Gerard Jackson
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 3 November 2003

When anyone begins a statement with something like: "I've got nothing against blacks. Why, some of my friends are blacks", we instantly recoil at the coming hypocrisy. So it is with Philip Adams who has tried to defend his actions in refusing to condemn Palestinian terrorism against Israel. He revealed his hypocrisy — and he's full of it, among other things — by defending "Hanan Ashrawi [a terrorist mouthpiece] and those who would honour her." (Handing a club to anti-Semites, The Australian 28/10).

That Hanan Ashrawi supports the Palestine Liberation Organisation charter calling for the extermination of Israel was completely ignored. Also ignored by Adams was that this apologist for terrorism and mass murder supported Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. She also supports the bloody work of Palestinian death squads.

This murderous woman's objection to suicide bombings is not that they are immoral but that they are politically counter-productive. Hanan is in full agreement with Abdelaziz Rantissi, a Hamas terrorist leader, who told Kenneth R. Timmerman, an investigative reporter, that: "There is no room for Jews and Muslims in Palestine… Let the Jews go to America and make Israel there."

That none of this fazes Adams suggests he has decided that Arab Jew-hatred is now politically correct. A view supported by his behaviour on Late Night Live, 13 September, 2001, when he rudely cut off an interviewee who made the mistake of trying to raising the topic of organised incitement to hatred and violence in Palestinian society against Jews. Adams justified his behaviour by accusing the interviewee of "behaving like a thug".

There is nothing new in Adams' racist hypocrisy. The man who brags about tackling vile anti-Semites has himself defended them. You see, Adams will always ignore anti-Semitism where the Jew-baiter is both leftwing and anti-American. This attitude was brought out by his fulsome praise for the self-styled Reverend Al Sharpton, noted black racist and anti-Semite (The Australian 17/7/99).

Grabbing the opportunity to vent his left-wing loathing for Western values, Adams sat himself at Sharpton's feet in the pretentiously named Hall of Justice. Looking around him, Adams whined about the lack of white faces in the crowd. That the absence of whites might have something to do with Sharpton's bigotry was never given a thought by Adams. Come to think of it, Sharpton's bigotry was not even referred to, though much ink was spilt damning "NYPD racism".

Adams enjoys flaunting his alleged tolerance while publicly flaying sundry racists and anti-Semites. But his Sharpton apologia exposed him as the moral poseur so many of us always knew him to be. The same man who used his paper to excoriate the decrepit Eric Butler for his anti-Semitism debases himself before another anti-Semite, telling us that this peddler of hate "has his heart." (How sweet.)

Oddly enough, not everyone shares Adams' loving relationship with Sharpton — and for good reasons. Isaac Abraham, for one, has no difficulty in spying Sharpton's racist colours. This is the same Abraham who acted as a spokesman for Rosenbaum family and who tirelessly worked to bring Yankel Rosenbaum's murderers to justice. (Yankel Rosenbaum was murdered during the 1991 Crown Heights riots in which groups of young blacks attacked Hasidic Jews).

Abraham even issued a statement calling for a federal investigation of the role that Al Sharpton played in causing the massacre at Freddy's clothing store in Harlem, stating that the "Rev. Al Sharpton is caught on tape spreading hate against Jews and whites. In Crown Heights, Sharpton did his share in inciting the riots but former Police Commissioner Lee Brown only said 'Sharpton came close to the line of inciting but did not actually cross it' and did nothing." (Is Lee Brown a Democrat, I wonder?)

The massacre at Freddy's certainly exposed the viciousness of Sharpton's racist credentials. Freddy's Fashion Mart was a white-owned discount business in Harlem. In 1995 Sharpton helped organise a protest against its operations, accusing its staff of being ''white interlopers''. The crowd became so worked up (I wonder why?) that the business was torched, killing seven people in the fire. And Adams has given his heart to this creature, as well as Hanan Ashrawi.

And yes, there's more. There always is with the likes of Sharpton and Adams. Sharpton became a self-appointed adviser (this man has the instincts and tenacity of a leech) to Abner Louima, the black man tortured by a couple of New York policemen. It was Sharpton who instructed Louima to tell reporters and state investigators that during his torture the cops said: "It's Giuliani time."

It was the left-wing Peter Noel of The Village Voice who discovered that Louima lied, thus sinking another vicious attempt to assassinate Giuliani character. But maybe this is what it takes to win Adams' heart.

As justice would have it, the media revelation that Sharpton had suborned Louima came just as a jury found good Ol' Al Sharpton and Co guilty of making false accusations of an especially vile nature against Steven Pagones, an assistant district attorney. In 1987 Sharpton, C. Vernon Mason and Alton Maddox accused Pagones and several white men of kidnapping, raping and sodomising Tawana Brawley. The story was found to be hoax and was dismissed by a grand jury. Pagones sued and won.

The racist Louis Farrakhan is another anti-Semite who appears to meet with Adams' approval. This is what David Dinkins, Giuliani's predecessor had to say about Farrakhan: "In light of Minister Farrakhan's visit to New York, I must say that I find his blatantly anti-Semitic remarks offensive and I condemn them."

Farrakhan responded in his usual thuggish way, asking a crowd whether any black leader who opposed him had the right to live. In a brazen attempt to intimidate Dinkins, he mentioned him by name. None of this nastiness rated a mention by Adams, who gives every appearance of earnestly believing that only whites can be racists.

About the turn of the century, Booker T. Washington warned against the likes of Sharpton and Farrakhan, describing them as "problem profiteers," proclaiming. "There is," he wrote, "a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs."

Booker was a former slave, no stranger to genuine degradation and humiliation. Yet he became, through his own selfless efforts, a beacon to tens of thousands of blacks, and a living admonition to racists.

Having established in his left-wing imagination the racist credentials of the New York police force — all 38,000 of them (no exceptions in Adams' book, except if you're black and left) — and determined that the trial of those cops who seriously injured Abner Louima, a Haitian black man, by sodomising him with a toilet plunger was rigged, we were told that Sharpton was "demonised . . . feared and hated by White New York."

Of course, it was all the fault of the fascist Giuliani. It was his drive against crime that led to the attack on the Haitian and the shooting of another Haitian. But from 1994 to 1999 the crime rate dived by about 50 per cent, with the drop being particularly marked in minority neighbourhoods. In Washington Heights, for example, rapes fell by 61 per cent, murders by 82 per cent and burglaries by 72 per cent.

Could it be, Mr Adams, that blacks also enjoy safe streets and freedom from criminals? These are not the kind of questions that the left-wing likes of Adams care to pose. Mr Bartle Bull, lawyer and active Democrat, struck the right note when he pointed out that Mayor Giuliani attacked "organised crime and crooked unions with characteristic intensity". He then called him a "a person of integrity and intelligence and energy, one of the best mayors in our lifetime."

Adams wrote of "soaring tensions created by spectacular episodes of police brutality." It was as if he was trying to persuade his readers that New York was on the verge of a race war provoked by its brutal police force and its fascist mayor.

OK, let's look at those facts that Adams ignored. Though the number of arrests in the city leapt from 309,000 in 1995 to 403,000 in 1998, police shootings fell sharply, dropping from 344 in 1995 to 249 in 1998. The incidence of fatal shootings are of particular interest, dropping from 30 to 19. Another important statistic is the rate of police fatal police shootings. This was 0.48 per 1,000 New York cops in 1998; a figure exceeded by Washington, D.C., Dallas, Philadelphia, Chicago, etc.

Like all ideologues, Adams will never allow reality or facts to get in the way of his political bigotry. But why, oh why are the likes of Adams prepared to publicly cuddle up to racist scum like Sharpton? I think the answer lies in their shared loathing for America. They both detest and despise it. In Adams' view anyone who hates America can't be all bad — and that now seems to include even anti-Semites. Ah well, what can one expect when slime meets slime.

I sincerely hope that this little exposé of Adams' moral posturing will encourage even more of his Jewish admirers to reassess their opinion of his true worth.

Phillip Adams and the moral bankruptcy of the left

Phillip Adams' anti-capitalist lunacy

Why the left support the BBC's neo-Stalinist agitprop that defends treason

Philip Adams, child murderers and paedophilia

Philip Adams' socialist hypocrisy

Gerard Jackson is also Brookes' Economics Editor