I like Al Sharpton, enough to have learned a few things about him. He is a bigot. Why bother trying to please him? Sharpton isn't worth the time.
Al Sharpton's résumé is at least as disgusting as David Duke's.
1987: Sharpton spreads the Tawana Brawley hoax, insisting fervently that a 15-year-old black girl was abducted, raped, and smeared with feces by a group of white men. He singles out Steve Pagones, a young prosecutor. Pagones was wholly innocent, the crime never occurred, but Sharpton taunted him: "If we're lying, sue us, so we can . . . prove you did it." Pagones did sue, and eventually won a $345,000 verdict for defamation. To this day, Sharpton refuses to recant his despicable slander or to apologize for his role in the incident.
1991: A Hasidic Jewish driver in Brooklyn's Crown Heights section accidentally killed Gavin Cato, a 7-year-old black child, and anti-Semitic riots broke out. Sharpton raced to pour gasoline on the fire. At Gavin's funeral he railed against the "diamond merchants" (code for Jews) with "the blood of innocent babies" on their hands. He mobilized hundreds of demonstrators to march through the Jewish neighborhood, chanting, "No justice, no peace." A rabbinical student, Yankel Rosenbaum, was 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, raised the rent on Freddy's Fashion Mart, Freddy's white Jewish owner was forced to raise the rent on his subtenant, a black-owned music store. A landlord-tenant dispute ensued; Sharpton used it to incite racial hatred. "We will not stand by," he warned, "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 shouted, "Burn down the Jew store!" and simulated striking a match. "We're going to see that this cracker suffers," said Sharpton's colleague Morris Powell. On Dec. 8, one of the protesters burst into Freddy's, shot four employees point-blank, then set the store on fire. Seven employees die in the inferno.
If Sharpton were a white skinhead, he would be a political leper, spurned everywhere but on the fringe. Instead, he is shown respect and deference. Democrats embrace him. Politicians court him. And the media reports on his comings and goings while ignoring his history of hatemongering and racial hustling.
Sharpton is a liar and a bigot.
