By now everyone knows about the recent idiotic remarks that longtime broadcaster Don Imus made last week about some black members of the Rutgers University women's basketball team, to whom he referred as “nappy-headed hos.” Imus' words require no comment; their stupidity is clear to all.

When one considers the multitude of hurtful, malicious, deceitful things Al Sharpton himself has said and done over the years—chiefly for the purpose of justifying his own existence as a proverbial shepherd dutifully shielding black Americans from the white racist wolves that supposedly surround them all times—it is beyond incredible not only that he hosts his own radio program, but that anyone on earth should take seriously anything he has to say.

Sharpton's career as a public liar and racial arsonist began in earnest two decades ago when he injected himself into the case of 16-year-old Tawana Brawley, who in November 1987 claimed that she had been repeatedly raped and sodomized for four days by six white kidnappers, at least one of whom was wearing a police badge. She further alleged that her assailants had chopped off some of her hair, forced her to perform oral sex on them, urinated into her mouth, smeared her clothing with feces, and covered her chest with racial slurs before finally depositing her in a wooded area of Wappingers Falls, a town in Dutchess County, New York. It was among the most disturbing tales in living memory.

In the autumn of 1988, after conducting an exhaustive review of the facts, a grand jury released its report showing beyond any doubt that the entire Tawana Brawley story had been fabricated, and that at least $1 million of New York taxpayers' money had been spent to investigate a colossal hoax.

Pagones won a court judgment against Sharpton for $345,000, which Sharpton never paid. Moreover, during the decade prior to Pagones' long-awaited vindication in court, the former prosecutor had suffered constant stress and anxiety (exacerbated by numerous death threats from Sharpton's credulous followers) that contributed heavily to the devastating dissolution of Pagones' marriage and the virtual ruin of his life.

In comparison to what Sharpton did, Don Imus' recent transgression seems rather minor, doesn't it? And unlike Imus, Sharpton has never—in twenty years—had the courage or the decency to acknowledge what he did and to apologize for it. Never.

Sharpton smelled more blood in 1991, when anti-Semitic riots in Brooklyn's Crown Heights section erupted after a seven-year old black child named Gavin Cato was accidentally killed by a car driven by a Hasidic Jew. Neighborhood residents were enraged by the boy's death, and within three hours a black mob had murdered an innocent rabbinical student, Yankel Rosenbaum, in retribution. At Gavin Cato's funeral, Sharpton criticized the Jewish community and thereafter organized a series of massive, angry demonstrations. He declared that Cato's death was not merely the result of a car accident, but rather “the social accident of apartheid.” The contentious activist then challenged local Jews—who he derisively characterized as “diamond merchants” —to “pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house” to settle the score. Finally he claimed, without proof, that the Jewish driver had run over the Cato child while in a drunken stupor.

All of this occurred under the watchful, approving eye of Sharpton, who provided some additional sound bites for the media: “We will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so some white interloper can expand his business on 125th Street…There is a systematic and methodical strategy to eliminate our people from doing business on 125th Street….[O]ne of our brothers...is now being threatened.” Sharpton exhorted blacks to join “the struggle brother Powell and I are engaged in.” The subsequent picketing became increasingly violent in tone until one of the protesters eventually shot four whites inside the store and then set the building on fire—killing seven employees, most of whom were Hispanics.

One wonders why Al Sharpton's apparently delicate sensibilities—as evidenced by his current snit over Imus' comments—were undisturbed by the incessant, ugly rhetoric that accompanied the Freddy's boycott. Equally inexplicable is how someone with Sharpton's professed abhorrence for racial insensitivity could have spent so many years as a strong supporter of the late Khalid Abdul Muhammad , whose vulgar diatribes against whites were too incendiary for even Louis Farrakhan to condone.

But such an evaluation makes perfect sense for someone who, like Sharpton, loathes white people and considers them the scourge of humanity. In December 1998, for instance, Sharpton hosted an AIDS forum in Harlem which featured a dozen guest speakers, all but one of whom professed to believe that the disease had actually been engineered by white racists as a tool for genocide against blacks.

Yet today Al Sharpton casts himself as a moral arbiter qualified to pass judgment on the words and actions of an aging broadcaster who recently uttered some stupid remarks that are no more offensive or insipid than a thousand other things he has said during his long radio career. Sharpton contends that Imus no longer has a moral right to hold a job in the industry where he has worked for more than four decades. But if Imus is unfit to be a broadcaster, by what calculus could anyone conclude that Sharpton himself merits a job behind a microphone? The episodes discussed in this article barely scratch the surface of what Sharpton has done to poison race relations for more than 20 years.

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