The Nuts Are Running The Squirrel House

If you’ve been watching the news lately, you know that Don Imus is taking heat for referring to the Rutgers women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos”. Many people, including Al Sharpton, are calling for his firing. Please allow me a two-part rant.

Part 1: Don Imus

Seriously, unless a person has been under a rock and not noticed that Mel Gibson, Michael Richards, and Isaiah Washington were lambasted for their predjudical comments, that person is seriously mistaken if he/she doesn’t expect to get flak from calling a team with black athletes “nappy-headed hos”. It was a stupid thing to say. Offensive, and stupid. It’s good that Don Imus has apologized.

Part 2: Al Sharpton, et al.

Welcome to the land of free speech. People here have the right to say things that are offensive to you, just as you have the right to say things that are offensive to others. Perhaps Mr. Sharpton remembers this incident? (Told here by 4 different sources, although if you google it, you will find many posts and links about the situation.)

1995: When the United House of Prayer, a large black landlord in Harlem, raises the rent on Freddy’s Fashion Mart, Freddy’s white Jewish owner is forced to raise the rent on his subtenant, a black-owned music store. A landlord-tenant dispute ensues; Sharpton uses it to incite racial hatred. “We will not stand by,” he warns malignantly, “and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business.”

http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=2411

In 1995-four years into the putative New Sharpton-there was another, fatal case in which Sharpton had a guilty hand: Freddy’s Fashion Mart. In Harlem, a white store owner — no, worse: a Jewish one — was accused of driving a black store owner out of business. At one of the many rallies meant to scare the Jewish owner away, Sharpton charged that “there is a systemic and methodical strategy to eliminate our people from doing business off 125th Street. I want to make it clear . . . that we will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business.” Sharpton’s colleague, Morris Powell, said of the Jewish owner — Sharpton’s “white interloper” — “We’re going to see that this cracker suffers. Reverend Sharpton is on it.” Three months later, one of the protesters, Roland Smith, stormed Freddy’s with a pistol, screaming, “It’s on now: All blacks out!” In addition to shooting, he burned the place down. Eight people died. Sharpton now faced a PR problem, a bump on his road to full respectability. In a manner both Sharptonian and Clintonian, he denied having even spoken at a rally at all. When tapes surfaced, he asked, “What’s wrong with denouncing white interlopers?” Eventually, he decided to apologize-but only for saying “white,” not “interloper.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/20Mar00/nordlinger032000.html

As for the remark about the “white interloper” he made several months before the 1995 arson attack on a Jewish merchant’s shop in Harlem—which resulted in eight deaths—Sharpton points out that he has apologized. (”I would not use ‘white’ again,” he told the Daily News in 1996, “because his sin was not based on his whiteness, but his practices.”)

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0146,goldstein,29902,1.html

In 1995 Freddy’s Fashion Mart, a Jewish owned store, was picketed by Sharpton’s National Action Network when it raised the rent on a black subtenant. Sharpton proclaimed that “We will not stand by, and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business.” On December 8, one of the protesters entered Freddy’s, shot four employees, and set the store on fire, killing seven. Sharpton denied his involvement had anything to do with the incident.

http://www.dkosopedia.com/wiki/Al_Sharpton

So if Al Sharpton wants to fight this one out, remember that Al called someone a “white interloper”, then apologized for the “white” part. But apologies are aparently not enough. If Don Imus gets fired, then Al Sharpton should be stripped of his “Reverend” title.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 10th, 2007 at 11:43 am and is filed under General, Politics. You can follow responses to this entry through the Comments RSS Feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your site.