I learned two things from the New York Times’ interview last week with author Alice Walker.

First, she enjoys super anti-Semitic propaganda. Second, she can recommend said propaganda to the Times’ millions of readers, and the newspaper won’t say boo about it. I’m not sure these were the takeaways the paper had hoped for, but such is life.

The Times’ interview begins simply enough with the question, "What books are on your nightstand?"

Walker answers first by naming Somaly Mam’s The Road of Lost Innocence, a terrifying account of human trafficking in Cambodia. She then recommends David Icke’s And the Truth Shall Set You Free, of which she says, “In Icke’s books there is the whole of existence, on this planet and several others, to think about. A curious person’s dream come true.”

She lists a few more books, and the interview moves on to the next question: “Who is your favorite novelist of all time?”

But let’s stop there for a second and pause Walker’s recommendation of Icke. For the uninitiated, Icke is a massive anti-Semite and his book Truth is little more than anti-Jewish propaganda. That the Times didn’t pause for a moment to notify readers of this point is — odd. Imagine if the Times interviewed, say, a White House aide who said he kept a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion on his nightstand. I imagine the paper wouldn’t gloss over it to move on to asking about his favorite author. I imagine there would be at least a quick aside from the Times to warn its readers that Protocols is a deeply disturbing anti-Semitic screed.

There is no such pause or editor’s note in the Walker interview, which, again, is curious considering the nature of the literature that the interviewee just recommended to the paper’s readers. And in case you are wondering just how bad the Icke material is, Tablet magazine's Yair Rosenberg has you covered.

For starters, Icke's book posits the theory that Jews bankrolled the Holocaust because no one ever said conspiracy theories had to make sense:



The Jewish members of the conspiracy have used an organisation called The Anti-Defamation League as an instrument to try to convince everyone that any mention of the Rothschilds and their allies is an attack on all Jews. In this way they have stifled almost all honest scholarship on international bankers and made the subject taboo within universities. Any individual or book exploring this subject is immediately attacked by hundreds of ADL communities all over the country. The ADL has never let the truth or logic interfere with its highly professional smear jobs … Actually, nobody has a right to be more angry at the Rothschild clique than their fellow Jews. The Warburgs, part of the Rothschild empire, helped finance Adolf Hitler.



Icke also writes that the Talmud is “among the most appallingly racist documents on the planet.” He also posits that violent, racist, far-right fringe groups are actually fronts for our, you guessed it, Jewish overlords. Remember: This is all contained in a single book, and it’s the book that Alice Walker recommended to the Times’ readers.

The Times can be forgiven for not saying anything about the book or warning its readers about Icke's conspiracy mongering. The problem here is that Walker herself has a long history of promoting anti-Semitic materials. The Times must have known when it was getting into when it gave her a platform to give Icke’s a cheery endorsement. If the paper was unaware of Walker’s own well-known flirtation with anti-Semitism, well, it suggests its editors are deeply incurious. Either that or they are willing to look the other way for the right sort of celebrity.

Then again, maybe it's a little bit of column A, a little bit of column B.