Academic antisemite of the day: Frank Leon Roberts

Frank Leon Roberts teaches courses such as "Black Lives Matter" and "The Life and Times of James Baldwin & Malcolm X." at NYU and Yale.

He was glancingly mentioned in a nice Tablet article criticizing the current "intersectionality" by John Paul Pagano. Pagano makes some very astute points about antisemitism and why the current Black Lives Matter movement is opposed to acknowledging that it exists:

White privilege is real. Yet when discussing racism I often challenge people who blithely saddle Jews with privilege, because it’s clear to me that they don’t understand anti-Semitism. For one, color bias is an insignificant factor in the history of Jewish persecution, so foisting “white privilege” on Jews is parochial—it shoehorns centuries of Jewish suffering into the particular American experience of racism, which centers on anti-black bias. But more important, anti-Semitism doesn’t work like most forms of racism, which denigrate their victims as inferior. Anti-Semitism is special in that it often perceives its target—Jews—as having too much privilege and assails them for it.

Unlike racism, whose modern versions stem from 19th-century pseudo-science, anti-Semitism is a conspiracy theory and at root all conspiracy theories envision a demonic elite oppressing and exploiting the common people. They may alight on eclectic topics—war, UFOs, weather and climate, food, medicine, the authorship of Shakespeare’s works, to name just a few—but if you delve deeper, you will find that every conspiracy theory is a narrative in which a secret society of the rich and powerful controls the banks, the media, schools, and governments in order to enslave and exploit the rest of humanity. Anti-Semitism is a name for the conspiracy theory which holds that “the Jews” are this evil elite. To the anti-Semite, Jews are the ultimate bearers of privilege.

It is clear from the first three words quoted above that Pagano is not a racist by any means. But he attacked an antisemitic statement by Frank Leon Roberts:

With much rhetorical pomp and little practical relevance to issues faced by African-Americans, last year a group of over 1,100 black activists, including BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors and Talib Kweli, launched Black Solidarity with Palestine, releasing a statement in which they decried Israeli “slaughter” of Palestinians, repeated lies about Israel sterilizing Ethiopians, endorsed the unmaking of Israel as a Jewish state, and demanded “unified action” against the related evils of “anti-Blackness, white supremacy, and Zionism.” The BLM activist Frank Leon Roberts, who took to Twitter after the Gaza Flotilla raid to complain about “Jewish elites” and their “monopoly” of influence, now teaches the nation’s first “Black Lives Matter” course at his alma mater, NYU.

Here are Roberts' tweets from 2010:

Its crucial for the public to realize that NBC/MSNBC,The NYTimes,US News & World Report, & the NY Daily News are all owned by Jewish elites

— Frank Leon Roberts (@FRANKLEONROBERT) June 1, 2010

Speaking out against Israel's massacre & Jewish elites' monopoly of the American free press is not anti-Semitic. #Gaza, #Flotilla, #OilSpill

— Frank Leon Roberts (@FRANKLEONROBERT) June 1, 2010

Um, yes it is, since there is no "Jewish elites monopoly of the American free press." And the Jews who happen to head major media companies are hardly monolithic in their political opinions. So, yes, accusing Jews of monopolizing the media is antisemitic, because it implies a sinister Jewish cabal that means to do nefarious things to others.

Roberts is now defending his antisemitic tweets:

@johnpaulpagano I stand by the statement. And all other statements of fact. Will not be shamed into your racist agenda.

— Frank Leon Roberts (@FRANKLEONROBERT) June 25, 2016

There was a whole thread between the two where Roberts came out quite the loser:

I don't attack intersectionality b/c I'm a racist, @FRANKLEONROBERT. I attack it b/c it leads to racism. Like this. http://pic.twitter.com/vnHsqW73x2

— John-Paul Pagano (@johnpaulpagano) June 25, 2016

The very idea of someone attacking the utterly insane concept of "intersectionality" makes one ipso facto a racist shows these academic frauds are quite aware of how poorly their theories do when faced with facts, and when the emperor is shown to have no clothes, their only defense is name calling.

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