What did he in fact say in his offending column (entitled in the CounterPunch version "When Billy Graham Planned To Kill One Million People"?) That the nasty remarks about Jews by a recipient of the Jabotinsky (!) Award -- a remarkable datum brought to our attention by Yoshie -- were rapidly apologized for, while the Rev. Graham's approval of war crime and mass murder requires not the slightest remorse. Racism is acceptable when it is consonant with a foreign policy run by an American elite, but if not, not.
Abba Eban said a generation ago that "one of the chief tasks of any dialogue with the Gentile world is to prove that the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all." But now we've gone further: even to draw attention to American anti-Jewishness in the conversation of an ex-president, or to note that "this sort of stuff is consonant with the standard conversational bill of fare at 75 per cent of the country clubs in America, not to mention many a Baptist soiree," is somehow to be tarred with he same brush, especially if like Cockburn, one has written mordant attacks on current Israeli policy, made possible only by the United States. (See "The Nightmare in Israel," www.counterpunch.org/nightmareisrael.html.)
On what can be said and not said in the US, and the political motives behind it, Cockburn seems to me to have it right, and his critics obfuscating that. --CGE