Israpundit

Obama Campaign Responds to Bigotry Complaint with Patronizing Insult
by Bill Levinson

Imagine the following interchange between an African-American voter and a candidate who has appeared with the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan:

Voter: “It is impossible for me to support someone who promotes and endorses an individual who has called my people the N word, and who has at least indirectly incited a lynching and the firebombing of a Negro church. You should apologize and distance yourself from that Klan leader.”
Candidate: “I’m sorry you feel that way” (or “I’m sorry you’re a Negro.”)

If our readers think such an interchange is highly unlikely, we will now share the Barack Obama campaign’s official response to our complaints about Mr. Obama’s ongoing promotion of the prominent racist and anti-Semite Al sharpton.

We began with the premise of a candidate associating with and openly promoting a Ku Klux Klan leader who has at least indirectly incited a lynching, and the firebombing of a Negro church in which people were killed. Al Sharpton played at least an indirect role in fomenting the 1991 Crown Heights pogrom in which a mob yelling “Kill the Jews” did so: a rabbinical student named Yankel Rosenbaum. Sharpton personally called the Jews “diamond merchants” with the blood of innocent children on their hands, although he admittedly didn’t throw in a recipe for making matzos from the blood of those children.

In 1995, a mob from Al Sharpton’s National Action Network–the same organization that Barack Obama endorsed last April–paraded around a Jewish-owned store, Freddy’s Fashion Mart, in Harlem. This mob, under Sharpton’s personal supervision, chanted epithets like “bloodsucking Jew” and “cracker,” to which Sharpton personally added “white interloper.” Like a Ku Klux Klansman who threatens to burn a Black-owned church or business in the “wrong” neighborhood, one of Sharpton’s people threatened to burn Freddy’s Fashion Mart. Another later put this threat into effect, just like a Kluxer who throws a firebomb into a Black-owned store or church, with the loss of seven innocent lives.

In 1988, Sharpton played a central role in the racist Tawana Brawley scandal, which did immense damage to the reputations of innocent people while costing Dutchess County something like half a million dollars. We encourage our readers in New York to remind the people of Dutchess County, and especially Wappingers Falls, just how much damage Obama’s friend did to their community twenty years ago. Remember, many people now of voting age had not even been born at the time.

This April, Barack Obama appeared at a meeting of the National Action Network–the very same hate organization that shouted slogans like “bloodsucking Jew” and “cracker” at Freddy’s Fashion Mart–where he endorsed this hate organization and its proprietor.

Senator Barack Obama (Ill): “Reverend Sharpton is a voice for the voiceless, and a voice for the dispossessed. What National Action Network has done is so important to change America, and it must be changed from the bottom up.”

In November, Obama made at least one more public appearance with this racist and anti-Semite at the Apollo Theater.

We have, in response to numerous unsolicited E-mails from the Obama campaign, called (866) 675-2008 to complain about Mr. Obama’s open promotion of a vicious professional bigot who has built his career by promoting hatred of white people, and especially of Jews. Today, we received an official reply that we can construe only as a patronizing brush-off, if not a deliberate insult:

Dear Friend,

Thank you for sharing your thoughts about Senator Barack Obama and his candidacy for President. Senator Obama welcomes an open dialogue about America’s future, and hopes for the widest possible participation in a great nationwide discussion.

Hearing and exploring different positions and ways of thinking furthers this discussion. It challenges our reasoning, sharpens our analysis of issues, and leads to new solutions. We appreciate having the benefit of your perspective.

One of Senator Obama’s mentors was the late Senator Paul Simon, a man of great ability and integrity. He believed that people could disagree without being disagreeable, and Senator Obama has taken that guiding principle as his own.

Thank you again for contacting Senator Obama.

Sincerely,

Obama for America

The operative statement appears to be, “people can disagree without being disagreeable.” In other words, “We’re sorry you feel that way about our candidate’s public and ongoing promotion of a racist and anti-Semitic hate monger, but we don’t care because we own the Jewish vote anyway.” It is therefore vital for us to spread the word as widely as possible that Barack Obama has so little respect for common decency that he consorts openly with the Negro counterpart of the Ku Klux Klan and the Stormfront White Nationalist Community. We encourage our readers to write letters to their local papers to let their communities know that Barack Obama is promoting racism and anti-Semitism while he claims to be the candidate of hope (or whatever). The truth is that Barack Obama is a phony smile on top of an empty suit, a media and George Soros creation who stands for absolutely nothing whatsoever.

Furthermore, Barack Obama’s association with Al Sharpton is an insult to all self-respecting African-Americans. There are dozens of prominent Black athletes, businesspeople, entertainers, educators, and other public figures who have made positive contributions to their communities and to American society as a whole. Instead of appearing with one or more of these African-Americans, Obama chose to appear with an individual whose actions reflect the absolute worst of African-American society: racism, anti-Semitism, and the attitude that Jews, whites, and Asians (Sharpton and his people doubtlessly have very imaginative names for all three groups) are somehow responsible for all their problems.

It is therefore clear that Obama feels that he can be everything to everybody, and that he does not have to take a principled stand on anything whatsoever. The truth is that a person’s enemies as well as his friends reflect his personal character, and that someone who is everything to everybody is really nothing to nobody: a phony smile on an empty suit. Perhaps Obama has at least the marginal level of intellect necessary to understand the following:

(1) You can’t appear at a tribute to Michael Vick today and at an SPCA meeting tomorrow, and expect the SPCA people to believe that you are really against dog fighting and other forms of animal abuse.
(2) You can’t appear at the Ku Klux Klan today and the NAACP tomorrow, and expect African-Americans to believe that you support civil rights.
(3) You can’t appear arm in arm with Al Sharpton today and at AIPAC tomorrow, and expect Jewish voters to think you have anything but total contempt for them as well as for common decency.

Since Obama is apparently too stupid to understand this or, more likely, he believes that we are too stupid to understand this, we must do everything possible to prevent his election.

Tags: Crown Heights, Obama, sharpton, Tawana Brawley, Yankel Rosenbaum

This entry was posted on Friday, January 4th, 2008 at 6:36 pm and is filed under antisemitism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.