David Duke due in Bahrain for lecture

gulf news ^ | November 12, 2002

[dennisw]

Manama |By A Correspondent | 12-11-2002 Print friendly format | Email to Friend

A former U.S. Senator is to arrive today in Bahrain to lecture on 'behind the scene influence of the Zionist lobby on U.S. politics,' at the invitation of a local religious centre, a spokesman told Gulf News yesterday.

David Duke, who represented Louisiana in the U.S. Senate from 1989 to 1991 and ran unsuccessfully for governor the same year, "is a well-known critic of the Zionist lobby in the U.S. and its threat to the U.S. national security," said Mohammed Zuhair, manager of Discover Islam Centre.

The centre, an educational institute serving mostly the non-Muslim community in Bahrain, is sponsoring Duke's four-day visit.

"During his stay, he will deliver two lectures, 'Global Struggle against Zionism' and "Israeli Involvement in September 11 (attacks)'. Both will be open to the public and followed by a question and answer session," Zuhair said.

Duke is a figure with controversial ideas. He is accused of being a white supremacist and anti-Semite since his days in university in the early 1970s when he founded the White Youth Alliance as an anti-black organisation. He went on to join the racist Ku Klux Klan in 1974.

"But he quit this organisation in 1978; now he is a mainstream politician, a member of the Republican Party," Zuhair insisted.

He said Duke was not being invited because of his perceived anti-Jewish stand but because he has recently authored a book that 'exposes the Zionist agenda for world domination."

[Skooz]

Would you have voted for him in that case?

I like to think I voted against Duke, instead of for Edwards. Helps me keep my dinner down.

[CobaltBlue]

>> Here was a candidate you agreed with on virtually every issue<<

The point is that you don't judge people by their words, you judge them by their deeds.

[bigunreal]

That is a disturbing picture. Duke must have been very young. All I can judge him by are his public pronouncements since he attempted to become a "respectable" political candidate. In that respect, I find a lot to like with the views he has expressed. I would also hope that you would asknowledge the possibility that Duke has honestly tempered his views and been transformed from a kooky KKK/"white power" leader into a far-right idealogue, not unlike Pat Buchanan. It's funny how the Robert Byrd's are allowed to leave their Klan pasts behind them (an earlier leftist, Supreme Court justice Hugo Black, is another example of this) and "grow" into respectability as liberals or centrists. I guess because Duke is still talking about race and our support of Israel, it is considered likely that he really hasn't changed, and is ready to put the brown shirt and/or white hood back on at the earliest opportunity. My main point, nonetheless, was that our society (and you reflect that) now clearly feels that "racism" and/or "anti-semitism" (whether the label is justified or not) are greater crimes than any violent one we can imagine (murder, rape, robbery, etc.).