Last week Julian Bond, chairman of the NAACP, reportedly spoke rather unrestrainedly to a student audience at Fayetteville State University in North Carolina. He –
delivered a blistering partisanspeech . . . equating the Republican Party with the Nazi Party and characterizing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her predecessor, Colin Powell, as tokens.
“The Republican Party would have the American flag and the swastika flying side by side,” he charged.
Calling President Bush a liar, Bond told the audience at the historically black institution that this White House’s lies are more serious than the lies of his predecessor's because Clinton's lies didn’t killpeople. . . .
He referred to former Attorney General John Ashcroft as J. Edgar Ashcroft. He compared Bush’s judicial nominees to the Taliban.
The source of these lurid quotes is WorldNetDaily, a right-wing site that makes no pretense of being “fair and balanced”, so Mr. Bond’s response had a degree of credibility. An FSU press release (via Best of the Web) quotes him thus:
I didn’t say these things I’m alleged to have said. There is no one in the audience who can say I said them. The reporter from the Fayetteville newspaper did not report I said them. I have denied I said them and refuse to engage in a back and forth about what I did say. This is an irresponsible attack by a right-wing blog – a partisan blog – and these kinds of attacks should be expected and dismissed for what they are.
The release added that school officials had “reviewed a tape of Bond’s speech to verify the alleged comments. Based on the review, it was determined that nowhere during Bond’s speech was reference made to the Nazi Party, nor was the word ‘token’ used.”
Intrigued by the limited scope of that denial, Best of the Web editor James Taranto called FSU’s public relations director, who did not deny the other parts of the WorldNetDaily story (Bush’s “lies” killing people, “J. Edgar Ashcroft”, “Taliban” judicial nominees) and specifically confirmed that Mr. Bond did say, “The Republican Party would have the American flag and the swastika flying side by side.” Mr. Taranto doubts that he “meant to equate the GOP to Hindus”.
Politics can be rough-and-tumble, but claims that one’s adversaries want to engage in mass murder – for that is what flying the Nazi flag implies – ought to be far outside the sphere of respectable discourse. For making that comparison, Mr. Bond deserves exile from polite company. That he cravenly lied to cover up the offense is an aggravating factor. He is both conscious of his guilt and unwilling to expiate it by forthrightly admitting that he was wrong.
That the NAACP, long the nation’s most prestigious civil rights organization, has such a man as its leader seriously tarnishes its own reputation. He should be booted out the door instanter. If he isn’t, one can only assume that the organization has no distaste for ideological derangement.
Needless to say, the bien-pensant politicians and journalists who decry harmless cartoons about Mohammed, none of them a tenth as derogatory as likening him to Adolf Hitler, will say nary a discouraging word about Julian Bond. “Respect”, it seems, is a slogan, not a principle.
Update (2/7/06): Brendan Loy, of The Irish Trojan’s Blog, has a more complete report on Mr. Bond’s speech. He finds that WorldNetDaily summarized and paraphrased, but did not distort the NAACP chieftain’s meaning. For example, he didn’t denigrate Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice as “tokens”; instead, he called them “human shields” for the Bush Administration.
The “swastika” quote is interesting. According to the tape (actually an MP3 file – we’re in the 21st Century now), Mr. Bond’s full statement was, “Their [Republicans’] idea of equal rights is the American flag and the Confederate swastika flying side-by-side.” Mr. Loy chews over the question of whether labeling the Nazi emblem “Confederate” makes the implicit accusation less hateful, but the answer is easy to discern. As noted above, Fayetteville State University’s own PR director confirmed the WorldNetDaily’s version of the quote. The insertion of the adjective “Confederate” made no impression on him, and I’m sure that the student audience caught the speaker’s subtext: Republicans are no different from mass murderers. It would be more accurate to say that Julian Bond is no different from the Islamofascist demagogues who pollute political argument with hatred. One hopes that the kids who listened to him in Fayetteville are less gullible than Syrian mobs.
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