This Sunday New York Times reporter Alex Williams paid tribute to Harry Belafonte, the aging entertainer and fan of the late Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and the story included plenty of pictures from the lefty-studded NYC gala held in the entertainer’s honor (which Belafonte was unable to attend) (click “expand”):
“He put his money where his mouth is, and he put his career on the line,” said Laurence Fishburne at a gala Tuesday night celebrating the 95th birthday of Harry Belafonte, This groundbreaking entertainer may have left a lasting legacy through his fight for racial justice. “And he looked pretty while he was doing it.”
Mr. Fishburne was one of more than 1,000 elegantly attired attendees at The Town Hall theater in Manhattan for the first Harry Belafonte Social Justice Awards given by Sankofa.org, a social justice organization founded 10 years ago by Mr. Belafonte….
(….)
Presenters include Spike Lee and Whoopi Goldberg were accompanied by Michael MooreIt should be noted that Mr. Belafonte was an active advocate for racial equality since the Eisenhower years. This could have been career-threatening.
There was ample room there for news-gathering: Lee and Goldberg have recently embarrassed themselves with political controversies — Lee by flirting with 9-11 “inside job” conspiracies, Goldberg with her shockingly bad take on the Holocaust. Not to mention “dapper” Al Sharpton, whose long history of racial arson rhetoric has been laundered by years at MSNBC.
All of this was not mentioned. However, if there were conservatives celebrating one of theirs, It Times would certainly have brought up January 6 or pestered attendees about who they thought won the 2020 election. They instead compared themselves with Ukrainians who were facing an invasion by Russia.
People who had the pleasure of knowing Mr. Belafonte said that grace and wit served as useful tools for fighting injustice.. “We traveled all over the country and the world together, and I always loved his sense of humor,” said Cornel West, the professor and public intellectual who received a social justice award in education. “It’s hard to have a genuine revolutionary with a sense of the comic.”
(….)
This was more than a night to look back. “You can’t fight for democracy in the Ukraine and not fight for it here,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton looks dapper in his three-piece, steel-blue suit.
To make matters worse, Williams let deceitful left-wing documentarian Michael Moore throw a lefty stink bomb to end the proceedings.
The evening was drawing to an end when Mr. Moore stepped on stage wearing a black sweatshirt with a cap. He pointed out That in 1927, the year Mr. Belafonte was born, the highest-grossing film was “The Jazz Singer,” featuring a scene where Al Jolson, a white actor, performs in blackface, and, he said, “there was no Voting Rights Act for Black Americans — just like now.”
The paper previously marked Belafonte’s 90th birthday in similar fashion, rolling out the red carpet for the Castro supporter in October 2016 in “Old Warrior Takes Stock But Continues the Fight” A subhead read that Belafonte was part of a festival “focusing on voting, Mass imprisonment and the relationship between community and law enforcement.”
It was quite nervy for writer Tamara Best to bring up “mass incarceration,” while ignoring her subject’s long, passionate support for the decidedly pro-incarceration Cuban Communist dictator Fidel Castro. Belafonte has been quoted: “If you believe in freedom, if you believe in justice, if you believe in democracy, you have no choice but to support Fidel Castro!” Well, Cubans certainly didn’t have any choice.
The double standard is more obvious when one watches this same newspaper work so feverishly to tie Fox News personalities to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, no hero to anyone on the mainstream right.
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