14 December 2006
Appearing on the US television news channel CNN, the American far-right leader David Duke attacked reporter Wolf Blitzer as an “agent of Israel” and said that president Bush’s advisers sounded like “a Jewish wedding.” Duke, a former head of the Ku Klux Klan, a former Louisiana state legislator and a Holocaust denier, had attended the Holocaust conference in Tehran earlier this week. He spoke live to CNN on Tuesday, but was incensed by the report that introduced him, saying it overemphasized his time in the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s. “You are not an honest broker on television, you are an Israeli agent,” he said, noting Blitzer’s employment by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee 25 years ago – a past Blitzer has never hidden and still occasionally mentions during reports. Blitzer asked Duke to explain “Jewish control” as Bush and vice president Dick Cheney were not Jewish. Duke cited a number of current and former Jewish advisers to Bush, saying that “sounded like a Jewish wedding.” Blitzer weathered the onslaught without raising his voice, prompting correspondent Carol Costello to say, “Wolf, all I have to say is, you rock.”