Has called Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice traitors to African Americans
Born in Harlem, New York on March 1, 1927, Harry Belafonte gained fame as a calypso musician and actor, and later on as an outspoken critic of American foreign policy and the Bush administration's war on terror. In the post-9/11 years, Belafonte has made numerous appearances as a guest speaker at anti-war demonstrations across the United States. "I go to places where enormous upheaval and pain and anguish exist," he says. "And a lot of it exists based upon American policy.”
Belafonte’s political activism began in the late 1950s, when he became a confidant of Martin Luther King Jr. and a stalwart in the civil rights movement. By the 1980s he was making statements that revealed an affinity for Fidel Castro and Castroism, and bitter skepticism about the Regan administration’s endgame in the Cold War. (Belafonte once said, "If you believe in freedom, if you believe in justice, if you believe in democracy, you have no choice but to support Fidel Castro!")
Meanwhile Belafonte praised Soviet “peace efforts” around the world. Speaking in October 1983 at a "World Peace Concert" run by East Germany's official Communist youth organization, Belafonte gave his blessings to the Soviet-sponsored "peace" campaign pushing unilateral Western disarmament -- at a time when the Soviets were putting SS-20 missiles in East Germany. As The New York Times reported, Belafonte "attacked the American invasion of Grenada and also criticized the scheduled NATO weapons deployment" of Pershing 2 missiles in West Germany, which were intended to offset the Soviet missile offensive.
Belafonte's anti-Americanism intensified in the enduing years. In June 2000 he was a featured speaker at a rally in Castro's Cuba, honoring the American Soviet spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Tears, one observer reported, "streaked down" Belafonte's face "as he recalled the pain and humiliation his friend [Paul] Robeson had been forced to endure" in 1950s America.
In October 2002 Belafonte stirred controversy when, during an interview on a San Diego radio station, he intimated that Secretary of State Colin Powell, by virtue of his service in the Bush admininistration, was a traitor to African Americans. "There's an old saying in the days of slavery," Belafonte later explained on Larry King's CNN program. "There are those slaves who lived on the plantation, and there were those slaves who lived in the house. You got the privilege of living in the house if you served the master. Colin Powell was permitted to come into the house of the master" -- a reference to President George W. Bush. "But when such an individual," Belafonte continued, "is in the service of those who not only perpetuate the oppression, but sometimes design the way in which it is applied, it then becomes very, very, very, very critical that we raise our voices and be heard. And . . . Colin Powell is in that position." Belafonte directed the same sentiments to then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.
Three years later, Belafonte continued on this theme of “race treason” by certain Republican blacks when he said, “Hitler had a lot of Jews high up in the hierarchy of the Third Riech” -- implying that such Jews were, at that time, the equivalent of conservative blacks in the Bush administration today.
In January 2003 Father Michael Pfleger, pastor of Saint Sabina Catholic Church in Chicago, invited Belafonte to be a guest speaker at a Sunday Mass. During his talk there, Belafonte blamed America for the events of 9/11: “We [Americans] move about the world arrogantly, calling wars when we want, overthrowing governments when we want. There is a price to be paid for it -- look at 9/11. [That] wasn’t just bin Laden. Bin Laden didn’t come from the abstract. He came from somewhere, and if you look where ... you’ll see America’s hand of villainy.” Belafonte also used the occasion to criticize President George W. Bush for allegedly threatening every “woman’s right to abortion.”
In September 2005 Belafonte spoke at a town hall meeting of the Congressional Black Caucus' 35th Annual Legislative Conference. The event featured some of the leading figures of the Democratic Party and was nominally devoted to the subject of "eradicating poverty." (A webcast of the meeting can be accessed here.) When he stepped to the podium, Belafonte impugned Republicans for “punishing” blacks for their resistance to segregation; he denounced the American criminal-justice system and its “prisons filled with victims of poverty”; he condemned U.S. foreign policy for having "made a wreck of this planet”; and he exhorted blacks to rise up and “let George Bush and the Christian Right know that their legs have just been amputated.”
In January 2006 Belafonte, along with Danny Glover, Cornel West and others, met with Hugo Chavez. “We’re here to tell you not hundreds, not thousands, but millions of the American people … support your revolution,” Belafonte said to the Venezuelan President. Addressing Chavez further, Belafonte referred to President Bush as "the greatest tyrant in the world, the greatest terrorist in the world." (On other occasions, Belafonte has likened the Bush administration to the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler.)
Also in January 2006, Belafonte toldThe Raleigh News and Observer that the U.S. government was no more honorable than al Qaeda or the 9/11 hijackers: "When you have a president that has led us into a dishonorable war, who has killed tens of thousands, many of them our own sons and daughters, what is the difference between those who would fly airplanes into buildings killing 3,000 innocent Americans? What is the difference between that terror and other terrors?" In a subsequent CNN interview, Belafonte told newsman Wolf Blitzer: "Al Qaeda tortures. We torture. Al Qaeda's killed innocent people. We kill innocent people."
Regarding the United States as a nation rife with racism and discrimination against blacks, Belafonte states: "[I]t is my personal feeling that plantations exist all over America. If you walk into South Central Los Angeles, into Watts, or you walk into Over-the-Rhine in Cincinnati, you'll find people who live lives that are as degrading as anything that slavery had ever produced."
