Redstate

By Mark Kilmer Posted in Liberals — Comments (7) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

We have some strange ladies to our left.

Former New York City powerbroker Dr. Lenora Fulani has been tossed off the Independence Party of New York's board for anti-Semitic remarks by which she continues to stand.

Try this:

[T]he quotation most often cited by critics of Fulani is her assertion in the National Alliance newspaper on Nov. 16, 1989 that “Jews had to sell their souls to acquire Israel and are required to do the dirtiest work of capitalism — to function as mass murderers of people of color — in order to keep it.”

Very ugly stuff.

(more below the fold)

Last April, Fulani affirmed her sentiments:

Asked about the comments on NY1 News on Wednesday night, Dr. Fulani, a high-profile official with the Independence Party, said, "What is anti-Semitic about it?" She added, "It's raising issues that I think need to be explored."

Fulani has endorsed New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg in this autumn's election, but Bloomberg did not show up at her endorsement announcement despite the fact that "[i]n 2001, Fulani's party delivered 59,000 votes, more than Bloomberg's margin of victory." The contrarian New York Times suggested that Fulani's ouster from the Independence Party "removes a stumbling block from the campaign of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, a Republican who has repudiated her remarks but did not give up her party's endorsement."

The mainstream media seem to be, at best, indifferent to Lenora. (The Village Voice lends her cover, but they are not quite MSM material.)

Fulani is something of a kook. Her guru is the father of "social-therapy," Fred Newman, with whom she once founded the New Alliance Party. (It put her on the Presidential ballot in all 50 States back in 1988.)

In his 1974 tome Power and Authority, Newman wrote:

"The therapist, again, functions in the therapeutic interaction as a revolutionary leader, leading by forming a revolutionary relationship of sisterhood or brotherhood with the worker patient and together becoming a proletarian authority, which overthrows the bourgeois authority or proletarian ego...Working to help the struggling slave go through the insurrectional act of overthrow of the proletarian ego and [then] helping the worker during the long period of withering away of the proletarian ego."

Some might refer to Fulani as somewhat eccentric, but… well… I cannot think of anything offhand. She is a rarity, if that term is alright, and even her would-be allies seem to have deserted her.

Which brings us to Cindy Shaheen. She is a lunatic, but her admirers are standing by her, even as she saunters into even more bizarre territory.

How much more rope does she need?

Cindy's first Anti-Semitic moment, as written to the ABC News program Nightline:

Am I emotional? Yes, my first born was murdered. Am I angry? Yes, he was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the army to protect America, not Israel. Am I stupid? No, I know full well that my son, my family, this nation and this world were betrayed by George Bush who was influenced by the neo-con PNAC agendas after 9/11. We were told that we were attacked on 9/11 because the terrorists hate our freedoms and democracy … not for the real reason, because the Arab Muslims who attacked us hate our middle-eastern foreign policy.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, as we know, , told us that Cindy Sheehan's "moral authority… is absolute." Calling her a media whore, despite her appetite for the media's attention and despite the "trailer full of PR professionals, makeup artists, hair stylists, and other apparatchiks."

Columnist John Leo pointed out some aspects of Cindy's incendiary nature and lamented:

On the whole, the mainstream media depicted Cindy Sheehan as a moral figure without blemish. Maybe reporters and editors felt paralyzed by the “absolute moral authority” rhetoric or justified by polls showing declining support for the war. Some reporters, of course, detest Bush and oppose the war. For whatever reason, they weren’t able to break from the original soft narrative line about a mother’s grief and tell us what was really going on.

The MSM never had that kind of relationship with our first kook, Lenora Fulani.

Both Lenora and Cindy are arguably unbalanced women and, to differing extents, publicity hounds. Both stand for causes embraced by the media – Fulani, the left's social agenda; Sheehan, the left's political agenda – and both have expressed anti-Semitic sentiments. What will it take for Cindy to become the anathema Lenora finds herself to be?

For the mainstream media to turn on Cindy, I am afraid, would be an act of intellectual suicide. On the war, they became Cindy Sheehan. The MSM pleaded with the President, with and for Cindy, to come out to the ditch and meet with her, share her grief, explain why….

They bought it hook, line, sinker, and tacklebox. The MSM spoke through Cindy just a Cindy spoke through the MSM.

Because of this, it would be easier for Fulani to rehabilitate her image by chanting outrageous anti-Bush slogans and campaigning against all that is Republican than it would be for Sheehan to fall completely from the grace with all but the most hardened and irrational anti-Bushies.