Fox New Channel’s Glenn Beck says President Obama has ‘a deep-seated hatred for white people’
By APWednesday, July 29, 2009
Fox’s Glenn Beck: President Obama is a racist
NEW YORK — Fox News Channel commentator Glenn Beck said he believes President Barack Obama is a racist.
Beck made the statement during a guest appearance Tuesday on the “Fox & Friends” morning show. He said Obama has exposed himself as a person with “a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.”
His remarks came during a discussion of Obama’s reaction to the arrest of Harvard University scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. Gates is black and was arrested for disorderly conduct by a white policeman over a misunderstanding about a break-in at Gates’ home.
An Obama spokesman, William Burton, said the White House had no comment on Beck.
Beck’s statement was challenged on the air by Fox host Brian Kilmeade, who noted that most of the people who work for the nation’s first black president are white.
“I’m not saying he doesn’t like white people,” Beck said. “He has a problem. This guy is, I believe, a racist.”
Beck wondered, during the discussion, what other president would immediately jump on the police for their actions in the case. Obama said in a news conference that he believed the police acted stupidly in the case, but later backtracked from the statement and invited Gates and the police officer, Sgt. James Crowley, to the White House for a conciliatory meeting later this week.
Bill Shine, Fox News senior vice president of programming, told the TVNewser Web site that Beck had “expressed a personal opinion which represented his own views, not those of the Fox News Channel. And as with all commentators in the cable news arena, he is given the freedom to express his opinions.”
Racial controversies are hardly new to presidents. In 2005, entertainer Kanye West said during a telethon after Hurricane Katrina that President George W. Bush “doesn’t care about black people.”
Beck, also a radio host and best-selling author, was an immediate hit with Fox News Channel viewers, starting in January when he made the jump from HLN (formerly CNN Headline News).
Beck didn’t speak about the racial comments on his own daily Fox show Tuesday.
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July 29, 2009: 10:36 am
As President Barak Hussein Obama is both the 1st black president AND also the 40th white president of United States of America tell me, how could he hate all those pale face people like me? During the last campaign he chose to spend a number of those most crucial final days of that presidential electoral campaign by the side of his (totally white) mother’s mother. Hardly the actions of a racist! Tell me, - Is Joe Biden black? - in the Administration, is there no one with a European background? Just as the Lawyer from Puerto Rico is deemed a racist by Republicans as she dares to think that her female Latino heritage provides something to offer for the US Supreme Court, so too they deem that black (and also white)guy from Chicago must be a racist because of his paternal heritage. Going on this form of logic Beck must regard all people as racist - save for those with a fairer shade of skin. |
luke weyland, Sydney Australia