On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the annual ritual has begun: twisting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. into a shape more convenient for today’s political arguments. This year, the distortions are coming from more than one direction. On social media and video platforms, posts and clips are circulating that claim King was “not a Zionist,” or that his views on Israel somehow disqualify him as a moral authority on civil rights. That is not serious history. It is ideological vandalism.
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Let’s be clear about the record. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. supported Israel’s right to exist. He saw Zionism as a legitimate national liberation movement and understood Jewish self-determination in the shadow of the Holocaust. He also understood something that seems to confuse many people today: that “anti-Zionism” often functions as a polite substitute for antisemitism.
He did not say this in a press release or a slogan. In October 1967, at a dinner party in Cambridge at the home of Marty Peretz, King was challenged by an anti-Zionist guest. According to scholars who were present and later documented the exchange, King cut him off and said: “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking antisemitism.” The remark was situational, blunt, and entirely in character.
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Yes, the so-called “Letter to an Anti-Zionist Friend” that circulates online is apocryphal. Many readers may not realize what it is: a long, eloquent text that began circulating decades after King’s death, attributed to him without any manuscript, recording, archival trace, or contemporary reference. No version of it appears in King’s papers, speeches, or correspondence, and historians across the spectrum agree it is a later fabrication. It should not be cited as genuine. But discarding a fake letter does not erase King’s real views, which are well-documented in his actual words and actions.
This is not the only way King is being rewritten. Another fashionable myth portrays him as a gentle, system-comforting figure who opposed disruption and believed protest should never make anyone uncomfortable. In reality, King defended civil disobedience, accepted jail as a moral tool, and warned that the “white moderate” who preferred order to justice was a greater obstacle than the outright bigot. At the same time, he was deeply critical of movements that embraced violence, racial hatred, or coercion, and he rejected the idea that moral ends could be reached by corrupt means. His vision was not a quieter struggle, but a disciplined one: radical in its goals, and uncompromising in its commitment to nonviolence and human dignity.
Actor Michael Rapaport’s sarcastic post—“CANCEL THIS ZIONIST TODAY!!!!”—lands because the impulse is real. Today’s ideological gatekeeping would indeed try to disqualify King, either by denying what he believed or by declaring those beliefs unacceptable.
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What we are seeing is not historical correction. It is historical revisionism with a purpose: to recruit King’s moral authority while emptying it of its actual content.
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