'Black Avenger' to speak in Tempe about anti-Semitism
ANNE BRADY
Associate Editor
Nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and author Ken Hamblin, who describes himself as "a 57-year-old colored American," is old enough to remember when blacks and Jews worked side-by-side in the Civil Rights Movement.
"I lived it," says Hamblin, who worked as a news photographer in the 1960s, covering the 1968 Democratic convention, the march on Washington, and race riots in Detroit.
"I saw the signs that said 'colored.' ... I saw blacks and whites, Christians and Jews, working together," he says. "My generation took those signs down."
So who better than this now-politically conservative, controversial commentator on everything from race to poverty to discuss "Black Anti-Semitism: Its Causes and Its Remedies"? Hamblin will address the subject as part of the Bureau of Jewish Education's Passages lecture series at 7:30 p.m. on Sunday, April 5, at Temple Emanuel, 5801 S. Rural Road, in Tempe.
Hamblin's radio program, "The Black Avenger," based at KOA in Denver, airs locally on KFYI (910 AM) from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. on weekdays. Hamblin also writes a column in the Denver Post and is the author of "Pick A Better Country," published by Simon & Schuster. His second book, "Plain Talk and Common Sense," is coming out soon, he says.
Hamblin says it's when members of ethnic groups get caught up in seeing themselves as victims that they pick out other groups of people to blame for their pain. He minces no words in turning right around and blaming people for most of their own misfortunes, even parodying members of his own race who he says are so obssessed with being victims of discrimination that they fail to rise above poverty and government dependence.
"They'll say, 'My problem isn't that I don't want to work; my problem is the government hasn't subsidized any programs to train me. My problem isn't that I don't want to be a farmer or a shopkeeper; my problem is that the Jews are taking all the money out of the community.' It gets dumber each decade.
"They are never going to get beyond being black in America," Hamblin says. "They need an enemy, and for (Nation of Islam leader Louis) Farrakhan, it's the Jews."
Hamblin also blames liberal politicians, such as Al Gore and Jesse Jackson, who he says benefit from maintaining an uneducated, underclass voter pool.
"People who are only fed 'you're the victim' (are going to believe it)," he says. "The parasites - Jesse Jackson, Al Gore, Farrakhan - want to maintain the status quo. They have to have a peasant class."
Meanwhile, liberalism has dampened the dreams of "people who look like me," Hamblin says, and black America tries to "deaden the pain by going after the Jews."
The Jewish people should say to black America, "I stood by you, and if you don't want to know that, I don't need you," Hamblin advises. "Collectively, as a society, we have said, 'We will not tolerate desecrating a synagogue. We will not stand by while you burn a cross in a black man's yard.' "
Jewish people "need to get beyond the whole Jewish guilt thing," Hamblin continues, adding that the first time he attended a Jewish seder, "I understood collective (survivor) guilt - guilt over getting out of Egypt, guilt over surviving the Holocaust."
Jews in America need to understand what native Israeli Jews already know - that they have a "right to survive," says Hamblin. "Your people are survivors."
"It's important that Jewish people ... realize you have a right to be free from oppression," he says.
Hamblin was born to West Indian immigrants in Brooklyn, N.Y., and grew up in a single-parent household. He says that "the women who raised me never raised me to be a nigger," explaining that when he first heard that word, dictionaries defined it as "a person of low character, and I've never been that."
"I was told that life is not fair, and that because of who you are, you're going to have to try a little harder," he recalls.
Although he is criticized by some indigent members of the black community for being insensitive to their plight, he disputes that there is rampant discrimination against black people today, noting, for example, that he drives across country frequently with his white wife and rarely gets pulled over by police officers - and that when he is stopped, it's "usually for a good reason."
"If black people and Hispanic people are really being singled out by police, if racism is as prevalent as these crybabies think, why don't they have their paperwork (license and registration) in order?" he poses. "A Jew from Nazi Germany certainly would not travel cross country with faulty paperwork!"
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