criticize Zionism thus they hate Jews - make no mistake about it.”
The ISRAEL’S APOLOGISTS
often refer to a letter written by
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to an Anti-Zionist Friend” in an August, 1967 edition of Saturday Review!
http://christianactionforisrael.org/antiholo/ml_king.html
"... You declare, my friend; that you do not hate the Jews, you are merely 'anti-Zionist' ... And I say, let the truth ring forth from the high mountain tops, let it echo through the valleys of God's green earth: When people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews... Anti-Semitism, the hatred of the Jewish people, has been and remains a blot on the soul of mankind. In this we are in full agreement. So know also this: anti-Zionist is inherently anti-Semitic, and ever will be so."
The fact is that this is a great framework to understand how various advocate of Israel have used statement like this to promote their cause and silence the critics.
Dr. King’s expertise as a non-violent civil rights leader and visionary are unparalleled in U.S. history. However, that does not make him an informed commentator on Middle Eastern affairs or on the ideological facets of Zionism. As impressive as the references to his views on Israel may seem, this is a textbook example of
Argumentum ad Verecundiam or fallacious appeal to authority (If Aristotle or Bible said it was so, it is so)
However Tim Wise, the Antiracism writer
http://www.zmag.org/bios/homepage.cfm?authorID=96
checked the citation, and declared in an article on January, 2003, that he found no such a letter from Dr. King in any of the four August, 1967 editions of the Saturday Review or in any book by Dr. King or his bibliography as provided by the King Center in Atlanta, nor in the catalogs of several large public and university libraries.
Soon afterwards, CAMERA, a pro-Israeli organization, published a statement declaring that the letter was “apparently” a hoax.
More recently, the Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) featured excerpts from the letter prominently on its website. Despite its name, SPME is an advocacy group seeking to bolster Israel’s image on campus – a mission it claims promotes peace in the region. Ironically, right under the false Dr. King quotation is an announcement of the formation of a task force “dealing with academic integrity with respect to fabricating and falsifying data when discussing the Middle East.”
After one of the authors of this article informed SPME’s director of the quotation’s discredited status,
he replied with hostility despite the simple verifiability of the claim that the citation is incorrect. After several exchanges he replaced it with another seemingly far-fetched quote:
http://www.spme.net/
“Martin Luther King addressed the issue in 1968, in a speech at Harvard when he said: “.. You declare, my friend, that you do not hate the Jews, you are merely 'anti-Zionist.' ...When people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews... And what is anti-Zionist? It is the denial to the Jewish people of a fundamental right that we justly claim for the people of Africa and freely accord all other nations of the Globe...When people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews - make no mistake about it.”
(see the end of the page on this site for an example)
http://www.israelactivism.com/resources/factsheets/factsheets/antizion_antisem_Factsheet.asp
When a citation for this new quote was requested, he refused to provide one, leaving visitors only with its claim that Dr. King delivered it in a 1968 Harvard “speech.” However, the language of SMPE’s new posting strongly resembles their original one -- on account of the fact that it too comes from the same discredited “Letter to an Anti-Zionist Friend.”
