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.

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