Ted Turner's Psycho-Social History
June 20, 2002 -- Ted has his reasons
NEAL TRAVIS - New York Post

    LET'S stop pussyfooting around about Ted Turner, calling him "loopy" and tagging him "the mouth from the South." That just makes him sound like some relatively harmless blowhard when, in fact, he is a dyed-in-the-wool and very dangerous hater of the Jews.

    Turner's latest outburst calling Israel a terrorist state (see Eric Fettmann's fine op-ed column in yesterday's Post) is just the latest slur the media billionaire and patron of the anti-Jewish United Nations has cast.

    I witnessed his anti-Semitism three decades ago in Newport, R.I., while covering America's Cup campaigns for months at a time. Turner was a total embarrassment to the yachting establishment (itself a pretty prejudiced lot at the time) with his crude anti-Jewish "jokes." They often had to drag him out of post-race press conferences for fear of what he might say.

    Then, though, he was just another rich redneck yachtie whose opinions didn't count for a damn in the world at large. But since then, he has become the power behind CNN and has been rehabilitated at AOL Time Warner as a vice chairman of the world's biggest media group (even if it's going down the tubes).

    I've been delving into Turner's past to see where his vicious bigotry came from and may have the answer. It could all stem back to his childhood in Savannah, Ga., then and now a gracious and liberal southern city.

    Legend has it that when Turner was a boy, his father, Robert Edward Turner, had an affair with the very beautiful wife of a Jewish doctor who was a close neighbor. (The young Turner may even have caught them in the sack together in an apartment over the family's garage - memories differ on this detail.)

    Anyway, the doctor's wife ended up dead when her car stalled on the railroad tracks, Turner Sr. went on to divorce Ted's mother, remarried and eventually shot himself to death in 1963 in a fit of manic-depression when his son was 24.

    Armchair psychologists in Savannah still surmise that the childhood trauma of catching his father with the doctor's wife caused him to blame the Jews for everything that happened afterward. Maybe.

    But as the wisest man on radio, Don Imus, said of Turner the other morning, "He's now popping more pills than even I am," and that's something to worry about. This heavily sedated hate-monger these days has a real platform from which to spout his bigotry - and a world audience. If I were AOL Time Warner, I'd be much more worried about having Ted Turner in my tent than about anything that's happening to my stock price.

TED Turner sure picked an interesting day to accuse Israel of practicing terrorism against Palestinians.

Even as the CNN founder's bizarre take on Mideast affairs appeared in the pages of Britain's Guardian newspaper, 19 Israelis - many of them young schoolchildren - lay dead in the wreckage of a passenger bus, blown to bits by a Palestinian suicide bomber.

As far as Turner is concerned, though, terrorism is relative. Indeed, he sees any military exercise by a Western nation as an exercise in terrorism.

"Aren't the Israelis and Palestinians both terrorizing each other?" he asked. "The Palestinians are fighting with human suicide bombers; that's all they have. The Israelis, they've got one of the most powerful military machines in the world. The Palestinians have nothing.

"So who are the terrorists?" he demanded. "I would make a case that both sides are involved in terrorism."

Little wonder that a top minister in Yasser Arafat's government, Ghassan Kattib, hailed Turner's "more consistent approach" to news reporting. Or that a spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, on the other hand, simply labeled Turner's statement "stupid" - a far more accurate sound bite.

To be fair, though, Turner's profoundly warped sense of moral equivalence isn't limited to the Middle East. In his rant to the left-wing British paper, Turner also declared that "when the Brits retaliated for the Germans, for the, awwww, Krauts . . . for the Nazis bombing London by bombing Berlin, weren't you both terrorizing each other?"

Actually, Ted, the answer would be no - as even the most dim-witted student of World War II would agree. (Well, the second most dim-witted.)

At least he's willing to give America a pass. For now, anyway. "The United States, I think," he offered, "would probably not be considered a terrorist example at the current time."

"At the current time," huh? Watch out, George W. - Ted Turner, moral policeman of the world, is keeping a careful eye on your every move.

Turner is so enamored of the left (he idolizes Fidel Castro, whom he calls "one hell of a guy") that he's bought into its hate-the-West rhetoric and absurd justifications for anti-Western, and especially anti-American, violence.

At Brown University last February, Turner said of the 19 terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center and severely damaged the Pentagon: "I think they were very brave at the very least." He even seemed to chastise his audience when he asked the students whether they would be willing to do the same for their country and not one raised his or her hand.

And he has bought into the discredited notion that "the reason that the World Trade Center got hit is because there are a lot of people living in abject poverty out there who don't have any hope for a better life." But none of the 19 terrorists, most of them Saudis, was living in anything approaching "abject poverty."

As in his horrendous Israeli-Palestinian comparison, Turner refuses to accept that some ideologies out there have simply declared war on all things Western - and, particularly, on all things American and/or Israeli.

It's easy enough to dismiss Turner, who's repeatedly had to apologize publicly over the years for his rampant foot-in-mouth disease. Except that he still wields tremendous clout in the world's largest media company, AOL Time Warner.

Turner reportedly played a major role in removing Gerald Levin, who tried to exile him, as CEO. And Levin's replacement, Richard Parsons, immediately reached out to Turner and made him a vice chairman. "Ted has signed up," Parsons said, adding that Turner will "help enrich the strategic thinking that we do."

That's hardly a reassuring note.

"Where's the upside in opening your mouth?" Turner has asked. In his case, none.

Frankly, he could do the rest of us a favor by taking to heart something else he told The Guardian this week: "It's kinda nice to keep quiet at a time when everybody else is telling everybody what to do."