Avowed Racists
One politician who has promoted himself by pandering to the antisemitic feelings of the public is David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan member who was elected to the Louisiana state legislature in 1989 and, in 1992, offered his candidacy for the governorship of Louisiana and the Presidency of the United States. In the gubernatorial elections, Duke obtained a majority of the white vote in Louisiana but a minority of the total vote. In the 1992 Republican presidential primaries, he performed poorly and quickly dropped out of the race.
Although his prejudices may be more explicit than most, Duke is not the only American politician to display antisemitic sentiments. Former President Richard Nixon believed that "ost Jewish people are insecure. And that’s why they have to prove things.” Nixon told his advisor Charles Colson that "he Jews are just a very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious personality.” He also suggested that Jews as a group were unwilling to serve in the military and more likely to desert: “I didn’t notice many Jewish names coming back from Vietnam on any of those lists; I don’t know how the hell they avoid it,” he said, adding: “If you look at the Canadian-Swedish contingent, they were very disproportionately Jewish. The deserters.” "He and his aides seem to make a distinction between Israeli Jews, whom Nixon admired, and American Jews."
Read more about this topic: Antisemitism In The United States
Famous quotes containing the words avowed and/or racists:
“Cant is always rather nauseating; but before we condemn political hypocrisy, let us remember that it is the tribute paid by men of leather to men of God, and that the acting of the part of someone better than oneself may actually commit one to a course of behaviour perceptibly less evil than what would be normal and natural in an avowed cynic.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“...Negroes must concern themselves with every single means of struggle: legal, illegal, passive, active, violent and non- violent.... They must harass, debate, petition, boycott, sing hymns, pray on steps—and shoot from their windows when the racists come cruising through their communities.... The acceptance of our condition is the only form of extremism which discredits us before our children [ellipses in source].”
—Lorraine Hansberry (1930–1965)