People are reeling over the anti-Semitic poem read at a recent poetry festival by Amiri Baraka, New Jersey's poet laureate. The poem blames Israel for the 9/11 attacks and contains the following lines:

Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed

Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers

To stay home that day

Why did Sharon stay away?

The New York Times reported that Baraka was once a prominent figure in the Black Arts Movement, and notes that before that his name was LeRoi Jones. What the Times does not report is that Jones-Baraka was a militant black nationalist during the late 60s and early 70s, and that he graduated from black nationalism to Third World Marxism. The Times also fails to note that before Jones-Baraka became a black nationalist he was married to a Jew. He left her when Malcolm X was killed, moved to Harlem, and married a black woman. Three years later, he adopted the Muslim name of Imamu Amiri Baraka. "Imamu" means "leader." And now he has become an anti-Semitic propagandist whose "art" serves the Islamofascist agenda. Guess that first marriage was just false consciousness.

UPDATE: Excellent and revealing New Republic piece on Baraka. The article attributes Baraka's anti-Semitism to his infatuation with the ideas of the Afrocentric cult leader Maulana Karenga, and observes that "much of Baraka's anti-Semitic work was written on the heels of his divorce from Hettie. Feeling compelled to prove that he was finished with white women in general and with Jews in particular, Baraka took black anti-Semitism to new depths. In addition to the "slimy bellies" of the "owner jews" in "Black Art," Baraka referred to his ex wife as "a fat jew girl" in "For Tom Postell, Dead Black Poet." Link courtesy of Little Green Footballs.

ONE LAST UPDATE: Stefan Sharkansky has interviewed Baraka on the phone. Baraka told the New York Times that his information about Israel's role in the 9/11 attacks was easily researched. And yet, he wasn't able to name his sources. Not believably, anyway.