Dumb And Dumber

Which one is which?

1987: Sharpton spreads the Tawana Brawley hoax, insisting that a 15-year-old black girl was abducted, raped, and smeared with feces by a group of white men. He singles out Steve Pagones, a young prosecutor. Pagones is innocent – the crime never occurred – but Sharpton taunts him: ”If we’re lying, sue us, so we can … prove you did it.” Pagones does sue and eventually wins a $345,000 verdict for defamation. To this day, Sharpton refuses to recant his slander (”Never, ever!”) or to apologize for his role in the affair.

1991: A Hasidic Jewish driver in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights section accidentally kills Gavin Cato, a 7-year-old black child, and anti-Semitic riots erupt. Sharpton races to pour gasoline on the fire. At Gavin’s funeral he rails against the ”diamond merchants” – code for Jews – with ”the blood of innocent babies” on their hands. He mobilizes hundreds of demonstrators to march through the Jewish neighborhood, chanting, ”No justice, no peace.” A rabbinical student, Yankel Rosenbaum, is surrounded by a mob shouting ”Kill the Jews!” and stabbed to death.

1995: When the United House of Prayer, a large black landlord in Harlem, raises the rent on Freddy’s Fashion Mart, Freddy’s white Jewish owner is forced to raise the rent on his subtenant, a black-owned music store. A landlord-tenant dispute ensues; Sharpton uses it to incite racial hatred. ”We will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business.” Sharpton’s National Action Network sets up picket lines; customers going into Freddy’s are spat on and cursed. ”We’re going to see that this cracker suffers,” says Sharpton’s colleague Morris Powell. On Dec. 8, one of the protesters bursts into Freddy’s, shoots four employees point-blank, then sets the store on fire. Seven employees die in the inferno.