Al Shameless

Al Sharpton has no shame. This should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed the career of America’s foremost racist demagogue and lynch-mob leader, and his recent statements show that Reverend Al continues to live down to that low reputation.

In a recent episode of his MSNBC show “Politics Nation,” he began by claiming that the Republican party is attempting to “dehumanize” President Obama, whatever that means. And in a jaw-dropping example of psychological projection, he accused them of engaging in “a long history of fear and smear.”

Projection is a defense mechanism whereby a person is in denial about his or her own attitudes and motivations, and instead attributes them to other people. It is a serious mental condition of the left, and it accounts for their astonishing blind spot to their own intolerance, hatred, bigotry, and racism, which they instead ascribe to the right.

In another recent example, a fact-free opinion piece entitled “War on Students,” Sharpton informs his Huffington Post readers that there is a kind of warfare “that is ideological rather than physical.” This isn’t news to conservatives, who have learned the hard way that progressives are the ruthless masters of such combat. But Al of course, asserts that “nobody knows the concept of waging these sorts of wars better than” – naturally – “Republicans”:

As a collective, they have waged virtual wars against women, immigrants and progressive groups... The latest victims in Republican warfare are the most defenseless among us – our children.

He’s referring to the diabolical Republican plot to keep “our children” in a “persistent cycle of poverty” by means of the crushing debt of student loans. He doesn’t explain why Republicans would want to choke off America’s future prosperity, nor does he address the fact that it is not they but the Obama administration that is driving our young people and everyone else into a “persistent cycle of poverty.”

Sharpton first thrust himself into the national spotlight in 1987, when he exploited the infamous Tawana Brawley case. The black 15-year-old in New York claimed she had been kidnapped and raped by a gang of six whites. Despite an absence of evidence to support her story, Sharpton made increasingly wild allegations, including the charge, without a shred of proof, that the assistant prosecutor himself had participated in the girl's brutalization. Brawley’s tale eventually proved to be false, and the assistant prosecutor won a court judgment against Sharpton (which he refused to pay).

In 1991 Sharpton formed the National Action Network, whose platform involves a rather unfocused range of activism regarding everything from racial profiling to police brutality, women’s issues to public education, job awareness to international affairs, abolishing slavery in Africa, and more.

That same year Sharpton showed just what kind of activism he espouses. Anti-Jewish riots erupted in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights after a Hasidic Jew accidentally ran over and killed a 7-year-old black boy. Delivering the eulogy at the funeral, Sharpton blamed Jewish “apartheid” rather than a car accident, and got the mourners fired up about the local “diamond merchants”: “All we want is what Jesus said. If you offend one of these little ones, you got to pay for it. No compromise, no meetings, no coffee klatsch, no skinnin' and grinnin'.” Within three hours of his eulogy, a black mob had hunted down and killed an innocent rabbinical student in retaliation.

Unapologetic as always, Sharpton organized angry demonstrations: “No justice, no peace!” he shouted. Hundreds of Crown Heights blacks took to the streets for three days and nights of rioting, which Sharpton excused by stating, “We must not reprimand our children for outrage, when it is the outrage that was put in them by an oppressive system.”

In 1994, Sharpton delivered this crudely bigoted gem in a speech at Kean College: “White folks was [sic] in caves while we was [sic] building empires.... We taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them [sic] Greek homos ever got around to it.” Imagine the left’s gleeful uproar if Rush Limbaugh were guilty of such a racist and anti-gay – not to mention illiterate – comment.

In 1995, Sharpton led NAN in a racially charged boycott against Freddy’s Fashion Mart, a Jewish-owned business in Harlem. The street leader of the boycott was also the head of Sharpton’s “Buy Black” Committee. The protesters warned passersby not to patronize the “crackers” and “the greedy Jew bastards [who are] killing our [black] people.” Some boycotters openly threatened violence against whites and Jews – all at the instigation of Sharpton, who referred to the Freddy's proprietors as “white interlopers.” One of the protesters ended up shooting four whites inside the store and setting the building on fire – killing seven employees, mostly Hispanics.

In a 2003 speech sponsored by Harvard Law School, Sharpton characterized Republicans as racists who “cut taxes for the rich while [they] strangle the poor”; compared black Republicans Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice to house slaves; declared that “white male land owners” were in control of the United States; and asserted that the descendants of the white men who “used to buy [blacks], now they rent 'em.”

Reverend Al invariably sides with the most America-hating radicals this country has spawned, from Louis Farrakhan to Malik Zulu Shabazz to Cindy Sheehan to Jeremiah Wright to Barack Obama, whom he once claimed he spoke to “two or three times a week.”

Wherever there is what the left labels “social injustice,” you can be sure Al Sharpton will be there, encouraging the mob with unintentionally comic exhortations like this: “resist we much… we must… and we will much… about… that… be committed.” Wherever the opportunity arises to inflame racial tensions, you will be sure to find Rev. Al, such as when he participated in the hyped uproar over the recent Trayvon Martin shooting (a case about which he has warned, with typical projection, that we must “not get caught in the divisive tactics that some would like us to fall into”). Wherever chaos can be sewn or exploited and non-blacks “dehumanized,” you will find shameless Al Sharpton engaged in his “long history of fear and smear.”

(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 5/24/12)