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Colin Powell thinks Chuck Hagel’s use of the term “Jewish lobby” was an innocent mistake, for which he should atone by writing “Israel lobby” 100 times on a blackboard.
“That term slips out from time to time,” the former secretary of state told David Gregory on Sunday’s “Meet the Press.” Mr. Powell also thinks that when Mr. Hagel’s critics “go over the edge and say because Chuck said ‘Jewish lobby,’ he is anti-Semitic, that’s disgraceful. We shouldn’t have that kind of language in our dialogue.”
OK, I get it. An errant slip of the tongue isn’t proof of prejudice. We have all said things the offensiveness of which we perhaps didn’t fully appreciate when we opened our mouth.
Like the time when, according to Bob Woodward, Mr. Powell accused Douglas Feith, one of the highest-ranking Jewish officials in the Bush administration and the son of a Holocaust survivor, of running a “Gestapo office” out of the Pentagon. Mr. Powell later apologized personally to Mr. Feith for what he acknowledged was a “despicable characterization.”
Or the time when, according to George Packer in his book “The Assassins’ Gate,” Mr. Powell leveled another ugly charge at Mr. Feith, this time in his final Oval Office meeting with George W. Bush. “The Defense Department had too much power in shaping foreign policy, [Powell] argued, and when Bush asked for an example, Powell offered not Rumsfeld, the secretary who had mastered him bureaucratically, not Wolfowitz, the point man on Iraq, but the department’s number three official, Douglas Feith, whom Powell called a card-carrying member of the Likud Party.”
Anyway, on this business of hypersensitivity to prejudicial remarks, real or perceived, here is Mr. Powell in the same interview talking about what ails the Republican Party:
“There’s also a dark vein of intolerance in some parts of the party. What do I mean by that? I mean by that is they still sort of look down on minorities. How can I evidence that? When I see a former governor [Alaska’s Sarah Palin] say that the president is shuckin’ and jivin,’ that’s a racial-era slave term. When I see another former governor [New Hampshire’s John Sununu] say after the president’s first debate when he didn’t do well, he said he was lazy. Now it may not mean anything to most Americans but to those of us who are African-Americans, the second word is shiftless and then there’s a third word that goes along with it.”
