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Column: Owner of 'Redskins' team the poster boy for hypocrisy
Monday, February 14, 2011
Filed Under: Opinion | Sports

"Dan Snyder is offended.

The source of his ire is the Washington City Paper, published weekly in the nation's capital. Last November, the paper ran a less than flattering piece on Snyder, owner of the town's godawful football team. It depicted him as a bungling, meddling cheapskate and laid blame for the god-awfulness right at his feet.

In response, Snyder recently filed a $2 million lawsuit, charging that this piece and others dating to 2009 libel and defame him. While his complaints are many, one thing that really seems to get Snyder's goat is the art accompanying the last piece: a photo of him onto which a Tony Stark mustache and devil horns have been scribbled.

The paper's publisher says the image was meant to suggest the defacement a frustrated fan might do. Snyder, who is Jewish, solicited no less august a personage than Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center to say the image hearkens back to ancient anti-Semitic slurs depicting Jews as the devil.

But there is an obvious irony here. The team Snyder owns is, after all, called the Redskins. It is called that despite long efforts by American Indian leaders to get it changed. They invoke the freighted history of that word, the blood that soaks it, the tears that drench it, the genocide it justified, and they say, this is no fit name for a football team.

Snyder always responds as he did in a recent radio interview with Washington Post columnist Mike Wise: "The name is not meant to be offensive whatsoever." Which is, as it happens, the same argument the City Paper has made; the image had no anti-Semitic intent. But Snyder, hypocrisy blind and irony deaf, said it was "silly" to compare that photo with the racial slur that is his team's name."

Get the Story:
Leonard Pitts Jr.: Dan Snyder, poster boy for hypocrisy (The Seattle Times 2/13)

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Opinion: Take a serious look at alternatives to 'Redskins' mascot (1/11)
Column: Once again time to tell the Redskins to drop 'racist' name (1/6)

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