Reply #19: Sorry, Try Again

[debsianben]

She never claimed that there were no Jews in the WTC, which is why you can't provide a quote. The reason you couldn't provide a quote is that she never said it, and any one who knows anything about her views in detail would know that she never would have said it.

She never even claimed that 9/11 was a plot by Bushco. She did raise the questions, "what did they know and when did they know it?" and, "who benefited?", but its a hell of a stretch to get from that to "it was a plot by neocons" (something she never said) and an even bigger stretch to get from that to "a plot by Jews." "Neocons" doesn't mean "Jews" and never has. It means a specific, very real ideological view within the conservative movement, leading representatives of which include thoroughly protestant folks like Cheney and Rumsfeld (both old PNAC members). Claiming that all criticism of the neo-cons is rooted in anti-Semitism is insupportable and silly.

The context of her remarks on 9/11 was to call for an investigation into those two questions--she was one of the first Congresspeople to do so. I think one of the reasons she was just re-elected is that that call doesn't seem so incindiary and controversial in retrospect, since it ended up becoming reality (the 9/11 Commission). I challenge you to find a single place where she actually claimed that Bush or any one else knew about 9/11 in advance, rather than just saying that there should be an investigation into who knew what when (which is legitimate, as it turns out, given what we now know about memos with very specific warnings, etc., that got a lot of play in the 9/11 hearings.)

I agree that the comment you quote from her father is unacceptabe, but I find it telling that you can only find such quotes from her father, and none from her. Your original claim was that *she* had made "explicitly racist" comments about Jewish people, and as such its kind of ridiculous that you can't come up with a single such quote.

Your implicit view seems to be that any time some who happens to be Jewish is laballed as a racist, this is somehow an anti-Semitic comment. I don't see the sense to this--just as its possible for black people to be anti-Semitic, its possible for Jewish people to be racist.

Calling some one a "neo-Confederate racist" is legitimate if they really are a neo-Confederate racist (for example, I would say that any one who strongly believes that a Confederate symbol should be in Georgia's flag and is contemptous towards blacks with a problem with that symbol would be accurately described as a neo-Confederate racist, regardless of their religious or community identification), and illegitimate if they are not racists. But under no circumstances would it add up to "anti-Semitism" just because the person so labelled (whether accurately or inaccurately) happens to be Jewish. Similarly, I'd say that accusing a black person of being anti-Semitic may be accurate or inaccurate in any given case, even dangerously libelous or not, but would never in itself be racist, even if it happens to be wildly and dangerously inaccurate and to be shamelessly feeding into a Republican smear campaign against one of the most progressive voices in Congress.