Calypso Harry, Meet Calypso Louis

On Monday we were reminded that Harry Belefonte hates whites, conservatives, and any of his own racial classification that don't share those sentiments. Today, we learn that he bears a striking rhetorical resemblance to another loopy, bigoted black celebrity, Nation of Islam kingpin Louis Farrakhan:

Entertainer/activist Harry Belafonte has retracted some of the controversial comments he made at a civil rights march in Atlanta regarding Jews working for Hitler, but his retraction may have created even more controversy for the singer.

During an interview with Cybercast News Service at the August 7 march, Belafonte asserted that Adolf Hitler's regime in Germany included Jews and that blacks working in the Bush Administration should be compared to Jews working for Hitler.

"Hitler had a lot of Jews high up in the hierarchy of the Third Reich," Belafonte said on Saturday. He went on to label African-Americans working in the Bush Administration as "tyrants."

On Wednesday, Belafonte told the Jerusalem Post, "I do regret the sentence was not structured more accurately." He added, "I, too, agree that Jews weren't 'high up.'"

Okay, he corrected the flagrant historical error. But this "retraction," as such, is, shall we say, "Durbinesque." And there's no retraction of or apology for the rest of his racist, anti-Republican rant.

Still, if he'd stopped there, he wouldn't have dug himself in deeper.

But he didn't stop:

But Belafonte's interview with the Jerusalem Post on Wednesday, which included the assertion that Jews claim "a high and pure morality," has caused more controversy and more demands for apologies.

"The point was not to attack Jews," Belafonte told the Jerusalem Post. "Sometimes, the Jewish people have laid claim to such a high and pure morality" that they react defensively when attacked. But the history of Jewish people "is a DNA that sits within the entire human family," Belafonte said.

In other words, Jews are too sensitive to historically illiterate allusions that they cooperated in their own genocide sixty-plus years ago, and the unspoken implication that the Israelis of today are carrying on that "Nazi tradition." But they can't help "laying claim" to "such a high and pure morality" of which they, by another unspoken implication, are patently unworthy because they're white AND "neocon," and, heck, what else can you expect from "tyrants"?

That's the paraphrase - here's the direct quote:

"I can understand why Jewish leaders would be prone to protect the image of George Bush and his Administration," Belafonte told the Post, noting that the President supports Israel "even when there are questions of the humanitarian, the moral and the political [motivation] of things that are done to Palestinians."

At least a few Hebrews were not to be so lamely mollified:

On Thursday, Wyman Institute Director Rafael Medoff responded to Belafonte's assertion that the Jewish people claim "a high and pure morality."

Medoff said Belafonte's new statement "smacks of bigotry," and he called on Belafonte "to retract and apologize for his remarks."

"Hitler and his regime murdered six million Jews and launched a world war that caused more than 40 million deaths. How can that be compared to current U.S. government policy?" Medoff asked....

Bryan Mark Rigg...repudiated Belafonte's attempt to use his book [Hitler's Jewish Soldiers] as the basis for his controversial statements.

"Belafonte continues to distort history. My book shows that a number of people of partial Jewish ancestry served in the German military, but they did not even consider themselves Jews," Rigg said in a statement released through the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies.

"Moreover, the vast majority of them were drafted - they were forced to serve Hitler just as other Jews were forced to become slave laborers in Auschwitz and elsewhere," Rigg said.

"In fact, many of them were later dismissed from the German military and sent to forced labor camps, where they themselves were persecuted, and some were murdered. Belafonte should take the trouble to read the books he cites before claiming they support him. My book doesn't support him," Rigg added.

Maybe Belefonte was engaging in a little projection, given that dictatorships, repression, and forced labor camps are all emblematic of the 46-years-and-running Cuban regime of Fidel Castro, whom Calypso Harry worships as a personal hero. That would make him Fidel's "house slave," at least vicariously.

But instead of making it official, he stays in the belly of his perceived "dragon," which allows him to spew his hate and bigotry and idiocy, the full realization of which would transform America into one big...well, Cuba.

But not a big Nazi Germany, though; after all, the "neocons" would be the first ones cattlecar-ed to the forced labor camps.

Or beamed up to the Mother Ship.

T'would be a calypso thing, I guess - not anything we poor "tyrants" could ever understand.

Thank God.