Al Sharpton: Murderer, and Professional Bigot

A friend of my wife's had a cousin visiting from overseas. He was looking for a ticket for the hottest Broadway play. My wife explained to him that the play was sold out, but if he went across the bridge to New Jersey he could get a ticket from a scalper.  After my wife explained what a scalper was, her friend's cousin exclaimed, "You Americans, you can make a business out of anything" ---he was right.

We have people who play cards for a living, we have people who scalp tickets for a living, and we have people are professional bigots. Rush Limbaugh, who's daily radio audience is by far the largest in the country, is not a professional bigot. When rush  tried to buy a NFL football team he was attacked by Al Sharpton who is a professional bigot. The "Wrong-Reverand" has made a career of using bigotry to promote Al Sharpton. A real minister would build bridges across ethnic divides, Sharpton burns them. To be honest he is a master at it. Why does Sharpton do this ? Because by fanning the flames of hatred it helps him market his number one product. That would be Al Sharpton, "King of the African Americans"

Sharpton's most famous case of professional bigotry was the case of 16-year-old Tawana Brawley.  In November 1987 Ms Brawley claimed that she had been repeatedly raped and sodomized for four days by six white kidnappers, at least one of whom was wearing a police badge. She further alleged that her assailants had chopped off some of her hair, forced her to perform oral sex on them, urinated into her mouth, smeared her clothing with feces, and covered her chest with racial slurs. It was a horrible story. It was a Hoax.

Six-months later, the "Reverend" broke the commandment about bearing false witness and accused Stephen Pagones, Dutchess County’s assistant district attorney, as one of Brawley's attackers. He also accused district attorney William Grady of trying to cover up Pagones’ involvement in the crime, and he demanded Governor Cuomo immediately arrest the two “suspects.” Sharpton refused to provide evidence, saying only that they would reveal the facts when the time was right.

Three months later a Sharpton aide named Perry McKinnon stepped forward to blow a hole in Sharpton's story.  McKinnon announced that “Sharpton acknowledged to me early on that ‘The [Brawley] story do sound like bull---t, but it don’t matter. We’re building a movement. This is the perfect issue. Because you’ve got whites on blacks. That’s an easy way to stir up all the deprived people, who would want to believe and who would believe—and all [you’ve] got to do is convince them—that all white people are bad. Then you’ve got a movement.” Explaining that Sharpton was methodically “building an atmosphere” for a race war, McKinnon continued: “Sharpton told me it don’t matter whether any whites did it or not. Something happened to her...even if Tawana done it to herself.” To prove his truthfulness, McKinnon submitted to a lie detector test administered on camera and passed all questions.


To Sharpton it did not matter that he made up the story about Pagones, or that he ruined the former assistant district attorney's life, only that "bearing false witness" helped to make Al Sharpton a star. The Brawley case was not the only time that Sharpton used false claims as a tool of his bigotry. Twice he used lies to stir up Anti-Semitic pogroms which resulted in deaths of innocents. In Crown Heights and in Harlem:

The Crown Heights pogrom occurred after a car accident involving the motorcade for the Lubavitcher Rebbe killed a young boy Gavin Cato. A riot was sparked after a private Hasidic ambulance came to the scene and, on the orders of a police officer, removed the Hasidic driver from the scene. Gavin Cato and his cousin Angela were picked up soon after by a city ambulance. Caribbean-American and African-American residents of the neighborhood then rioted for four consecutive days fueled by rumors driven by Sharpton that the private ambulance had refused to treat Cato, which was a lie.  Sharpton was fully aware that the ambulance was directed by the police to get the driver and scram. Al Sharpton became the de-facto representative for the Cato family. During the funeral he referred to "diamond merchants" considered a code word for Hasidic Jews for shedding "the blood of innocent babies" leading marchers shouting "No Justice No Peace". Sharpton did not start the riots but his rhetoric poured gas on the fire. And while the Mayor of NY refused to do anything to help, A visiting rabbinical student from Australia by the name of Yankel Rosenbaum, 29 years old, was killed during the rioting by a mob shouting "Kill the Jew".

A few years later, Sharpton decided that Harlem should be segregated and that a Jewish-owned store named Freddie's Fashion Mart  should close even though it had been there for decades. At one of the many rallies meant to scare the Jewish owner away, Sharpton charged that “there is a systemic and methodical strategy to eliminate our people from doing business off 125th Street. I want to make it clear . . . that we will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business.” Sharpton’s colleague, Morris Powell, said of the Jewish owner — Sharpton’s “white interloper” — “We’re going to see that this cracker suffers. Reverend Sharpton is on it.” Three months later, one of the protesters, Roland Smith, stormed Freddy’s with a pistol, screaming, “It’s on now: All blacks out!” In addition to shooting, he burned the place down. Eight people died. Sharpton first lied about being present. When confronted with a video tape showing his presence, he said: "What's wrong with denouncing white interlopers?"

Rush Limbaugh wanted to purchase a professional football team. His biggest accuser was someone who claims to be a man of faith who has publicly broken with the commandment about bearing false witness and incited people to break with the commandment about "thou shalt not murder".  Shame on the Main Stream Media and the Commissioner of Football for paying heed to this professional bigot.