Tony Martin has done it again!

Tony Martin has done it again! With The Jewish Onslaught: Despatches from the Wellesley Battlefront, Tony Martin, Professor of Africana Studies at Wellesley College, has taken Black history to new and dizzying heights of academic excellence and political fearlessness. After years of Jewish-authored books on Black-Jewish relations, at last a Black historian has come forward with the scholarly ability and independence of spirit to place the subject in an African-centered perspective.
Long known as the world's greatest historian of the Marcus Garvey Movement, Martin happened into Black-Jewish history by accident, when the Anti-Defamation League and several other organizations called for his dismissal from Wellesley College earlier this year. They were displeased by his use of The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews in an African American survey course. Martin responded to their intolerant attacks by issuing a "Broadside No. 1" on "The (No Longer) Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews." Broadside No. 1 was an instant hit in the Black community and has been reprinted in several newspapers and magazines in the United States and the Caribbean.

Martin followed this by what he called a "crash course" in Black-Jewish history. The result is a remarkable book.

The Jewish Onslaught takes, as its point of departure, Martin's personal experience as the target of organized Jewry's campaign of lies. half-truths and defamatory accusations. But this is no boring literary of complaints and recriminations. It is a unique analysis of contemporary Black-Jewish relations, in the context of historical relations between the two groups, and viewed from the vantage point of Martin's own experiences on the firing line.

After briefly telling his Wellesley tale, Martin examines the role of the media in his own and other cases of Jewish attacks on Black people. He finds the major media, with its heavy concentration of Jewish producers, anchor persons, executive editors and the like, to have been willing accomplices in the efforts to defame his character. ABC Television's Nightline and "The Week with David Brinkley" programs, the Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and various wire services were among those that carried organized Jewry's unprincipled attacks. The Boston Globe ran four hostile articles in six days, including an editorial, then refused to publish Martin's letter to the editor.
Even more fascinating and new was Martin's analysis of the Jewish press. He found Jewish newspapers to be often poorly edited, but more openly hateful than the major media. The Jewish reporters and columnists, he found, routinely vilify Black leaders (there are few that have not yet been labeled "anti-Semitic"). They attack affirmative action, discredit the intellectual ability of Black academics and engage in the mind of hysterical exaggerations that transformed a mild disturbance in Crown Heights, Brooklyn into a "pogrom."

The racism of the Jewish press, Martin found, was even more pronounced in the Jewish hate mail he received. He has printed some of this as an appendix and it will come as a revelation to most decent people.

As fascinating as any part of this excellent book is Professor Martin's analysis of Jewish strategy against Black progress. A key element in that strategy has been the use of Harvard's Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and other Black professors, as quasi-Jewish battering rams against independent Black thought. Martin brilliantly analyses the writings of Gates and Cornel West to show that while they may attack African American targets, West's mild efforts to criticize Israel have met with swift Jewish disapproval. The Jewish message to Gates, West and others seems to be - "We want you to criticize other Blacks, but that does not mean that you can comment on us. We are out of bounds for you."

The most positive aspect of Martin's experience on the Jewish firing line has been the amazing outpouring of Black solidarity. Black newspapers, radio talk shows, bookstores, academics, students and community groups have rushed to his defense in myriad ways. Martin sees the African American community at a new high of consciousness, which has reached even into the mainstream of Civil Rights leadership and the Congressional Black Caucus.

The new consciousness has been helped along by revelations of the Anti-Defamation League's espionage against Black groups and by the recent revelation that Joel Spingarn (Jewish head of the NAACP for decades), spied for military intelligence against his Black "colleagues" in the NAACP.

Martin's skills as a historian are vividly demonstrated throughout this well-documented book. His insights are often new and startling. Why, he asks, did Zionists (the most nationalistic group within the Jewish community), turn around and help found, run and control the NAACP as an assimilationist group for Black people? Why was nationalism good for the Jews but bad for Black people? And why are Jews, such as Professor Michael Levin of City College, New York, now in the forefront of the resurgence of pseudo-scientific white supremacy? And why have Jews, throughout the 20th century, insisted on controlling, monitoring, analyzing, polling and directing African Americans?

It is difficult to pinpoint the most impactful segment of this insightful book, but it may well be the chapter on Afrocentrism. The Jewish onslaught against Professor Martin has merged with the general Jewish and allied attack on African centered scholarship. Martin's Afrocentric perspective has been attacked often in the Jewish press. Martin clarifies the points of contention with an ease and effectiveness not seen before. He demonstrates the African influence n Greek civilization and reveals, possibly for the first time, the Jewish attempts to posit Jews as the founders of Western civilization. He shows that Martin Bernal, regarded by some as a European Jewish friend of Afrocentrism, is in fact an integral part of the struggle against Afrocentrism.

The Jewish Onslaught is an amazing book. In it the scholar-activist is seen at his most brilliant. It is well-documented, beautifully written, humorous at times and replete with new insights. Almost two decades ago, Professor Martin took African American historical writing to new heights with Race First, as he freed Marcus Garvey from the negative and trite treatments of white and Negro historians. Now he has unshackled Black-Jewish history from the often negative and trite commentaries of Jewish and Negro writers.

Tony Martin has done it again