Andrew Young, We Hardly Knew You

I'm guessing his invitations for MLK speaking engagements will taper off in 2007. This outburst is just hard to figure:

The civil rights leader Andrew Young, who was hired by Wal-Mart to improve its public image, resigned from that post last night after telling an African-American newspaper that Jewish, Arab and Korean shop owners had “ripped off” urban communities for years, “selling us stale bread, and bad meat and wilted vegetables.”

In the interview, published yesterday in The Los Angeles Sentinel, a weekly, Mr. Young said that Wal-Mart “should” displace mom-and-pop stores in urban neighborhoods.

“You see those are the people who have been overcharging us,” he said of the owners of the small stores, “and they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they’ve ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it’s Arabs.”

Mr. Young, 74, a former mayor of Atlanta and a former United States representative to the United Nations, apologized for the comments and retracted them in an interview last night. Less than an hour later, he resigned as chairman of Working Families for Wal-Mart, a group created and financed by the company to trumpet its accomplishments.

“It’s against everything I ever thought in my life,” Mr. Young said. “It never should have been said. I was speaking in the context of Atlanta, and that does not work in New York or Los Angeles.”

He was on to a legitimate idea--that a company like Wal-Mart with a single-minded focus on low cost production doesn't permit discriminatory practices against consumers by competing stores. And then he soiled himself, badly.

Can anyone figure out if he really apologized, if he concludes his statement by implying that his depiction of Jewish, Arab, and Korean shop owners is valid for Atlanta, though not for New York or Los Angeles?