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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: zonkie who wrote (104486)	4/12/2007 9:55:25 AM
From: Travis_Bickle	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 362339

If I refer to the killers as savages it would probably be construed as racist.

To: zonkie who wrote (104486)	4/12/2007 10:07:47 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 362339

Al's OK. He's a Deadhead. His favorite album... Reckless Blowhard Sharpton made his name and his fame as the one to lead a protest movement after every racially charged incident in New York over the last 30 years (and many elsewhere in the U.S.) Especially early in his career, he seemed content and even eager to inflame racial hatreds at the risk of violence, as long as it gave him publicity and power. Several of these protests escalated to the point of violence, in several cases by those who Sharpton championed. Examples include the Crown Heights riot of 1991, and a 1995 arson attack on a Jewish Harlem jeweler that resulted in 8 deaths. That attack came months after Sharpton made remarks about the "white interloper". (He later apologized, saying that he wouldn't use the word white again in that context.) Two incidents however appear to have caused him to tone down his excesses and refine his image. First, in 1987, black teenager Tawana Brawley claimed that six white law enforcement officers -- including then-assistant district attorney Steven Pagones -- had abducted and raped her, scrawled racial insults on her body and smeared her with feces. Miss Brawley refused to speak with authorities or the media, but Sharpton and her two other advisers were soon making wild claims. Sharpton compared then-state Attorney General Robert Abrams, a Jew, to Adolf Hitler. All three linked then-Gov. Mario Cuomo to organized crime and the Ku Klux Klan. Within a year, a grand jury announced the story was a hoax and specifically cleared a Fishkill police officer and Pagones. Pagones sued Sharpton and the other 2 advisers for more than $150 million for defamation. At this point, Sharpton's involvements is similar to George Bush and the Iraqi uranium purchase forgeries -- it's unclear if he was actively involved in fraud, or just recklessly willing to use information he knew was very shaky to make his political point. The other turning point came in 1991 when Sharpton was stabbed by a drunk white man during a protest march in Bensonhurst; after that he began to mellow. "There are times [since the stabbing] when I've found him remarkable and responsible," says critic Stanley Crouch. He recalls that after the murder of Yusuf Hawkins, a young black man from Brooklyn, Sharpton brought together Hawkins' stepfather with one of the group of white boys that had killed his son. "This would have been more recognized had it been someone like Giuliani," says Crouch. "After the Diallo verdict, he discouraged people from being violent," warning locals in New York that violence would not only put them in harm's way, but it would reduce them to the low level from which the unjust verdict originated," he notes. "So you have these great moments. He's also taken a more mature vision of the police and moved to differentiate those good white cops, who enforce the law properly in tough and often dangerous environments, and bad cops)." realchange.org