Al Sharpton, Long Accused of Anti-Semitic Incitement, Calls Out Anti-Semitic Attack in Texas

MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace hosted Al Sharpton as part of a panel to discuss the hostage attack on Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas.

Four hostages were taken by a gunman at the synagogue. After several hours one hostage was freed. A few hours later, the remaining hostages were freed and the gunman was fatally shot by police. The attack lasted 11 hours.

In addition to Sharpton, the panel included MSNBC contributor and former Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) and Anti-Defamation League CEO and National Director Jonathan Greenblatt.

Sharpton denounced the attack in his appearance on MSNBC Monday: “All of us ought to stand up and denounce what happened in Texas at that synagogue.”

Despite the strong words of condemnation, Sharpton himself has a troubling and well-known history of anti-Semitic incitement.

Sharpton has been accused of helping to incite the Crown Heights Riots in Brooklyn in 1991. The violence kicked off after a 7-year-old Black child named Gavin Cato was struck and killed by a car that was part of the convoy of the famed Jewish leader Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. Sharpton led a march through the streets during which some protestors shouted anti-Semitic epithets. During the riots, a Jew named Yankel Rosenbaum was beaten and stabbed to death. More than a hundred people were injured.

Additionally, as Seth Mandel has written in The Washington Post:

In August 1991, after City College professor Leonard Jeffries ranted that “everyone knows rich Jews helped finance the slave trade” and that “Russian Jewry had a particular control over the movies, and their financial partners, the Mafia, put together a financial system of destruction of black people,” Sharpton rushed to his defense, threatening: “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.” Days later, a Jewish driver accidentally struck and killed a black 7-year-old named Gavin Cato in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. That set off three days of rioting, in the first hours of which a group of African Americans chanting “Kill the Jew” did just that, beating and stabbing an Orthodox Jew named Yankel Rosenbaum, who died of his injuries.

…

Nor was that an isolated incident. In 1995, Sharpton and his National Action Network colleague Morris Powell agitated against Fred Harari, a Jewish shop owner in Harlem. “We are not going to 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,” Powell said. Sharpton added: “We will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business on 125th Street.” A few months later, a gunman entered the store and set it ablaze, killing seven and then shooting himself. When the shop reopened, Powell was back at it, warning, “Freddy’s not dead.”

What’s more, NPR has reported that in a eulogy at the funeral for Cato, “Sharpton criticized Jewish merchants in Crown Heights for selling diamonds from apartheid South Africa.”

It should be noted that Sharpton has never apologized for his rhetoric, though he has vaguely alluded to it, and admitted in 2019 that he should have “done more to heal rather than harm.”