No top ten of American hate would be complete without David Duke, the ex-Louisiana state representative who has made a career out of white supremacism and slandering African Americans, gays, and most of all Jews. The reason I put Duke no higher than number seven on my list is that, despite his fervent efforts, he has been kept—just barely—out of the mainstream. More mainstream, presentable figures—who are not hate-mongers per se—are more effective purveyors of antisemitism.
The Anti-Defamation League has called Duke “perhaps America’s most well-known racist and anti-Semite.” His greatest triumph, if one can call it that, was being elected in 1989 to the Louisiana State Legislature, where he served until 1992. Duke has also run unsuccessfully for governor of Louisiana and for U.S. senator (twice), representative, and even president. His first bid for the Senate and his bid for the governorship, however, won a majority of white Louisiana voters.
Meanwhile Duke has carried on with the show, tirelessly spreading hate through books, articles, his newsletter, his website, and leadership of racist organizations from the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s to, at present, his European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO). More recently Duke has been taking the show on the road, further inflaming Jew-hatred in places—including parts of Eastern Europe and, particularly, the Middle East—where it is already strong. And lately Duke has been starring on Iranian TV.
David Duke was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1950. As a student at Louisiana State University in 1970, he organized a group called the White Youth Alliance. He became known for holding birthday parties for Adolf Hitler and going around the campus in a Nazi uniform.
In the mid-1970s Duke played a key role in revitalizing the Ku Klux Klan. As grand wizard he tried to pretty up the Klan, trading in the white robes for a profile of spiffy, decent folk just trying to secure their “rights.” Some of his Klan comrades, though, were not impressed, accusing the wizard of serially siphoning off the organization’s funds. By 1979 Duke had left the Klan and set up his National Association for the Advancement of White People.
Duke got married in 1974; but according to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, he continued to “pursue…female sex partners so avidly and so openly that it embarrassed many of his closest colleagues.”
The 1980s and 1990s were the decades of Duke’s political activity, including his years in the Louisiana legislature and failed runs for higher offices. The first years of the new millennium found him in Russia and Ukraine promoting antisemitism—and dodging the U.S. authorities, who had charged him with tax evasion and trying to bilk thousands of supporters out of huge sums through mail fraud. Back in the USA, Duke pleaded guilty and got a fifteen-month prison sentence, of which he served thirteen months.
It may seem surprising, then, that in September 2005, not long after his release from prison, David Duke received an honorary doctorate. It was awarded by MAUP, a private university system in Ukraine and the country’s main hotbed of antisemitism.
Two months later Duke was in Syria, where he told a rally that “Washington D.C. and New York and London and many other capitals of the world” were under “Zionist” occupation, and that “your fight for freedom is the same as our fight for freedom.” The crowd responded with: “Our soul and our blood we will sacrifice for you, Bashar.”
December 2006 found Duke, along with an international roster of Jew-haters, in Tehran for a Holocaust-denial conference sponsored by the Iranian Foreign Ministry.
The leadoff speaker was then-Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who declared, to gusts of applause, that Israel would be “wiped out.” Duke, for his part, told the Associated Press that “the Holocaust is the device used as the pillar of Zionist imperialism, Zionist aggression, Zionist terror and Zionist murder.” He was not concerned about the fact that, as he spoke, Americans were being murdered in Iraq by Iranian-sponsored terror.
And so it went. In 2007 Duke was in Spain to promote the Spanish translation of his book Jewish Supremacism. In 2008 he was in Belgium to give the keynote speech at the racist Euro-Rus Congress. In 2009 he was arrested in Prague for Holocaust denial and ordered to leave the Czech Republic the next day.
Just lately Duke had another run-in with the law, this time in Italy, from which he was expelled in early December for trying to set up a pan-European neo-Nazi organization. The Italian court called him “socially dangerous for his racist and anti-semitic views.”
Duke has, though, found a home where he is more than welcome—Iran’s English-language Press TV, which has been giving U.S. antisemites like Duke, Gordon Duff, and others a worldwide audience.
Considering the “Death to America” regime’s ongoing record of anti-American terror, David Duke—who has not shrunk from inciting the masses in Syria as well—can add treason to his inglorious record of philandering, fraud, theft, Holocaust denial, and generally working to drag humanity down to the lowest level.
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