The Political Freakshow

National Review Fires One Racist Journalist, Hires Another Racist to Take His Place!!!

Back in April, National Review finally parted ways with longtime contributor John Derbyshire after Derbyshire penned an especially racist piece advising non-black American parents on how to talk to their kids about black people. Explaining his decision to sever ties, editor Rich Lowry called Derbyshire’s piece “nasty and indefensible,” and wrote that Derbyshire:

“is effectively using our name to get more oxygen for views with which we’d never associate ourselves otherwise. So there has to be a parting of the ways. Derb has long danced around the line on these issues, but this column is so outlandish it constitutes a kind of letter of resignation.”

While National Review’s decision to can Derbyshire was commendable (if long overdue), ThinkProgress noted at the time that it continued to feature the writings of prominent Islamophobes such as Robert Spencer, David Horowitz, and Daniel Pipes, and called on the magazine to sever ties with these figures as well.

Unfortunately, not only has National Review continued to publish these Islamophobic authors, it has now taken on as a contributor one of the Islamophobia network’s worst offenders, David Yerushalmi.

Back in September 2010, ThinkProgress examined Yerushalmi’s long history of extremists statements, which include a proposal making it “a felony punishable by 20 years in prison to knowingly act in furtherance of, or to support the, adherence to Islam.” In a 2006 article, Yerushalmi lamented in the inability to engage in “a discussion of Islam as an evil religion, or of blacks as the most murderous of peoples (at least in New York City), or of illegal immigrants as deserving of no rights” without being labeled a racist. He also wrote that the American founders were on to something when they limited the vote to white men. “There is a reason the founding fathers did not give women or black slaves the right to vote.”

As Mother Jones noted, the Anti-Defimation League said Yerushalmi has “record of anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-black bigotry.”

In short, he has espoused white nationalist views very similar to John Derbyshire’s, with the added bonus of anti-Muslim “creeping sharia” nonsense. Were the editors of National Review simply unaware if these statements? Or don’t they consider this stuff “nasty and indefensible”?