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"The Lid": When Al Sharpton Incited a Massacre at Freddy's Fashion Mart
Angelina Marrero . . . Cynthia Martinez . . . Luz Ramos . . . Mayra Rentas . . . Olga Garcia . . . Garnette Ramautar . . . Kareem Brunner their names will forever be remembered as the seven victims of the massacre at Freddy's Fashion Mart. Their deaths can be traced to the racial incitement of one man.. the faux Reverend Al Sharpton.
It all started as a rent dispute in the summer of 1995:
The United House of Prayer, a large African-American church was also a major landlord in Harlem. They raised the rent Freddy's Fashion Mart, a Jewish-owned clothing store which had operated from the same Harlem location for over 40 years. In turn Freddy's had to raise the rent on its sub-tenant, a black-owned record store. A landlord-tenant dispute ensued. As he has done so often in his life, Al Sharpton turned this non-racial economic dispute into a racial conflict.
The Sharpton-led protests began in August and came to a head on the morning of Friday, December 8th when Roland James Smith, Jr., who had been part of the Sharpton's protests, walked into Freddy's Fashion Mart, pulled out a gun, ordered all the black customers to leave, spilled paint thinner on several bins of clothing and set them on fire -- a fire that resulted in killing 7 people plus Smith. The only African American left in the story was Freddy's security guard Kareem Brunner, 22-years-old, who was ordered to stay by the mass murderer Smith.
At the time the faux-preacher claimed he wasn't involved in the protests, he was only there to mediate. He also claimed there was no Antisemitism involved in the protests, but he has been proven to be a liar.
Soon after the massacre, the Jewish Action Alliance, a New York-based civil-rights group, released audiotapes of several of Sharpton's weekly radio show in which Morris Powell, leader of the 125th Street Vendor's Association, can be heard using racial and anti-Semitic language to encourage Harlem residents to boycott Freddy's. Learning from his Crown Heights experience Sharpton let others push the anti-Semitic hatred but it was all done on his show.
"We are going to see that this cracker suffers," Powell is heard telling a crowd in one broadcast on Aug. 19.
"Reverend Sharpton is on it. We have made contact with these crackers. We don't expect a lot out of them. They haven't seen how we feel about anything yet. We are going to show them."
He also said
They think they gonna drive this man out of business, they gotta be out of their minds. We are not gonna stand idly by and let a Jewish person come in Black Harlem and methodically drive black people out of business up and down 125th Street. If we stand for that, we'll stand for anything. Which we've been doing.
At a rally was recorded on Sept. 9, Mr. Sharpton is heard telling a crowd:
"I want to make it clear to the radio audience and to you here that we will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business on 125th Street.
Ironically Sharpton was the interloper, he was living in Hollis Queens at around the time Freddy's opened in Harlem and living in New Jersey when Freddy's was burned down. When other white-owned businesses fled the neighborhood as the population became more African-American, Fred Harari the owner of Freddy's continued to serve the neighborhood.
On an October 21st broadcast Norman "Granddad" Reide said:
I am saying to the Jewish community and specifically to Abraham Foxman, that you come out and utter a word, accusatory remark against Reverend Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Donna Wilson, Reverend Shields, or Gary Byrd, we will boycott you and nobody loves money any more than the Jewish people. Thank you.
In court papers filed the day before the fire, Harari and two employees described weeks of protests outside the clothing store in which demonstrators threatened employees, hurled obscenities at "bloodsucking Jews" and talked of burning down the store.
Aftermath
Sharpton, the professional bigot criticized NYPD investigators for quickly linking the fire to the protesters. But the police evidence and the tapes from the Jewish Alliance proved him to be a liar. After first telling the press "What's wrong with calling someone a white interloper?" he apologized for using that term. He never apologized for the Jew-hatred broadcast on his radio shows and spoken at the rallies he helped to organize. He continues to deny that the rallies had anything to do with the firebombing
Of course Sharpton never apologized for Tawana Brawley or slandering DA Pagones by with the unfounded charge that Pagones was the rapist,
“I did what I believed….They are asking me to grovel. They want black children to say they forced a black man coming out of the hard-core ghetto to his knees….Once you begin bending, it’s ‘did you bend today?’ or ‘I missed the apology, say it again.’ Once you start compromising, you lose respect for yourself.”
..nor did he apologize for saying the "Central Park Jogger" was raped by her boyfriend and leading demonstrations calling the woman who was raped and beaten to within a hair of death a whore...
...and he certainly never apologized for the anti-Semitic Pogrom he led at Crown Heights.
Al Sharpton is a Baptist Minister who regularly breaks the ninth commandment, Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor, he has incited riots which have lead to the deaths of innocents. A real preacher would not have incited violence but called for peace. A real preacher would have waited for the truth before he incited and a real preacher would have apologized when he wrongly accused people...none of which Al Sharpton has done.
Sharpton's real business isn't preaching, his real business is being a professional agitator. In the end just like a TV detergent, Al Sharpton is selling a product...Al Sharpton. And he has been rewarded for his efforts with an undeserved halo of respectability by the press, by MSNBC, and by the President of the United States.
As you read, watch or hear the news reports about Sharpton's protests with the Trayvon Martin family, understand this context. Sharpton couldn't give a rat's ass about Travyon, his grieving family or improving the lives of African Americans in this country. He is only concerned with selling his product.
"The Lid": The REAL Al Sharpton: Incitement of the 1991 Crown Heights Pogrom
Al Sharpton is a user. He exploits tragedy to get headlines for himself. It's what he is doing in the Trayvon Martin Case--it's what he has done his entire career. Though this story has been told before, I thought it appropriate to reexamine some the exploitative handiwork of this Reverend who has long forgotten the golden rule, a purveyor of hatred who is given a place of honor as a civil rights leader by the mainstream media and by the President of the United States.
Twenty-one years ago a tragic car accident in Crown Heights Brooklyn escalated into a pogrom against the Jewish people, thanks in part to this faux-preacher.
The media gives this pogrom a politically correct description, violence between the area's Blacks and Jews. They ignore the fact that the violence was not two-sided. The Crown Heights riot was an attack on the Jews by the neighborhood's Caribbean community.
Black Antisemitism in the Summer of 1991
Jews were a key part of the civil rights movement in the 1960s---when the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. made his famous march to Selma Alabama, he walked hand in hand with many Jews including Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Along with the Jews was a contingent of Torahs to emphasize that the quest for Civil Rights was a holy mission for the Jewish people.
In spite of the strong Jewish participation in the civil rights movement the transformation from the peaceful marches to Black power movement introduced considerable friction into African American-Jewish relations, especially within the “Black Muslim” movement.
During the 1970s and 1980s African-Americans stopped looking at Jews as their allies but as their oppressors. The Jews were seen as having the political power that the African-Americans desired. Black leaders such as Louis Farrakhan, and Jesse Jackson went public with anti-Semitic comments.
Adding to the hatred were the leaders of the South African anti-Apartheid movement who traveled throughout the United States as conquering heroes, and spreading Jew-hatred. For example, in 1984 Desmond Tutu publicly complained about American Jews having “an arrogance—the arrogance of power because Jews are a powerful lobby in this land and all kinds of people woo their support.
Understandably Jewish/Black relations were already rocky as NY City entered the summer of 1991.
On July 20, 1991, Leonard Jeffries of City College who had a history of anti-Semitic slurs presented a two-hour long speech claiming “rich Jews" financed the slave trade, Jews control the film industry (together with Italian mafia), and use that control to paint a brutal stereotype of blacks. Jeffries also attacked Diane Ravitch, (Assistant Secretary of Education) calling her a "sophisticated Texas Jew," "a debonair racist" and "Miss Daisy.”
Jeffries’ speech received enormous negative press during the first weeks of August especially from the leaders of the Jewish community who wanted Jeffries fired for the bigotry.
With each new criticism of the professor, leaders in the African-American community rushed to Jeffries' defense. NYC’s two black newspapers as well as black radio station WLIB; joined activists such Al Sharpton, Colin Moore, C. Vernon Mason, Sonny Carson, and Lenora Fulani to showcase their approval of Jeffries’s “scholarship” and to denounce the people who criticized Jeffries Antisemitism as race baiting.
Serial race-baiter Al Sharpton is credited with saying, “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house" as a response the Crown Heights riot. That is a fallacy; he made that threatening comment to the Jewish community about the growing Jeffries controversy on August 18th the day before the riots began. Clearly something bad was coming.
Jeffries was fired because of his bigoted speech and pressure from the Jewish community (he was later reinstated and won a court case surrounding his firing) leading to further resentment of the Jews from a Black community already being barraged with anti-Jewish incitement from the African-American media.
Crown Heights Ignites
On Monday 8/19/91 a station wagon driven by Yosef Lifsh, hit another car and bounced onto the sidewalk at 8:21 p.m. The station wagon was part of a 3-car motorcade carrying the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Schneerson. The Rebbe was in a different car.
The station wagon struck two black children, 7-year-old cousins Gavin and Angela Cato who were on the sidewalk. Lifsh immediately got out of his car and tried to help the children gathering crowd started to attack him.
Within minutes, an ambulance from the Hasidic-run ambulance service, and two from the city's Emergency Medical Service arrived. Also the gathering crowd became unruly. The police who showed up radioed for backup reporting the station wagon’s driver and passengers were being assaulted. Police officer Nona Capace ordered the Hasidic ambulance to remove the battered Yosef Lifsh, and his passenger from the scene.
The injured children went by separate city ambulances to Kings County Hospital. Gavin Cato was pronounced dead; his cousin survived.
A rumor began to spread that the Hasidic ambulance crew had ignored the dying black child in favor of treating the Jewish men. Ignoring the commandment about bearing false witness, Sharpton used this falsehood to incite the crowd. Other rumors sprang up Lifsh was intoxicated (breath alcohol test administered by the police proved his sobriety). More falsehoods circulated; Lifsh did not have a valid driver's license; he went through a red light; the police prevented people including Gavin Cato's father, from assisting in the rescue.
Charles Price, an area resident who had come to the scene of the accident, incited the masses with claims that, "The Jews get everything they want. They're killing our children." Price later pled guilty for inciting the crowd to murder Yankel Rosenbaum.
Ignited by the falsehoods, resentment exploded into violence. Groups of young black men threw rocks, bottles and debris at police, residents and homes.
According to the New York Times, more than 250 neighborhood residents went on a rampage that first night, mostly black teenagers, many of whom were shouting "Jews! Jews! Jews!"
Three hours after the tragic crash, 29-year-old Australian Jewish scholar Yankel Rosenbaum was attacked by a gang of Black teens. He was stabbed four times. Cops quickly arrested Lemrick Nelson, who was identified by Rosenbaum as his attacker. Rosenbaum's wounds were not fatal he was expected to recover; Mayor Dinkins visited Rosenbaum at the hospital. Yankel died at 2:30am Tuesday because the hospital staff missed one of his knife wounds.
The next evening, according to the sworn testimony of Efraim Lipkind, a former Hasidic resident of Crown Heights, Sharpton started agitating the crowd.
“Then we had a famous man, Al Sharpton, who came down, and he said Tuesday night, kill the Jews, two times. I heard him, and he started to lead a charge across the street to Utica.”
With each passing hour the violence worsened, Jewish leaders began to desperately complain about the lack of protection to the authorities. They said, the rioters were being allowed to rampage unchecked, too little force was being brought to bear, and too few arrests were being made. Area Jews felt the police were under orders by the City’s first black mayor to hold back, that the police were not allowed to fight against the Black rioters, who continued to grow bolder in their anti-Semitic attack as they sensed the appeasement.
The fact is New York City Mayor David Dinkins responded to the riot immediately by deploying 2,000 police officers and making a personal visit to the troubled neighborhood under a hail of rocks and epithets hurled at him by fellow blacks.
Dinkins has spoken of his own mishandling of the riots. Admitting he “screwed up Crown Heights”
“I regret not saying to the police brass sooner whatever you guys are doing is not working” it was then they altered their behavior and they were able to contained the ravaging young blacks who were attacking Jews … I will forever be accused of holding back the police and permitted blacks to attack Jews, however that did not happen it is just inaccurate”
In all, the street violence against the Crown Heights Jews lasted three days/four nights starting with the evening of the accident. On Thursday evening, cops finally restored order, although sporadic violence against Jews continued for weeks after the riot was contained.
Yankel Rosenbaum wasn't the only person murdered by the rioters. On September 5th, Italian-American, Anthony Graziosi, was dragged out of his car, brutally beaten and stabbed to death because his full beard and dark clothing caused him to be mistaken for a Hasidic Jew.
During the funeral of Gavin Cato on August 26th, Al Sharpton gave an anti-Semitic eulogy, which fueled the fires of hatred.
“The world will tell us he was killed by accident. Yes, it was a social accident. ... It's an accident to allow an apartheid ambulance service in the middle of Crown Heights. ... Talk about how Oppenheimer in South Africa sends diamonds straight to Tel Aviv and deals with the diamond merchants right here in Crown Heights. The issue is not anti-Semitism; the issue is apartheid. ... All we want to say is what Jesus said: If you offend one of these little ones, you got to pay for it. No compromise, no meetings, no kaffe klatsch, no skinnin' and grinnin'. Pay for your deeds."
Regarding the Mayor's call for peace Sharpton pontificated:
"They don't want peace, they want quiet."
Sharpton and the lawyer representing the Cato family counseled them not to cooperate with authorities in the investigation and demanded a special prosecutor be named.
Sharpton was asked about the violence, he justified it,
“We must not reprimand our children for outrage, when it is the outrage that was put in them by an oppressive system," he said.
The first Sabbath after the Funeral Sharpton tried unsuccessfully to kick up tensions again by marching 400 protesters in front of the Lubavitch of Crown Heights shouting “No Justice, No Peace."
Sharpton called for the arrest of Lifsh, the driver of the station wagon. Even though more than twenty similarly accidental vehicular deaths had occurred in Brooklyn since 1989 without a single arrest several involving local Hasidim run down by blacks. The agitator’s pressure led Charles Hynes, the Brooklyn district attorney, into convening a grand jury.
When the investigation of the accident did not produce a criminal indictment against Yosef Lifsh, Al Sharpton encouraged the Cato family to seek big-bucks damages in a civil suit against Lifsh (who had since fled to Israel for his own safety). Sharpton announced that he would personally serve papers on Yosef Lifsh in Israel. He bought tickets and hopped an El-Al flight on the weekend of Yom Kippur. At Ben Gurion Airport, a woman spotted Sharpton hailing a cab and yelled to him, "Go to hell! “I am in hell already," shot back. "I am in Israel."
The Aftermath
Sharpton abandoned the Caribbean people of Crown Heights as soon as the anti-Semitic violence had died down. His entire participation in the violence may have been a calculated effort to usurp Jesse Jackson as the leading spokesman for African-Americans. Jackson may have had his “Hymie-town” but Sharpton’s incitement against those Jews who he perceived as having the political power that African Americans deserved, went much further than simply words like Jackson.
Sadly had Sharpton not exploited the death of Gavin Cato for his own “resume”, what was by all accounts, a disorganized group of ruffians on the first night of the riot, might well have dissipated the morning after the accident.
The media portrayed the Crown Heights riot as two-sided promoting the myth that both blacks and Jews were equal in their violence. The violence was a one-sided rampage waged by some of the neighborhood’s 180,000 strong black majority against a Jewish minority of 20,000.
Maybe the media continues to sugarcoat the riot because it was unprecedented in American history. For liberals it’s impossible to perceive blacks as purveyors of bigotry they are forever in the role of victims of hate.
Angelina Marrero . . . Cynthia Martinez . . . Luz Ramos . . . Mayra Rentas . . . Olga Garcia . . . Garnette Ramautar . . . Kareem Brunner their names will forever be remembered as the seven victims of the massacre at Freddy's Fashion Mart. Their deaths can be traced to the racial incitement of one man.. the faux Reverend Al Sharpton.
It all started as a rent dispute in the summer of 1995:
The United House of Prayer, a large African-American church was also a major landlord in Harlem. They raised the rent Freddy's Fashion Mart, a Jewish-owned clothing store which had operated from the same Harlem location for over 40 years. In turn Freddy's had to raise the rent on its sub-tenant, a black-owned record store. A landlord-tenant dispute ensued. As he has done so often in his life, Al Sharpton turned this non-racial economic dispute into a racial conflict.
The Sharpton-led protests began in August and came to a head on the morning of Friday, December 8th when Roland James Smith, Jr., who had been part of the Sharpton's protests, walked into Freddy's Fashion Mart, pulled out a gun, ordered all the black customers to leave, spilled paint thinner on several bins of clothing and set them on fire -- a fire that resulted in killing 7 people plus Smith. The only African American left in the story was Freddy's security guard Kareem Brunner, 22-years-old, who was ordered to stay by the mass murderer Smith.
At the time the faux-preacher claimed he wasn't involved in the protests, he was only there to mediate. He also claimed there was no Antisemitism involved in the protests, but he has been proven to be a liar.
Soon after the massacre, the Jewish Action Alliance, a New York-based civil-rights group, released audiotapes of several of Sharpton's weekly radio show in which Morris Powell, leader of the 125th Street Vendor's Association, can be heard using racial and anti-Semitic language to encourage Harlem residents to boycott Freddy's. Learning from his Crown Heights experience Sharpton let others push the anti-Semitic hatred but it was all done on his show.
"We are going to see that this cracker suffers," Powell is heard telling a crowd in one broadcast on Aug. 19.
"Reverend Sharpton is on it. We have made contact with these crackers. We don't expect a lot out of them. They haven't seen how we feel about anything yet. We are going to show them."
He also said
They think they gonna drive this man out of business, they gotta be out of their minds. We are not gonna stand idly by and let a Jewish person come in Black Harlem and methodically drive black people out of business up and down 125th Street. If we stand for that, we'll stand for anything. Which we've been doing.
At a rally was recorded on Sept. 9, Mr. Sharpton is heard telling a crowd:
"I want to make it clear to the radio audience and to you here that we will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business on 125th Street.
Ironically Sharpton was the interloper, he was living in Hollis Queens at around the time Freddy's opened in Harlem and living in New Jersey when Freddy's was burned down. When other white-owned businesses fled the neighborhood as the population became more African-American, Fred Harari the owner of Freddy's continued to serve the neighborhood.
On an October 21st broadcast Norman "Granddad" Reide said:
I am saying to the Jewish community and specifically to Abraham Foxman, that you come out and utter a word, accusatory remark against Reverend Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Donna Wilson, Reverend Shields, or Gary Byrd, we will boycott you and nobody loves money any more than the Jewish people. Thank you.
In court papers filed the day before the fire, Harari and two employees described weeks of protests outside the clothing store in which demonstrators threatened employees, hurled obscenities at "bloodsucking Jews" and talked of burning down the store.
Aftermath
Sharpton, the professional bigot criticized NYPD investigators for quickly linking the fire to the protesters. But the police evidence and the tapes from the Jewish Alliance proved him to be a liar. After first telling the press "What's wrong with calling someone a white interloper?" he apologized for using that term. He never apologized for the Jew-hatred broadcast on his radio shows and spoken at the rallies he helped to organize. He continues to deny that the rallies had anything to do with the firebombing
Of course Sharpton never apologized for Tawana Brawley or slandering DA Pagones by with the unfounded charge that Pagones was the rapist,
“I did what I believed….They are asking me to grovel. They want black children to say they forced a black man coming out of the hard-core ghetto to his knees….Once you begin bending, it’s ‘did you bend today?’ or ‘I missed the apology, say it again.’ Once you start compromising, you lose respect for yourself.”
..nor did he apologize for saying the "Central Park Jogger" was raped by her boyfriend and leading demonstrations calling the woman who was raped and beaten to within a hair of death a whore...
...and he certainly never apologized for the anti-Semitic Pogrom he led at Crown Heights.
Al Sharpton is a Baptist Minister who regularly breaks the ninth commandment, Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor, he has incited riots which have lead to the deaths of innocents. A real preacher would not have incited violence but called for peace. A real preacher would have waited for the truth before he incited and a real preacher would have apologized when he wrongly accused people...none of which Al Sharpton has done.
Sharpton's real business isn't preaching, his real business is being a professional agitator. In the end just like a TV detergent, Al Sharpton is selling a product...Al Sharpton. And he has been rewarded for his efforts with an undeserved halo of respectability by the press, by MSNBC, and by the President of the United States.
As you read, watch or hear the news reports about Sharpton's protests with the Trayvon Martin family, understand this context. Sharpton couldn't give a rat's ass about Travyon, his grieving family or improving the lives of African Americans in this country. He is only concerned with selling his product.
"The Lid": The REAL Al Sharpton: Incitement of the 1991 Crown Heights Pogrom
Al Sharpton is a user. He exploits tragedy to get headlines for himself. It's what he is doing in the Trayvon Martin Case--it's what he has done his entire career. Though this story has been told before, I thought it appropriate to reexamine some the exploitative handiwork of this Reverend who has long forgotten the golden rule, a purveyor of hatred who is given a place of honor as a civil rights leader by the mainstream media and by the President of the United States.
Twenty-one years ago a tragic car accident in Crown Heights Brooklyn escalated into a pogrom against the Jewish people, thanks in part to this faux-preacher.
The media gives this pogrom a politically correct description, violence between the area's Blacks and Jews. They ignore the fact that the violence was not two-sided. The Crown Heights riot was an attack on the Jews by the neighborhood's Caribbean community.
Black Antisemitism in the Summer of 1991
Jews were a key part of the civil rights movement in the 1960s---when the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. made his famous march to Selma Alabama, he walked hand in hand with many Jews including Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Along with the Jews was a contingent of Torahs to emphasize that the quest for Civil Rights was a holy mission for the Jewish people.
In spite of the strong Jewish participation in the civil rights movement the transformation from the peaceful marches to Black power movement introduced considerable friction into African American-Jewish relations, especially within the “Black Muslim” movement.
During the 1970s and 1980s African-Americans stopped looking at Jews as their allies but as their oppressors. The Jews were seen as having the political power that the African-Americans desired. Black leaders such as Louis Farrakhan, and Jesse Jackson went public with anti-Semitic comments.
Adding to the hatred were the leaders of the South African anti-Apartheid movement who traveled throughout the United States as conquering heroes, and spreading Jew-hatred. For example, in 1984 Desmond Tutu publicly complained about American Jews having “an arrogance—the arrogance of power because Jews are a powerful lobby in this land and all kinds of people woo their support.
Understandably Jewish/Black relations were already rocky as NY City entered the summer of 1991.
On July 20, 1991, Leonard Jeffries of City College who had a history of anti-Semitic slurs presented a two-hour long speech claiming “rich Jews" financed the slave trade, Jews control the film industry (together with Italian mafia), and use that control to paint a brutal stereotype of blacks. Jeffries also attacked Diane Ravitch, (Assistant Secretary of Education) calling her a "sophisticated Texas Jew," "a debonair racist" and "Miss Daisy.”
Jeffries’ speech received enormous negative press during the first weeks of August especially from the leaders of the Jewish community who wanted Jeffries fired for the bigotry.
With each new criticism of the professor, leaders in the African-American community rushed to Jeffries' defense. NYC’s two black newspapers as well as black radio station WLIB; joined activists such Al Sharpton, Colin Moore, C. Vernon Mason, Sonny Carson, and Lenora Fulani to showcase their approval of Jeffries’s “scholarship” and to denounce the people who criticized Jeffries Antisemitism as race baiting.
Serial race-baiter Al Sharpton is credited with saying, “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house" as a response the Crown Heights riot. That is a fallacy; he made that threatening comment to the Jewish community about the growing Jeffries controversy on August 18th the day before the riots began. Clearly something bad was coming.
Jeffries was fired because of his bigoted speech and pressure from the Jewish community (he was later reinstated and won a court case surrounding his firing) leading to further resentment of the Jews from a Black community already being barraged with anti-Jewish incitement from the African-American media.
Crown Heights Ignites
On Monday 8/19/91 a station wagon driven by Yosef Lifsh, hit another car and bounced onto the sidewalk at 8:21 p.m. The station wagon was part of a 3-car motorcade carrying the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Schneerson. The Rebbe was in a different car.
The station wagon struck two black children, 7-year-old cousins Gavin and Angela Cato who were on the sidewalk. Lifsh immediately got out of his car and tried to help the children gathering crowd started to attack him.
Within minutes, an ambulance from the Hasidic-run ambulance service, and two from the city's Emergency Medical Service arrived. Also the gathering crowd became unruly. The police who showed up radioed for backup reporting the station wagon’s driver and passengers were being assaulted. Police officer Nona Capace ordered the Hasidic ambulance to remove the battered Yosef Lifsh, and his passenger from the scene.
The injured children went by separate city ambulances to Kings County Hospital. Gavin Cato was pronounced dead; his cousin survived.
A rumor began to spread that the Hasidic ambulance crew had ignored the dying black child in favor of treating the Jewish men. Ignoring the commandment about bearing false witness, Sharpton used this falsehood to incite the crowd. Other rumors sprang up Lifsh was intoxicated (breath alcohol test administered by the police proved his sobriety). More falsehoods circulated; Lifsh did not have a valid driver's license; he went through a red light; the police prevented people including Gavin Cato's father, from assisting in the rescue.
Charles Price, an area resident who had come to the scene of the accident, incited the masses with claims that, "The Jews get everything they want. They're killing our children." Price later pled guilty for inciting the crowd to murder Yankel Rosenbaum.
Ignited by the falsehoods, resentment exploded into violence. Groups of young black men threw rocks, bottles and debris at police, residents and homes.
According to the New York Times, more than 250 neighborhood residents went on a rampage that first night, mostly black teenagers, many of whom were shouting "Jews! Jews! Jews!"
Three hours after the tragic crash, 29-year-old Australian Jewish scholar Yankel Rosenbaum was attacked by a gang of Black teens. He was stabbed four times. Cops quickly arrested Lemrick Nelson, who was identified by Rosenbaum as his attacker. Rosenbaum's wounds were not fatal he was expected to recover; Mayor Dinkins visited Rosenbaum at the hospital. Yankel died at 2:30am Tuesday because the hospital staff missed one of his knife wounds.
The next evening, according to the sworn testimony of Efraim Lipkind, a former Hasidic resident of Crown Heights, Sharpton started agitating the crowd.
“Then we had a famous man, Al Sharpton, who came down, and he said Tuesday night, kill the Jews, two times. I heard him, and he started to lead a charge across the street to Utica.”
With each passing hour the violence worsened, Jewish leaders began to desperately complain about the lack of protection to the authorities. They said, the rioters were being allowed to rampage unchecked, too little force was being brought to bear, and too few arrests were being made. Area Jews felt the police were under orders by the City’s first black mayor to hold back, that the police were not allowed to fight against the Black rioters, who continued to grow bolder in their anti-Semitic attack as they sensed the appeasement.
The fact is New York City Mayor David Dinkins responded to the riot immediately by deploying 2,000 police officers and making a personal visit to the troubled neighborhood under a hail of rocks and epithets hurled at him by fellow blacks.
Dinkins has spoken of his own mishandling of the riots. Admitting he “screwed up Crown Heights”
“I regret not saying to the police brass sooner whatever you guys are doing is not working” it was then they altered their behavior and they were able to contained the ravaging young blacks who were attacking Jews … I will forever be accused of holding back the police and permitted blacks to attack Jews, however that did not happen it is just inaccurate”
In all, the street violence against the Crown Heights Jews lasted three days/four nights starting with the evening of the accident. On Thursday evening, cops finally restored order, although sporadic violence against Jews continued for weeks after the riot was contained.
Yankel Rosenbaum wasn't the only person murdered by the rioters. On September 5th, Italian-American, Anthony Graziosi, was dragged out of his car, brutally beaten and stabbed to death because his full beard and dark clothing caused him to be mistaken for a Hasidic Jew.
During the funeral of Gavin Cato on August 26th, Al Sharpton gave an anti-Semitic eulogy, which fueled the fires of hatred.
“The world will tell us he was killed by accident. Yes, it was a social accident. ... It's an accident to allow an apartheid ambulance service in the middle of Crown Heights. ... Talk about how Oppenheimer in South Africa sends diamonds straight to Tel Aviv and deals with the diamond merchants right here in Crown Heights. The issue is not anti-Semitism; the issue is apartheid. ... All we want to say is what Jesus said: If you offend one of these little ones, you got to pay for it. No compromise, no meetings, no kaffe klatsch, no skinnin' and grinnin'. Pay for your deeds."
Regarding the Mayor's call for peace Sharpton pontificated:
"They don't want peace, they want quiet."
Sharpton and the lawyer representing the Cato family counseled them not to cooperate with authorities in the investigation and demanded a special prosecutor be named.
Sharpton was asked about the violence, he justified it,
“We must not reprimand our children for outrage, when it is the outrage that was put in them by an oppressive system," he said.
The first Sabbath after the Funeral Sharpton tried unsuccessfully to kick up tensions again by marching 400 protesters in front of the Lubavitch of Crown Heights shouting “No Justice, No Peace."
Sharpton called for the arrest of Lifsh, the driver of the station wagon. Even though more than twenty similarly accidental vehicular deaths had occurred in Brooklyn since 1989 without a single arrest several involving local Hasidim run down by blacks. The agitator’s pressure led Charles Hynes, the Brooklyn district attorney, into convening a grand jury.
When the investigation of the accident did not produce a criminal indictment against Yosef Lifsh, Al Sharpton encouraged the Cato family to seek big-bucks damages in a civil suit against Lifsh (who had since fled to Israel for his own safety). Sharpton announced that he would personally serve papers on Yosef Lifsh in Israel. He bought tickets and hopped an El-Al flight on the weekend of Yom Kippur. At Ben Gurion Airport, a woman spotted Sharpton hailing a cab and yelled to him, "Go to hell! “I am in hell already," shot back. "I am in Israel."
The Aftermath
Sharpton abandoned the Caribbean people of Crown Heights as soon as the anti-Semitic violence had died down. His entire participation in the violence may have been a calculated effort to usurp Jesse Jackson as the leading spokesman for African-Americans. Jackson may have had his “Hymie-town” but Sharpton’s incitement against those Jews who he perceived as having the political power that African Americans deserved, went much further than simply words like Jackson.
Sadly had Sharpton not exploited the death of Gavin Cato for his own “resume”, what was by all accounts, a disorganized group of ruffians on the first night of the riot, might well have dissipated the morning after the accident.
The media portrayed the Crown Heights riot as two-sided promoting the myth that both blacks and Jews were equal in their violence. The violence was a one-sided rampage waged by some of the neighborhood’s 180,000 strong black majority against a Jewish minority of 20,000.
Maybe the media continues to sugarcoat the riot because it was unprecedented in American history. For liberals it’s impossible to perceive blacks as purveyors of bigotry they are forever in the role of victims of hate.
