Last week Steve Scalise, a leading Republican member of the US House of Representatives, apologized when it was revealed that he may have spoken in 2002 at the conference of a white nationalist organization founded by former Ku Klux Kan leader David Duke.
“It was a mistake I regret, and I emphatically oppose the divisive racial and religious views groups like these hold.”
Scalise surely should have known better, but at least he felt the need to publicly reject Duke’s hateful views toward African-Americans and Jews.
Meanwhile, as recently as last April, someone else was lavishing praise on Duke:
Now there is something very interesting and it’s again the first time I’m saying it. The left is devastated by David Duke for instance. He was in the KKK when he was young. But here is something quite amazing: I read him and I was shocked to find out that this guy knows more about Jewish identity than I do! How could a supposedly ‘racist’ Gentile who probably never entered a synagogue knows more than I do about Judaism? The reason is in fact very simple: he is a proud white man. He’s interested in nationalism, in the culture of his own people, so he understands things that I am not even allowed to think about. Believe it or not, even as a Jew, I wasn’t allowed to think of myself as a racist. I was a racist, maybe I am still one, but I was not allowed to acknowledge it. Once he acknowledges the he’s talking about white people’s rights, in a way he thinks like Avigdor Lieberman! But in fact, he is way better than Liberman. David Duke is a humanist because he says, “I want to celebrate my right and you should celebrate your rights” whether you are Muslim or black or whatever. He believes that all people should celebrate their rights, this is his current philosophy. Avidgor Liberman is not a humanist, because he wants to celebrate his rights at the expense of other people.
The speaker was none other than Gilad Atzmon– who posted these words (from an interview) on his own website.
The admiration is mutual.
In fact Atzmon’s vicious antisemitism, his Holocaust denial, his belief that the Jews provoked Hitler, have been widely and publicly reported for years– so much so that even leading Israel-haters have rejected him.
Perhaps it’s a sign of how little antisemitism matters among elements of the Left that George Galloway figures he can get away with doing a friendly interview with Atzmon on his Russian government-funded RT program “Sputnik”– and that his “leftwing” friends will have nothing to say about it.
I mean, it’s not as if he was sullying himself by debating an actual liberal Israeli Zionist.
(Hat tip: Oliver Kamm, who was exposing Atzmon’s toxic views as early as 2005.)
Update: Dave Rich had the stomach to watch the Galloway-Atzmon encounter and reports at the CST blog.
