Earth to Alice--the Freedom Riders Weren't Trying to Help the Racists

A NOW magazine scribbler sits down for an interview with out-to-lunch Alice Walker of the Audacity of Flatulence flotilla. Alice tells the sympathetic young man exactly where she's coming from:

ATHENS— I first meet Pulitzer Prize winning author and civil rights activist Alice Walker in the Athens port while touring the American boat participating in the flotilla preparing to set sail for Gaza.

Along with the other U.S. activists, she is training and preparing for the voyage. Sitting stoically on the deck under a canopy of an American flag with The Audacity of Hope, the ships name written across the bottom, Walker’s description of the flotilla as, "the freedom ride of this generation," comes to life.

She’s referring to the young Americans who put their bodies on the line to challenge Jim Crow segregation. Standing next to her, shaded by the star spangled awning, the moment strikes me as simultaneously ironic and abundantly optimistic...

The supreme irony: Alice thinks helping the would-be genocidaires of Hamas (Islamic supremacists who have Hitlerian hopes of expunging all Jewry) is akin to American civil rights era "freedom riding"

Did I say "irony"? What I meant to say was imbecility.