In seeking to summon up a coherent response to the Wespeak by Martin Benjamin ’57 featured in the Nov. 7 Argus (“Open letter to President Roth,” Volume CXLIV, Number 18), I decided to do a Google search for the terms “Martin Benjamin” and “Wesleyan University.” What I found came as no surprise, and I believe that I should remind the Wesleyan community of some of Mr. Benjamin’s past writings for the Argus.

My thanks to Lisa Eisenberg ’06, who in 2004 wrote a Wespeak similar to this one (“Benjamin’s ongoing hatred is sick,” April 23, 2004, Volume CXXXIX, Number 42), which formed a digest of Benjamin’s small-minded rhetoric. In it, she noted his vocal opposition, as early as 2001, to the creation of a “queer studies” department. Eisenberg wrote, “There are those who believe that homosexuality wallows in squalor. I dare say your barely coherent April 16 ’Open letter to Prezzie-Pie,’ beginning to end does little to disabuse them of that view.” Benjamin wrote that queer studies should be discussed only in a “desexualized” and “clean” manner. These words were written in response to a student’s letter advocating the creation of just such a department.

On Benjamin’s racial views, Eisenberg offered another quote of interest in examining his criticism of Obama and of Roth. “A while back, black actor Ozzie [sic] Davis complained that Manhattan cabbies were spurning him solely because of his race. Harlem-born Hoover fellow Thomas Sowell took the occasion to mention receipt of treatment much the same. But Sowell had better things to do than sit on the curb and sip a cup of victimhood,” wrote Benjamin in a 2001 Wespeak. A man who sees black men pointing out racism’s effect on their lives as “sipping from the cup of victimhood” and then turns on his heel to talk about the victimization of another group, the Jewish people, in such self-righteous terms

Why are Mr. Benjamin’s opinions on homosexuality and race important? For one, they highlight the staggering hypocrisy of his rant about anti-Semitism. Somehow Benjamin manages to transition from a discussion of whether Hitler was primarily a “racist fascist” or an anti-Semite to discussing the President-elect as being “tutored” by an “Islamist Dr. Frankenstein.” Mr. Benjamin’s writing on this subject is shamefully lacking in historical understanding.

First of all, Rashid Khalidi is an academic, as was Barack Obama, until recently. Academics debate and discuss issues in a civil manner even when they disagree, something Mr. Benjamin and much of America should keep in mind when attacking an academic for associating with another academic. In the (paraphrased) words of terrorist, radical, but not (despite the insinuations) friend of Obama William Ayers: to look at people’s political views this way requires a “political litmus test to begin a conversation.” Likewise, comparing Edward Said and Obama on the basis of their both having written rags-to-riches memoirs fails to equate the two on anything more than the most superficial level, and is irrelevant to Benjamin’s main argument regarding Obama’s Islamic connections and Roth’s traitor status toward Israel.

His assertion that if there had been “no Jews,” there would have been “no Holocaust” ignores the suffering of millions of other ethnic minorities (gypsies, etc.) at the hands of the Nazi regime, and frames the Holocaust as a specifically Jewish phenomenon. This assertion is not so offensively wrong on its own, but in context it is part of an emotionally manipulative and intellectually dishonest attack on President Roth and on Wesleyan. “I guess you never got the word (you’ll find it in the Bible) that Archangel Michael was Israel’s guardian angel,” Benjamin writes to Roth, as if one’s name should affect one’s synthesis of history, or as if Roth owes some sort of race-based loyalty to Israel that should have higher priority than intellectual honesty.

I am writing in indignation at the depths that Mr. Benjamin is willing to go to in order not only to personally attack President-elect Obama, but, more importantly from my standpoint, to impugn the opinions and knowledge of President Roth and the intelligence and intentions of the entire student body here. The narrowness of Benjamin’s willingness to discuss racism only in terms of anti-Semitism and to not see where he is scapegoating and fearmongering based on race shows questionable intentions and/or a certain shortage of inquiry on his part. His use of terms such as “the Great Black Hope” and insinuations that Obama is somehow figuratively sexually assaulting his supporters with a hand “halfway up their thighs” fits into Martin Benjamin’s time-honored tradition of using the crudest of sexual and racial imagery to argue his convoluted and intellectually empty views. To call Obama a flim-flam artist is one thing, and if it is an expression of an honest opinion then I support it. But to call him a “black messiah” with a “rap sheet” feeds into obvious and destructive stereotypes, racism of the type whose importance Martin Benjamin seems so eager to de-emphasize.