Horowitz gives Giuliani too much credit Plus: La Leche League isn't full of boobs; has coach Bob Knight mellowed?
Apr 6, 2000 | What Hillary Clinton won't say
BY DAVID HOROWITZ
(04/03/00)
When David Horowitz lauds Mayor Rudy Giuliani for cleaning up the streets of New York it's much like supporters of Mussolini raving that the trains run on time. "Increasing safety and well-being of New Yorkers" are code words keeping the black and Hispanic population in line, if not shipping them off to prison in record numbers. If Giuliani is doing such a great job why are the courts and prisons clogged? Why is it that crime in all other major cities is also down? No matter how you slice it, white supremacy is on the rise and David Horowitz is there to cheer it on. Killing innocent and unarmed black people is symptomatic of something much larger for which the right must answer.
-- Dennis Dalrymple
New York
Just like the other supporters of Giuliani, Horowitz does not tell us how many of the shots fired during the Dinkins administration were fired at unarmed civilians. He also fails to note that crime in New York began its decline during the Dinkins years and that crime has fallen all over the country, in cities where Giuliani is not the mayor. He fails to acknowledge that it was the crack epidemic that caused most of the violence and that the end of that epidemic was cyclical and had nothing to do with Giuliani. Giuliani is a repressive tyrant with no regard for civil rights or the Constitution and no amount of distortion will change that.
-- Lynn Samuels
If, as the Giuliani administration claims, crime is down 70 percent in New York since the Dinkins administration, one would expect the number of police shootings to decline accordingly. From this perspective, Giuliani has actually lost ground on police violence.
In times of historically low crimes rates nationwide, why are more blacks and Latinos stopped and frisked in New York than ever before? And why do only 25 percent of those stops result in actual arrests, let alone convictions? Why do over 20,000 people go through the dirty and violent New York jail system each month?
To people of color who are harassed by Giuliani's NYPD more than ever, police slayings of unarmed black men symbolize the deranged misanthropy directed at them by Rudolph Giuliani.
-- Bryan Keller
Thank you David Horowitz for your knowledgeable articles on the left. It has been disgusting to watch the lawyer for H. Rap Brown portray him as a "political prisoner." I can't help but wonder if the Clinton Justice Department's failure to prosecute his open-and-shut case was a political decision. I must point out that though the .223-caliber rifle Brown used is "high power," it's the lowest power round allowed to hunt deer in most states. Almost any rifle will penetrate body armor.
-- S. Marc Prince
I realize that Horowitz may well be your house conservative, but I am getting the most uncomfortable feeling, as a Christian conservative, that the only place that I find any sanity in commentary and reporting is in places like Salon. I tend to hew pretty close to the conservative Christian line on most public policy matters, but when I read such great writing as Camille Paglia, whose self-identification as a pagan lesbian democrat should send me screaming from my computer, along with such sober good sense as evidenced by Horowitz in his recent article, I wonder if perhaps the media world has been turned upside down?
-- George W. Bang
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