FOCUS
Most Dangerous Politician?
Continued from preceding page
Rabbi Robert Loewy of Metairie, Louisiana, says his
congregants are deeply worried about the prospect
of a Duke election.
David Duke
appearing on a
televised debate
with a black leader
in Atlanta.
164
ethnic groups and Jews should get New
York? His response is that the source was
an article someone else wrote in the
NAAWP News, and that he was not re-
sponsible for it.
Yes, he sold Nazi books out of his of-
fice, he concedes, but his book store was
like a general book store and it also con-
tained Communist books.
The Holocaust? "I've been misquoted.
I never said the Holocaust didn't hap-
pen," he says. "I've argued against the
numbers and I've argued in the past that
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 1990
a constant recital of the Holocaust kind
of kept us from dealing with some of the
issues of the Palestinians. Sure, the Ho-
locaust happened and there were terrible
atrocities against the Jewish people in
Europe."
Mr. Duke has also been accused of
minimizing the number of Jews killed in
the Holocaust. Did six million die? "I
don't know the numbers," he parries. "I
just read an article from the Jewish Mu-
seum in Israel contesting some of the [ac-
cepted] numbers. I leave it to the
historians. Human life is human life and
those kinds of politics and programs that
happened were wrong and worthy of con-
demnation, but I don't know all the
aspects of the Holocaust."
Crunching on some ice cubes from a
Diet Coke, Rep. Duke says he is certain
he will attract Jewish votes. "There are a
lot of good conservative Jewish people,"
he says. "As a group I think we all ac-
knowledge the Jews tend to vote liberal
but there's a lot of Jews I have a lot of
admiration for, whom I really support
and who would support me."
Rep. Duke also denies he's anti-black,
asserting he has "no hatred in my heart
toward blacks." Rather, he says, he
wants blacks "to become part of the
mainstream of America." He blames lib-
eral social welfare policies and programs
for preventing this by encouraging people
not to work. "I think it's held blacks
back, not helped them." As state repre-
sentative, he has introduced bills against
affirmative action programs.
Rep. Duke almost begs an interviewer
to judge him for what he is today, to for-
give him his past. Even his most fervid
critics concede that he has toned down
his public anti-Semitism, if not his rac-
ism. The only anti-Jewish reference in re-
cent issues of the NAAWP newsletter
has been to the "minority-controlled me-
dia" in an ad for membership. (The news-
letter does tend to portray Israel in an
unfavorable light, with stories emphasiz-
ing the extent of American aid to that
country).
The newsletter also tends to advocate
the white race rather than make overtly
negative statements about blacks.
"The more I read, the
more I'm convinced he's
modeling himself after
Hitler."
Rabbi Robert Loewy
But Jewish leaders in Louisiana are
less than sanguine about "the new Duke."
"I think he is very dangerous," says
Rabbi Loewy. "He's a liar and he manipu-
lates truth." He notes that Mr. Duke re-
sponds to questions about his past "as if
he were a bad boy as a teen-ager but now
he's changed." But the rabbi notes that
those "bad years" were as recent as 1988.
"I don't see him as a changed person. I
see him as an opportunist."
Alarmed by the Duke threat, the Baton
Rouge Jewish community held a city-
wide meeting recently and raised $25,000
to defeat him. Many Jews around the
state have joined and are the principal fi-
nancial backers of The Louisiana Coali-
tion Against Racism and Nazism, a polit-
ical action committee organized earlier
this year by people who opposed Mr.
Duke when he ran for the House of Rep-
resentatives. The coalition, which claims
2,000 "contacts and contributors," in-
cluding 17 campus groups throughout
the state, is bipartisan and multi-racial.
Executive Director Lance Hill asserts
that the question is not whether Mr.
Duke will win the Senate race but wheth-
er he will finish strongly enough to gain
increased legitimacy. Interviewed in his
downtown New Orleans office, Mr. Hill
says Mr. Duke is seeking to build "a
mass-based racist and anti-Semitic
movement politically, and this is simply a
device in a long-term strategy.
"If he pulls anywhere near 35-40 per-
cent of the white vote, he's broken
through and would be perceived by a ma-
jority of whites as a solution to the [ra-
cial] problem," Mr. Hill says.
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