The Dangers of Duke

Sketchy, uneven, but at least concise. notes toward an article.

David Duke is one of the foremost living promoters of anti-Semitism.  He is a large scale attempted corrupter of people's thinking, and a potential drainer of people's energy, for the need to respond, correct, or self-protect from all his wrongness. 

Once, when I was on a substitute teacher job, in the spring, the lesson plan left by the teacher included going through the coming week, using the wall calendar.  As soon as I mentioned Passover, one of the students started spouting a completely malicious fabrication about what the Seder was.  I knew what I was encountering, but not until a few years later, online, did I recognize the likely source, an anti-Semitic Youtube by David Duke.    

 

David Duke's video about Purim and Passover, villainizes  these holidays while idealizing the Christian spring holiday of Easter.   His methodology is the epitome of prejudice, and some details from his fabrication were exactly what that student had spouted.

2. 

David Duke has crafted a lot of wording to deflect the charge of racism and white supremacy, against him and his colleagues, by euphemizing it, and by counterposing a distracting alleged menace of Jewish supremacy.   Duke's website contain numerous examples of this.

  

Duke was and is involved in scapegoating the institution of African slavery onto the Jews.  This is a huge distortion of the historical record, cast in the guise of scholarship and fact.  Jewish participation in the slave trade is recast as the instigator and dominator of the slave trade. This explicitly distorts the Jewish record by enlarging it, and also distorts the record of the dominant participants, by reducing the appearance of their participation.

This falsification that Duke is promoting is the same one contained in the anonymous volume promoted by Nation of Islam, The Secret Relationship between Jews and Blacks.  In the mid-1980's Duke and Louis Farrakhan were brought together by Willis Carto to begin sharing "intelligence" on the subject of the Jews.  David Duke has smeared Martin Luther King repeatedly, as well as Black Lives Matter, recently.  But Duke found common ground or potential liaison with Louis Farrakhan, in their anti-Semitism as well as their racial separatism and racial nationalism.

Theoretically, ideologically, David Duke can promise Louis Farrakhan half of Michigan or more for his Black nationalist state.  I imagine that there was some conversation like that.  I also imagine that Duke and Carto  wanted the same outcome, that the anonymous book  be useful for white anti-Semites as well as Black.  And that was the outcome for that obnoxious book.

3.

Duke's smear of Martin Luther King was not just an ad hominem attack but an attack on civil rights for Black people.  The content of the smear featured the charges of "womanizer" and "communist."   His methodology was to bring these accusations to the fore, while shifting attention from the content of what King stood for -- support for Black people as part of society in the U.S., and the well-being and full rights of Black people, and for everyone. 

 

That part of him, his enduring legacy, is of course lost to David Duke, and made invisible by him.

4.

More recently David Duke has contributed to the smearing of Black Lives Matter by promoting the charge of cop killers against them.  Black Lives Matter did the country a service by strongly protesting racism, and especially the racism that recurrently compromises the work of the police.  

Yes, I did take issue with Black Lives Matter on a couple of details in their positions, but I appreciate their basic points, and reject David Duke's basic malicious distortion of them.          

  

5.

   

It is well known that he went Iran and personally promoted Holocaust denial there.  It is less well known that he went to Ukraine and helped them apply anti-Semitic ideology to the suffering  in their history -- receiving his much touted PhD for that treachery.

7

Duke promotes the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" on Youtube, and seems to get the most views. He admits they are a fraudulent document, but is not bothered by their fraudulence.  The "Protocols" are like the grandfather of modern fake news.  The "Protocols" function to exaggerate and villainize any problem involving the Jews or anything Jewish, while concealing the general versions of the same problem.

The edition of the "Protocols" that Duke is selling contains an introduction by Henry Ford, in whose political tradition David Duke squarely resides. 

8

David Duke was once a leader in the Ku Klux Klan.  Then he became a politician and tried to euphemize and clean the appearance of his politics.  Under his leadership, white supremacy and white racism were re-packaged as white nationalism, in an attempt to mainstream a version of these politics.

9

David Duke tried more than once to insert his anti-Semitism into the Middle East peace movement.  As that movement shifted in its tactics from dialogue to boycott, David Duke saw an opportunity to coattail, which was generally rebuffed, but also absorbed by peripheral and extremist elements.  

David Duke, and his followers, attempted to woo Jewish Voice for Peace, but when they clearly rejected them, Duke began attacking that organization as "Jewish supremacist," a defamation he routinely makes against a variety of Jewish people and organizations.   

David Duke has attacked both Jewish Zionists and Jewish anti-Zionists, using the same methodologies and caricatures.  He is not a friend to the Palestinians, although he claims to be.  He is only an enemy of the Jews, a corruption, a promoter of endless prejudice. 

10.

It is of course not automatically anti-Semitic to criticize a policy or practice of Israel, but David Duke is a major anti-Semite who has mixed that ideology with hyperbolic attacks on Israel.  

The Anti-Defamation League reports that

"when Duke is not attacking Jews directly, he is spreading conspiracy theories about the Mossad, the Israeli government and unnamed “Zionists” and their role in various world events including the 9/11 attacks, the Iraq war, illegal immigration or any fluctuation in the U.S. economy. Since September 11, Duke has reiterated his belief that Israel and the Mossad perpetrated the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He has insisted that the Mossad warned 4,000 Jews who worked at the World Trade Center to stay home on the day of the attacks, while allowing thousands of innocent Americans to die. Duke's "proof" further reveals his bigotry--he has said that since Jews control finance, more Israelis/Jews should have died in the World Trade Center. He has also stated that Israel carried out the attacks to turn attention away from its treatment of the Palestinians."

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, in 2005, Duke said on Syrian television, "Israel makes the Nazi State look very, very moderate."  This is an extreme bizarre and outrageous falsification, a double falsification actually.  

     

In Conclusion 

   

David Duke is vicious, compulsive and broad based in his attacks on the Jews.  He has no concern for truth.  He distorts religion, history, and current events to villainize the Jewish people and everything Jewish.  Duke is an heir to the politics of Henry Ford in that regard.  He has rivals but is preeminent in his deeply offensive field.     

Peoples' awareness, peoples' ability to see through this prejudice, and educational activism will help curtail this and related problems.       

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refutations of the lie that Jews dominated the Atlantic slave trade:

http://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/jews-and-the-african-slave-trade/