Al
Sharpton for President?
By Alan Caruba
For the past few months we have all been hearing and reading
about the Democrat candidates for that Party’s nomination for President. What
has amazed me is the way Al Sharpton, the master exploiter of riots, mayhem and
murders, has been treated as a credible candidate.
There he’s been, right up there on the stage the other
candidates as they debate. Sharing the platform on occasion has been Carol
Mosely Braun, a black former Senator whom voters dismissed for sheer
incompetence.
The problem for me is that the mainstream media have all
developed amnesia, rarely mentioning that this candidate gained fame by
inserting himself into a number of racially charged incidents in various New
York City neighborhoods. He first gained national headlines by supporting a hoax
perpetrated by a young, black teenager named Tawana Brawley. In a 1987 case, she
claimed to have been kidnapped and raped by several white men. Sharpton, at one
point, accused a local prosecutor, Steven Pagones, of being one of the rapists.
In 1998, Pagones won a $345,000 judgment against Sharpton for having defamed
him.
Earlier, in a 1991 riot, Sharpton led protests in Crown Heights, a Jewish
neighborhood, for four nights in a row and a young rabbinical student, Yankel
Rosenbaum, was set upon by a mob and killed. In 1995, Sharpton led a two-month
protest outside of Freddy’s Fashion Mart in Harlem. Owned by Freddy Harari, a
Jew, his rent had been raised by a black church, the United House of Prayer, and
Freddy had to raise the rent on his subtenant, a black-owned music store.
Sharpton denounced Freddy, not the black landlords, and the result was that one
of the protesters burst into his store, shot four employees dead, and then set
fire to the store. In all, seven employees died.
In March of 1983, Sharpton had been caught on a FBI
surveillance video discussing a cocaine purchase with an undercover FBI agent
posing as a Latin American businessman. Sharpton talked about making a buy,
possibly as an agent for Daniel Pagano, a member of the Genovese crime family
and a longtime friend of Sharpton. He subsequently became an informant for the
FBI and Pagano was indicted on racketeering charges.
And this man is running for President of the United States of
America! If he can qualify on the ballot in twenty states, he could be eligible
for more than $16 million in federal matching funds!
What I don’t understand is why no one seems outraged by
this? This man is invariably referred to as a "leader" of
Afro-Americans. This Jesse Jackson wannabe is following in the footsteps of this
other "leader" who has since gone into eclipse as the result of having
had an adulterous affair with a woman and fathering her child. Jackson’s
"Operation Push" has been described as nothing more than a racist
extortion racket.
Despite some real advances in recent decades, the black
community in America has continued to be "led" by some of the most
racist and disreputable people one could imagine. Larry Elder, a radio talk show
host, recently noted that "Most blacks do quite well in America, with black
income and business creation outpacing that of whites." Regrettably,
despite those advances, homicide is still the number one cause of death for
young black men and women between the ages of 15 and 25. An astonishing 94% of
black Americans slain between 1976 and 1999 were killed by other black
Americans.
Democrats assume blacks will vote for their candidate no
matter who it is. And they do. In 2000, 90% of the black vote went to Al Gore.
The time is long overdue for black Americans to let go of their own racism and
smarten up. The politics of victimization keep them trapped by the Democrat
Party, by the NAACP, the Party’s black socialist lapdog, and others who play
the race card.
Meanwhile, I am still waiting to find out how "Reverend" Sharpton can call himself a man of the cloth when he has never been a pastor of any church? That goes for Jesse, too.
Alan Caruba is the author of “Warning Signs” and his weekly commentaries are posted on www.anxietycenter.com, the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center.