Hillary Recalls Her Fulani Moment
Posted By Adam DickterPolitical Insider: Hillary Recalls Her Fulani Moment
In Tuesday night’s debate Hillary Clinton implied that she was stronger than Barack Obama in standing up to anti-Semitism.
Her comments came after Obama responded to a question from NBC’s Tim Russert about whether he would reject the endorsement of Louis Farrakhan, and Obama equivocated, standing by his denunciation of the Nation of Islam leader.
That led the New York senator to refer to an incident during her 2000 Senate bid when she denounced a faction of New York’s Independence Party controlled by Lenora Fulani and did not seek the party’s endorsement. Fulani has accused Jews of being “mass murderers of people of color.”
“[The party] was under the control of people who are anti-Semitic, anti-Israel and I made it very clear that I did not want their support and rejected it and said it would not be anything I would e comfortable with,” Clinton said. “It looked as if I may pay a price for that … I would not be associated with people who said such inflammatory and untrue charges against either Israel or the Jewish peple in our country. I thought it was more important to stand on principle.”
That’s true enough. Clinton even went to the party’s candidates forum and, in a sort of Sister Souljah moment, denounced “voices of anti-Semitism, extremism, prejudice and intolerance.”
But critics at the time, as The Jewish Week reported, said that she and her husband actively solicited the endorsement of the Independence Party, the state’s third largest, knowing full well of Fulani’s influence. President Clinton even played golf with the party’s three-time gubernatorial candidate, Rochester billionaire Tom Golisano in a bid to win his support.
Hillary Sought the support of the Independence Party
02/28/08 @ 08:37 AM | Posted By Bob Conroy Adam,Your readers can read at www.independentvoting.org/news/HillaryClinton.html on how Hillary Clinton sought the support of the Independence Party of New York for cross-endorsement of her Senate campaign in 2000. She also sought a guarantee from party leaders that she would not have to compete for the support of independents in a primary against then opponent Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Failing to extract such a "no primary" promise, the former First Lady abruptly changed her tune and began attacking the party. Read the blow-by-blow account by Independence Party insider Jackie Salit who later ran Mike Blooomberg’s mayoral campaigns on the party’s line.