See this story at BrooklynDaily.com.
By Shavana Abruzzo
Brooklyn Daily
Mayor-elect Bill DeBlasio stumped to bridge inequality, but his first public speech stoked the gap with a smooch-a-thon for agitator Al Sharpton.
“Every year, Rev. Sharpton is becoming stronger as a leader,” DeBlasio brayed at Sharpton’s National Action Network meeting last month. “He’s a blessing for all of us.”
Al Sharpton and his cronies are a curse for New Yorkers familiar with their jaundiced commitment to civil rights that came of age 23 years ago during the Dinkins administration, and scared-off blue-team Gothamites from electing another Democrat to City Hall until now.
Sharpton, firebrand lawyers C. Vernon Mason and Alton Maddox, and notorious late activist Sonny Carson — a foul-mouthed, convicted kidnapper who openly claimed to be “anti-white” — virtually ruined Dinkins. They fanned racial flames into raging infernos, while the likes of DeBlasio, then an aide at City Hall, watched. The mayor-elect, who should bone up on his ex-boss’s dismal legacy, later called Carson a “strong community leader” who had an “important impact” on the neighborhood. What rot.
Mayor Dinkins hired thousands of police officers amid a budget crunch, launched the “Safe Streets, Safe City” program, inked a deal to keep the U.S. Open Tennis Championships in New York, and began the revitalization of tired old Times Square. Yet he is remembered most for his failure to quell the race baiters who began their onslaught within weeks of him taking office, after a Haitian woman claimed a Korean grocer assaulted her during a row over plantains and peppers.
Beleagured cops idled during a 17-month-long boycott that followed, and authorities were as incompetent a year later, when rioters fatally stabbed an Australian rabbinical student to avenge two black children whom a Hasidic motorist accidentally ran over in Crown Heights, tragically killing one of them.
Dinkins’s stately calls for racial healing were met with contempt, and rabblerousers branded him “a Negro bastard,” “Judas,” and a “lover of white people.”
The mayor rushed to Crown Heights with a bullhorn to restore order, but his pleas fell on deaf ears.
“Will you listen to me for just a minute, please,” beseeched Dave.
“No!” the crowd thundered.
“I care about you — I care about you desperately,” he implored.
“Arrest the Jews!” exploded the hordes, whose inciters were Sharpton and Carson.
They burned the Israeli flag in public, hassled Dinkins who was visiting a school to diffuse tensions, labeled Crown Heights’ Jews “diamond merchants,” and likened them to diamond-mine owners in apartheid-era South Africa.
Philip Gourevitch, who covered the riots for the Jewish Forward, remembers the pandemonium.
“Sharpton was a vulture who would go in and take on anybody’s funeral, shouting about justice as if anything that stirred emotion was a good occasion to exploit for the general feeling that there was injustice towards the black community,” he reported.
Bill DeBlasio ran as a populist, but his hyper-coziness with a volatile fringe group suggests he is a heartbeat away from inviting the same chaos that turned his former employer into a one-termer.
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