As I mentioned below, Pete McCloskey (according to the L.A. Times, "the best thing that could happen for the district, the state, the nation and possibly the Republican Party") had spoken to a Holocaust revisionist group, and had called the Holocaust "the so-called Holocaust." That struck me as troubling, and it seemed to me that the papers should have acknowledged this and tried to explain it.

But a commenter points to yet another item, which strikes me as even more troubling. This is from McCloskey's speech at the Institute for Historical Review conference (emphasis added):

From an Israeli television studio I was interviewed by Tom Brokaw in New York for NBC national television. I'll never forget what happened. He asked what we had found, and about our talks with Assad, Hussein and Arafat. You know, you just get five-minute sound bites. I was asked what I thought of Begin. And I said that he's the same guy who, back in 1947, had hanged British soldiers. He was terrorist. Even most Jews thought of him as a terrorist. Some called him a Jewish Hitler, I believe. And I was asked what I thought of Ariel Sharon [who was then Israel's defense minister]. "Well, he's a butcher," I said. "He's a mean guy." I was asked about Yitzhak Shamir. I said something similar about him. And then Brokaw asked me what I thought about Yasser Arafat. "Well," I said, "I think he's a man of peace." At that point, the Israeli military censor cut off the interview and the link to NBC in the United States....

Now if the Israelis did cut off the interview, they could quite properly be faulted for it. And it's certainly quite legitimate to fault Israeli leaders for their past actions. (I can't speak to the details of Begin's, Sharon's, and Shamir's past conduct, but I do know that reasonable people have made such criticisms of Begin and Sharon; for purposes of this post, I'm happy to assume the truth of those criticisms, and to include Shamir in the group.)

But can someone who harshly condemns Begin, Sharon, and Shamir for their past violent acts yet calls Yasser Arafat "a man of peace" really be "the best thing that could happen for the district, the state, the nation and possibly the Republican Party"?

(For those who want to justify McCloskey's statements on the theory that he would have said more to qualify his position about Arafat had the censors not cut him off, please note that he related this story in his own speech, with no qualification and no explanation. When someone gives a speech to a Holocaust revisionist group and favorably recalls an incident in which he harshly criticized Israeli leaders but called Arafat "a man of peace," that seems to me a good window on the man's mindset.)