re: #637 Aceofwhat?

but antipathy for Israel is a racial topic, you said earlier. i’m just having a tough time understanding why that logic is stuck on a one-way street, that’s all.

I’m saying that support for Israel isn’t— or shouldn’t be— tied to race, it shouldn’t be ‘we’ll protect them because they’re Jews’, but instead “we’ll help them because they’re unfairly attacked.”

It’s a hairsplit, don’t worry about it.

But on the topic of Republicans and antisemtism:

Here’s a good bit from the SPLC on the GOP and the virulently antisemetic CCC:

Most Americans learned of the CCC in late 1998, when a scandal erupted over prominent Southern politicians’ ties to the brazenly racist group. After it was revealed that former Congressman Bob Barr (R-Ga.) gave the keynote speech at the CCC’s 1998 national convention and that then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) had spoken to the group five times, both claimed they knew nothing about the CCC. However, an Intelligence Report investigation, publicized by national television and newspaper reports, made clear what the CCC really was: a hate group that routinely denigrated blacks as “genetically inferior,” complained about “Jewish power brokers,” called homosexuals “perverted sodomites,” accused immigrants of turning America into a “slimy brown mass of glop,” and named Lester Maddox, the now-deceased, ax handle-wielding, arch-segregationist former governor of Georgia, “Patriot of the Century.”

As evidence of widespread association between Southern GOP officeholders and the CCC mounted, Republican National Committee Chairman Jim Nicholson took the unusual step in 1998 of asking party members to resign from the group because of its racist views. A resolution moved through the U.S. Congress “condemning the racism and bigotry espoused by the Council of Conservative Citizens,” although it ultimately failed. (Congress had earlier condemned the black supremacist Nation of Islam in a similar manner, but failed to do the same with the CCC. Republican Party leaders, likely embarrassed by Lott’s very public connection to the CCC, managed to defeat the censure effort.)

But six years later, many Southern lawmakers were still pandering to and meeting with the CCC — and still pleading ignorance. According to a 2004 Intelligence Report review of the Citizens Informer, no fewer than 38 federal, state and local elected officials had attended CCC events between 2000 and 2004, most of them giving speeches to local chapters of the hate group.