by Bill Levinson
It must be shown …that there is someone who is not afraid of this bandit leader, and who will treat him as a highwayman…”
Jarema Wisniowiecki talking about Bogdan Chmielnicki in “With Fire and Sword” by Henryk Sienkiewicz
Al Sharpton,
We read that you threatened to sue Rush Limbaugh for saying that you played a leading role in the 1991 Crown Heights riots and the riot at Freddy’s Fashion Mart in 1995. We are ...
not an attorney and cannot give legal advice, but you are not going to sue anybody; you are going squeal like a schoolyard bully whose victim has struck him back while Rush Limbaugh does what should have been done in 1988. He will demolish you as a public figure, and quite possibly take your National Action Network down in the bargain, by exposing your long history of racist and anti-Semitic hate speech. We have done our best to do this ourselves, but our voice does not have quite the reach of Rush Limbaugh’s. When he finishes with you, no political figure in his right mind will appear at your organization as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards did in 2007, any more than they would appear at a cross-burning by the Ku Klux Klan.
You know from personal experience that a false and malicious accusation of a crime is libel, because a civil trial found you guilty of defaming an attorney in Wappingers Falls. Rush Limbaugh did not, however, accuse you of a crime. There are many non-criminal ways, including hate speech that does not meet the legal standard for “incitement to riot” in which you can be “involved” with a violent hate crime. Unless the Wall Street Journal and publications of similar stature fabricated identical stories out of whole cloth, you were indeed involved with racist and anti-Semitic hate crimes.
You and your fellow Black hatemongers like Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan have been given a pass, at least by the far Left, for conduct that would immediately disqualify any Caucasian as a credible public figure. We recall that you insisted that Don Imus lose his job for talking about “nappy headed hos.” Had we been in Mr. Imus’ position, we would not have come to you for absolution and forgiveness the way a medieval penitent might have come to a priest. We would have said, “Two wrongs do not make a right, and I should not have assumed from Black rap artists’ frequent use of this kind of language that it is an acceptable way to talk about Black women or indeed any women. With regard to Al Sharpton’s demand that I be fired, I remind my listeners that no Black people or their employees were harmed physically because of my tasteless joke. There are in contrast seven employees of a Jewish-owned store who might be alive today had Mr. Sharpton and people under his supervision not talked about ‘white interlopers,’ ‘crackers,’ and ‘bloodsucking Jews.’”
Well, Mr. Sharpton, you have finally run into somebody who is not going to give you a pass: a man who is not afraid that you will call him a racist, and one who will treat you the same way he would treat the Klan’s David Duke, Tom Metzger of the White Aryan Resistance, Jeremiah Wright of the Trinity United Church of Christ, or any other dregs of society that promote themselves by inciting racial, religious, or ethnic hatred.
We lived in Wappingers Falls in 1988, and that was when we learned all we needed to know about you. We even wrote a letter to the Poughkeepsie Journal about you: “We are the demagogues, and hate is our stock in trade.” Your circus freak show, with you as the main attraction, cost Dutchess County more than half a million dollars in the money of the late 1980s.
Now for our advice on what Don Imus should have said: “There are in contrast seven employees of a Jewish-owned store who might be alive today had Mr. Sharpton and people under his supervision not talked about ‘white interlopers,’ ‘crackers,’ and ‘bloodsucking Jews.’” There are indeed less-than-criminal ways in which you can be involved in a violent hate crime, as you and your National Action Network were in 1995, and we do not see anything in Rush Limbaugh’s statement that accuses you of anything more. Here are excerpts from Wikipedia’s definition of a hate group, and the National Action Network seems to have met the criteria perfectly at Freddy’s Fashion Mart.
A hate group is an organized group or movement that advocates physical or verbal aggression toward or refusal to interact with persons on the basis of those persons’ possession and/or exhibition of a certain characteristic.
Dr. Ehud Sprinzak, an expert on terrorism and hate crimes, asserts that verbal violence is “the use of extreme language against an individual or a group that either implies a direct threat that physical force will be used against them, or is seen as an indirect call for others to use it.” Sprinzak argues that verbal violence is often a substitute for real violence, and that the verbalization of hate has the potential to incite people who are incapable of distinguishing between real and verbal violence to engage in actual violence.
Here is what The Wall Street Journal’s opinion page says you and your hate group did in 1995. Do you want to try to sue The Wall Street Journal, Sharpton? Do you contend that Fred Siegel (and Jeff Jacoby, and everybody else who has written about this) made it all up?
Democrats Embrace ‘Impresario of Hatred’
by Fred Siegel
Monday, October 20, 2003 12:00 p.m. EDT
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.
To recap, “the verbalization of hate has the potential to incite people who are incapable of distinguishing between real and verbal violence to engage in actual violence.” Even though you did not go so far as to incite a riot, Roland Smith acted on your hate speech and that of people under your supervision (e.g. Morris Powell of your “Buy Black” committee, who called the owner of Freddy’s a greedy Jew bastard). Your argument that Roland Smith was your critic carries no weight whatsoever–every lone wolf white supremacist who blows up a Black-owned home or business doubtlessly condemns the Ku Klux Klan for not actually lynching Negroes as it once did. You and your hate group (as defined by its behavior in 1995) acted exactly the same way the Klan once acted toward Black-owned businesses that moved into the “wrong” neighborhoods.
The Nine Lives of Al Sharpton By: John Perazzo
FrontPageMagazine.com | Thursday, April 12, 2007
In 1995, Sharpton led his National Action Network in an ugly boycott against Freddy’s Fashion Mart, a Jewish-owned business in Harlem, New York. The boycott started when Freddy’s owners announced that because they wanted to expand their own business, they would no longer sublet part of their store to a black-owned record shop. The street leader of the boycott, Morris Powell, was the head of Sharpton’s “Buy Black” Committee. Repeatedly referring to the Jewish proprietors of Freddy’s as “crackers,” Powell and his fellow protesters menacingly told passersby, “Keep [going] right on past Freddy’s, he’s one of the greedy Jew bastards killing our [black] people. Don’t give the Jew a dime.”
As head of your “Buy Black” Committee, Morris Powell was working under your supervision, and you were responsible for his conduct. We doubt he would have used this kind of language without your approval or even your encouragement.
Recall that “A hate group is an organized group or movement that advocates physical or verbal aggression toward or refusal to interact with persons on the basis of those persons’ possession and/or exhibition of a certain characteristic.” It is one matter to say, “Keep going right on past Freddy’s, he is unfair to his tenants, don’t give him a dime.” Whether true or false, and this accusation was apparently false, it is not hate speech that advocates refusal to interact with somebody because of his race, religion, or ethnicity. “Don’t give the Jew a dime” is. The National Action Network therefore meets the criteria of a hate group, and we have often referred to it as such in numerous blog postings and letters to the editor.
We have contacted some of the National Action Network’s corporate sponsors to express our objection to their sponsorship of a racist (as shown by “crackers” and “white interloper”) and anti-Semitic (as shown by “greedy Jew bastards” and “don’t give the Jew a dime”) hate group, and encouraged them to Google on “Sharpton” and “Tawana Brawley,” “Yankel Rosenbaum,” and “Freddy’s Fashion Mart” to see for themselves. We have stated that SEIU President Andy Stern accepted an award from a hate group; in other words, we are going to use your organization’s history against anybody who associates with you just as we would use the Ku Klux Klan against anybody who attended one of its cross-burnings.
“Power Dem” by Jay Nordlinger in the National Review adds,
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. Sharpton insisted-against all evidence-that the attackers were innocent. They were, he said, modern Scottsboro Boys, trapped in “a fit of racial hysteria.” Unspeakably, he and his people charged that the victim’s own boyfriend had raped and beaten her to the point of death. Outside the courthouse, they chanted, “The boyfriend did it! The boyfriend did it!” They denounced the victim as “Whore!”
Right, Mr. Sharpton, Don Imus should lose his job for talking about “nappy headed hos,” while you called a rape victim a whore while you and/or your followers made yet another false accusation of rape: genuine libel or slander depending on whether the accusation is written or verbal. Columnist Jeff Jacoby adds,
Al Sharpton: The Democrat’s David Duke
1991: A Hasidic Jewish driver in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights section accidentally kills Gavin Cato, a 7-year-old black child, and antisemitic riots erupt. Sharpton races to pour gasoline on the fire. At Gavin’s funeral he rails against the “diamond merchants” — code for Jews — with “the blood of innocent babies” on their hands. He mobilizes hundreds of demonstrators to march through the Jewish neighborhood, chanting, “No justice, no peace.” A rabbinical student, Yankel Rosenbaum, is surrounded by a mob shouting “Kill the Jews!” and stabbed to death.
1995: When the United House of Prayer, a large black landlord in Harlem, raises the rent on Freddy’s Fashion Mart, Freddy’s white Jewish owner is forced to raise the rent on his subtenant, a black-owned music store. A landlord-tenant dispute ensues; Sharpton uses it to incite racial hatred. “We will not stand by,” he warns malignantly, “and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business.” Sharpton’s National Action Network sets up picket lines; customers going into Freddy’s are spat on and cursed as “traitors” and “Uncle Toms.” Some protesters shout, “Burn down the Jew store!” and simulate striking a match. “We’re going to see that this cracker suffers,” says Sharpton’s colleague Morris Powell. On Dec. 8, one of the protesters bursts into Freddy’s, shoots four employees point-blank, then sets the store on fire. Seven employees die in the inferno.
Suppose a Black person opened a store in a predominantly white neighborhood. A group of white people show up and begin to call white store customers “Negro lovers” (with “Negro” not being the exact word they use). They shout, “Burn down the n***er store” and simulate striking matches. We would obviously suspect those whites of owning sheets and hoods even if they were not actually wearing them at the time. The National Action Network is therefore, according to what Mr. Jacoby has written, no better than the Ku Klux Klan.
We are glad that Al Sharpton finally chose to attack the wrong person, even though Rush Limbaugh will regrettably deny us the pleasure of taking him and the NAN down ourselves. Rush Limbaugh will indeed show this racist and anti-Semitic liar that there is somebody who is not afraid of him, and who will treat him like what he is: a hatemongering demagogue who appeals to the absolute dregs of African-American society the same way David Duke and Tom Metzger appeal to the dregs of Caucasian society.
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