So three racists walk into a bar. Unfortunately, there’s no punchline. What Michael Richards said about blacks at a Los Angeles comedy club was racist. His career should be over.
But so should the careers of two other racists, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Unfortunately, they’re thriving.
While Richards made a gazillion phony apologies for uttering what he really thinks at age 57 (and blamed it on the War in Iraq – huh?), Jackson and Sharpton have never apologized even once for constantly telling us what they really think, over decades.
It’s a little strange – no, make that, absurd – to see Richards groveling and apologizing to Jackson and Sharpton, especially when the latter two have made race-baiting a career. Even more ludicrous is the media’s blindness to the thick irony of it all.
Take Jackson. Perhaps everyone forgot his comments that Jews are “Hymies” and New York is “Hymietown,” for which he never forthrightly apologized to America’s – or even New York’s – Jews. But check out these other Jackson utterances you probably don’t even know about because they didn’t get the “Kramer” treatment:
● He said he spit into the food of white customers when he worked as a waiter because “[It] gave me a psychological gratification.”
● “You can’t trust the Jews. I never have trusted those people.”
● He claimed President Nixon’s policies were harsh on the poor because, of Nixon’s top aides, “four out of five of them are German Jews.” Someone forgot to tell him that Erlichman and Haldeman were not “Hymies.”
● In working up a black church about the Jews, he claimed Jews conspired to keep the black man down (shown on PBS’s “McNeil-Lehrer Report”).
● Jews are “not willing to share power.”
● He told an Ohio county commissioner, “You Jews are much too sensitive.”
● He said the Democratic Party was “perverted by a reaction . . . to the Jewish element within the party,” and that the relationship between Jews and Democrats was “a kind of glorified form of bribery. Financial bankrolling and moral bankruptcy.”
● He claimed labor unions were insensitive to blacks because “Jews dominate the leadership at the top.”
● “I’m sick and tired of hearing about the Holocaust.”
● “I have seen very few Jewish reporters who are objective about Arab affairs.” (Unfortunately, Jackson is right about this. Most Jewish reporters bend over backward to portray the Arabist position positively and the Israeli position negatively.)
● When discussing his media critics, he said they were few in number (unfortunately, true) and “all Jewish” (not true).
Then there’s Sharpton:
● At a 1991 funeral of a black child accidentally killed by an out-of-control car driven by a Jew, Sharpton stated during his eulogy, “Talk about how Oppenheimer in South Africa sends diamonds straight to Tel Aviv and deals with the diamond merchants right here in Crown Heights.”
Oppenheimer is the Jewish family that is a big player in the diamond industry, and Crown Heights is a chassidic Jewish community, some of whose residents are in the diamond industry. It was clear he was denouncing the Jews. Sharpton spoke of how these “diamond merchants” had “the blood of innocent babies” on their hands and seemed to relish the idea of a violent confrontation in Crown Heights: “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.”
His shouting of “No Justice, No Peace” with the funeral crowd was akin to holding a lit match over a container of kerosene in Crown Heights, where a mob shouting “Kill the Jews!” already had surrounded Jewish rabbinical student Yankel Rosenbaum and stabbed him to death.
● In 1995, the black landlord of Freddy’s Fashion Mart in Harlem raised the rent on the store’s white (and Jewish) owner, who was forced to raise the rent on his black subtenant. Sharpton organized a protest and announced, “We will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business.”
Sharpton did nothing to cool the passions of the protesters, many of whom took to shouting, “Burn down the Jew store!” and “We’re going to see that this cracker suffers.”