A lot of comments, some on the blog and mostly via e-mail, about my earlier posting today regarding yesterday's murder at the Holocaust museum in Washington and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's explanation of why he hasn't spoken with President Obama ... because of the Jews.

This was not -- or at least, my blog posting was not -- about Gaza, or the Israeli settlements, or how AIPAC or for that matter the Learned Elders of Zion control the U.S. government.

And I was not, and am not, saying there is linkage between Wright's remarks to the murder of a security guard at the Holocaust museum yesterday by James von Brunn, a white supremacist and anti-Semite, or the murder of abortion doctor George Tiller last month by anti-abortion extremist Scott Roeder.

All I'm saying -- and this is all I'm saying -- is that hate speech is hate speech, and it should be condemned whenever and wherever possible. When Wright is asked about whether he spoke to the president, and the first words out of his mouth are to blame the Jews, to me, that's hate speech. This has nothing to do with justifying Israeli foreign policy or what's happening to the plight of Palestinians or anything of the sort. The question to Wright wasn't, "What do you think of Israeli foreign policy?" Blaming "the Jews" for keeping him from talking to Obama was not an adult critique of what's going on in the Mideast.

We can argue this all day if we want. All I'm saying is that, to me anyway, if the first response out of someone's mouth to a seemingly innocuous question is that it's the Jews' fault -- or the blacks' fault, or the Muslims', or the Hispanics', or the Palestinians', or the Eskimos' -- then there has to be an element of hate somewhere that provokes such an answer.

categories: Behind His Words

1:41 - June 11, 2009

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