After all, this "civil rights advocate" has spewed bigotted garbage against ethnic minorities and Jews -- while stone-cold sober. Will Andrew Young get the Mel Gibson treatment?

The civil rights leader Andrew Young, who was hired by Wal-Mart to improve its public image, resigned from that post last night after telling an African-American newspaper that Jewish, Arab and Korean shop owners had “ripped off” urban communities for years, “selling us stale bread, and bad meat and wilted vegetables.”

In the interview, published yesterday in The Los Angeles Sentinel, a weekly, Mr. Young said that Wal-Mart “should” displace mom-and-pop stores in urban neighborhoods.

“You see those are the people who have been overcharging us,” he said of the owners of the small stores, “and they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they’ve ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it’s Arabs.”

Mr. Young, 74, a former mayor of Atlanta and a former United States representative to the United Nations, apologized for the comments and retracted them in an interview last night. Less than an hour later, he resigned as chairman of Working Families for Wal-Mart, a group created and financed by the company to trumpet its accomplishments.

“It’s against everything I ever thought in my life,” Mr. Young said. “It never should have been said. I was speaking in the context of Atlanta, and that does not work in New York or Los Angeles.”

His remarks drew forceful condemnation from Arab, Jewish and Asian leaders.

Mel Gibson is an alcoholic actor who spoke while three (or more ) sheets to the wind. Young is an influential political figure who spoke while under the influence of his own hatred. Wil he receive the same sort of high-tech lynching that Gibson did -- or will his liberal credentials be sufficient to earn him a pass from those who have sought the personal destruction of a sick conservative?

Posted by: Greg at 10:37 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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