October 17, 2009

SEIU President Andy Stern accepted award from prominent racist and anti-Semite Al Sharpton
by Bill Levinson

It has come to our attention that the head of the Service Employees International Union, one of the major unions that supported the election of Barack Obama, accepted an award from Al Sharpton and his National Action Network. The National Action Network is the same organization that paraded around a Jewish-owned store, Freddy’s Fashion Mart, while yelling racial and anti-Semitic epithets. This took place under Al Sharpton’s leadership and supervision, and Al Sharpton personally used the racial epithet “white interloper.”

Is it reasonable to define the National Action Network as a hate organization?

A hate group is an organized group or movement that advocates physical or verbal aggression toward or refusal to interact with persons on the basis of those persons’ possession and/or exhibition of a certain characteristic.

The “certain characteristic” might of course include the “wrong” skin color (white, black, or yellow depending on the hate group’s agenda) or, in the case of the Crown Heights riots and the arson of Freddy’s Fashion Mart, big Jewish noses (”because air is free”). Now let us take a look at the National Action Network’s behavior outside Freddy’s Fashion Mart in 1995.

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. …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.

To put this another way, the National Action Network acted toward Freddy’s Fashion Mart the way the Ku Klux Klan once acted toward Black-owned businesses that moved into the “wrong” neighborhoods: racist hate speech, threats to burn the business down, and actual firebombings by deranged individuals who acted on the Klan’s hate speech. The Wikipedia definition of a hate group adds,

Dr. Ehud Sprinzak, an expert on terrorism and hate crimes, asserts that verbal violence is “the use of extreme language against an individual or a group that either implies a direct threat that physical force will be used against them, or is seen as an indirect call for others to use it.” Sprinzak argues that verbal violence is often a substitute for real violence, and that the verbalization of hate has the potential to incite people who are incapable of distinguishing between real and verbal violence to engage in actual violence.

It is therefore worth repeating:

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.

Although Mr. Sharpton’s hate speech and that of his entourage apparently did not rise to the level of “incitement to riot,” or to direct incitement for a deranged individual to torch the store, it is clear that Sharpton’s “verbalization of hate [had] the potential to incite people who are incapable of distinguishing between real and verbal violence to engage in actual violence.”

It may also be noted that Al Sharpton’s and the National Action Network’s hate speech did not involve Freddy’s business practices; statements like “Freddy’s Fashion Mart is Unfair,” whether true or false, are not hate speech. Phrases like “Jew bastards,” “bloodsucking Jews,” “white interlopers,” “cracker lovers,” and “don’t give the Jew a dime” are hate speech, and hate speech is a characteristic of hate organizations. “Don’t give the Jew a dime” seems to fulfill the definition “refusal to interact with persons on the basis of those persons’ possession and/or exhibition of a certain characteristic” perfectly. Andy Stern, President of the SEIU, accepted an award from a group that uses language like “bloodsucking Jews,” “crackers,” “Jew bastards,” “white interloper,” and “don’t give the Jew a dime.”

The Nine Lives of Al Sharpton By: John Perazzo
FrontPageMagazine.com | Thursday, April 12, 2007
In 1995, Sharpton led his National Action Network in an ugly boycott against Freddy’s Fashion Mart, a Jewish-owned business in Harlem, New York. The boycott started when Freddy’s owners announced that because they wanted to expand their own business, they would no longer sublet part of their store to a black-owned record shop. The street leader of the boycott, Morris Powell, was the head of Sharpton’s “Buy Black” Committee. Repeatedly referring to the Jewish proprietors of Freddy’s as “crackers,” Powell and his fellow protesters menacingly told passersby, “Keep [going] right on past Freddy’s, he’s one of the greedy Jew bastards killing our [black] people. Don’t give the Jew a dime.”

“Greedy Jew bastards” sure sounds like hate speech to us, and it was uttered publicly by an individual under Al Sharpton’s supervision and, given his own use of “white interloper,” probably with his approval. Nonetheless, SEIU President Andy Stern saw fit to accept an award from Al Sharpton and his organization.

This is far from the only incident of racist and/or anti-Semitic hate in which Al Sharpton played a major if not central role. We encourage our readers to Google on “Al Sharpton” and “Yankel Rosenbaum” or “Crown Heights riots” or “Tawana Brawley.” Andy Stern’s acceptance of an award from a professional hate-monger and his hate group says plenty about the SEIU, and about whether it can really represent its rank-and-file members.