err, actually wasn't he a booster and promoter of Chas. Taylor?
Yeah we're racist, we're racist. Everything we do is racist. After 35 or more years, Jesse's charges are just kind of losing their punch.
I'd feel differently than I do about Jesse and the black leadership if they had come out for the victims of 911. They only care about the black part of the American population and only when it is convenient for them financially, IMO.
Yep, he sure was. When Clinton appointed him "ambassador at large" to Africa, one of his first actions was to prop up Charles Taylor, and "legitimize" him and his regime. A job for which, he reportedly was paid handsomely in diamonds.
As the president and Pentagon ponder whether to send U.S. troops to Liberia, many Americans will be surprised to learn that the crisis there was in part the creation of a U.S. political leader who claims to champion Africans' right to self-governance: Jesse Jackson.
As President Clinton's special envoy for Democracy and Human rights in Africa, starting in October 1997, Jackson became the administration's point man for Africa.
It was Jackson who legitimized both Liberian strongman Charles Taylor and his protégé, the machete-wielding militia leader in neighboring Sierra Leone, Cpl. Foday Sankoh. The two hacked to death several hundred thousand citizens of their respective countries.
Jackson's involvement in the diamond wars of Liberia and Sierra Leone arguably caused tens of thousands of African children to be murdered, because his political support for ruthless killers masquerading as political leaders encouraged them to continue their mayhem
http://www.freespeech.com/archives/000551.html The tragic story of Liberia's long spiraling descent into the inferno requires many more pages than a newspaper column can permit. I devote an entire chapter to it in "Shakedown," my unauthorized Jackson biography. But here are some lowlights:
* In May 1999, Jackson "kidnapped" President Laurent Kabbah of Sierra Leone, according to Kabbah advisers I interviewed, and flew him to neighboring Lome, Togo, where Jackson forced him to sign a cease-fire with rebel leader Foday Sankoy.
* That July, under the terms of a powersharing agreement which Jackson helped negotiate and which Kabbah vigorously resisted, Sankoh was released from house arrest, made a vice president in a new national unity government and put in charge of Sierra Leone's diamond mines.
* Sankoh then began smuggling out thousands of diamonds, many of which he sent to Charles Taylor in Liberia in exchange for weapons. Jackson repeatedly raised the issue of the illicit diamond trade and the clandestine arms supplies with Taylor, who simply denied the charges. Jackson never pressed him further.
* Jackson stayed in contact with Sankoh, phoning him repeatedly with words of encouragement. Braced by this support and funded by the diamond trade, Sankoh built up his Revolutionary United Front (RUF) forces, ignoring Jackson's pleas to disarm and give peace a chance. New fighting broke out in January 2000 in the hinterland. Jackson's cease-fire lasted less than six months.
* By May 2000, the fighting in Sierra Leone took on crisis proportions, when Sankoh's fighters murdered U.N. peacekeepers and took 500 of them hostage. Meanwhile, Liberia, which has no diamonds, reported that it had exported $300 million worth of diamonds the previous year.
* Jackson made one final attempt to halt the bloodshed in mid-May 2000, but was warned by the U.S. embassy in Freetown not to set foot in Sierra Leone because of widespread popular anger over his role in rehabilitating Sankoh, a known mass murderer. One local journalist wrote bitterly that the U.S. civil rights leader was better known in Africa as a "killer's rights" leader.
* Jackson's final contributions to the "peace process" were vain attempts to cajol Taylor to "negotiate" an end to the hostage crisis, since Taylor was the godfather of the RUF and Sankoh's arms and diamond broker.
* Arriving in Monrovia, Liberia, at the peak of the crisis, Jackson declared, "President Taylor has been doing a commendable job negotiating for the release of the hostages. All the hostages should be freed, and freed now. There is no basis for delay, there is no basis for negotiations."
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/162.htm