Posted on 05/22/2008 3:40:14 PM PDT by rightwingintelligentsia
NEW YORK (CBS) ― Police are mobilizing a massive presence in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn in the wake of increased tension between black and Jewish communities.
Leaders from both communities have come together recently to preach cooperation among residents of the neighborhood where blacks and Hassidic Jews live side by side. But recent violence has showed that religion and race don't always mix.
"I definitely feel [like there's unrest] because I see it everyday. I'm around here a lot and that's what I'm hearing," said Crown Heights resident Anthony Rios.
Another resident, Joe Morgenstein, agreed, saying he hears "a lot of racial slurs all day" in the community.
Since 1991, when riots broke out after a 7-year-old black boy was killed by a Hassidic driver, Crown Heights has been hurt off-and-on by periodic tension. In the past month, 20-year-old Andrew Charles, who is black, was beaten up, and the suspect is Jewish.
(Excerpt) Read more at wcbstv.com ...
It's a tragedy, not racism.
Well, the riot was racism.
I'm over this bellyaching by the thin-skinned.
You might know better than I, but I recall from hearing the story years back that an ambulance came for the Jewish motorist and left the black kid. I would consider that racism.
“Added Councilman Mathieu Eugene (D-Dist. 40): “We may have arrived on different ships, but now we are all in the same boat.”
That’s actually true. All the more reason why the black and Jewish tensions totally confuse me. You would think there’d be some common ground there somewhere.
Guess not. I’m also guessing....no never mind, I can’t really say what I’m thinking right now.
Thanks. Looks like I was correct, assuming the article is valid. Wikipedia is obviously easy to manipulate, but it looks like there are more sources.
That’s why I was double checking. I was asking somebody more familiar with the details to weigh in. Also, it appears that my recollection was correct.
First, let's get something straight about the people that live in Crown Heights:
Many, if not most of the blacks in Crown Heights did not come to the United States on ships, as they are fairly recent immigrants from the Caribbean and/or Latin America. If anything, they came here on the latest jet airplanes, not slave ships.
It's understandable that you recall it that way, because it is the type of too-good-to-be-true, hate-Whitey lie that the mainstream media lives for. A "fact too good to check," as some reporters describe such tales.
The following is from a dispassionate account of the incident, found here. It paints an accurate picture of the characters who dominated the culture in Mayor David Dinkins's New York, where I lived at the time. It is worth quoting at length:
"The most conspicuous anti-Semite plying his trade in the summer of 1991 was [City College professor Leonard] Jeffries, whose relentless slurs against Jews enjoyed enormous attention in the press during the first weeks of August. When he was criticized, many mainstream blacks rushed to Jeffries’s defense or kept silent.
"Black newspapers like the Amsterdam News and the City Sun; the black radio station WLIB, long an open-air forum for anti-Semitic ranters; and some of the black activists who would later figure significantly in Crown Heights—Al Sharpton, Colin Moore, C. Vernon Mason, Sonny Carson, Lenora Fulani—all went to bat, expressing their approval of Jeffries’s “scholarship” and denouncing his critics as race baiters. This, then, was the immediate background to the riot.
"Not only was anti-Semitism in the ether, it was gathering steam as a loud and increasingly mainstream black movement when a station wagon from the entourage of Menahem Schneerson, the Lubavitcher rebbe, careered out of control and crashed onto a Crown Heights sidewalk on the night of August 19, crushing to death a black child, seven-year-old Gavin Cato, and leaving his seven-year-old cousin, Angela Cato, badly injured.
"The violence erupted immediately. When the driver of the station wagon, Yosef Lifsh, stepped out of his car with the intention of helping the children he had hit, he was set upon by angry black bystanders who beat and robbed him before the police could reach the scene.
"Moments later, an ambulance from the Jewish-run Hatzolah service arrived. Police, seeking to remove the object of the crowd’s anger, directed the crew to take away Lifsh and his passengers. Before the Hatzolah vehicle was out of sight a city ambulance had arrived to begin the gory and laborious task of removing the Cato children from beneath the car, but Lifsh’s attackers were enraged at the decision to place him in the first ambulance."
Immediately after this, a mob began smashing car windows, and seized a passing Hasid from Australia, Yankel Rosenbaum, and beat him—some of them yelling "Kill the Jew!" One of the crowd, Lemrick Nelson, Jr., stabbed him to death.
"Racism" is an ideological and vacuous word in most uses, but if anything qualifies as racism, I'd say that does.
http://www.eugene2007.com/ ..... he sure didn’t come on any slave ship. He immigrated to this “racist” country
I was in NY at the time. They left because an ugly mob was building and the ambulance crew became concerned for their own safety
I would consider it a complete lie; if not, then malpractice.
I didn't even look up his profile, and bingo, I hit the nail on the head.
Many of the people there are recent immigrants, so any "slavery talk" that comes from Crown Heights is a load of BS designed to bamboozle persons who are not familiar with the area.
I've even seen newspaper articles trying to be politically correct in calling them "African-Americans", as if we're talking about people from Selma, Alabama or New Orleans.
Are you unfamiliar with accident scenes? First Aid, as any Red Cross CPR course will emphasize, is a logistical art. The basic facts concerning the ambulances used at Crown Heights are not in dispute. (The only variation in the accounts had to do with Al Sharpton's speculation about everyone's motives but his own.)
If someone is injured, you get him away from the scene as soon as you safely can. The more people crowded and sprawled at an accident scene, the worse. Another car could hit the disabled vehicles, people, or emergency personnel, compounding the crisis. Never mind the danger from hundreds of emotional idiots in the crowd. Protocol is to take the more seriously injured person first—if he can be moved right away. Which the Cato kids could not.
If someone has a car parked on him, he must be extracted with extreme focus and care. You often need special equipment. If you need another ambulance, you get one. In a city, there are lots of them. This is utterly routine. Another ambulance indeed arrived immediately, and got the kids out right away. The first ambulance leaving with the injured Jewish driver had zero effect on how long the black kids were under the car.
I know you're trying to be even-handed and sensitive, but please forgive me for saying you're being a sucker. You may understandably have trouble fathoming the absolute cynicism of urban operators like Sharpton, who spun the story about the City's alleged indifference, and whose only business is to prey upon victims of circumstance like little Gavin Cato. By his inflammatory speeches and appearances, Sharpton leverages other people's suffering to extract guilty corporate donations to his own foundation, the National Action Network, which pays his rent and buys his suits. "Reverend" Sharpton has no congregation and no other business. This is what he does.
If you think the mainstream media is always waiting to cry "anti-Semite," that has not applied in New York since at least the 1960s. Blackness, and more recently Moslem-ness, easily trump Jewishness in the victim stakes. Religious Jews are "worse than white," utterly despised by media people—because they are mostly conservative.
It's understandable. You're confused because you're trying to apply logic and reasonable motives to Leftists. Relax. It can't be done.
Rather than riot, Al Sharpton should be credited with precipitating the only pogrum in nearly four centuries of Jewish presence in America.
[edit] Event immediately precipitating the riotAt approximately 8:20 p.m. on August 19, 1991, Yosef Lifsh, 22, was driving a station wagon, with three passengers, east on President Street, part of the three-car motorcade of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson.[4][5] The procession was led by an unmarked police car with two officers, with its rooftop light flashing.[1] Lifsh's vehicle fell behind. He continued through the intersection at President Street and Utica Avenue in an attempt to rejoin the group. Witnesses could not agree upon Lifsh’s speed and could not agree whether the light that Lifsh went through was yellow or red.[6] [7]Lifsh’s vehicle struck a car being driven on Utica Avenue, veered onto the sidewalk, knocked a 600-pound stone building pillar down, hit a wall, and injured a seven-year-old Guyanese boy named Gavin Cato and his cousin Angela Cato, also seven.[8][9]
Lifsh believed he had the right of way to proceed through the intersection because of the police escort.[1] Lifsh said he deliberately steered his car away from adults on the sidewalk, toward the wall, a distance of about 25 yards (22.9 m), in order to stop the car. Lifsh later commented that the car did not come to a full stop upon impact with the building, but rather slid to the left along the wall until it reached the children.
Accounts differ as to the next sequence of events. After the collision, Lifsh said that the first thing he did was to try and lift the car in order to free the two children beneath it.[10] The EMS unit that arrived on the scene about three minutes after the accident said that Lifsh was being beaten and pulled out of the station wagon by three or four black men.[1][11] All accounts agree that Lifsh was beaten before ambulances and police arrived.
A volunteer ambulance from the Hatzolah ambulance corps arrived on the scene at about 8:23 pm followed shortly by police and a City ambulance which took Gavin Cato to Kings County Hospital, arriving at 8:32 p.m. Cato was pronounced dead shortly thereafter.[1] Volunteers from a second Hatzolah ambulance helped Angela Cato, until a second City ambulance arrived and took her to the same hospital.[1][6]
Two attending police officers, as well as a technician from the City ambulance, directed the Hatzolah driver to remove Lifsh from the scene for his safety, while Gavin Cato was being removed from beneath the station wagon.[12] According to the New York Times, more than 250 neighborhood residents, mostly black teenagers shouting ’Jews! Jews! Jews!’, jeered the driver of the car ... and then turned their anger on the police.[13] Some members of the community were outraged because Lifsh was taken from the scene by a private ambulance service while city emergency workers were still trying to free the children who were pinned under the car. Some believed that Gavin Cato died because the Hatzolah ambulance crew was unwilling to help non-Jews. Their anger was compounded due to a rumor at the time that Lifsh was intoxicated. A breath alcohol test administered within 70 minutes of the accident indicated that this was not the case. Other false rumors that circulated shortly after the accident included: Lifsh was on a cell phone, Lifsh did not have a valid driver's license, and that police prevented people, including Gavin Cato's father, from assisting in the rescue.[1][14]
Later on that evening, as the crowd and rumors grew, people threw bottles and rocks to protest the treatment of the children. At about 11:00 p.m., someone shouted, “Let's go to Kingston Avenue and get a Jew!“ A number of black youths then set off toward Kingston, a street of predominantly Jewish residents several blocks away, vandalizing cars and heaving rocks and bottles as they went.[15]
Because the kids were still under the car, and there were city ambulances on the scene. Why would you delay the private, yes Jewish ambulance, from heading for the hospital when city ambulances and personel are on the scene?
I understand why Rev Al made an issue of it.
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