After a crisis of authority–who am I to have a hiphop blog?–I’m back, trying to find my public voice again, trying to reclaim it from the din of Facebook where I’ve produced what I’m sure is a very detailed data profile of my political opinions without ever having to write them out for myself.

But I have a lot of opinions. Let me state some of them here. I might not cite everything. If you don’t believe me, get googling. Now let’s talk about the DNC electing Tom Perez as chair on Saturday.

For going on forty years, Israeli apartheid has poisoned the coalition-building of the American Left. As far back as the 1970s, as soon as U.S. Black folks started standing in solidarity with dispossessed Palestinians, the Black-Jewish cooperation of the Civil Rights era was over.

[Update 2/28: If you haven’t yet, read Bernie Sanders’s speech to progressive Jewish American PAC J-Street now.]

Stokely Carmichael speaking at Berkeley in 1966. Image via Radio Open Source.

Writing for The Hill last week, criminal lawyer and pro-Israel hawk Allan Dershowitz said that he would leave the Democratic Party if Keith Ellison was elected DNC chair, arguing that Ellison’s affiliation with folks like Louis Farrakhan and Stokely Carmichael made him an unrepentant anti-Semite.  Continue reading →