Kristen Clarke misled Senators about her association with anti-Semitic prof

Kristen Clarke is Joe Biden’s nominee to head the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. We have discussed the fact that, as a student at Harvard, she invited a rabidly anti-Semitic professor (Tony Martin) to campus and then praised his hateful ravings.

Now, it appears that Clarke misled the Senate Judiciary Committee about her links with another anti-Semitic professor, Amiri Baraka. The professor in question was a virulent anti-Semite who, among things, accused Israel of having prior knowledge of the 9/11 attack on America.

In written questions to Clarke, Sen. Mike Lee made a series of inquiries about Baraka and, in particular, an article he wrote comparing police officers and judges to the Ku Klux Klan. The article is called “Mumia, Lynch Law, and Imperialism.” “Mumia” is Mumia Abu-Jamal, who murdered a police officer in 1981, thereby becoming a cause célèbre of the radical Black Nationalist movement.

One of Sen. Lee’s questions to Clarke was whether she served “on the editorial staff of a journal with Amiri Baraka.” Clarke’s answer, under oath, was “no.”

But according to the Washington Free Beacon:

Archived copies of a scholarly journal show Justice Department nominee Kristen Clarke listed on the masthead alongside Baraka. In all eight of the editions of “Souls, A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, it found that Clarke is listed on the masthead as an assistant editor. Baraka is listed as a contributing editor.

It’s not clear whether, as a contributing editor, Baraka had any editorial responsibilities at the journal. The professor is no longer around to say.

However, if Clarke doesn’t believe that, his title notwithstanding, Baraka was involved in the editorial process, she should have disclosed that they were on the masthead of the same publication and then claimed that he was not part of the editorial staff.

Clarke has already lied to the committee about her own work while a student at Harvard. Back then, she wrote a letter to the school newspaper arguing that Blacks are superior to Whites.

She told the committee under oath that the letter was satire. However, there is no evidence to support this assertion, and Clarke didn’t claim the letter was satirical when it came under attack for its blatant racism.

Moreover, the racist statements in her letter track the pseudo-scientific “melanin theory” of black racial superiority that was popular in radical black circles at the time, including among the militants Clarke admired. There can be no doubt that when Clarke spewed her black supremacist nonsense, she meant what she said.

Furthermore, as we showed here, Clarke lied about her position on defunding the police. She falsely testified that she hasn’t favored defunding.

Finally, although this last point doesn’t go to Clarke’s honesty, her work for the radical publication — it was founded by the black Marxist Manning Marable — that Baraka contributed to should count against her. And coupled with her own black supremacist utterances, it should disqualify her. After all, Ryan Bounds was disqualified from a federal judgeship, at Clarke’s urging, based on college writings less inflammatory than Clarke’s and those contained in the publication she helped edit.

Maybe Clarke is no longer a black supremacist. Maybe her favoritism of Blacks goes no further now than her desire to prefer Blacks to Whites and Asians in college admissions and her general desire to overturn standards that Blacks as a group don’t meet to the same extent as other racial groups.

That should be enough to cause her rejection for the nation’s leading civil rights job. If not, then her lack of honesty should be the deal breaker.