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Posts Tagged ‘Daniel Greenfield’

Chuck Hagel didn’t even have a year and a half before going under the bus

by Mojambo ( 3 Comments › )
Filed under Headlines at June 12th, 2014 - 10:44 am

Hagel was always a dimwitted rageaholic alcoholic.

by Daniel Greenfield

Chuck Hagel was confirmed at the end of February 2013. He didn’t even have a year and a half in his new position before becoming a fall guy.

That must be some kind of record.

And Hagel is pathetically embracing his role. The sad sack who stumbled incompetently through his hearings now stumbles through the motions of taking on the responsibility for the Bergdahl deal, ever since it was announced that it’s his fault.

Hagel, unlike Shinseki, probably won’t pay the ultimate penalty. Not unless Bowe Bergdahl’s first words on camera are, “I love Jihad more than I love peanut butter and jelly”. But the decline has started.

Obama has two kinds of appointees. Those he connects with and will fight for, like Susan Rice, and the expendables, like Hagel. He will fight for them out of ego, but he will sacrifice them if there’s a threat.

Susan Rice might be sent out to lie, but she won’t be sent out to fall on her sword. Chuck Hagel now knows exactly where he stands. Even the famously dimwitted ex-senator can’t be too stupid to realize his place in the scheme of things.

Obama had more respect for Panetta and Petraeus than he does for Hagel.

“We didn’t handle some of this right,” Hagel admitted to the House Armed Services Committee, toward the end of the first public hearing on the prisoner exchange.

In his opening remarks, Hagel also said both he and President Obama were on board with the decision — amid some confusion in Washington over who technically approved the trade. “I want to make one fundamental point — I would never sign any document or make any agreement … that I did not feel was in the best interests of this country,” Hagel said. “Nor would the president of the United States, who made the final decision with the full support of his national security team.”

Is Hagel covertly passing the buck back? He just might be. But don’t make the mistake of thinking Hagel is smart. Ask him a question about a talking point and he folds like Hillary after three margaritas.

He said there was “no direct evidence of any direct involvement in their direct attacks on the United States or any of our troops,” though they were combatants and “part of planning.”

Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, asked him to clarify.

“So your point was they didn’t pull the trigger, but they were senior commanders of the Taliban military who directed operations against the United States?” he asked.

“That’s right,” Hagel said.

It’s another brilliant performance from the woodchuck

The Progressive Red Guard

by Mojambo ( 241 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, China, History, Liberal Fascism, Progressives at May 14th, 2014 - 3:00 pm

Calling Barack Obama a “Child of the Cultural Revolution (1966 -69” I think is the best description of him I have ever read.

by Daniel Greenfield

As the 50th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution approaches some of the former students who participated in its Red Guard terror have been trying to make amends to their victims. If China’s former leftist fanatics feel some remorse for the atrocities they participated in, the same can’t be said of their American counterparts.

Even as the Cultural Revolution was dying down in China, it flared up in the United States. The Weather Underground drew inspiration from China’s Red Terror. Their founding manifesto cited the Red Guard as a model for a “mass revolutionary movement.”

Bill Ayers, among others, had signed a letter, “Long live People’s China. Love live Comrade Mao.”

The American counterparts of China’s Red Guard remain largely unrepentant because here the Cultural Revolution never ended. Instead it went mainstream. Its members were never disavowed and their acts of terror continue to be celebrated, minimized and whitewashed by a left that finds them alternately embarrassing and thrilling.

The terrorists became celebrities and the radicals became part of the system and set the rules. There was less violence, but more authoritarianism. Instead of carrying on a futile campaign of bombings and bank robberies, the radicals used the vast wealth and power of the system to train the next generation of the Red Guard. And that next generation did the same thing.

Barack Obama, a child of the Cultural Revolution

Each wave of the Cultural Revolution in the United States has eroded civil rights and illiberally undermined a liberal society. Though the Red Guards have chosen to work within the system, they are animated by an unmistakeable contempt and hatred for the country and its institutions. Their endgame has not changed. Only their tactics have.

Barack Obama, a child of the Cultural Revolution, is the very model of a modern Red Guard. The mark of a successful revolution is that the revolutionaries no longer need extreme rhetoric since they can do anything they want. The Weather Underground engaged in extreme rhetoric and actions. Obama dispenses with the extreme rhetoric and gets right down to the extreme actions. He is calculating enough to avoid the verbal vindictiveness of an Ayers or a Wright, but he still chose them as his mentors.

America under the Red Guards is run by liberals without liberalism.  […….]

The United States has gone from a society that sought to create equality through neutral spaces that nullified authoritarian power relationships and restored a natural state of individuality to a society of authoritarian power relationships that promise equality by redistributing poverty and oppression. There is no room for neutral spaces in such a system. No room for withdrawal or dissent.

[…….]

The virtue of the creative individual was displaced by the Red Guard’s virtue of outrage. Its members mistake the thrill of abusing others for the rightness of a moral crusade. They celebrate the elimination of all restrictions that prevent them from punishing their victims as a revolutionary act.

This form of crowdsourced political terror by elites and their pet mobs isn’t new. It’s only new to the United States.

Political outrage is the supreme virtue of both the American and Chinese Red Guard. The denunciations leading from that outrage show off their revolutionary commitment to everyone.

The lines of scapegoats paraded through the media for some petty crime against political correctness are a modern digital version of the Red Guard’s denunciations and humiliations. The politics and the poisoned power motives are the same. The only difference is that the Red Guard lacks the license to commit real violence, as of now, and must instead settle for economic and social violence.

The virtue of outrage leads to a state of authoritarian lawlessness. Legislatures and laws are replaced with an alliance between the executive authority of Barack Obama and the Red Guard activists. The activists demand, the media manufactures outrage and Obama uses executive orders to deliver. These totalitarian antics of a new Cultural Revolution are celebrated as populist, when they are really the Machiavellian show that the leftist elite puts on for the people.

The Red Guard, whether it’s the Occupiers or Barack Obama, abide by no rules except those of their own ideology

When outrage displaces the process of the law, what remains is either authoritarianism or anarchy. And despite the occasional Circle-A embroidered on a pricey jacket, the progressive Red Guard are not anarchists. What they are after is not less authority, but more of it. Not more freedom, but less of it. Their rhetoric about banks and corporations disguises what they intend for the rest of us.

They are not fighting against power. They are fighting for power.

The Red Guard, whether it’s the Occupiers or Barack Obama, abide by no rules except those of their own ideology. The United States Constitution and the rule of law mean nothing to them. The rules of their ideology are expressed formally in private, but publicly as outrage or empathy.

The left understands that Americans have a great deal of antipathy to words like “Socialism” and relies on emotion instead putting over its agenda over through individual stories that engage audiences emotionally. Beyond that its rhetoric relies on “modern” and “sensible” cultural signifiers aimed at winning over the same middle class audiences that it inwardly hates.

[…….]

Liberal societies are sustained by reason. The momentum of emotion has no room for argument or dissent. There is no possibility of negotiation or compromise. Everything exists in black and white. Reason is not even a factor. There is nothing to debate. Either you agree or you are the enemy.

Under the rule of the Red Guard, rights do not transcend the ruling ideology. Freedom of speech and thought are only provided to those who say and think the right things. The same is true for all else. There are no rights, as we know them anymore. Only a binding mandate of social justice. The right to speak your mind or donate to a political cause is valid only if it serves that mandate.

The Constitution is not an absolute. There are no absolutes except social justice. A right either serves the cause of social justice, in which case it can be dispensed with since it will be protected by social justice anyway. Or it obstructs it, in which case it must be destroyed. The same is true of all laws.

The Living Constitution is not a fixed legal structure, but a mandate for equality. Justice is not blind. She’s a community organizer coming out on the side of the social justice faction against the greedy and ignorant majority. The entire system, political, cultural and legal, is a means of enforcing the mandate. Its administrators are an elitist faction whose contempt for the people leads them to believe that tyranny is the only way to equality.

[…….]

The artificial and extraordinary force of the Red Guard is a perverse parody of mob rule. Our Red Guard, like many in China’s Red Guard, are the sons and daughters of the elites. Their violence is a ferocious assault of the top against the middle in the name of the low. They manufacture an elitist populism in order to call for despotism.

In New York City, the sons and daughters of the elite stopped shaving, set up camping tents opposite Wall Street and clamored for the radical change that their parents were already busy implementing. Their 99% sloganeering, a group that few of their parents belonged to, was a massive distraction from an alliance between political and commercial elites to ration health care and displace the working class that had generated an authentic populist movement, which like all authentic populist movements rejected the authoritarian rule of a chief executive, rather than defending and endorsing it.

Occupy Wall Street

Occupy Wall Street, like every modern manifestation of the Red Guard in the United States, and like the original Red Guard, was a cynical power move by a ruling elite. The fake populism of 1 percenter brats shrieking about income inequality while campaigning to destroy the middle class and what’s left of the working class was true despotism.

The new Cultural Revolution is aimed at shrinking the already narrow power and prosperity of the majority for the sake of the minority. Not the minority of racial or ethnic minorities, but the minority of elites that is determined to get its way by any means necessary.

When George Washington warned of the political system being distorted by a “small but artful and enterprising minority of the community”, he certainly didn’t mean it in racial terms. He was warning about a radical left eager to align with the French Revolution in the name of a greater revolution that would transcend nations, tear down borders, dispose of morals and impose despotism in the name of liberty.

The 50th anniversary of China’s Cultural Revolution will coincide with a national election in the United States that will serve in part as a final referendum on the Red Guard reign of the previous eight years. Like the Chinese, Americans will be forced to confront the ruin of their institutions, the polarization of their society and the victims of the Red Guard’s political inquisitions.

[……..]

Read the rest – The Progressive Red Guard

It’s hard to see racism when you’re a collectivist

by Mojambo ( 68 Comments › )
Filed under Bigotry, Racism at May 2nd, 2014 - 8:38 am

To the race hustlers, it is always about race, otherwise they are out of a  very lucrative business.

by Daniel Greenfield

A few years ago, Newsweek’s glossy cover asked “Is Your Baby Racist?” The baby looking back at supermarket shoppers, airline passengers waiting for their flight and patients in the dental office had blue eyes.

The labeling of racists as white has itself become a racial stereotype. And it’s not an accidental stereotype.

Behind the left’s support for affirmative action is the belief that white racism is the only kind of racism that exists. Black racism they insist is really called “reverse racism” and is a myth made up by white people.

It’s not that the left believes that affirmative action isn’t racist. It’s that it believes that there is no such thing as racism against white people. Like the Knockout Game or white students who qualify on merit but can’t get into college because of racial diversity quotas; it’s an invalid category. A myth.

And if it’s a myth, then there’s nothing wrong with a little racial violence or a few racial preferences.

[…..]

The left is delusional, but it isn’t completely insane. It doesn’t deny that black hate crimes can take place. It won’t even deny the occasional act of institutional discrimination. And that is where sanity parts ways with insanity because the left does not recognize racism except as a collective phenomenon.

The debate over affirmative action is about the collective and the individual.

“It cannot be entertained as a serious proposition that all individuals of the same race think alike,” Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the Schuette v. BAMN decision that permits a ban on racial affirmative action discrimination in Michigan. But that’s the exact premise that the left operates under. Or rather it doesn’t care whether members of a race think alike. It still chooses to address them as a group or not at all.

Racism, to the left, exists systemically. It exists institutionally. It exists collectively, but not individually.

All white people are racist. All black people are victims of racism. Any events to the contrary are exceptions to the rule. Racism can only exist one way between the majority and the minority.

Anything else is a mythical ‘reverse racism’.

Conservatives view people as individuals. Leftists view them as parts of a system. To a conservative, racism is something that happens between individuals. To a leftist, it’s the attribute of a system. Trying to convince a leftist that black racism exists or that affirmative action is racist is like trying to convince him that some of the cells in his body are plotting against him.

He doesn’t see individuals, he sees a system.

The debate over affirmative action is really the debate over whether we see people as individuals or cells, whether the white and black students who want to be seen as individuals will prevail, or whether the totalitarian left with its insistence on viewing them as differently colored marbles in a single system will continue to get its way.

Similarly in politics, conservatives reach out to people who agree with their policies, regardless of race, leading to less diverse, but more intellectually robust groups, while liberals form racial coalitions. Liberals accuse conservatives of racism because they assume that they are not a coalition of individuals, but a racial collective, just like them. The lack of individual conservative racism occasionally registers, but is not processed because only the system matters.

[……]

That is what the left, with its obsession with systems, cannot see and cannot cope with it. The Great Society failed miserably because we were a great society all along. We weren’t a great society because we were perfect, but because we were constantly striving to better ourselves as individuals.

And it is this trait which affirmative action and the left’s collectivist view undermines.

Systems don’t reject racism. Individuals do.

It is this fundamental truth that Newsweek’s obsession with baby racism and the indoctrination of white privilege are meant to combat. Their collective message is that individuals are products of the system, puppets of their biology, forever damned by an original sin of racism that so thoroughly pervades every part of their being and mental state that they can never escape it.

Not unless the system changes.

That was the left’s defeatist totalitarian response to class. The failure of its systems of economic management and the success of capitalism destroyed its credibility on class. The idea that the working class can never escape poverty under private enterprise has been buried as thoroughly as the statues of Marx and Lenin.

But instead of rethinking its paradigm, the left substituted race for class. The working class could succeed under private enterprise , but only as long as it was white.

And that’s still wrong.

Race, like class, is not a systemic problem. It’s not a problem of the system, but of the individual. There is no single collective solution, only the solutions that individuals find for themselves. We are not a nation divided between black and white, or between the even more absurd formulation of the colorless whites and the ‘people of color’.

We are individuals. We always were.

Affirmative action denies that race is an individual experience.  [……..]

It denies the individual. It denies his identity, his worth and his agency. It puts the system above the individual and takes away the rights of everyone, of all races, genders and assorted identities.

The left is obsessed with the ‘whiteness’ of the system. Its obsession is not only racist, but it replaces an open system in which people can change and are changing… with a closed system under which they cannot.  [……..]

The system doesn’t reward aspiration, it rewards only outrage. It is interested only in promoting the collective force that keeps its wheels turning, not the individual counter-clockwise rotation of dissent.

The white experience of black racism is illegitimate because it turns ‘against’ the system. And so it’s a conversation that has to be shut down and an experience that has to be delegitimized with accusations of white privilege. White privilege is an artifact of systemic thinking that does not recognize individuals. It’s an attack by the political immune system of an ideology that has absolutely no room for non-conforming experiences.

What will determine the outcome of the affirmative action debate and the larger debates over race and class is whether we approach them as individuals or as parts of a system. Americans resist being treated like interchangeable parts of a system, but the individual narratives that the left uses so effectively are cover for systemic approaches and systemic solutions.

The left has responded to institutionalized racism with institutionalized racism until it became the very racist institution that it was once fighting against. Institutions don’t fight racism, they create it. The most compelling argument against the left’s collective racial policies has always been the individual.

[……]

Read the rest –  It’s hard to see racism when you’re a liberal

The Black Hitler of Harlem

by Mojambo ( 111 Comments › )
Filed under Anti-semitism, Crime, History at March 12th, 2014 - 7:00 am

Racial demagoguery preceded Malcolm X, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Maxine Waters, and Barack Obama. Case in point – one Sufi Abdul Hamid.

The tactic was an old one, unleash violence and then claim to be the only ones who could bottle it up.

by Daniel Greenfield

The Black Hitler was a Chicago community organizer who moved to New York. Somewhere along the way he picked up a gold lined cape, a purple turban and a stepladder on which he used to stand while giving speeches outside the stores of Harlem’s dwindling Jewish community.

The cape and the turban were combined with Nazi style military shirt and jackboots, for the quixotic uniform of a man who is remembered today as a pioneering labor leader– but was known back then as the Black Hitler.A dagger thrust through his belt completed the ensemble.

In his stepladder speeches, Black Hitler declared that he was the only man who could stop the Jews, accusing them of spreading filth and disease, and called on his followers to tear out the tongues of any Jew they met.

[…..]

Speeches like these earned him the title, ‘Black Hitler’ and intimidated local businesses into hiring workers from his own private labor union.

The enterprising community organizer dubbed himself Sufi Abdul Hamid, and when he opened his mosque, he expanded his name to His Holiness Bishop Amiru Al-Mu-Minin Sufi A. Hamid. His press man claimed that he had been born in Egypt beneath the shadow of a pyramid. In reality he had been born Eugene Brown in Lowell, Massachusetts and in Chicago had briefly claimed to be Bishop Conshankin, a Buddhist cleric. Like the Nation of Islam, which was finding its feet at around the same time, his theology was a hodgepodge of Islam and anything else he picked up along the way.

It is unknown what connection Sufi Abdul Hamid had to the burgeoning Nation of Islam, which took the same mix of racism, anti-semitism, black nationalism and Islam and became a major movement, but in the year before he moved to Harlem, Nation of Islam founder Fard Muhammad disappeared, and his successor Elijah Muhammad moved to Chicago after conflicts with the state government and rival NOI leaders.  Hamid was probably never part of the Nation of Islam, but he had almost certainly seen it in action and his New York operation was guided by similar methods.

The year was 1932. In Germany, the actual Hitler was running for president. In New York City, Mayor Jimmy Walker was still reigning as the corrupt but entertaining figurehead of Tammany Hall’s Democratic party apparatus, but in a few months the Seabury Commission’s investigation into the city’s horrifyingly corrupt justice system would send the Tin Pan Alley singing mayor fleeing off to Europe along with his showgirl wife.

The Great Depression had hit New York’s prosperous commercial sector like a sledgehammer. The city that never slept had not gone quiet, but it had slowed down.  [……]

The time was ripe for a messiah or a violent explosion. And Sufi Abdul Hamid offered them both.

Hamid was not the only one working the streets of Harlem. The Young Communist League and the Young Liberators had been there first looking for cannon fodder for the revolution. The Japanese were dreaming of a black army that would serve as their fifth column in the conquest of the United States. Both were to be disappointed. The Black Communist, once commonplace among Harlem intellectuals, would become an endangered species beginning with the Hitler-Stalin pact and ending with the liberal takeover of civil rights. But for now black intellectuals would visit Japan and even endorse its brutal invasion of China.

Imperial Japan’s simultaneous cultivation of Muslims in order to subvert the British Empire, also led to ties between Japanese officials and the Nation of Islam’s Elijah Muhammad. The Moorish Science Temple, a more explicit fusion of Islam, Asiatic exoticism and Black Nationalism, another pseudo-Islamic cult operating out of Chicago. would eventually be investigated by the FBI for ties to Japan. These days, its members are more likely to be investigated for squatting empty mansions on the grounds that they are descendants of the ancient Moabites of Africa and represent a sovereign nation.

[……]

Sufi Abdul Hamid was not limited to Japanese money. He had something better. For all his theatrics,  under the slick mustache, the gold lined cape and gleaming dagger, beat the heart of a community organizer.

What Hamid came up with was a combination labor union, employment agency, protection racket, Islamic cult and protest movement. With black unemployment in Harlem running as high as 50 percent, he offered to find jobs for black men who paid him a dollar. And to make sure they got hired, his men picketed businesses demanding that they be put on the payroll. Businesses which didn’t have a proper proportion of black employees were accused of racism and exploitation. Businesses which did were harassed anyway until they fired their black employees and hired Hamid’s men instead.

Hamid’s 125th street stepladder harangues intimidated Jewish store owners and customers, and many black customers as well. Whenever he succeeded, he picked up more recruits who might not believe in his religious message, but liked the idea of getting a job. Businesses that paid up didn’t have to worry that the cape wearing hatemonger would show up in front of their store screaming violent threats.

Hamid’s following grew. As did his bank account.

By 1938, Hamid had his own private plane and a white secretary. His union had gone through many names, from the Negro Industrial and Clerical Alliance to the Afro-American Federation of Labor. Adam Clayton Powell briefly joined forces with Sufi Abdul Hamid in labor protests and store boycotts, but Hamid was too power hungry to work with anyone for long.

Black Hitler’s rhetoric moved beyond anti-white and anti-Jewish racism to targeting light skinned blacks. Violent clashes with rival black unions led to Hamid’s arrest for stabbing Hammie Snipes, a former follower of Marcus Garvey turned Communist labor union organizer.  [……] But before that the Black Hitler would play a role in Harlem’s first race riot.

The Harlem riot of 1935 had many of the characteristics of what would become the typical race riot. False information about police brutality circulated by radicals looking to stir up a mob. Looting misrepresented as a civil rights protest. And a swelling undercurrent of bigotry portrayed as outrage. As Congresswoman Maxine Waters would call the LA riots, “a revolution” and a “a spontaneous reaction to a lot of injustice”; Nannie H. Burroughs compared the Harlem riot to the Boston Tea Party and claimed that it was the duty of the oppressed to revolt.

The tactic was an old one, unleash violence and then claim to be the only ones who could bottle it up. Hamid had begun by intimidating storeowners with the threat of racial violence, but the race riot of 1935 would intimidate the entire neighborhood and eventually the entire city. [……]

A race riot before 1935 had been an unusual phenomenon in Harlem. After 1935, it became far less so. Next year when Joe Louis lost his first fight against Max Schmeling, Harlem rioters attacked white men in the street and dropped bricks from buildings on passing cars.

The 1935 riot would destroy as many black businesses as white ones. But the Communists who had played a major role in organizing the riot, did not want to see black men reach the middle class, and  Sufi Abdul Hamid wanted to increase the scope of his protection racket. The courts had taken a dim view of his labor organizing tactics, but a race riot allowed stores to be hit up in a whole new way.

The riots and arsons went on for three days. Two hundred stores were destroyed and many more were looted. Fires were set to cries of “Let it burn”. Entire businesses were wiped out. Some never recovered. The damage to Harlem’s business district was estimated at one million dollars. Bodies went to hospitals and morgues.

In what would also become a commonplace feature of race riots, afterward, in a bid to gain mainstream political influence, the Black Hitler debuted a more moderate image.

In an interview with The Nation magazine, he disavowed bigotry and claimed to be a champion of the underprivileged. Liberal newspapers and magazines were all too eager to embrace the myth that the riot was caused by oppression rather than radical manipulation.  [……] While some Jewish newspapers called the attacks a ‘Pogrom’, the socialist  Forward insisted on whitewashing the attacks as a protest against the authorities.

The judicial crackdown on Hamid’s labor extortion racket refocused his attention on his mosque, the Universal Holy Temple of Tranquility, where he dubbed himself a Bishop. His nickname migrated from the Black Hitler to the Black Mufti. He married Queenie St. Clair, who ran Harlem’s numbers racket, but their marriage ended badly when Queenie shot him, but failed to kill him. Hamid married again and bought a private plane, an obscene luxury at a time when many of those he claimed to help didn’t have enough to eat. But Hamid frugally kept it low on gas. The plane ran out of fuel over Long Island and crashed. Hamid died, survived by his white secretary who suffered only a broken elbow.

His new wife, a candle shop owner and fortune teller named Dorothy Hamid, who styled herself Madame Fu Futtam, and improbably claimed to be Asian, attempted to keep Hamid’s mosque going with visits that he reportedly made to her nightly from beyond the grave. Her prediction that Hamid would return from the grave in sixty days did not come true.

Not long after the mosque became a dance hall featuring a one legged dancer. Today the site at 103 Morningside Avenue is the home of St. Luke’s Baptist Church.

But though Sufi Abdul Hamid is mostly forgotten today, his legacy lives on.

60 years later, back on 125th street where the Black Hitler had delivered his stepladder harangues, the smashed windows and burning stores would make a comeback.

In the winter of 1995,Al Sharpton and his National Action Network went to Harlem to lead a protest against another Jewish store, Freddie’s Fashion Mart. Sharpton denounced Freddie’s owner as a “White Interloper” in Harlem, protesters mimed tossing matches into the store, and one of them threatened to “Burn the Jew Store Down”.

Finally one of the protesters pulled out a gun, ordered the black customers to leave and set the store on fire. Seven of the store’s mostly Hispanic employees died in the blaze.

[……] When Obama visited Sharpton to celebrate the 20th anniversary of his National Action Network, he was commemorating not just the 20th anniversary of the Crown Heights Pogrom, but an organization which had ominous similarities to Hamid’s own.

The Freddie’s protests had been led by Morris Powell who ran the National Action Network’s Buy Black Committee, which echoed Hamid’s Don’t Buy campaign. Powell’s tactic of standing outside and screaming hatefilled slurs at passerby would have been entirely familiar to Hamid. “Keep going right on past Freddy’s, he’s one of the greedy Jew bastards killing our people. Don’t give the Jew a dime.”Powell’s record goes back to 1984 when he broke the head of a Korean woman during one of his pickets.  [……]

Sharpton too had plenty in common with the Black Hitler. Like Hamid, Sharpton started out with a flamboyant personality, playing on bigotry while terrorizing storeowners and entire communities, fueling the perception that he was the man who could unleash or tamp down racial violence, and then toned down his rhetoric in exchange for political influence. Hamid never lived long enough to see the president come down to pay homage to him, but Al Sharpton did.

The Black Hitler demonstrated that racial violence is profitable. Today Hamid is remembered as a pioneering union organizer. And Sharpton has been to the White House more often than any black leader. Sharpton’s gold medallion and Hamid’s turban and cape were showpieces. Their bigoted rhetoric and mob pickets a way of playing on violent populism. Self-interested protests whose goal is to boost the profile of a leader and the bank accounts of his organization have become the bread and butter of more mainstream leaders like Jesse Jackson. Their occasional outbursts of bigotry are forgiven for the power, protection and influence that they bring to the table.

Even after the fire, Powell returned to Freddie’s screaming, “Freddie Ain’t Dead Yet”. The Black Hitler ain’t dead yet either. Not until his tactics are disavowed for good.

Read the rest – The Black Hitler of Harlem