Gerard Jackson
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 22 December 2003

Phillip Adams ranks as one of Australia's most politically bigoted and dishonest columnists. Seething with hate and resentment he casually dismissed the capture of the murderous Saddam and described the liberation of Iraq as a "tawdry" and "sham affair" (Now watch Bush dine out on a plastic bird perhaps, The Australian 16/12/03)

That millions have been freed from the horror of Saddam's charnel house cuts no ice with this caring leftwing plagiarist. The mean-spirited man who viciously opposed the liberation of Iraq and whose obsessive anti-Americanism causes him to side with terrorists and anti-Semites is never going to allow President George W. Bush the credit for giving 23 million Iraqis a second chance to reach for the good life.

Adams admits that his pro-Palestinian stand has lost him Jewish friends. The point, however, is the degree to which his sympathy for those who are waging a murderous terrorist campaign against Israel is based on latent anti-Semitism.

Let us return to Adams' fulsome praise for the self-styled Reverend Al Sharpton, race-baiting hustler and anti-Semite. Venting his left-wing loathing for Western values Adams shamelessly reported how he sat at Sharpton's feet in the pretentiously named Hall of Justice (Rupert Murdoch's Australian, 17/7/99). Adams whined about the lack of white faces in the crowd. That so few whites were present might have had 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 have always known him to be. The same man who ruthlessly used his column to excoriate the decrepit Eric Butler for his anti-Semitism debased 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 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."

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!

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's character. But maybe this is the kind of thing that wins 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.

Having established in his left-wing imagination the racist credentials of the New York police — all 38,000 of them (no exceptions in Adams' book, except if you're black, anti-American or a commie) — 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 then 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. What Adams omitted were the crime figures. From 1994 to 1999 the crime rate dropped by about 50 per cent, with the fall 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.

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." None of which washed with Adams.

Adams wrote of "soaring tensions created by spectacular episodes of police brutality." It seems he thought that New York was on the verge of a race war provoked by its brutal police force and fascist mayor. The facts, as usual with Adams, told another story. 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.

As the leftwing black Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy put it in his 1997 book Race, Crime, and the Law, "Blacks have suffered more from being left unprotected or underprotected by law enforcement authorities than from being mistreated as suspects or defendants, although it is allegations of the latter that now typically receive the most attention."

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 anti-Semites, Saddam Hussein and Palestinian terrorists. Ah well, what can one expect when slime meets slime.

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

Gerard Jackson is Brookes economics editor