Jones was disheartened by the silence of some in the Jewish community, comparing the initial response to the police attacks on blacks to the Nazi campaign of extinction in the 1930s. "I am also reminded that just as the Africans of New York, in the face of death-squad activities sanctioned and encouraged by a fascist government, continue to depend upon the judicial system for justice, even when history clearly provides no evidence in support thereof, the Jewish middle class in Germany tended to look the other way when the Germans came for Gypsies, the feebleminded, the lame, and the less affluent Jews," he argued.
"Just as the bourgeois Jew of the 1930s saw the decimation of the poor Jew as an aberration in a system, which was fundamentally rational, so does the Negro trusty in the New York of the 1990s view the execution of a young African by a death squad of the New York City Police Department as an aberration having nothing to do with the life or lifestyle of the trusty class."
Enemy Squad: We have met the enemy, and it’s not us.
Related Content
More About
Jones is no Khallid Muhammad, but he complained that "the tepid, if not timid, response to terror by the Africans of New York [sent] the desired signal to all the fascist forces of America [that] Negroes have lost the will to resist." In a direct attack on Sharpton's tactics, Jones declared, "This is hardly the time for prayer vigils and symbolic rallies, organized and led by would-be politicians and ambulance chasers." This approach, he charged, is "calculated solely to divert the attention of the black masses from the reality of life and death. . . .
"The current tactics are the direct result of a failure of intellect on the part of those who follow the leaders of these so-called protests," Jones contended. "It is a failure to understand the distinction between a march to City Hall and a march on City Hall. It is a failure to understand the difference between cause and effect and to develop a strategy designed to eliminate the cause of the death of the young African who was gunned down for no reason other than the color of his skin by a death squad consisting of a group of Mafia rejects acting under the aegis of a fascist state. It is failure to understand the difference between the concept of civil rights and that of human rights. It is a failure to understand the difference [between] a simple act of murder and a war crime."
The CCRB will determine whether a crime was committed by cops in the case of Enemy Squad. What is striking, however, is the length some defenders of Diallo's accused killers will go to portray the NYPD as an army of efficient lawmen unaffected by persistent accusations of brutality. "I don't hear lots of complaints about police misconduct," Commissioner Safir said at a City Council hearing last week. "What I do hear about is they want more cops. They want more cops doing what they've been doing."
But critics of the NYPD charge that Safir has turned a deaf ear to complaints that cops are frequently abusive of those they encounter, especially minorities. For members of Enemy Squad, Safir's NYPD had made the city a scary place to visit. Following the incident, "the band performed that night, and wanted to get on the road directly after the show as they were frightened to stay in the city," Braunstein recalled in his complaint. "I convinced them to return to my apartment to sleep. Mr. Haber spent the night in the van."
The next morning, at about 9:30, two of the officers allegedly involved in the raid accosted Haber, who was listening to the Howard Stern show on the radio. "The head officer," according to Braunstein, "asked Mr. Haber what was going on [because] he had heard there was going to be an investigation and demanded to know why we were looking into it. Mr. Haber took this as an overt act of intimidation and explained that their manager and the band members felt that their rights had been deeply violated, that they had no cause to harass them, [or to] enter and search the apartment without a warrant or identification. The officer then identified himself [his name is being withheld by the Voice] and suggested that Mr. Haber have his manager call him directly."
Additional reporting: Danielle Douglas and wire services
