OPINION:
Voters at a precinct on Philadelphia’s Fairmont Street witnessed unusual sights and sounds on Election Day Nov. 4, 2008. Two members of the New Black Panther Party, King Samir Shabazz and Jerry Jackson, stood within 15 feet of this polling station dressed in military-style black jackets, black berets and black combat boots. King Samir Shabazz wielded a 2-foot-long night stick.
“Cracker, you are about to be ruled by a black man,” one of the New Black Panthers told a white voter. They taunted others as “white devils.” A black couple who served as Republican poll watchers said they felt endangered when the Panthers called them “race traitors.”
At an April 23, 2010, Civil Rights Commission hearing, Chris Hill, an eyewitness, explained under oath that he spoke with the male Republican poll watcher inside the precinct. “He was definitely shook up,” Mr. Hill testified. “And he told me that he was called a race traitor by [King Samir Shabazz] and that he was threatened if he stepped outside of the building, there would be hell to pay.”
Surely the Obama administration prosecuted King Samir Shabazz and Mr. Jackson for voter intimidation.
Wrong.
When the administration ignored late-term George W. Bush administration charges of Voting Rights Act violations, Federal District Judge Stewart Dalzell in Philadelphia issued a default ruling against King Samir Shabazz, Mr. Jackson, the New Black Panther Party and its chairman, Malik Zulu Shabazz (no relation to King Samir Shabazz). Although career federal prosecutors won this case (arguing, among other things, “There is never a good reason to bring a billy club to a polling station”) they were overruled by political appointees in President Obama’s Justice Department who ordered them to dismiss the complaints against all parties except King Samir Shabazz. He was ordered not to exhibit a weapon within 100 feet of a Philadelphia precinct through Nov. 15, 2012. Pittsburgh seems fair game.
The May 15, 2009, case dismissal was timed perfectly for Jerry Jackson. During the 2008 incident, he was an elected member of Philadelphia’s 14th Ward Democratic Committee and a credentialed poll watcher for the Democratic Party and the Obama campaign. With the federal case safely behind him, Mr. Jackson watched the polls again in municipal elections on May 19, 2009.
This situation is even more outrageous, given the unvarnished bigotry of those involved.
c “You want freedom, you gonna have to kill some crackers,” King Samir Shabazz says on a National Geographic/You Tube video. “You gonna have to kill some of they [sic] babies.”
c “F*** Whitey’s Christmas,” read a message on Jerry Jackson’s MySpace page, until it was whitewashed once Kerry Picket uncovered it in the July 30, 2009, Washington Times. “BLACK UNITY, BLACK MINDS, KILLIN CRAKKKAS,” stated Mr. Jackson’s webpage.
c The leftish Southern Poverty Law Center calls NBPP “a hate group based on the anti-white, anti-gay, and anti-Semitic views its leaders have repeatedly expressed.”
Why would the supposedly ethnically transcendent Obama administration distribute free passes to the black equivalent of Ku Klux Klansmen? Blame power lust and unequal justice under law.
J. Christian Adams, until recently a career attorney in the Voting Section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, testified under oath on July 6 about an increasingly radical Justice Department before the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.
c According to Mr. Adams, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes last November instructed prosecutors on the “motor voter” law that governs voter registration. Regarding that statute’s Section 8 - which requires that local officials purge their rolls of relocated, ineligible and dead voters - Mr. Adams recalls hearing Ms. Fernandes, an Obama political appointee, say: “We have no interest in enforcing this provision of the law. It has nothing to do with increasing turnout, and we are just not going to do it.” Such lawlessness, of course, invites ACORN-style vote fraud.
c Mr. Adams also testified: “I was told by Voting Section management that cases are not going to be brought against black defendants [for] the benefit of white victims.”
Mr. Adams, who resigned from Justice in protest on June 1, encapsulated the Obama administration’s moral bankruptcy in this case: “We abetted wrongdoers and abandoned law-abiding citizens.”
Deroy Murdock is a nationally syndicated columnist with Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
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