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CounterPunch
December
13, 2002
The Hypocrisy
of Lott's Critics
by TOM GORMAN
At Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party, once
and future Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott gushed "I want
to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president,
we voted for him. We're proud of him. And if the rest of the
country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these
problems over all these years, either." Lott's supposed
endorsement of Thurmond's "States' Rights" candidacy
in 1948 was met with condemnations from both Democrats and Republicans.
Former Vice President Al Gore said, "It
is not a small thing for one of the half-dozen most prominent
political leaders in America to say that our problems are caused
by integration and that we should have had a segregationist candidate."
Gore added that Lott's comments were "racist." Nancy
Pelosi, soon to be the House Minority Leader, argued, "Lott
can apologize all he wants. It doesn't remove the sentiments
that escaped his mouth that day at the party." Senator Joe
Lieberman felt that President Bush needed to condemn Lot's remarks.
"The longer the president waits to speak out, the more the
wounds that were done by Trent Lott's statements go deeper,"
cautioned Lieberman. President Bush did jump on the bandwagon,
telling a mixed-race audience, "Any suggestion that the
segregated past was acceptable or positive is offensive and it
is wrong. . . . Every day our nation was segregated was a day
that America was unfaithful to our founding ideals."
It would seem, then, that the Democratic
leaders in the country are stridently antiracist, and loathe
Lott's remarks as nostalgia for the time of American apartheid.
The hypocrisy of this outrage is belied by several factors, though.
It should be remembered that when Thurmond
broke off to form the "Dixiecrat" Party in 1948, he
broke off from the Democratic Party. Thurmond's legacy of bigotry
is also the legacy of the Democrats. Another Democrat of Thurmond's
ilk, J. William Fullbright, (as noted by Mark R. Levin of National
Review Online) was honored by President Clinton with the Medal
of Freedom, the highest civilian award, in 1993. Clinton praised
Fullbright as "a visionary humanitarian, a steadfast supporter
of the values of education. . . . The American political system
produced this remarkable man, and my state did, and I'm real
proud of it." Anyone thinking that Clinton may have distanced
himself from his views of Fullbright since 1993 should note that
in October of this year, Clinton dedicated a bronze statue of
Fullbright in Fayetteville, Arkansas. What people may not know,
and what Levin points out, is that Fullbright was one of the
most steadfast defenders of segregation when he was in the Senate,
voting against both the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting
Rights Act in 1965.
Nor is Lott the only Senator to have
heaped praise on Thurmond. Carl Levin, Democrat from Michigan,
said on September 24th, "I am pleased to join my colleagues
in paying tribute to Senator Strom Thurmond and honoring him
for his unparalleled record of public service to this Nation."
At the same event where Lott made his offensive remarks, Joe
Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, praised Thurmond as "an
institution within an institution," a "man of iron
with a heart of gold." These accolades are given to a man
who said, while running for President in 1948, "All the
laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force
the nigger into our homes, our schools, our churches." (Most
recent media accounts of this speech have been sanitized, replacing
the word "nigger" with "Negro." Audio recordings
of the speech have Thurmond saying the more offensive term. This
in itself shows that Lott's desire to look at Thurmond's record
through rose-colored glasses is by no means idiosyncratic.)
But perhaps the most glaring hypocrisy
of those criticizing Lott is that they portray themselves as
antiracists opposed to segregationist policies of the past. While
this may be true as far as past American society goes, Gore,
Lieberman, and Pelosi seem to have no qualms about supporting
Apartheid regimes operating abroad in the present day.
Gore ran his 2000 campaign with the unflagging
support of the pro-Israel lobby. For years, as discussed by Alexander
Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair in Al Gore: A User's Manual, Gore
has pandered to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee
(AIPAC), taken direction from rabid Zionist Martin Peretz (whose
New Republic has also come out with a duplicitous condemnation
of Lott), and steadfastly defended Israeli settlement policy.
Pelosi (whose rise to leadership is supposedly
indicative of a "liberal shift" in the Democratic Party)
has argued that "Prime Minister Barak made a generous and
historic proposal at Camp David in 2000." Speaking before
AIPAC on April 23, 2002, Pelosi said "When I met with Chairman
Arafat in Ramallah last year, I explained that he had lost credibility
when he rejected Barak's proposal. His answer: 'There was no
proposal.' It takes your breath away. It is really tragic that
he would say such a thing," (emphasis in original). Pelosi
seems not to want to face the reality that Arafat was right_there
never was a proposal by Barak. (For more on the "generous
proposal," see my essay "The Only Thing 'Generous'
is the Propaganda," CounterPunch website, June 24, 2002).
Lieberman has prided himself over the
last two years as being further to the right on Israel than President
Bush. Commenting on Colin Powell's "peace mission"
to Israel and Palestine in April 2002, Lieberman stated, "I
believe strongly we should not ask Israelis to stop their war
against terrorists until they have achieved greater homeland
security." Later that month, in a statement of support for
a "Resolution Expressing Solidarity With Israel," he
argued that "in supporting Israel's right to protect itself,
to defend itself, we are supporting our own war against terrorism,"
adding that we must not "lose our bearings and muddy the
moral clarity with which we began and are carrying out our campaign
against terror." This "moral clarity" quickly
becomes opaque when we compare outrage at American apartheid
with support for Israel's version of "Jim Crow."
The "Jewish State" has achieved
a system of Apartheid that would make Strom Thurmond blush. From
schooling to housing grants, from police protection to simple
freedom of movement, Palestinians not only in Israel, but especially
in the Occupied Territories, face ever-increasing deprivations
in the face of domination by "God's Chosen People."
While anyone in the world, as long as they are Jewish (even if
they are recent converts from the indigenous tribes of Peru),
can claim citizenship in Israel at any time, Palestinians are
not allowed to return to the homes from which they were driven
in 1948. A Jew born and raised in Brooklyn is given the right,
along with substantial government subsidy, to "settle"
in the West Bank or Gaza. An Arab Israeli has no such right.
Palestinian land and homes are routinely confiscated for this
very purpose, their occupants thrown to the curb. "Jewish
only" roads, built with American taxpayer funds, crisscross
the West Bank, making the shortest of journeys into a nightmarish
odyssey for Palestinians. Curfews are enforced against Palestinians;
Jewish "settlers" (occupiers) have no curfew. The Arab
people of the Occupied Territories suffer regular humiliation
at checkpoints; Israeli soldiers murder Palestinians with impunity.
And increasingly, in a trend that would
have made the Strom Thurmond of 1948 drool with envy, mainstream
Israeli policymakers are talking openly of "transfer"_expelling
the Palestinian population altogether from the Occupied Territories.
Even when he was running for President, Thurmond could only have
dreamed of such a policy being implemented against African Americans.
Both the United States and Israel were
founded as racist states, though Israel more overtly so. Where,
at its inception, the US did pay some lip service to pluralism,
the entire idea behind the founding of Israel was that there
should be a homeland where Jews would have special status. This
special status, defended by the likes of Gore, Lieberman, and
Pelosi, was what Strom Thurmond sought to preserve for whites
in 1948. One would only have to look as far as these politicians'
support for the racist, segregationist State of Israel to see
the hypocrisy of their horror over the racist nostalgia of Trent
Lott.
Tom Gorman
lives in Glendale, California. He welcomes comments at tgorman222@hotmail.com.
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