Mugged (15 page)

The entire mosque incident was brushed off in a single slippery sentence: “The next year, another officer, Phillip Cardillo, was fatally shot inside a Harlem mosque.” Actually, he was murdered in cold blood and his assassin was protected by Patrick Murphy.

The
Times
was still dissembling about the mosque ambush in a May 12, 2012 article about a proposal to name a Harlem street after Phil Cardillo. The article described the 1972 ambush thus: The 911 call “turned out to be spurious, and a melee ensued,” adding that mosque leaders “believed they were being invaded by a hostile police force.” No. They set a trap for the purpose of killing cops. Everyone knew it—the police, the mayor and, certainly, the “mosque leaders.” (In the
Times
’s defense, it may not have known.)

The ranks of ordinary cops included plenty of black officers. These were
the ones on the street making arrests, at the mosque, visiting colleagues in the hospital afterward, and the ones who would be enraged for the rest of their lives at their betrayal by the mayor and top officials of the NYPD. But black cops were no more respected by liberals than white cops were. Only murderous, cop-killing, brick-throwing, garbage burning, taunting, spitting black miscreants at the Harlem mosque counted as “black” for purposes of the police brass and the politically correct media.

Phil Cardillo’s murderer was eventually brought to justice, mostly through the indefatigable work of detective Randy Jurgensen. Meanwhile, the top echelons of the NYPD did everything in their power to block the capture and conviction of the murderer. Any investigation might raise questions about their own despicable conduct.

Blocked from using police surveillance equipment, Cardillo’s partner privately said: “[They’ve] got a million motherf—king dollars’ worth of equipment to collar dope heads, but for a dead cop, we can’t get a camera and a roll of film. I wanna vomit…This job and those c—ksuckers downtown are a f—king joke. A dead cop, Randy, a dead cop. My partner.”

Do not imagine that New York City was saved by anything other than Rudy Giuliani.

While Police Chief Murphy and his coterie were throwing every manner of roadblock in Jurgensen’s way as he searched for Cardillo’s murderer, a black Muslim from Farrakhan’s mosque, Foster 2X Thomas was the hero of the case. Three years after the mosque attack, Thomas was arrested for using a stolen credit card. The polite young man immediately owned up to his crime and answered directly when asked about the ambush. As Foster explained in repeated interviews, he spoke the truth “because Minister Farrakhan always reminds the Muslims that we must tell the truth.”
⁹

Thomas had been working in the mosque bakery during the ambush and only emerged when he heard a commotion in the vestibule. Rushing in to defend his Muslim brothers, he was present when one of them shot the cop. He said it was Lewis 17X Dupree.

When Thomas testified against Dupree at trial, he was subjected to taunting from a hundred angry black Muslims glaring at him from the gallery. But, again, he matter-of-factly explained that he spoke the truth because Minister Farrakhan said Muslims must always be honest.

Unfortunately, the trial resulted in OJ-style justice with the truth coming out but with the jury hung, 10–2, for conviction. A black female juror refused to convict Dupree, and a white female juror refused to disagree
with her. The second trial, with a less impressive presentation, ended in an acquittal. (Lewis 17X Dupree later ended up in prison on a federal felony conviction in North Carolina.)

For telling the truth, Thomas had to be shuttled about in seedy motel safe houses for three years until the trial and then placed directly into the federal witness protection program after the second trial.

But liberals don’t celebrate men like Foster 2X Thomas. If only he had killed a cop or faked a hate crime, he would have been celebrated in movies, Hollywood petitions, Anna Quindlen columns and
New York Times
editorials. That was the chaotic, upside down world that liberals foisted on the nation in the 1970s right up to the OJ trial.

JIM JONES’S PEOPLES TEMPLE

Another shining example of the Democrats’ promotion of a fringe black “religion” was their close association with Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple. Though recent television biographies on Jones portray him as a religious leader in the mold of Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson, Jones was the original left-wing community organizer, beloved by Democratic politicians throughout the land.

Jones’s Temple was a black cult, even though Jones, like so many other jackass liberals who wreck black people’s lives, was white. But more than 80 percent of Jones’s followers were black,
¹⁰
and according to the most intensive study of Jonestown ever conducted—by the Department of Religious Studies at San Diego State University—the Peoples Temple was a “primarily black community in racial terms” and in “cultural identity.”
¹¹

That, in addition to the fact that Jones bashed America, meant that no matter how obviously unhinged he was, Democrats fawned over him. Just as they would later be required to pay homage to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, in the seventies Democrats had to kiss the ring of Jim Jones, atheist, communist and fake Cherokee. (What is it with liberals always claiming to be Cherokee?)

During Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign, Rosalynn Carter visited Jones’s Peoples Temple of “apostolic socialism” and appeared on a stage with him, an act second in embarrassment only to the time she appeared on stage with her husband. Carter’s vice presidential candidate,
Walter Mondale, wrote a letter to Jones, saying: “Knowing of your congregation’s deep involvement in the major social and constitutional issues of our country is a great inspiration to me.”
¹²

Based in San Francisco, Jones was embraced by all of California’s liberal elite, including then (and current) governor Jerry Brown, former governor Edmund Brown Jr., Democratic congressmen Phillip and John Burton, then assemblyman Willie Brown and San Francisco mayor George Moscone—who gave Jones a position on the city’s housing authority.
¹³

Jones modeled himself on a black preacher, Father Divine, giving sermons that were described as “fiery” and “charismatic.” As one member put it, “He preached and he read good. And he shout. I used to like to see him shout.”
¹⁴
An article in the
San Francisco Chronicle
described Jones as a “Southern-style gospel preacher” who “tossed Marxist phraseology into sermons.”
¹⁵

Like Farrakhan’s mosque, Jones’s temple was protected by locked doors and armed bodyguards. He was a bisexual who had sexual liaisons with many of his followers as well as those far outside his church: In December 1973, he was arrested in a Hollywood theater for attempting to molest an undercover policeman in a theater.
¹⁶

Even before the mass suicide in Guyana, it was obvious that Jones was as mad as a March hare. His newspaper,
Peoples Forum
, was like a mini-
Nation
magazine, praising socialism, Black Panthers, Angela Davis and Huey Newton, and predicting a “Nazi” takeover of America. He warned his followers that fascists were planning concentration camps for black people, to do to them exactly what Germany did to the Jews.
¹⁷
Jones had relocated his so-called church to California from Indiana in the 1960s because he anticipated a thermonuclear war in 1967 and believed only Brazil and California would be safe.

He demanded that members remit jewelry, furs and homes to the temple as well as at least 25 to 40 percent of their money—another clue that he was a Democrat.
¹⁸
Many followers were forced to sign “confessions” to horrible crimes they had never committed.

During the “healing” sessions, Jones’s wife, Marceline, would go into a bathroom with a cancer patient and emerge with old chicken gizzards in a jar, proclaiming—to cheers from the congregation—that the cancer had “passed.” (This is covered in a lesser-known provision of Obamacare, by the way.) During “catharsis” sessions, members were disciplined with belts, paddles, fists, urine and vomit. Jones trained them out of their “hypocrisy” by having the entire congregation shout “shit!” over and over again.
¹⁹

A year before the final bloodbath, Marceline Jones told the
New York Times
that Jones’s hero was Mao Tse-tung and that his goal had always been social change through Marxism. She said he only “used religion to try to get some people out of the opiate of religion.”
²⁰

The
Times
reported that Jones “was openly contemptuous of religion among his associates”
²¹
and, according to his wife, had once slammed a Bible on the table and said, “I’ve got to destroy this paper idol!”
²²
One Jonestown survivor admitted that “even though it called itself a church, that was to legitimize it, to validate it, there was never actual Bible study.”
²³

(And yet, Christopher Hitchens included Jim Jones’s Marxist cult in a list of monstrosities caused by religion in his book,
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
. God can’t get a break.)

For most of its existence, Jones’s commune was left alone by the press. But on August 1, 1977,
New West
magazine ran a major exposé on Jones, based on interviews with more than a dozen former members willing to speak on the record. In response to credible allegations of child abuse, assault and fraud, San Francisco’s liberal political establishment rallied around Jones.

The Democratic mayor and district attorney—whom Jones had helped elect—refused to investigate (a practice now known as “pulling an Eric Holder”) with both Moscone and District Attorney Joseph Freitas Jr. summarily announcing that no laws had been broken.
²⁴

Willie Brown responded to the accusations by showing up at a rally at Jones’s Temple, saying the attacks on the commune were “a measure of its effectiveness.”
²⁵
Would it kill you to become a follower of Reverend Jones?

Sadly, none of these elected Democrats accompanied the Peoples Temple to Guyana.

Would the political and media establishments have looked away if the Peoples Temple had not been left-wing and majority black? With few exceptions, it wasn’t until after the mass suicide in Guyana that the major press took any notice of Jones at all. Why hadn’t anyone in the media—apart from
New West
magazine—bothered exposing this lunatic before he led more than nine hundred people to suicide?

Not long after the
New West
investigative report appeared, Jones resigned from his position with the housing authority and fled with his followers to Guyana, a country he admired for its Marxist government. His entry was greased with letters of recommendation from Rosalynn Carter, Vice President Walter Mondale, and Carter cabinet member Joseph Califano,
²⁶
among other eminent Democrats. His plan was to create “an experiment in socialism.”
²⁷
Terrific move. Those always go so well.

In Guyana, Jones began meeting with KGB agents at the Soviet embassy, hoping to move the commune to Russia. In anticipation of the move, Jones instituted mandatory Russian-language classes at Jonestown, refusing to let people eat—even the elderly—unless they spoke in Russian.
²⁸
In Guyana, he also began the suicide drills, which he called “White Nights.”
²⁹

After the cult’s departure to Guyana, ex-members and relatives of members began kicking up a fuss, warning in interviews, newspaper articles, and letters to President Carter and the State Department that Jones was insane and was planning a mass suicide. Carter’s State Department investigated and concluded that it had no basis for action.
³⁰

In November 1978 a Bay Area congressman, Leo Ryan, went on a fact-finding mission to Guyana. As he and his entourage were about to board their plane for home, Jones’s followers sprayed them with machine-gun fire, killing Ryan and NBC correspondent Dan Harris. In all, five people were killed and ten wounded.

Back at the socialist paradise, Jones ordered his followers to commit “revolutionary suicide” to protest “the conditions of an inhumane world.” Several cult members asked what happened to the plane to Russia. Jones told them Russia wasn’t going to happen and tried to get on with the mass suicide. But they kept pestering him about Russia, until Jones assured them that “I’m right now making a call to Russia.” But minutes later, he began exhorting them to take the grape drink and die “quickly, quickly, quickly, quickly, quickly.…Good knowing you!”

As hundreds died in front of him, Jones never mentioned God, but rather harangued his followers to stop their hysterics because “this is not the way for people who are Socialists or Communists to die.…I call on you to stop this now if you have any respect at all. Are we black, proud, and Socialist, or what are we?”
³¹

More than nine hundred men, women and children died, most of them black. The majority died by drinking cyanide-laced Flavor Aid grape drink, an act memorialized in popular culture as “drinking the Kool-Aid.” Cyanide poison causes death after several painful minutes of writhing, screaming and foaming at the mouth.
³²
Some were apparently murdered with injections of the poison. Jones died of a gunshot wound to the head.

His wife, Marceline, left a will bequeathing all her money to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, specifically directing that her daughter, Suzanne Jones Cartmell, was to receive nothing. Three members who escaped the mass suicide said that during the massacre, Jones’s mistress, Maria Katsaris, gave them a heavy box, instructing them to take it to the
Soviet embassy. The box, which never made it to the embassy, had half a million dollars in it.

Jones’s only religion was communism and a strange multicultural bisexualism—in other words, he was a mainstream Democrat. Even Jones’s lawyers were part of the fabric of liberal America. One was attorney Charles Garry, white lawyer to the Black Panthers, who had defended Bobby Seale in the Chicago Seven trial. Garry pleaded the Fifth Amendment when called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Just one year before the Guyana massacre, Garry returned from a visit to Jonestown, proclaiming to the U.S. press, “I have been to paradise!”
³³
Garry was visiting Jonestown again when Representative Ryan’s party was shot. He bravely ran into the woods to escape.
³⁴