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Jewish World Review August 31, 2010 / 21 Elul, 5770 Beck, the Next McVeigh? By Jack Kelly
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Talk show host Glenn Beck held an ecumenical revival meeting on the mall in Washington D.C. Saturday. A lot of people came.
The Rev. Al Sharpton held a counter demonstration in the same city the same day. Not many participated.
Unofficial estimates for the size of the crowd at Mr. Beck's "Restore Honor" rally ranged from 87,000 from CBS News to an equally risible million plus by Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn.
The National Park Service stopped doing official crowd estimates after Louis Farrakhan threw a tantrum when the Park police officially pegged the turnout for his 1995 "Million Man March" at just north of 400,000.
But ballpark estimates are not difficult to do when you are dealing with a space of known size, and you have aerial photographs that give you a reasonable idea of crowd density.
If you estimate the crowd density at 10 square feet per person, as did Charlie Martin, an engineer who blogs at Pajamas Media, then attendance at the Beck rally was about 215,000. The National Park Service says a "dense crowd" has about five square feet per person. That would mean Mr. Beck's crowd was about 430,000. If you split the difference, you get 300,000 -- which is what NBC News estimated the crowd to be.
The Washington Post estimated the turnout for Mr. Sharpton's march and rally at between 2,000 and 3,000. The New York Times pegged it at "several hundred."
The turnout for Mr. Beck's rally was comparable to the 200,000 or so who heard Martin Luther King Jr. make his "I have a dream" speech on the same spot on the same date.
Mr. Beck said this was a coincidence, which, he said, was "providential." He and other speakers -- mostly notably Martin Luther King's niece, Dr. Alveda King -- effusively praised Dr. King.
Mr. Beck is trying to "hijack" the civil rights movement, Mr. Sharpton said.
"Glenn Beck is trying to reverse what King did and there are those of us who are not going to allow that to happen," Mr. Sharpton said in an interview.
Martin Luther King "was hailed for his exhortation that his country judge people by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin," noted Washington Examiner columnist Gregory Kane, who is black. "Sharpton gained notoriety during the boycott of a white-owned business in Harlem. The good revvum called the owner a'white interloper.'"
Mr. Sharpton played no role in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. Dr. Alveda King did. She thinks her uncle would have been pleased to have 200,000 plus mostly white folks endorse his goal and cheer his name at the place where he made his "I Have a Dream" speech.
"If Uncle Martin could be here today, he would surely commend us for giving honor where honor is due," Ms. King said. "He would encourage us to lay aside the divisive lies that cause us to think we are part of separate races. We are one human family."
That they lustily cheered Martin Luther King didn't deter many liberal pundits and journalists from asserting or implying that those who attended the "Restore Honor" rally were bigots.
CNN's Bill Press, a former Democratic party official, said granting Mr. Beck a permit to speak at the Lincoln Memorial was like "giving al Qaida permission to hold a rally on Sept. 11 at Ground Zero."
Liberal blogger Dave Niewart (Crooks and Liars) said: "when I saw pan shots of the crowd -- which was one of the whitest crowds in D.C. in recent memory -- I mostly thought I saw 'the next Timothy McVeigh.'" (It is doubtful Oklahoma City bomber McVeigh, an atheist, would have gone near a religious revival meeting.)
Atlantic editor Clive Crook, who describes himself as "a member of the uncomprehending godless elite," preferred facts to malicious spin.
"The truth is, it was an enormously friendly, good-natured event," Mr. Crook said. "There were families with children everywhere, all smiles."
But Mr. Crook did witness one bit of callousness.
"Walking back to my home in predominantly white northwest D.C., I paused for a bite to eat in the predominantly white Dupont Circle area, in a cafe whose clientele was predominantly white," he wrote. "There I did see something mean. A family wearing 'Restore Honor' T- shirts walked by outside, and a little girl tripped and hurt herself. The couple at the next table laughed."
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JWR contributor Jack Kelly, a former Marine and Green Beret, was a deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration.
© 2009, Jack Kelly |
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