Chuckie Watch 19: More on Chuckie and Anti-Semitism

Two Chuckie Watches in a row! This one gets back to an earlier theme. In The Silly Tip of the Iceberg (10/24/03), Chuckie wrote:

<< A few years ago members of the media tried to make Billy Graham look like an anti-Semite because of some long ago, taken out of context telephone conversation with then President Richard Nixon. Of course it didn’t work because anybody with a half ounce of gray matter knows that Billy Graham has spent his life proclaiming the gospel of a Jew, Jesus Christ and loves both Israel and the Jewish people. >>

Actually, it was last year, but why nit-pick? Not that Chuckie or the actual fans of his rants would care, but here is a better summary of that event, from When Religion Becomes Evil (2002) by Charles Kimball:

<< In early March 2002 a private conversation between evangelist Billy Graham and then-President Richard Nixon appeared on the thirty-year-old Oval Office tapes that were released to the public. Graham told the president that Jews had a "stranglehold" on the media that needed to be broken because it was "ruining the country." Nixon replied, "You believe that?" "Yes, sir," Graham responded. "Oh, boy. So do I," Nixon agreed, adding, "I can't ever say that, but I believe it." At this point Graham replied, "No, but if you get elected a second time, then we might be able to do something." Graham also confides to Nixon, "A lot of Jews are great friends of mine. ... They know I'm friendly to Israel and so forth. But [Jews] don't know how I really feel about what they are doing to this country, and I have no power and no way to handle them." Nixon's reply: "You must not let them know." On hearing of the tapes, Billy Graham immediately issued an apology saying that he did not recall making the remarks when he was fifty-three years old. >>

The Billy Graham of 2002 had the decency to make an apology. The Chuckie of 2003 didn't see how anybody could thank there was anything anti-Semitic about that nohow.

It's well known that the Watergate revelations provoked Graham into a serious rethinking of some of his positions. And he has never (publicly) encouraged the kind of bigotry or indulged in the kind of venom that Chuckie routinely does in his Soapbox rants.