Catching up with Marxist Mayor Bill de Blasio

Bill de Blasio

In recent years, while many other major American cities have declined precipitously in quality of life, with crime statistics booming and workers and taxpayers fleeing to the suburbs, New York City has thrived. This is no coincidence. After the living nightmare of the 1970s and 80s that can still be seen in movies like Death Wish (1974) and Taxi Driver (1976)a time when the subways and Central Park and whole neighborhoods seemed to have been taken over by criminal gangs and the police had been defanged by feckless, politically correct mayors such as John V. Lindsay, Abe Beame, and David Dinkins – Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (1994-2001) turned everything around by making vigorous use of the police department and city courts. Things kept running relatively smoothly under Mayor Michael Bloomberg (2002-13), although one could argue with his nosy nanny-state policies, such as attempts to control the consumption of soft drinks.

De Blasio and family

But then along came de Blasio. On the surface, his election made no sense. Giuliani had almost surely saved the Big Apple from fiscal disaster and civil disorder of the sort that has plagued cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Baltimore. De Blasio, an out-and-out Marxist, was fiercely opposed to the kind of governance that had pulled New York back from the brink. He bought into the idea that heavily policing high-crime black neighborhoods is racist. In July 2015, we made note on this website of a proclamation he had recently issued congratulating The Nation, a far-left weekly published in New York, on its anniversary. The proclamation painting a glowing picture of The Nation, depicting it as a positive moral force that “mobiliz[ed] its readers to articulate and reaffirm their values and to take action in the name of progress (necessarily ruffling not a few feathers along the way).”

De Blasio with Al Sharpton

In fact, as we pointed out at the time, The Nation was the flagship publication of American Stalinism. Over a period of decades, it passionately defended (or minimized the significance of) Stalin’s Gulag and show trials, systematically demonized Stalin’s critics, and mocked and vilified American freedom. Nor did The Nation‘s insipid politics evaporate with the death of Stalin or the fall of the USSR. After 9/11, Christopher Hitchens, a longtime Nation columnist, quit the magazine because he was disgusted by its editors’ view that America had deserved what it got. He called The Nation “the voice and the echo chamber of those who truly believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden.” De Blasio’s praise for The Nation should have discredited him for all time in the eyes of every New Yorker who had lived through the city’s darkest day. But it didn’t. 

De Blasio at a mosque

Nor, bafflingly, have New Yorkers been put off in significant numbers by his various social and economic policies, which have changed New York’s course, heading it once again for that proverbial cliff. By ordering an end to the NYPD’s spectacularly effective “stop and frisk” strategy, which certain self-styled leaders of minority communities had criticized, de Blasio showed that he cared more about good relations with race hustlers than about the safety of New Yorkers. Similarly, by putting an end to an equally successful Muslim surveillance program, de Blasio showed that he was more interested in being praised by groups like CAIR than in protecting his city from another 9/11.

Cops turn their backs on de Blasio at funeral for slain colleague Wenjian Liu, January 4, 2015

Also, De Blasio repeatedly gave the impression that he viewed cops as racists. When two police officers were murdered during his term, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association blamed their deaths on de Blasio’s anti-cop rhetoric. Not long after, when he attended the funeral of a policeman who’d been killed in the line of duty, the police officers in attendance turned their backs en masse on the mayor.

Rudy Giuliani

One might have hoped and expected that some Democrat would have come along and mounted a serious challenge to de Blasio at the primary level, or that the GOP would have found a candidate capable of defeating him in the general election. But no – de Blasio sailed smoothly to re-election without much at all in the way of opposition. It’s not only one of the more puzzling chapters in recent American political history, but also a potential tragedy for the one American metropolis that has done the best job of weathering a decades-long tide of destructive political correctness in the nation’s City Halls.

Catching up with terror enabler Linda Sarsour

Women’s March on Washington

Linda Sarsour shot to fame on January 21 of this year, the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration as president. On that day, feminists marched down the major thoroughfares of several American cities; in Washington, at the main Women’s March, stars of film and TV and music and cable news and professional feminism (Gloria Steinem) took turns giving speeches. Madonna spoke of burning down the White House. Ashley Judd read a poem about being a “nasty woman.”

Linda Sarsour

Joining these superstars on the list of speakers was an obscure woman in hijab. Linda Sarsour, head of the Arab American Association of New York, was one of the event’s organizers, and she used her moment in the sun to say that she would “respect the presidency,” but not Trump himself. She said that Trump had been elected “on the backs of Muslims.” And she said that American Muslims had been “suffering in silence for the past fifteen years.” She didn’t mention the suffering of the many non-Muslim Americans – and non-Muslims elsewhere around the world – who had experienced suffering as a result of suicide bombings, planes being piloted into buildings, gunmen opening fire at concerts and discos, and truck drivers mowing down pedestrians.

Rachel Maddow, lesbian Islam apologist

Sarsour was cheered. A star was born. Rachel Maddow had her on. Sarsour made outrageous claims about the supposed oppression of Muslims in the U.S., and Maddow didn’t question a thing she said. Nor did Maddow ask Sarsour how a woman who supports sharia law and openly praises Hamas, as Sarsour does, could call herself a progressive feminist.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

There are real feminists with Arab or Muslim backgrounds. Among them are Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Brigitte Gabriel. Sarsour has smeared both of them. She has said that they deserve as “ass-whipping.” It is well known that Hirsi Ali, as as girl, was subjected to the brutal practice known as female genital mutilation. This didn’t keep Sarsour from saying that she wished she could take away Hirsi Ali’s and Gabriel’s vaginas because “they don’t deserve to be women.”

Sarsour is not just a woman of words. She is a woman of action. When Brandeis University announced plans to award Hirsi Ali an honorary degree, Sarsour participated in a successful effort to get Brandeis to change its mind.

Sarsour and friends

We wrote about all this in April. We devoted two days to Sarsour. We hoped that perhaps her fifteen minutes of fame would soon be over. Alas, no. Sarsour ended up being named to Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” list. Earlier this month, Glamour Magazine included her and the other Women’s March organizers on its list of women of the year. Publications around the country, ignoring Sarsour’s own ugly views, have portrayed her as the virtuous victim of irrational Islamophobic hatred.

The scene of the Halloween attack

In late October, Sarsour tweeted a photo of her new Democratic Socialists of America membership card. A few days later, after the Halloween terror attack in lower Manhattan, she was heavily quoted in an AOL News story headlined “Muslim New Yorkers Are Bracing for Hate Crimes after Terror Attack” – one of those absurd “backlash” articles that always follow jihadist attacks and that seek to distract attention from the real victims of actual Muslim atrocities to imaginary Muslim victims of non-existent infidel atrocities.

That mosque in Paterson

After the Halloween massacre, Sarsour complained on Twitter that such events are always being used to paint all Muslims with a broad brush. As it turned out, she had more than a passing connection to the jihadist of the day, Saypullo Saipov. As was discovered soon after his arrest, Saipov had attended a mosque in Paterson, New Jersey, that the NYPD’s Demographics Unit, under Mayor Bloomberg, had monitored closely. But the current mayor, Bill de Blasio, who is less worried about terrorism than about “Islamophobia,” listened to a certain individual who told him that monitoring mosques was an anti-Islamic act, and closed down the Demographics Unit. Who was that individual who got the mayor to stop the monitoring of mosques? Linda Sarsour. If not for her, in short, the New York police might have fingered Saipov as a potential terrorist and prevented eight deaths.

Honoring a murderer in New York

The aftermath of the Fraunces Tavern bombing

Three facts. First, the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (Armed Forces of National Liberation, or FALN) was a Marxist-Leninist terrorist group that was dedicated to Puerto Rican independence and that, between 1974 and 1983, killed several people in over a hundred bomb attacks within the United States. The most famous of these actions was a 1975 bombing that took four lives at the historic Fraunces Tavern in New York City.

Oscar López Rivera

Second, Oscar López Rivera was an FALN leader who was arrested in 1980, sentenced to 55 years in federal prison in 1981, and released on May 17 as the result of a commutation order issued by Barack Obama three days before the end of his presidency. President Clinton had offered to release him as far back as 1999 on the condition that he renounce violence – but López Rivera refused. Obama placed no such condition on him.

Third, the organizers of New York City’s annual Puerto Rican Day Parade announced in early May that the parade, set to take place on June 11, would honor López Rivera as a “National Freedom Hero.”

Joseph Connor

Joseph Connor, the son of one of the four people killed in the Fraunces Tavern bombing, Frank Connor, responded to the news with a furious op-ed in the New York Post. “The idea is truly sickening,” he wrote. Reminding readers that New York City had been the setting for the “most horrific” of all of FALN’s bombings, he asked: “Why would anyone in New York salute this man — particularly in the midst of our nation’s war on terrorists?”

Melissa Mark-Viverito

Even more appalling, the announcement of this twisted tribute to López Rivera had been made by a public official, City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, at “the very site of the most horrific terror attack in our nation’s history,” namely the 9/11 assault on the Twin Towers. Coincidentally, Frank Connor’s godson, Steve Schlag, was one of the over 3000 victims of that assault. And that wasn’t the only grim coincidence: the Twin Towers, Joseph Connor noted, was the location of a 1977 threat by FALN that “prompted an evacuation” of both towers.

So it is, wrote Joseph Connor, that “the city in which our father was born, raised, worked and was murdered — a city bloodied by the most savage of all terrorist attacks on 9/11 — will play host to honoring” a terrorist with the blood of New Yorkers on his hands.

Fraunces Tavern

As Connor pointed out, López Rivera’s terrorism never had the slightest thing to do with freedom. Puerto Ricans have frequently had the opportunity to vote on the status of their island – independence, statehood, or a continuation of its unique commonwealth status? “Never more than 5 percent of them have ever voted for independence from America,” wrote Connor, “and in 2012 fully 60 percent voted for statehood.”

No, what López Rivera was fighting for was not freedom but “subjugation in a Cuba-like state.” After all, another notorious FALN member, William Morales, “has been a guest of Cuba for over 30 years.” New Yorkers, maintained Connor, “should be fuming. The NYPD and FDNY should refuse to participate.”

As of this writing, there’s no news about the NYPD or FDNY pulling out of the parade. But on May 16, it was reported that Goya Foods, America’s “oldest and best-known Hispanic food company,” had withdrawn support from the parade because of the tribute to López Rivera. But Univision, Telemundo, SBS, JetBlue, Coca-Cola, AT&T, McDonald’s, and the New York Yankees all stayed on as sponsors.

As the date of the parade approaches, we’ll keep an eye on developments.  

The Maoist behind decades of race riots

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Carl Dix

While Bob Avakian has worked hard to make himself the mystery man at the head of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), his co-founder, Carl Dix, who serves at party spokesman, has been the RCP’s public face. He’s led a career crowded with varied activities, though his ideological compass has remained constant: he’s always supported Maoist and Stalinist revolutions (in, for example, Nepal, Peru, and the Philippines), always expressed solidarity with convicted cop-killers (such as Mumia Abu Jamal and Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, né H. Rap Brown), always been determined to stir up violence against the police. As his bio at the RCP website puts it, he “believes in world revolution” and “has actively opposed U.S. imperialism” throughout his career.

In 1981 he moderated an event called the “Mass Proletarian War Crimes Tribunal,” which pretended to prosecute the U.S. government for its purported imperialism and international atrocities. That same year, when some of the Americans who’d been held hostage in Tehran for over a year sued the governments of the U.S. and Iran for damages in a Los Angeles court, Dix and a group of his followers were outside the courthouse accusing the hostages of war crimes.

(FILE FOOTAGE) April 29, 2012 marks the 20th anniversary of the Los Angeles Riots, when a jury acquitted three white and one hispanic LAPD officers in the beating of Rodney King following a high-speed pursuit. Thousands of people rioted in LA over the six days following the verdict.
An image from the 1992 L.A. riots

In 1992, Dix led a group of RCP agitators who played a key role in instigating the riots in Los Angeles that followed the verdict in the Rodney King case. Flyers distributed throughout the city carried a message signed by Dix calling on blacks to react to the verdict by waging “revolutionary war.” Not only did Dix and his comrades instigate the riots – they took part in them, looting stores and committing arson at several locations around L.A. Before the L.A. riots were over, more than 2300 people had been injured and 58 had lost their lives. (As one news source wrote at the time, the RCP had been “’working’ the various ethnic and immigrant groups for years” and during that time had celebrated every May Day by whipping up violent confrontations with the police.)

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Carl Dix and Cornel West

Dix has long worked in partnership with the so-called public intellectual Cornel West, a former professor at Harvard and Princeton. Together they led a successful campaign to end the NYPD’s “Stop and Frisk” program, which had helped make New York the safest large city in the United States. In 2011, they founded the Stop Mass Incarceration Network (SMIN) to “stop the slow genocide of mass incarceration” and “the police murder of Black, Latino and other oppressed peoples.”

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Dix and friends in Ferguson

In 2014, it was Dix & co. that fomented riots in New York City, Oakland, and Ferguson, Missouri, after the grand jury decided not to prosecute police officer Darren Wilson in the death of Michael Brown, a black man. Innumerable protesters in these cities carried signs bearing the RCP’s web address, and Dix himself was on the ground in Ferguson, where flyers bearing Dix’s byline described Wilson as a “murdering pig” and called on the public to block traffic, take over university buildings, stay away from work, and so on.

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Dix and Quentin Tarantino marching together against “killer cops”

In 2015, when police officers from around the U.S. called for a boycott of Quentin Tarantino’s latest movie because the director had described cops as murderers, Dix came to Tarantino’s defense, comparing the police to Mafiosos.

Last year he led a group that burned a flag outside the Republican National Convention, explaining helpfully to a reporter that the action was a “political statement about the crimes of the American empire. There’s nothing great about America.”