Colin Powell’s Double Standard
http://israel-commentary.org/?p=5692
The former secretary of state offers a dubious defense of Chuck Hagel and his comments about the ‘Jewish lobby.’
By BRET STEPHENS
Colin Powell thinks Chuck Hagel’s use of the term “Jewish lobby” was
an innocent mistake, for which he should atone by writing “Israel lobby”
100 times on a blackboard.
“That term slips out from time to time,” the former secretary of
state told David Gregory on Sunday’s “Meet the Press.” Mr. Powell also
thinks that when Mr. Hagel’s critics “go over the edge and say because
Chuck said ‘Jewish lobby,’ he is anti-Semitic, that’s disgraceful. We
shouldn’t have that kind of language in our dialogue.”
OK, I get it. An errant slip of the tongue isn’t proof of prejudice.
We have all said things the offensiveness of which we perhaps didn’t
fully appreciate when we opened our mouth.
Like the time when, according to Bob Woodward, Mr. Powell accused Douglas Feith,
one of the highest-ranking Jewish officials in the Bush administration
and the son of a Holocaust survivor, of running a “Gestapo office” out
of the Pentagon. Mr. Powell later apologized personally to Mr. Feith for
what he acknowledged was a “despicable characterization.”
Or the time when, according to George Packer in his book “The
Assassins’ Gate,” Mr. Powell leveled another ugly charge at Mr. Feith,
this time in his final Oval Office meeting with George W. Bush. “The
Defense Department had too much power in shaping foreign policy,
[Powell] argued, and when Bush asked for an example, Powell offered not
Rumsfeld, the secretary who had mastered him bureaucratically, not
Wolfowitz, the point man on Iraq, but the department’s number three
official, Douglas Feith, whom Powell called a card-carrying member of
the Likud Party.”
Anyway, on this business of hypersensitivity to prejudicial remarks,
real or perceived, here is Mr. Powell in the same interview talking
about what ails the Republican Party:
“There’s also a dark vein of intolerance in some parts of the party.
What do I mean by that? I mean by that is they still sort of look down
on minorities. How can I evidence that? When I see a former governor
[Alaska's Sarah Palin] say that the president is shuckin’ and jivin,’
that’s a racial-era slave term. When I see another former governor [New
Hampshire's John Sununu] say after the president’s first debate when he
didn’t do well, he said he was lazy. Now it may not mean anything to
most Americans but to those of us who are African-Americans, the second
word is shiftless and then there’s a third word that goes along with
it.”
So let’s get this straight. Mr. Powell holds it “disgraceful” to
allege anti-Semitism of politicians who invidiously use the phrase “the
Jewish lobby.” But he has no qualms about accusing Mr. Sununu—along
whose side he worked during the George H.W. Bush administration—of
all-but whispering the infamous N-word when he called Mr. Obama’s first
debate performance “lazy.”
It’s hard to decide whether Mr. Powell is using a double standard
hypocritically or inadvertently. I’ll assume the latter, since he seems
to have missed the reason why Mr. Hagel’s nomination to be secretary of
defense has run into so much opposition.
Consider the following hypothetical sentence: “The
African-American lobby intimidates a lot of people up here.” Would this
pass Mr. Powell’s smell test?
Or this: “I’m a United States senator, not a Kenyan senator.” Such a
statement would be considered as so weird and unwonted that no amount of
spinning (let’s say it was uttered in the context of a discussion of
U.S. policy toward Africa) would have saved the person making it from
immediate disqualification.
Now maybe someone can explain how that’s materially different from
Mr. Hagel’s suggestion that “The Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of
people up here” and “I’m a United States senator, not an Israeli
senator.”
One of the arguments I’ve come across recently is that there’s
nothing unwarranted about using the word “intimidate” and that it’s
something all lobbies do. Remarkably, however, a Google search yields
zero results for the phrases “the farm lobby intimidates,” “the
African-American lobby intimidates,” or “the Hispanic lobby
intimidates.” Only the Jewish lobby does that, apparently.
There is also the argument that supporters of Israel really do
intimidate politicians on Capitol Hill. The word itself means “to make
timid or fearful,” to “frighten,” and “to compel or deter as if by
threats.” It would be interesting to see valid evidence that any group
commonly associated with the Israel lobby ever employed such Mafia-like
tactics. What I’ve seen instead are crackpot allegations,
such as the letter I recently received charging that the Jewish lobby
was responsible for William Fulbright’s 1974 senatorial defeat in
Arkansas. Who knew?
In the meantime, maybe Mr. Powell could show that he’s as sensitive
to the whiff of anti-Semitism as he is to the whiff of racism. If George
Packer’s description of Mr. Powell’s last meeting with President Bush
is inaccurate, he should publicly disavow it. If it’s accurate, he
should publicly apologize for it. Nobody questions where Mr. Powell’s
loyalties lie. If he has called the loyalties of other patriotic
American public servants into question, that would be, to use his word,
disgraceful.
Write to bstephens@wsj.com
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