Al Sharpton also played a central role in the Crown Heights riots (1991) and the Tawana Brawley scandal.
Our experience from blog postings and letters to the editor is that the Democrats have NO conceivable excuse or defense for promoting, endorsing, and empowering this vicious racist and anti-Semite, and his racist and anti-Semitic hate organization..
The National "Jewish" Democratic Council recently posted a guide for responding to "smears" and "viral E-mails" that attack the Democratic candidates. Although they tried to address many issues, Obama's and Clinton's appearance with and promotion of Sharpton was not among them. NJDC knows that I have been attacking them in every conceivable medium for promoting the African-American counterpart of the Klan--I have even E-mailed them and challenged them to respond while giving them links to my blog entries--and they have done absolutely nothing. This verifies my belief that they can offer no conceivable defense or excuse, while hoping that our side does not make an issue of this.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110004192
It would have taken no great effort for the reporters covering the Apollo debate to have walked across 125th Street from the theater to visit Freddy's Fashion Mart, where in 1995 eight people died in a murderous rampage inspired by Mr. Sharpton. Mr. Sharpton is best-known for the Tawana Brawley hoax, in which he insisted that a 15-year-old black girl had been abducted and raped by a band of white men practicing Irish Republican Army rituals. In fact she had made up the story to protect herself from her violent stepfather. But at Freddy's, Mr. Sharpton was even more malevolent. He turned a landlord-tenant dispute between the Jewish owner of Freddy's and a black subtenant into a theater of hatred. Picketers from Mr. Sharpton's National Action Network, sometimes joined by "the Rev." himself, marched daily outside the store, screaming about "bloodsucking Jews" and "Jew bastards" and threatening to burn the building down. After weeks of increasingly violent rhetoric, one of the protesters, Roland Smith, took Mr. Sharpton's words about ousting the "white interloper" to heart. He ran into the store shouting, "It's on!" He shot and wounded three whites and a Pakistani, whom he apparently mistook for a Jew. Then he set the fire, which killed five Hispanics, one Guyanese and one African-American--a security guard whom protesters had taunted as a "cracker lover." Smith then fatally shot himself.
In other words, the National Action Network, while under Sharpton's personal supervision, behaved at Freddy's Fashion Mart exactly the way the KKK once behaved around Black homes, stores, and churches in predominantly white neighborhoods.
http://www.nationalreview.com/20Mar00/nordlinger032000.html
There was more, of course-always more. In the spring of 1989, the Central Park “wilding” occurred. That was the monstrous rape and beating of a young white woman, known to most of the world as “the jogger.” The hatred heaped on her by Sharpton and his claque is almost impossible to fathom, and wrenching to review. ...Outside the courthouse, they [Sharpton and his entourage] chanted, “The boyfriend did it! The boyfriend did it!” They denounced the victim as “Whore!” They screamed her name, over and over (because most publications refused to print it, though several black-owned ones did). Sharpton brought Tawana Brawley to the trial one day, to show her, he said, the difference between white justice and black justice. He arranged for her to meet the jogger’s attackers, whom she greeted with comradely warmth. In another of his publicity stunts, he appealed for a psychiatrist to examine the victim. “It doesn’t even have to be a black psychiatrist,” he said, generously. He added: “We’re not endorsing the damage to the girl — if there was this damage.” ...But the torching, so to speak, continued. In 1995-four years into the putative New Sharpton-there was another, fatal case in which Sharpton had a guilty hand: Freddy’s Fashion Mart. In Harlem, a white store owner — no, worse: a Jewish one — was accused of driving a black store owner out of business. At one of the many rallies meant to scare the Jewish owner away Sharpton charged that “there is a systemic and methodical strategy to eliminate our people from doing business off 125th Street. I want to make it clear . . . that we will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business.” Sharpton’s colleague, Morris Powell, said of the Jewish owner — Sharpton’s “white interloper” — “We’re going to see that this cracker suffers. Reverend Sharpton is on it.”
“We’re going to see that this Negro suffers. The Grand Wizard is on it.” We see no difference between the National Action Network's behavior and that of the Ku Klux Klan, and the National Action Network is the same organization at which Clinton, Obama, and Edwards made their appearance.
People keep telling me that "no one dares attack Al Sharpton for fear of being called a racist." I attack him all the time. My recent letter to the editor in a highly Democratic area (Northeast PA) that says Obama's association with Sharpton makes him unfit for public office has gone unanswered, and I am sure there are at least SOME Obama supporters around here. The reason they don't answer is because they can offer no conceivable defense, so they do the smart thing and remain silent.
Q: What is the difference between Don Imus and Al Sharpton?
A: Imus' remarks about Black women, while in poor taste and totally uncalled for, did not result in physical threats or violence to any Black people. Al Sharpton's activities in Crown Heights and Harlem promoted activities that caused white people, and especially Jews, to fear for their physical safety, and arguably played a role in encouraging deranged individuals to commit acts of fatal violence (e.g. Yankel Rosenbaum, arson of Freddy's Fashion Mart).
Q: What does Al Sharpton call a fellow African-American he dislikes?
A: The N word. (He called David Dinkins a "cheap Negro whore turning tricks in City Hall," and "Negro" was not the word he used.)
It is vital that we blog and write letters to the editor about Clinton's and Obama's shameless and blatant promotion of Al "white interlopers" Sharpton.