Before Zimmerman, DOJ should probe Freddy’s massacre

After calling the ruling an atrocity on his MSNBC program, Al Sharpton wants the federal government to act.

“There are grounds for civil rights charges here,” he said on Meet the Press, adding, “There would never have been protests if there had been an arrest and if the police department there did what it was supposed to do.”

Despite Reverend Al’s protestations, local police did do their job. After examining all the evidence, police believed Zimmerman’s story. However, they were overruled to keep agitators such as Sharpton happy.

Former police chief Bill Lee told CNN that his investigation was hijacked, that evidence was shared improperly and that he was pressured to arrest George Zimmerman, simply to placate the protesters.

“It was [relayed] to me that they just wanted an arrest. They didn’t care if it got dismissed later,” he said.

In the end, a jury of six women agreed with the police’s original decision — they believed Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense.

Before the Justice Department gets involved in the Zimmerman case, it should investigate an 18-year-old civil rights case which lead to the deaths of Angelina Marrero, Cynthia Martinez, Luz Ramos, Mayra Rentas, Olga Garcia, Garnette Ramautar, Kareem Brunner — the seven victims of the massacre at Freddy’s Fashion Mart. Their deaths can be traced to the racial incitement of one man, Al Sharpton.

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In 1995, the United House of Prayer, a large African-American church, was also a major landlord in Harlem. It raised the rent at Freddy’s Fashion Mart, a Jewish-owned clothing store that 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, Dec. 8, when Roland James Smith, Jr., who had been part of 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 seven 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 anti-Semitism involved in the protests, but he was lying.

Soon after the massacre, the Jewish Action Alliance, a New York-based civil-rights group, released audiotapes and transcripts of several of Sharpton’s weekly radio shows 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 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.”

“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 September 9 rally, Sharpton told 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, around the time that 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 21 Sharpton 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.

Sadly, Roland James Smith, Jr. listened to the calls and burnt the store down.

In the aftermath of the massacre, Sharpton criticized NYPD investigators for quickly linking the fire to the protesters, but the police evidence and the tapes 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.

A jury found George Zimmerman not guilty. A jury, or the Department of Justice, never tried Al Sharpton. Sharpton was found not guilty by the same media that convicted George Zimmerman without seeing any evidence, and MSNBC gave Sharpton a TV platform to spew his hatred.