FROM THE ARCHIVES
Democrats Embrace 'Impresario of Hatred'
BY FRED SIEGEL
Monday, October 20, 2003 12:00 p.m. EDT
(Editor's note: This article appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 29, 2000.)
George W. Bush has taken a lot of heat, and deservedly so, for tolerating intolerance. On Sunday, stung by criticism of his visit to South Carolina's Bob Jones University, Mr. Bush sent a letter to New York's Cardinal John O'Connor in which the Texas governor apologized for having failed to distance himself from the university's racially discriminatory and anti-Catholic policies. Yesterday John McCain denounced two Bush backers, the Rev. Pat Robertson and the Rev. Jerry Falwell, as "agents of intolerance." And Mr. McCain himself has come under fire for referring to his Vietnamese captors as "gooks" and for refusing to take a position on the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the South Carolina capitol.
So when will the press ask Bill Bradley and Al Gore to disavow Democratic extremists? Both men have been cozying up to the Rev. Al Sharpton, the man at the center of some of New York's ugliest racial incidents.
When Mr. Gore showed up to debate Mr. Bradley at Harlem's famed Apollo Theater on 125th Street last week, he came because Mr. Sharpton had threatened him with protests. Mr. Gore could have capitalized on the opportunity to repudiate a racial demagogue, the way Bill Clinton did in 1992 when he denounced the rap singer Sister Souljah at a meeting of the Rev. Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition.
Instead, Mr. Gore, who has quite rightly criticized Mr. Bush for kowtowing to white racism in South Carolina, decided to capitulate to black racism in New York. After a private meeting with Mr. Sharpton at the apartment of Mr. Gore's daughter, Karenna, the vice president agreed to participate in the Sharpton-organized debate. With the vice president ahead of the fading Mr. Bradley by a whopping 25 percentage points in New York polls, it would have taken only minimal courage to stand up to Mr. Sharpton's intimidation. Yet he caved in to the man Richard Brookhiser aptly describes as "an impresario of hatreds."
The irony for Mr. Gore is that he could appeal to inner-city blacks by running as a "new Democrat." Harlem would have been an ideal venue to do so. Devastated by the violence of the 1960s and '70s, largely bypassed by the boom of the 1980s, Harlem is now undergoing what been described as its second renaissance, thanks to the success of both Mr. Clinton's economic policies and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's anticrime efforts. Employers and middle-class professionals are moving into Harlem as never before. Capitalism, shut out of Harlem first by white racism and then by crime and political patronage, has begun to work its magic. If Mr. Gore continues to ignore this good news and to embrace Mr. Sharpton's politics of division, he will only help Mr. Bush or Mr. McCain.
The press has been appropriately vigilant in examining Mr. Bush's willingness to pander to Southern white identity politics. It would have taken no great effort for the reporters covering the Apollo debate to have walked across 125th Street from the theater to visit Freddy's Fashion Mart, where in 1995 eight people died in a murderous rampage inspired by Mr. Sharpton.
Mr. Sharpton is best-known for the Tawana Brawley hoax, in which he insisted that a 15-year-old black girl had been abducted and raped by a band of white men practicing Irish Republican Army rituals. In fact she had made up the story to protect herself from her violent stepfather.
But at Freddy's, Mr. Sharpton was even more malevolent. He turned a landlord-tenant dispute between the Jewish owner of Freddy's and a black subtenant into a theater of hatred. Picketers from Mr. Sharpton's National Action Network, sometimes joined by "the Rev." himself, marched daily outside the store, screaming about "bloodsucking Jews" and "Jew bastards" and threatening to burn the building down.
After weeks of increasingly violent rhetoric, one of the protesters, Roland Smith, took Mr. Sharpton's words about ousting the "white interloper" to heart. He ran into the store shouting, "It's on!" He shot and wounded three whites and a Pakistani, whom he apparently mistook for a Jew. Then he set the fire, which killed five Hispanics, one Guyanese and one African-American--a security guard whom protesters had taunted as a "cracker lover." Smith then fatally shot himself.
Eight people died, and so evidently did the conscience of liberal Democrats. It was Al Sharpton who had the honor of asking the first question at last week's debate, held within hailing distance of the Freddy's massacre.
Messrs. Gore and Bradley both have excoriated Mr. Bush for being "morally blind" to white racism. At the Apollo, they asked white Americans to look deep in their hearts for racial insensitivity. Yet both Mr. Gore and Mr. Bradley are willfully blind to Mr. Sharpton's form of racism. Last August Mr. Bradley spoke before Sharpton's National Action Network. "This is where justice lies," Mr. Bradley said of the organization that had incited the murders at Freddy's. Then he repeated Mr. Sharpton's slogan: "No justice, no peace."
Meanwhile, just outside the headquarters, Khalid Muhammad, a man so extreme he had been expelled from Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, was threatening to kill New York City Councilman Bill Perkins, who is black. Mr. Perkins's crime? He failed to support the Million Youth March, Mr. Muhammad's annual Harlem hate fest. Mr. Sharpton was the only leading black politician to attend the march.
In the wake of last week's verdict in the accidental shooting of Amadou Diallo, Mr. Sharpton has moved into his statesman act. This will be the fifth or sixth time Mr. Sharpton, almost always dubbed a "civil rights leader" by the mainstream press, has repackaged himself to a credulous media.
On NBC's "Meet the Press" a few weeks ago, host Tim Russert did a terrific job of pressing George W. Bush on his pandering to Southern bigotry. Will he do the same with Mr. Gore? Will he ask the vice president about his newfound friendship with Al Sharpton? Will he ask the man whose boss denounced Sister Souljah why he has chosen to tout an endorsement from "gangsta" rapper Wycliff Jean? I doubt it. There are some matters on which you can be just too inquisitive.
Mr. Siegel is author of "The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A. and the Fate of America Big Cities," just out in paperback from Encounter Books.