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RIGHT WING PROVES IT AGAIN - HONESTY DOESN'T ALWAYS PAY

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BY Stanley Crouch

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Friday, May 4, 2001, 12:00 AM

Oddly, little has been reported about the squabble among conservatives over right-wing icon Paul Weyrich's talking the same talk that put Charlie Ward of the Knicks on the hot plate. As you surely must know by now, Ward is a New Testament man who went back into the old charge that the Jews killed Christ. After that got on the front pages, there were some behind-the-scenes movements to make sure we didn't find ourselves in the middle of another moment of hysteria in which Jews were accused of attacking another black man. The point was to get Ward to back up to at least Vatican II and renounce language that has been a staple of anti-Semitic types for centuries. As for Weyrich, this gentle Christian recently published that very same "Jews killed Christ" charge on his Web site. This was exposed by conservative columnist and investigative reporter Evan Gahr. Gahr was promptly attacked and painted as "a publicity hound" by conservative gadfly David Horowitz, whose own most recent claim to publicity has been his buying ads in college newspapers to argue against the idea of reparations for American slavery. In another twist of the knife, Gahr was informed yesterday that he would soon be relieved of his position at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank. That this story has not made much of a showing in the ongoing press discussion of identity as determined by public - or private - statements is more than a bit interesting, particularly in light of the coverage Ward got for much the same thing. It surely proves there's no liberal press bias against the conservatives. After all, the so-called liberal press let off Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) despite plenty of proof showing his connection to the Council of Conservative Citizens, more than a few of whose members consider black people innately inferior to whites. No black politician connected to a group with the opposite view would have gotten away with it. Imagine, for example, if Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice had ever praised the ideas of the Nation of Islam. But if the mainstream press isn't paying attention to Gahr, the right wing certainly is. In fact, he is being treated much the same way that Washington Post reporter Milton Coleman was when he reported the Hymietown comment that boiled Jesse Jackson in charges of anti-Semitism for a few years. No one has promised to "deliver death" to Gahr as Louis Farrakhan did to Coleman. But Gahr has definitely been stripped of his conservative stripes. The irony is that if he had looked the other way and ignored Weyrich's anti-Semitic remarks, Gahr would be quite safe now. But dissension in the ranks is a crime among hard-core ideologues, from the far right to the far left. E-mail: scrouch@edit.
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