Fred Malek's anti-Semitic past makes him unfit to chair a state government panel.

By Timothy Noah
Posted Friday, May 21, 2010, at 7:15 PM ET

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On May 7 Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell appointed Fred Malek chairman of his Commission on Government Reform and Restructuring. McDonnell, a conservative Republican who assumed office in January, had achieved unwelcome national attention a month earlier when he declared April "Confederate History Month" without mentioning that the Confederates fought to preserve slavery (because, he explained to reporters, slavery did not rate as one of the issues "most significant for Virginia"). Two months before that, McDonnell had issued an executive order banning discrimination in state government that pointedly removed Virginia's previous protections based on sexual orientation.

McDonnell ended up backing down a little after his whitewash of the Confederacy and his revocation of civil rights protections for homosexuals stirred a predictable outcry from the African American and gay communities. (See "What's The Matter With Virginia?") But Jewish groups have been slow to protest the appointment of Malek, whose most noteworthy prior experience in government reorganization dates to 1971, when Malek was a 34-year-old special assistant to President Richard Nixon. At Nixon's request, Malek produced a memo denoting the number of Jews employed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Malek then arranged the demotion of at least four people with Jewish-sounding surnames. (He didn't actually know who was Jewish and who wasn't; he guessed based on their names.) It was the last recorded act of official anti-Semitism by the United States government.