Topic: Horowitz
Right-wingers are trying to score political points in the controversy over the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates and President Obama's remarks on it: by seeking to justify racial profiling.
In a July 23 Newsmax column, Ronald Kessler wrote:
Then Obama cited the history of blacks and Hispanics “being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately . . . and even when there are honest misunderstandings, the fact that blacks and Hispanics are picked up more frequently, and often time for no cause, casts suspicion even when there is good cause.”
In saying that, Obama ignored the unfortunate fact that blacks account for four times more violent crimes than people of other races.
Then, in a July 23 appearance on Glenn Beck's Fox News show, David Horowitz responded to complaints by Beck's black crew members about racial profiling by saying: "If he’s on the New Jersey Turnpike or in that area, 70 percent of the drug dealers are black. And who do you think they’re dealing the drugs to? Poor blacks in the -- in Newark, in the inner cities there. So the fact that they stopped him -- I mean, it’s an inconvenience. I have an inconvenience. I get searched every single time every time I jump a plane -- take a plane because I have an artificial hip, but I put up with it."
David Swindle reiterated and sycophantically defended Horowitz's remarks in a July 25 post at the (Horowitz-operated) NewsReal blog:
In explaining why it might be appropriate to search an African-American man’s truck when he gets pulled over Horowitz threw out something Media Matters doesn’t want people to think about: a high percentage of drug dealers in the New York-New Jersey area were black and were making money addicting young blacks to drugs.
This isn’t a “racist” point. He’s not saying that blacks are ethnically inclined to be drug dealers. Horowitz has black family members and has been a civil rights activist for his entire life. He’s primarily concerned with seeing that black children grow up in a safe environment so they too can participate in the American Dream. And part of that means confronting the criminals that are standing in the way of that pursuit.
Are Kessler, Horowitz and Swindle really claiming that racial profiling is not racist? And Horowitz having "black family members" somehow give him a free pass to advocate racial profiling? It appears so.
