The fourteenth anniversary of any historical event would not usually call for any special remembrance except by those most intimately connected. The fourteenth anniversary of the so-called "Crown Heights Riots" is different this year, coming during a New York mayoral campaign season in which Michael Bloomberg, a Jewish billionaire media mogul running as a Republican is set to trounce the once mighty New York City Democratic Party, a Party that was deeply wounded by the Crown Heights events.
On the night of August 19, 1991, a police sanctioned and guarded weekly motorcade consisting of the Jewish Lubavitcher Grand Rabbi and his entourage came careening down President Street on its way to the Lubavitcher headquarters on Eastern Parkway. The last car in the motorcade, a Mercury Grand Marquis station wagon driven by Yosef Lifsh a member of the Lubavitcher sect who drove through a red light to keep up with the rest of the motorcade, collided with a Chevrolet Malibu and went up onto the sidewalk, killing a seven year old African Guyanese boy, Gavin Cato, and breaking the leg of another Black child, Angela Cato. Often called a "tragic accident" in the press, this was no accident, as accidents happen in spite of reasonable efforts to prevent them. Here was a driver who with accustomed impunity had taken a red light and as a result killed one Black child and seriously injured another.
What followed immediately is fairly clear. An ambulance crew affiliated with the Orthodox Jewish Hotzoloh organization, (a private ambulance service for orthodox Jews that operates in Crown Heights) came to the scene before the municipal ambulance arrived. The Hotzoloh crew was at first attending to the two Black children but stopped doing so when the City crew arrived and they took Lish the Jewish driver (who had taken the red light in the semi official motorcade and had driven his car onto the sidewalk and killed Gavin Cato) away from the accident scene for his safety as an angry crowd of Black residents began forming at the intersection of Utica Avenue and President Street.
It is said that Black community members shouted "get the Jews" and "kill the Jews" and that a group of young Black men came upon Lubavitcher member Yankel Rosenbaum of Australia and that one of the youths, Lemrick Nelson, stabbed Rosenbaum with a knife. Charged with murder, Nelson was acquitted when it was proven that the stab wound had not been fatal and should not have caused Rosenbaum's death, but that Rosenbaum died due to what some people call the typical incompetence at Kings County Hospital, a hospital that has an overwhelmingly Black patient population. Rosenbaum's family in fact sued Kings County and won an undisclosed settlement from them.
What followed the so- called "tragic accident" were three days and four nights of sporadic outbursts of anger from the Black community against the organized political/ religious cult of Lubatvitcher Jews that because they had had the run of the streets of the community ended up killing a black child and crippling another. One non Jewish white man was killed and there was some property damage during the three days and four nights of incidents.
At the time New York City had its first African American mayor, David Dinkins and also an African American Police Commissioner named Lee Brown, often called "out of town Brown" by cops. Dinkins had ousted "white power" Jewish mayor Ed Koch, who had presided over what was probably the most corrupt administration the city had ever had in the Democratic primary and had narrowly beaten another white power politician, Rudolph Giuliani, running as a Republican in the four - to - one Democratic city. A new election was around the corner with Dinkins who was no Stokely Carmichael facing off with Giuliani in a rematch. Dinkins was a mainstream politician who had always nurtured close ties with Jewish leaders and who had stood with Zionists on more than one instance. He had been criticized by Blacks as having worn "one too many yarmulkes."
White and particularly Jewish New Yorkers were infuriated that the New York Police Department did not massacre a few dozen Blacks but instead used ordinary police crowd control tactics that contained and eventually dissipated the disorders with minimal loss of life. White power and Jewish power politicians united to denounce and attack Dinkins who went on to lose his second race against Giuliani by a narrow margin due to a considerable loss of ordinarily liberal Jewish supporters.
Lemrick Nelson was prosecuted for a second time in spite of constitutional guarantees against double jeopardy, this time in a Federal Court where judge David Trager sentenced him to the maximum allowed for violating Yankel Rosenbaum's civil rights. The driver, Yosef Lifsh, escaped prosecution and civil action by fleeing to Israel, where he still resides.
Michael Bloomberg, a Jewish billionaire who says that he smoked pot and liked it a lot but who presides over imprisonment of marijuana smokers, and who says his life as a billionaire bachelor in Manhattan was a virtual wet dream but who locks up women trying to earn their livelihoods selling sex, is about to be re elected as a Republican in what is still nominally Democratic and liberal New York City.
The political charge of anti - Semitism is a fake and phony charge in New York City. It is used and taken seriously against Black political leaders while others are immune. There are the famous (for fifteen minutes) Giuliani anecdotes from his tenure as US Attorney in New York regarding his arresting of a Jewish man who is said to have survived Auschwitz concentration camp and having him brought into a room where on the blackboard was the inscription "Arbeit Macht Frei" and another in which publicity hound Giuliani had several Jewish stock brokers arrested and handcuffed at their offices with television news cameras on hand in time for the local evening news show, with the brokers quietly released the following morning for lack of evidence. One can imagine the outcry were these escapades to have been presided over by a Black politician or one who ever showed the slightest sympathy for the Palestinian cause yet these incidents are virtually unknown. Giuliani went on after these events to unseat friend of Israel (but Black) David Dinkins with the help of considerable normally Democratic Jewish votes cast on the bogus "Liberal Party" line, in full throat about the so called "Crown Heights pogrom" (i.e. Dinkins' failure to massacre Blacks).
It should be said that in New York City's political culture most Jews would rather choke to death than cast their votes for the Republican Party. It is for this reason that Giuliani bought the use of the Liberal Party line, to give these traditional and religiously so Democratic Jewish voters a way to vote for a Republican without actually pulling the Republican Party lever on their voting machines.
Having called in the leading mainly Jewish Democratic Party fund raisers and warned them not to bankroll the Democrats this year, and having bought for a pittance the support of historically Democratic municipal labor union heads, Bloomberg has taken measures to get himself a non Republican line on the ballot in order to completely assure his victory. This year he is not dealing with the now dead Liberal Party but with a new force in town, the so called Independence Party and its leaders Fred Newman and Leonora Fulani.
Newman and Fulani have been criticized and attacked for making statements deemed by some to be "anti Semitic." Fulani once said and does not retract :
"Bloomberg Ally Stands by Her Remarks About Israel
New York Times/April 15, 2005
By Jim Rutenberg and Michael Slackman
Lenora B. Fulani, an important political ally of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's, has refused to disavow comments attributed to her in the late 1980's saying that Jews "had to sell their souls to acquire Israel" and had to "function as mass murderers of people of color" to keep it.
Asked about the comments on NY1 News on Wednesday night, Dr. Fulani, a high-profile official with the Independence Party, said, "What is anti-Semitic about it?" She added, "It's raising issues that I think need to be explored." ....
While this author has no quarrel with Fulani's statements and others attributed to her mentor Fred Newman it does seem odd, does it not, that a Jewish Billionaire politician would donate $250,000 of his own money to such a group and arrange for city moneys to fund one of their front organizations, the All Stars Talent Show Network. http://www.rickross.com/reference/new_alliance/new_alliance42.html
The All Stars Talent Network is an after school program affiliated with Bloomberg's "anti Semitic allies" aimed mainly towards Black youths that is presently showing a production called " Crown Heights" which according to reviewers does not tow the predominant line that Blacks were bad and Jews innocent in Crown Heights fourteen years ago.
Politics make strange bedfellows and the cry of anti Semitism is as phony as a three dollar bill. It all depends on whose ox is being gored.
