When Rudy Giuliani recently appeared with Mayor Bloomberg at an Orthodox Jewish gathering in Brooklyn, he unleashed a firestorm of incendiary comments. Most alarming for some of his backers was what Bill de Blasio charged as “veiled race baiting” by the former mayor.
“I worried daily that the city might be turned back to the way it was before 1993—and you know exactly what I’m talking about,” Giuliani told the Boro Park Jewish Community Council. “This community remembers the fears, the worries and the crimes—and the great fear of going out at night and walking the streets.”
Such an insinuation was not missed by de Blasio. “If Giuliani is using an openly divisive tactic, Bloomberg has to disavow it,” said de Blasio, the odds-on favorite to become the city’s next public advocate.
City Controller and mayoral hopeful Bill Thompson was equally perturbed by Giuliani and Bloomberg’s remarks.
“I am very disappointed that they have taken a step backward,” Thompson told the Amsterdam News. “This is nothing more than a return to the politics of fear and division by Giuliani. And Mike Bloomberg is engaged in similar tactics. The mayor is merely trying to distract us from his failed policies.”
If African-American supporters of Bloomberg are upset by Giuliani’s comments and his stumping for Bloomberg, only one of them was willing to respond.
“Mayor Bloomberg must unequivocally distance himself from Giuliani’s remarks and his attempts to take New Yorkers back to a place we don’t want to return,” said Milton Allimadi, publisher of the Black Star News and a Bloomberg endorser.
http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=2b05a1f696291faa3ada179311bb2798
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