AUGUST 2, 2005
(Part Two on ADL director Foxman and the Bloomberg-Independence Party alliance)
ADL national director Abraham H. Foxman's April 20, 2005 letter giving the mayor a clean bill of health regarding his alliance with Lenora Fulani's Independence Party can only be described as a travesty of the ADL's fight against anti-Semitism. A page-image of the letter can be found on my website at http://www.lyndonlarouchewatch.org/pdf/foxman.pdf. Here is an annotated version, sentence by sentence:
"Dear Mayor Bloomberg: Time Magazine may think there are five "best" mayors, but we know that, through your creative leadership, you have shown you are the "best of the best." You and your NYC2012 Olympic team certainly showed that creativity in Berlin. It would be great for the City to host the Olympic Games. I hope the IOC will see it your way."
COMMENT: Foxman shows how eager he is to help Mayor Bloomberg get reelected, while avoiding the kind of direct endorsement that would place the ADL in clear violation of its 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. This suck-up paragraph contrasts sharply with Foxman's response to pleas in past years that the ADL speak out strongly against anti-Semitic electoral candidates such as David Duke and Patrick Buchanan. When defense of Jews is needed, 501(c)(3) is the ADL director's great excuse to do nothing. When an opportunity presents itself to gain a fund-raising advantage with a billionaire politician, 501(c)(3) is out the window.
"I also want to share with you a brief observation about your principled position on the anti-Semitic statements of Lenora Fulani."
COMMENT: What "principled position"? Bloomberg has a four-year history of pretending to criticize Fulani's statements and then throwing more money at the self-styled "postmodern Bolshevik" and her guru Fred Newman. As noted in our last posting, he blasted her in 2001 for blaming the Sept. 11 terror attacks on the U.S. government, but failed to end his alliance with her Independence Party and then compensated her and Newman by approving an $8.7 million city bond so their All Stars charity could launch a "youth development center" to indoctrinate New York's kids with the "Newmanite" ideology.
Fulani and Newman then showed their utter contempt for the mayor's appeasement by putting on as their first play at the new center in January 2004 a production (written by Newman) that blamed the 1991 Crown Heights pogrom on the mayor's fellow Jews. A Bloomberg aide expressed disapproval of the play, but the city's Parks Department bought tickets to send after-school program children to see it. The mayor then rewarded Fulani and Newman with more money--this time, $250,000 from his own pocket for Independence Party activities--and by appearing on the stage with Fulani to help raise funds for the same All Stars center that had produced the Crown Heights play.
The mayor once again ran his con on New Yorkers in April 2005 after Fulani affirmed on NY1 News that she thinks Jews are "mass murderers of people of color." He called her statements "phenomenally offensive" on his WABC radio show, but said in the same breath: "I'm happy to have their [the IP's] endorsement, and I think a lot of the things they stand for I stand for as well." (The latter statement was not reported as widely in the media as the former one.)
Obtaining his letter from Foxman with which to cool out at least part of the Jewish community, the mayor went on to accept the endorsement of Newman and Fulani's party in late May. And once again the Phenomenally Offensive One and her guru received their reward: The city's Department of Youth and Community Development announced in June that their All Stars Project had been found eligible for a $216,000 grant to run an after-school program.
Where is the "principled position" here? There is none--only a four-year record of opportunism and appeasement.
"The ADL firmly believes that everyone, politicians, civic leaders, the general public, must resist giving in to political expediency whenever anyone in our City engages in divisive hateful rhetoric."
COMMENT: By praising the mayor's non-existent "principled position," Foxman himself has done the opposite of what he professes to call for. This self-appointed leader of the Jewish community has given his stamp of approval to one of the most glaring cases of "political expediency" in recent New York politics.
"Lenora Fulani's anti-Semitic statements are no exception and we sincerely hope many others will join your call to the members of the Independence Party to stand up and say no to hate, to say no to anti-Semitism."
COMMENT: The only significant organized force inside the New York City IP is the secretive Newman-Fulani cult, which provides most of the campaign workers, raises and controls the money, runs the party's think tank, furnishes the party's lawyers (who themselves are cult members), and receives the city patronage. The rest of the membership is mostly just people who have no relationship to the party machine--former Perotistas driven out of active involvement by the Newman-Fulani cult, people who simply registered with the IP thinking they were registering as "independent" voters, and several thousand members of the hospital workers union and certain civil service unions who were pressured by union leaders to register with the IP in 2002 simply to vote for Governor Pataki in that year's IP gubernatorial primary. Thus a call for IP members to say no to hate is a nonsense statement--it implies that the Newman-Fulani cult will rise up against the Newman-Fulani cult.
By ignoring the existence of the IP's cult-machine and posing the issue in terms simply of Fulani as an individual versus an amorphous mass of well-meaning party members, the ADL is basically chanting the same mantra as Bloomberg adviser Bill Cunningham--that Fulani is only one of 90,000 members in a party that magically exists without any kind of organization.
More to come on how the ADL is running interference for Mayor Bloomberg's Independence Party alliance....
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