Sorry You Feel That Way, White Interloper and Bloodsucking Jew

Here are excerpts from Bill Levinson's Jan. 4 post on Israpundit about Barack Obama's stubborn loyalty to Jew-baiting race hustler Al Sharpton.

Obama Campaign Responds to Bigotry Complaint with Patronizing Insult
by Bill Levinson

Imagine the following interchange between an African-American voter and a candidate who has appeared with the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan:

Voter: “It is impossible for me to support someone who promotes and endorses an individual who has called my people the N word, and who has at least indirectly incited a lynching and the firebombing of a Negro church. You should apologize and distance yourself from that Klan leader.”
Candidate: “I’m sorry you feel that way” (or “I’m sorry you’re a Negro.”)

If our readers think such an interchange is highly unlikely, we will now share the Barack Obama campaign’s official response to our complaints about Mr. Obama’s ongoing promotion of the prominent racist and anti-Semite Al Sharpton.

We began with the premise of a candidate associating with and openly promoting a Ku Klux Klan leader who has at least indirectly incited a lynching, and the firebombing of a Negro church in which people were killed.

Al Sharpton played at least an indirect role in fomenting the 1991 Crown Heights pogrom in which a mob yelling “Kill the Jews” did so: a rabbinical student named Yankel Rosenbaum. Sharpton personally called the Jews “diamond merchants” with the blood of innocent children on their hands....

In 1995, a mob from Al Sharpton’s National Action Network – the same organization that Barack Obama endorsed last April – paraded around a Jewish-owned store, Freddy’s Fashion Mart, in Harlem. This mob, under Sharpton’s personal supervision, chanted epithets like “bloodsucking Jew” and “cracker,” to which Sharpton personally added “white interloper.”

Like a Ku Klux Klansman who threatens to burn a Black-owned church or business in the “wrong” neighborhood, one of Sharpton’s people threatened to burn Freddy’s Fashion Mart. Another later put this threat into effect, just like a Kluxer who throws a firebomb into a Black-owned store or church, with the loss of seven innocent lives.

In 1988, Sharpton played a central role in the racist Tawana Brawley scandal, which did immense damage to the reputations of innocent people while costing Dutchess County something like half a million dollars.

We encourage our readers in New York to (ask) the people of Dutchess County, and especially Wappinger Falls, just how much damage Obama’s friend did to their community twenty years ago. Remember, many people now of voting age had not even been born at the time.

This April, Barack Obama appeared at a meeting of the National Action Network–the very same hate organization that shouted slogans like “bloodsucking Jew” and “cracker” at Freddy’s Fashion Mart–where he endorsed this ... organization and its proprietor.

Sen. Barack Obama: “Reverend Sharpton is a voice for the voiceless, and a voice for the dispossessed. What National Action Network has done is so important to change America, and it must be changed from the bottom up.” In November, Obama made at least one more public appearance with (Sharpton), at the Apollo Theater.

We have, in response to numerous unsolicited e-mails from the Obama campaign, called (866) 675-2008 to complain about Mr. Obama’s open promotion of a vicious professional bigot who has built his career by promoting hatred of white people, and especially of Jews. Today, we received an official reply that we can construe only as a patronizing brush-off, if not a deliberate insult:

Dear Friend,

Thank you for sharing your thoughts about Senator Barack Obama and his candidacy for President. Senator Obama welcomes an open dialogue about America’s future, and hopes for the widest possible participation in a great nationwide discussion.

Hearing and exploring different positions and ways of thinking furthers this discussion. It challenges our reasoning, sharpens our analysis of issues, and leads to new solutions. We appreciate having the benefit of your perspective.

One of Senator Obama’s mentors was the late Senator Paul Simon, a man of great ability and integrity. He believed that people could disagree without being disagreeable, and Senator Obama has taken that guiding principle as his own.

Thank you again for contacting Senator Obama.

Sincerely,
Obama for America

The operative statement appears to be, “people can disagree without being disagreeable.” In other words, “We’re sorry you feel that way about our candidate’s public and ongoing promotion of a racist and anti-Semitic hate monger, but we don’t care because we own the Jewish vote anyway.”

It is therefore vital for us to spread the word as widely as possible that Barack Obama has so little respect for common decency that he consorts openly with the (equivalent) of the Ku Klux Klan and the Stormfront White Nationalist Community.

It is ... clear that Obama feels that he can be everything to everybody, and that he does not have to take a principled stand on anything....

Perhaps Obama (can) understand the following: (1) You can’t appear at a tribute to Michael Vick today and at an SPCA meeting tomorrow, and expect the SPCA people to believe that you are really against dog fighting and other forms of animal abuse. (2) You can’t appear at the Ku Klux Klan today and the NAACP tomorrow, and expect African-Americans to believe that you support civil rights. (3) You can’t appear arm in arm with Al Sharpton today and at AIPAC tomorrow, and expect Jewish voters to think you have anything but total contempt for them as well as for common decency.

Is Obama Really a Uniter?

In the tradition of Yasir Arafat, he speaks one way to his core followers on the street, and another to the public at large. If he is not yet a full-blown media darling, he is fast becoming one. Reporters get a kick out of him, finding him exciting, personable, and a joy to quote. As the liberal New York Post columnist Jack Newfield has pointed out, he is 'dangerous because he is so likable.' And only rarely is (he) held accountable for his offenses, both past and ongoing. The tendency to forget, or to brush aside, is close to overpowering.

No, the National Review's Jay Nordlinger is not writing about Barak Obama here, but about race hustler Al Sharpton, in an essay over seven years old. But it is as much a description of our credulous talking heads and newspapermen as of Sharpton.

How does Sharpton rate identification (only in the mass media) as a "civil rights leader" when he has made his living as a political shakedown artist?

His "Chappaquiddick," as columnist Nat Hentoff called it, was the Tawana Brawley hoax. After staying away from home for several days, young Tawana smeared herself with dog feces, wrote racial epithets on her body, climbed into a garbage bag, and waited to be discovered. Then she claimed she was abducted, raped and otherwise abused by six white men, including a police officer and an assistant district attorney, practicing Irish Republican Army rituals.

Sharpton became the family's press spokesman. Bill Cosby offered a large cash reward for information leading to arrests and convictions, but Sharpton told the family not to cooperate with New York Attorney General Robert Abrams. To cooperate with him, Sharpton said, would be "to sit down with Mr. Hitler."

One of Sharpton's assistants was quoted telling him "Robert Abrams, you are no longer going to masturbate looking at Tawana Brawley's picture."

It was a total, absolute hoax. Sharpton never apologized. Over a decade later, he said "If I had it to do again, I'd do it in the same way." He taunted one of the falsely accused men to sue him if he was innocent, and when the man did, he was subjected to death threats and menacing encounters that can only be attributed to Sharpton.

In the Central Park "wilding" case, a young white woman was set upon by a group of young Black males, who raped and beat her near death. Sharpton came to the rapists' defense, describing them as the equivalent of the "Scottsboro Boys." When the case went to trial, Sharpton brought his group to the courthouse steps where they shouted "whore" at the victim and chanted "the boyfriend did it."

Sharpton brought Tawana Brawley to the courthouse, where she and the jogger's attackers greeted one another warmly. Ever the ready provider of quotable zingers for the media, he said he had brought her there "to see the difference between white justice and Black justice."

When a Hasidic Jew lost control of his car, jumped the curb and killed a Black child, Sharpton decided to throw gasoline on the fire by denouncing a Jewish diamond company that bought South African diamonds, routed them through Tel Aviv and wholesaled them out of a Hasidic neighborhood in New York City. Rioters injured 100 Jews and lynched a rabbinical student.

"All we want to say is what Jesus said: if you offend one of these little ones, you got to pay for it. No compromise. You got to pay for your deeds. It's no accident that we know we should not be run over. We are the royal family on this planet. We are the original man."

When a Jewish retailer revoked a Black subtenant's lease in Harlem, Sharpton's National Action Network mounted a series of rallies to intimidate the Jew. Picketers screamed "bloodsucking Jews" and "Jew bastards," and threatened to burn the store down. They taunted a Black security guard as a "cracker lover."

At one of the rallies, Sharpton declared that "we will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business."

A Sharpton associate said "we're going to see that this cracker suffers. Reverend Sharpton is on it."

After weeks of escalating rhetoric, one of the overwrought partisans shouted "it's on," rushed into the store with a drawn firearm, and ordered all Blacks out of the store. He shot three whites and a Pakistani, whom he apparently mistook for a Jew, then set the store on fire, which killed five Hispanics, one Guyanese and the Black security guard.

Sharpton never took responsibility for inciting hatred against the Jewish retailer. At first he denied that he ever spoke at the rallies. When tapes proved he had, he was dismissive.

"What's wrong with denouncing white interlopers?" Sharpton asked.

What's Al Sharpton got to do with Barak H. Obama?

Well, the two have appeared together and been photographed together on several occasions. I don't think Obama would pose for photos with David Duke. And Obama has endorsed the activities of the man Richard Brookhiser called "an impresario of hatreds."

"Reverend Sharpton is a voice for the voiceless, and a voice for the dispossessed. What the National Action Network has done is so important to change America, and it must be changed from the bottom up."

If I've taken Obama out of context, I'm willing to be corrected. If you know of any instance where he has expressed disapproval of the way Al Sharpton handled the Tawana Brawley lie, the Central Park wilding, the Jew-lynching Crown Heights riots or the racially motivated shootings and arson on 125th Street, please post them in the Comments section below. I don't want to be unfair to Sen. Obama. But please supply a citation so that readers can look it up and independently verify it.

How would JFK have handled an endorsement by the Provisional Irish Republican Army?

It's safe to say that, despite his sentimental loyalty to Ireland, he would have distanced himself from violent Irish activists at least as emphatically as he distanced himself from the peace-loving bishops of the Catholic church.

Despite his stated ambition to be a uniter, Barak Obama has, thus far, lacked the steel or the inclination to renounce his most bigoted supporters. To date, this has been an asymmetrical factor in his favor. In South Carolina, for example, prominent Black Democrats openly acknowledged their racial motivation in voting for Obama. However, when former President Clinton noted that Jesse Jackson had won the South Carolina primary, he was accused of attempting to "marginalize" Obama by racial subtext.

This advantage is likely to hold as long as the generally left-leaning mass media keep message discipline. If significant media outlets break ranks to hold Obama as accountable as they held George Bush for speaking at Bob Jones University or Trent Lott for praising former Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond, the pressure could reach critical mass, at which point Obama may have to denounce his most fanatical supporters or forego outreach to independents and undecideds.