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Al Sharpton's Double Standard

By John Perazzo
FrontPageMagazine.com | March 9, 2001

IT APPEARS THAT AL SHARPTON, that noted watchdog of racism, has spotted yet another instance of white bigotry rearing its ugly head -- this time in the town of Perry, Florida. Without wasting a moment, Sharpton, accompanied by forty fellow activists, rushed to Perry last Friday to protest a local bar's alleged refusal to wait on black customers in its main serving area. "We're here to let people know this is not going to happen here in Perry, it's not going to happen anywhere in Florida, and it's not going to happen anywhere else," a furious Sharpton said regarding the bar's policy. Promising to "make a national example of Perry," Sharpton and his delegates gathered at a church and whipped some 300 fellow protesters into a frenzy with chants of "Fired up, can't take no more!"



Of course the allegations against the bar, if true, should justifiably result in a stiff penalty against those responsible for that ugly violation of civil rights - which few people of any race or ethnicity would condone for a moment. But even Sharpton's supporters ought to be embarrassed by his selective vision in determining which particular acts of racism warrant his attention. For while he is clearly prepared to race around the country and confront even the most irrelevant white numbskull who happens to do something as ludicrous as the Perry bar owner apparently did, the fiery activist is habitually silent about even the most gruesome, barbaric examples of black racism directed against whites.

Indeed, like all another self-anointed civil-rights crusaders in the country, he said nothing in response to the October 18, 1995 killing of Richard Will, a white man who was doused with lighter fluid and set afire by a group of black youths in a Chicago suburb. Sharpton was similarly silent in May 1997, when a black member of a Nation Of Islam offshoot viciously beat a white New York woman named Laura Zirinsky, injuring the woman so badly that she needed emergency brain surgery to save her life. Even though the perpetrator was carrying a notebook filled with anti-white writings advocating a race war, Sharpton never once vowed "to make a national example" of this racially motivated abomination. In fact, Sharpton had long been an unapologetic supporter of the infamous Khalid Muhammad, a Black Muslim whose vulgar diatribes against whites did not preclude Sharpton from calling him "a very articulate and courageous brother."

Nor did Sharpton feel "fired up" enough to condemn a 1997 incident in which six black Michigan youths fatally shot two white males in the head, then forced a white female to perform oral sex on them while they sodomized her, and finally murdered her as well. Neither was Sharpton's patience for injustice tested in January 1998, when a fifteen-year-old black gangster shot and killed Vitaly Bereslavsky, a hardworking Latvian immigrant in Brooklyn. When investigators later sought to ascertain the motives of the killer, who had robbed his dead victim of the two dollars in his pocket and promptly spent the money on fruit punch and cupcakes, the remorseless youth explained tersely, "I was hungry." Sharpton, however, had no appetite for publicly denouncing this fiend.

Nor did Sharpton take to the airwaves early in 2000, after a black Pennsylvania man named Ronald Taylor gunned down five innocent whites inside an apartment building. Though Taylor's residence was laden with anti-white and anti-Jewish writings, and though Taylor had candidly declared his intent to "kill all white people," Sharpton felt no inclination to publicly condemn either the crime or its racist roots. Nor did he have anything to say in April 2000 after a black man, who had previously been incarcerated for a hammer attack on a white stranger to whom he referred only as "whitey," pitilessly slit the throat of an eight-year-old white boy named Kevin Shifflett.

No, it seems that Al Sharpton had no desire to devote his considerable energies to the task of impugning any of these crimes, to say nothing of the thousands of similar black-on-white incidents that have plenished our nation's graveyards in recent years. Even though fully 90 percent of violent interracial attacks involving blacks and whites are perpetrated by blacks, Mr. Sharpton chooses to portray America as a snakepit of racist white vipers lurking behind every corner, just waiting for an opportunity to sink their fangs into the proverbial neck of black America. Even if he has to turn over a rock in some out-of-the way corner of Perry, Florida to find such a viper, he is ever eager to do so. Conversely, because examples of black-on-white injustice (myriad though they are) do not harmonize with his endless lamentations about white racism, Sharpton simply ignores them. And in so doing, he willfully infuses into millions of minds the outrageous lie which says not only that white racism is black America's most formidable foe, but also that black racism scarcely exists.

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