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Pastimes : The Boxing Ring Revived -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: one_less who wrote (5468)	3/12/2003 2:43:44 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 7720

I was a couple of miles down the road to my lunch date when I realized that I forgot to past in the editorial. Haste makes waste. Here it is. PC run amok or hate speech? A racial slur Virginia Democrat Rep. Jim Moran has drawn some strong and much deserved rebukes for this statement: "If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq, we would not be doing this. The leaders of the Jewish community are influential enough that they could change the direction of where this is going and I think they should." Moran uttered these words at a forum in Reston, Va, a Washington suburb, on March 3. Jewish leaders were rightly outraged. The statement was a slur, a perpetuation of the myth of Jewish conspiracy. It is absurd to assert that Jewish influence is rushing the nation to war. The heated reaction of the Jewish community and others prompted an apology from Moran: "I should not have singled out the Jewish community and regret giving any impression that its members are somehow responsible for the course of action being pursued by the administration, or are somehow behind an impending war." What he really meant to say, Moran said, was that "if more organizations in this country, including religious groups, were more outspoken against a war, then I do not think we would be pursuing war as an option." The only part of that apology that rings even half-true is the phrase, "I do not think." This statement, issued Monday, was Moran's second apology. He was elaborating on the first apology delivered Friday. Moran's apology is much akin to Mississippi Republican Sen. Trent Lott's feeble apologies following his stupid remark. Lott said that if Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond had been elected president in 1948, the country would be better off. Of course, Thurmond - then a diehard segregationist - was in a fierce battle against Democrats seeking civil rights reforms. President Bush joined in the outcry against Lott. Thus, disgraced, Lott's fellow Republicans fired him as Senate majority leader. We can only wish that an even worse fate awaits Moran whose apology cannot gloss over his anti-semitism. Moran is a seven-term congressman who represents Northern Virginia. He was elected in 1990 after a difficult race in which he called his opponent "a deceitful, fatuous jerk" - clearly a statement more descriptive of the speaker. Surely the good citizens of Northern Virginia deserve better.