Amiri Baraka just doesn’t get it, and it appears he never will.

New Jersey’s one-time poet laureate is back in the news on the strength of an off-Broadway production of his classic 1960s play Dutchman and the publication of a new collection of short stories. That entitles him, as these things go, to a fresh round of publicity, positive and not so, as befits a one-time leading literary figure and longtime activist for the rights of African-Americans. It is also an opportunity for Baraka and his interlocutors to revisit the controversy of 2003. That’s when he lost this job as poet laureate following the publication of his poem that seemed to take as received truth the notion that “4,000 Israeli workers” at the World Trade Center were warned to stay home on Sept. 11, 2001.

Baraka remains unrepentant about his endorsement of this obscene Internet rumor. “To accuse me of being anti-Semitic,” he told The New York Times on Sunday, “is the same way some Negroes will use the race card. Israel is a foreign state and it warned the U.S. about the attacks. Why wouldn’t it warn its own citizens? Look at the nationalities of the World Trade Center tenants who died, and do the math.”

It doesn’t matter that a number of people have done the math, and that there is not a shred of truth to the idea that 4,000, or 400, or 40 in-the-know Israelis turned their backs on their coworkers and spent the most horrific day in recent American history at the beach, or safely at home. Never mind that 10 percent of the Twin Tower casualties were Jewish. To “do the math” is to enter Baraka’s conspiratorial fantasy world, where Israel has the ability to secretly pass messages to thousands of its citizens abroad, and where every one of those who received the message managed to keep it quiet for five long years. To “do the math” in response to Baraka’s slur is to give it credibility it doesn’t deserve.

Out of fashion for years as a writer and dramatist, Baraka nonetheless manages to be au courant in grabbing onto the latest academic trend: accusing Jews of conflating anti-Israel sentiments with anti-Semitism. What lifts Baraka out of the realm of those who merely criticize Israeli actions to that of true Judeophobes is the patent absurdity of his claim and the themes it exploits. The Baraka slur is a catalogue of classic anti-Semitic tropes, especially in attributing to Israelis superhuman capabilities and inhuman tribal loyalties.

In the same New York Times article, the measure of Baraka was taken by cultural critic Stanley Crouch. “I don’t think his literary standing is very high,” said Crouch. “For the last at least 40 years he’s been more interested in writing propaganda than in writing literature.”

We can only hope that those who buy tickets for Dutchman or read Baraka’s stories can similarly tell the difference between the literature he was once capable of producing and the propaganda that he continues to spew.