The Israeli newspaper Haaretz is no stranger to extreme left-wing stances on both domestic and foreign issues, but this time the the paper has gone major league crazy. For an op-ed on unifying against hatred and supporting justice, Haaretz invited Al Sharpton, a man who has made a career of inciting hatred.
In the piece, Sharpton tells Jews to put aside what did or didn’t happen in Crown Heights and unify with blacks against hatred and an unfair justice system and to fight for economic justice in the U.S. The ‘reverend’ insists that only a coalition of blacks and Jews can defeat hatred in America.
Now I am not opposed to fighting hatred and certainly not opposed to uniting with African-Americans to fight hatred. However, a message of unity and justice loses its power when it comes from one of the most divisive figures of the last forty years.
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Sharpton’s history of creating justice and eliminating hatred includes the time when he refused to meet with New York Attorney General Robert Abrams during the Tawana Brawley hoax because, he claimed, meeting the Jewish Abrams would be “like asking someone who watched someone killed in the gas chamber to sit down with Mr. Hitler.”
Sharpton pursued his version of Justice for Steven Pagones, former Assistant District Attorney in Dutchess County. During a March 1988 news conference, Sharpton accused Pagones of being one of Brawley’s rapists. He also accused District Attorney William Grady of trying to cover up Pagones’s involvement in the crime and demanded that Governor Mario Cuomo arrest the two “suspects.” Haaretz’s op-ed writer even told Spin magazine that Stephen Pagones had privately confessed to the crime. When asked for evidence of his claims, Sharpton insisted he would reveal the facts when the time was right. That never happened.
Sharpton’s brand of justice was on display again in the Crown Heights riots he helped incite and now wants us to forget. The incident grew out of a 1991 traffic accident when a car driven by Yosef Lifsh accidentally struck and killed Gavin Cato, a black child. Sharpton announced to the community that Lifsh had been driving drunk the night of the accident despite the fact police tested the driver and he was clean. Sharpton incited so much hate against Lifsh that he fled to Israel.
Per the sworn statement of Efraim Lipkind, a former Hasidic resident of Crown Heights, on the second night of the riot, Haaretz’s “unifier” wasn’t calling for coming together and reasoning with the Jews. According to Lipkind:
[W]e had a famous man, Al Sharpton, who came down, and he said Tuesday night, kill the Jews, two times. I heard him, and he started to lead a charge across the street to Utica [Avenue].
Angelina Marrero, Cynthia Martinez, Luz Ramos, Mayra Rentas, Olga Garcia, Garnette Ramautar, Kareem Brunner, and the seven victims of the massacre at Freddy’s Fashion Mart were also on the wrong side of Al Sharpton’s version of justice. They are dead because a four-month-long campaign of anti-Semitic hate by Sharpton culminated in the firebombing of Freddy’s that killed seven innocents.
There are countless other examples on Sharpton’s lengthy resume of hatred, violence, and dishonesty, but the American Left is willing to overlook those “minor indiscretions,” so why should Haaretz?
Cross posted at The Lid