Imus Isn’t The Only One

Who Needs To Apologize

To the Editor:

It was uncomfortable listening to Don Imus apologize 86 times this week for his remarks directed at the Rutgers University women’s basketball team. His remarks were stupid, thankfully brief and not particularly funny. Making these remarks was not a shining moment. In offering his apology (at least the first time), I believe he did have a shining moment. I like Don Imus a lot.

What made his apology uncomfortable was not what he said, but rather whom he chose as representative of the black community — “Reverend” Al Sharpton. Let’s recall some of “Reverend” Al’s past:

1987: Sharpton partakes in the wholesale manufacture of a heinous crime against 15-year-old Tawana Brawley in Upstate New York. The entire crime was fabricated, involving charges of kidnapping, assault and rape against several white men. Sharpton and attorneys Alton Maddox and C. Vernon Mason accuse a part-time police officer who had recently committed suicide, in addition to Steven Pagones, a Dutchess County district attorney. Eventually their case falls apart. Pagones files a defamation suit against Sharpton & Co. ten years later and receives a $345,000 settlement from Sharpton and his band of liars while Ms Brawley is ordered to pay $185,000. Never one word of apology is spoken by Al Sharpton.

1991: Sharpton’s involved in the Crown Heights incident involving the funeral of Gavin Cato, a black boy accidentally killed by a Hasidic Jewish driver. This emotional setting gets Reverend Al’s opportunistic juices aflow. He leads a group of black supporters through Jewish neighborhoods wherein rabbinical student Yankel Rosenbaum is engulfed by a mob and knifed. Rosenbaum dies. Sharpton lives.

1995: Freddy’s Fashion Mart in Harlem is burned to the ground following the fatal shooting of four Freddy’s employees. Seven employees die in the fire. Freddy’s is owned by a white Jewish man who has recently raised the rent on his tenant, a black who owns a music store. Freddy’s raised his rent in direct response to a rent increase from his Harlem landlord, the United House of Prayer. Sharpton mobilized a crowd, got the protestors fired up, and was quoted as saying, “We will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business.” Several days later, one of those protestors pulled the trigger and lit the match.

By contrast, Don Imus has in the past ten years:

Founded a working cattle ranch for kids with cancer and other incurable illnesses, funded by his own money and money raised through the sale of Imus Ranch food products. He has changed the lives of 700-plus kids and their families.

Through the USS Intrepid/Fallen Heroes Fund, raised $10 million for the completion of a state-of-the-art rehab center in San Antonio, Texas.

Through pointed conversations with Senators Joe Lieberman, Rick Santorum, John McCain, and others, motivated the US Congress to increase the death benefit for US servicemen and women who die in the line of duty from $6,000 to $250,000.

Don Imus screwed up. He has apologized profusely. The liberal press will try to amplify it to celestial levels, but it is simply a human mistake. We should forgive Imus and loudly applaud his service to the country.

By contrast, Sharpton’s history proves him to be an opportunistic and bigoted liar who deserves no one’s forgiveness until he apologizes for and rectifies his past.

Brendan Duffy

4 Chestnut Knoll Drive, Sandy Hook                            April 12, 2007