David Duke and his dog, in happier times. (Photo: YouTube)

Former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke may hate the Jews, but he sure loved his dog, Torri. When the seventeen-year-old, all-white (naturally!) Maltese died a few months back, Mr. Duke did what any of us would do after the loss of a beloved pet--he filmed a nearly fifteen minute video tribute to the dog and uploaded it to YouTube complete with an emotional folk soundtrack, photos of Torri exploring the great outdoors and musings on the nature of life, death and grief.

Mr. Duke initially made his "Tribute to Torri" private, but he has since relaxed the clip's privacy settings at "the urging of those who met Torri over the last 17 years." We're so glad Mr. Duke chose to share his video, because it's all kinds of incredible. Despite how amazing this video it is, it somehow seems to have escaped the attention of the internet, so we present it to you now. 

"It's been two weeks since Torri died....It still hurts," Mr. Duke explains as the video begins. "Grief actually can be quite wonderful. It heals the soul and it's such a tribute to the spirit that has passed on....I want to express my heart while these feelings flood over me like warm waves. We all, once upon a time long ago, came from the water and the tears that fill our blurry eyes, even against our will, wash us and heal us."

According to Mr. Duke, Torri was an invaluable companion in his crusade against "Zionist-driven Globalism."

"The eternal struggle for our peoples' heritage and our freedom is so hard sometimes. There are so many difficulties on this high, rough road," said Mr. Duke. "Torri would sit by me the countless hours as I wrote books and articles. And it seemed she was always telling me, 'Keep doing your job, I'm doing mine staying by your side.'"

The small dog didn't simply help Mr. Duke by sitting near him. He also credits Torri with being a sounding board as he created his 1998 "masterpiece," My Awakening: A Path to Racial Understanding, in which he purports to provide "compelling evidence that belief in racial equality is the modern scientific equivalent of believing that the earth is flat."

"She truly helped me write my seven hundred page book My Awakening. She was there to listen to me read aloud what I had just written to make sure it had the rhythm and eloquence that I sought. And Torri always looked at me intently when I spoke to her," Mr. Duke said.

Though Torri clearly spent a great deal of time with Mr. Duke in front of a keyboard, she also traveled the globe with him. In his video, Mr. Duke claims he and the dog "explored ancient European ruins" and "climbed at least 500 mountains and hills" together.

"She even secretly made her way in her shoulder bag into places like the Sistine Chapel, and the Louvre and a number of places that her kind were banned," explained Mr. Duke.

Torri's portability was a key part of her appeal to Mr. Duke. In his video he said he chose to get a Maltese, a toy dog breed, because he needed an animal that was "small enough to easily go wherever I went." This apparently raised eyebrows with his friends as carrying a small, toy dog in a man-purse was incongruous with his image as a white nationalist firebrand.

"A few times my friends told me, 'How can you carry around that little, quote, 'fag' dog?' I told them that I was a man secure enough in my heterosexuality that I sure was not going to worry about what people might think," Mr. Duke said.

Indeed, Mr. Duke's life isn't all angry racist rhetoric. His love for animals is just one aspect of his softer side. Mr. Duke also moonlights in "PhotoArt," a discipline he seemingly created himself that involves taking pictures of landscapes and then  using a computer to add "artistic flourish in color, brightness, contrast, composition, line and form to make a truly beautiful photo-artwork that will captivate and inspire you." According to Mr. Duke's website, some of his "PhotoArt" has even "been quietly displayed in European showings and galleries under a nom de plume."

Apparently, in this internet-dominated age, the White Nationalist world, much like the rest of society, is being taken over by Instagram-style digitally-manipulated nature photos and cute animal videos.

Watch Mr. Duke's "Tribute to Torri" video below.

O'Dowd's comments surfaced on a day when Clinton herself answered a question about what she would have done in Obama's place, by saying of Wright, "He would not have been my pastor." She added, "We don't have a choice when it comes to our relatives. We have a choice when it comes to our pastors and the churches we attend."

She hasn't said yet whether she has brought up the issue of Obama's relationship with Wright in conversations with superdelegates.

Here are 2 guys who couldn't be hear thru normal channels. The first was in response to the issue of censoring comments, something I just started doing.

Tikun Olam
(And I urge readers to look at Richard's latest, on a favorable review of Carter's book by Yossi Beilin)

And this was from Brad, responding to my statement about wanting to have it out with the neocons, within the Jewish community. His post follows the last one there now, Beth Waterberg's comment mocking me:

Why had the heirs of a great literature become so small? His explanation was political: No one had honestly faced the causes and consequences of France’s loss to Nazi Germany in 1940. This was worse than the debacles of Napoleon and Napoleon III, for this defeat had been followed by partition, occupation and collaboration. In all the years since, he said, there had been only one honest look at that time—French Suites, a novel by Irene Nemirovsky.

I dimly remembered the reviews, but praise like that made me read it.

The author’s bio is unusual; she won’t be appearing on Booknotes, at least not in this world. Irene Nemirovsky (b. 1903) was the daughter of a Russian Jewish banker who fled St. Petersburg after the Russian Revolution, settling ultimately in France. There Irene married, had children and became a successful novelist. After the fall of France, she sketched a five-part work on what her newfound countrymen were going through. Supported by covert gifts from her old publisher, she wrote away, finishing two of the five parts, until 1942, when she was murdered in Auschwitz. Her husband soon followed. Her two daughters, children, were saved, and kept their mother’s notebook as a talisman. A few years ago, the eldest finally felt willing to read it and discovered that it was not a journal but two finished, related novellas. It was published in France, now here.

It must speak with special power to a French reader, but because it is art, even in truncated form, it speaks to a wider audience—not just to abstract men in dimensionless time, but to flesh-and-blood men in different historic moments. What does it have to say to this moment?

The more obvious message is: Jew-hate, the song that never leaves the hit parade. New talents cover it in every generation; it’s been recorded more times than “St. James Infirmary.” Nemirovsky is no 10-thumbed journalist, so the Jew-hate depicted in French Suites is implied. Every writing school in the world tells its charges to write about what they know, yet there is not a Jewish character in Nemirovsky’s tale. She writes about what she knows—not as a Russian Jew, the identity that would send her to a death camp, but as a Frenchwoman, the identity she acquired as a teenager.

What she knows is how the French think, and what shortcuts (all cultures use them) they take instead of thinking. At some point, one of her characters, lost in the chaos of defeat, says he can’t possibly imagine what will happen next, since he’s neither a Jew nor a Mason. There you have the folk wisdom that, in the wrong hands, became extermination. Two in-groups, one a religion, one a secret society: as in-groups they must, by definition, have had knowledge denied to the ordinary honest Frenchman. In ordinary times, Jacques would shrug his shoulders; in extraordinary times, he might ask, “Why not round them up?”

How strange that, 30 years ago, when we guarded against anti-Semitism with strict social taboos, there was relatively little of it afoot. Who were the great anti-Semites of the 1970s? The Black Panthers? David Duke? Yet now, when Muslim dictatorships spew it out, and when multiculturalists, attentive to the Other, are willing to give it at least a respectful hearing, the taboos are AWOL. The New York Times reports that the Palestinian Contemporary Art Museum of Tehran, and the Iranian newspaper Hamshahri, are sponsoring a show of Holocaust cartoons—not anti-Jewish, claims the curator, only anti-Zionist and anti-Israeli. Well, that’s all right, then! These are the bumptious manners of a despotic regime. But when will such stuff appear—has it already appeared—on college campuses? Be careful what you say to yourself, or you may hear it on loudspeakers.

The second message of French Suites is central to the book. Social divisions that become hatreds lead to despair, and despair leads to madness. Any country can lose a war. But it loses the aftermath only if its citizens lose all respect for each other. French society as depicted by Nemirovsky is a ripe, poisoned fruit, watered by 150 years of bad politics: revolution, restoration, the June Days, the Paris Commune, the Dreyfus Affair. There were moments along the way when France pulled together, in causes good (World War I) and not so good (Napoleon’s lucky streak). But the quarrels remained until, by 1940, the rich, the middle class and the poor disliked each other more, it turned out, than they disliked the enemy.

This moral gives a modern American, oddly, a feeling of hope. I say this in no French-bashing spirit. We lack their history, their virtues and their attendant vices, and so cannot imagine how we would walk in their shoes (though a great novelist can put us temporarily in them).

We have taken our own path. And despite the violence and injustices of American history, we do not seem to hate each other that much. Even the black-white relationship, the most cankered one in our past, has been eased in any number of ways. Poor Jefferson, the anti-slavery slave-owner, thought that if blacks were ever freed, they would have to be sent back to Africa, because their just resentment, and the fears of whites, could not be overcome. Wrong, Tom. A lot of shit has gone down, but only a handful of brothers have left for Liberia.

I will keep hold of this thought as I wander through the bright corridors of the Internet, humming with the fury of the comments sections on blogs. If you put someone at a lonely screen in a lonely room, he will scream. The world is better than that.

This time, Freddy's endorsement of anti-gay State Senator Ruben Diaz last year is the issue. Outrage! is the general theme.

Freddy is quoted as saying, "When it's between him and a former criminal defendant who was charged with ripping off people including people with AIDS in the Bronx, easy for me, easy for me."

Now we have some sympathy with Freddy here. He and Diaz are hardly pals, and he's taken real shit from Diaz for backing gay rights.

Still, corruption isn't always a good enough reason to oppose someone. Remember when David Duke ran against Edwin Edwards for Governor of Louisiana? The Edwards bumper stickers said, "Vote for the crook. It's important."