What do Steven Pagones, Kareem Brunner and George Zimmerman have in common?Al Sharpton aided and abetted by the media.Now that
George Zimmerman has been acquitted in a court of law, it’s reasonable to review how the case progressed. Breitbart provided a useful timeline. Here’s
the third item:
March 13, 2012 – NBC’s Al Sharpton Uses MSNBC Platform to Stoke Phony Racial Narrative
Joel Pollak, Breitbart editor,
elaborated:
The next day, March 12, Al Sharpton’s National Action Network issued a statement in which Sharpton called for a “complete and thorough investigation” into Martin’s death. He added: “[W]e are told that racial language was used when the young man reported his suspicions to police,” a misleading claim later disproved by transcripts of the 911 call, in which race was first raised in a question by the dispatcher, not by Zimmerman himself.
On March 13, Sharpton devoted a portion of his program on MSNBC, PoliticsNation, to the Trayvon Martin case. He interviewed Martin family attorney Benjamin Crump, who reiterated the accusation that Zimmerman was “white”: “We think Trayvon Martin didn’t know who the heck this white man was who approached him before he got killed.”
Sharpton was one of those who shaped the narrative that the killing of Trayvon Martin was a hate crime that needed to be prosecuted.
As
Bryan Preston observed:
Al Sharpton’s presence as a commentator is particularly galling. Sharpton operates as part shakedown artist, part con man, and part Hizballah-lite through his National Action Network. He was no bystander in the Martin case. He was among the first to turn the tragedy into a phony referendum on race relations. He is regularly among the first to deploy the terroristic slogan “No Justice, No Peace” when things aren’t going his way. Or when he believes a credible threat of violence is useful to him.
Al Sharpton regularly denounces America as a racist country. But only in “racist” America could Sharpton build a lucrative and influential career in national media on anti-Semitism, a horrendous hoax, lies, smears and a riot that resulted in the deaths of innocent people.
By now the Tawana Brawley case is known as a hoax. But the hoax wasn’t a victimless crime. In the course of pressing the fraudulent case forward, Sharpton and his allies defamed the Dutchess County (NY) prosecutor, Steven Pagones.
Pagones sued Brawley and her advisers, including Sharpton, and won $65,000 from Sharpton. Sharpton, having been found guilty of defamation, refused to pay and refused to apologize. Instead,
well moneyed Sharpton supporters paid the settlement.
Mr. Pagones filed a $395 million defamation suit in...
...
Read more at Legal Insurrection, linked in the post title, above.