Boston Herald
JACKSON, Miss. - Robert Kennedy Jr. says that some right-wing broadcast hosts are feeding the sort of hatred behind this year’s rise in hate crimes.
In Jackson for a memorial for slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, Kennedy said Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck are among those who have drummed up anger against abortion doctors and others.
"They’re driving this kind of hatred," Kennedy, co-host of the Ring of Fire radio show, said in a brief session with reporters Friday after his speech.
"If you listen to right-wing radio, including so-called Christian channels, there is little to do with Jesus Christ’s values," he said.
Kennedy had been asked what he thought was the reason for the increase in killings such as Wednesday’s fatal shooting of a security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and last month’s killing of abortion provider Dr. George Tiller in Wichita, Kan.
Kennedy was Friday night’s keynote speaker for a longstanding annual memorial to Evers, the Mississippi NAACP leader who was killed outside his home in Jackson on June 12, 1963, during Robert F. Kennedy’s term as attorney general.
Kennedy said his father wrote separate letters to him and each of his eight brothers and sisters the night of Evers’ murder, saying Evers had died fighting for his country.
"That crystallized the importance of what Medgar Evers had done," he said. "The battles he and others fought helped to make this nation a true constitutional democracy."
He said Evers and others "were really heroes like soldiers who died in the Revolutionary War. Medgar Evers is as much a hero as any of the patriots."
Klansman Byron De La Beckwith was convicted of Evers’ murder 30 years later; he died in prison.
The tribute is organized by Evers’ brother, Charles, who campaigned for U.S. Sen. Robert Kennedy in New York in 1964 and in the presidential campaign four years later.
"He was there when my father was killed," Kennedy said.
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