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| March 20, 2013The iconic picture of a bloodied injured Isaac Bitton on the August 21 1999 front page of the tabloid New York Post didn’t show the even-handedness of the politically-correct news reports of the previous days. But two days after the Crown Heights riots began it was the first New York publication to acknowledge that the murderous mob uprising against the Jews in that Brooklyn neighborhood was much more insidious than a case of mutual racial tension.
Two nights before 7-year-old Gavin Cato was accidentally run over by a yeshivah student who sped through an intersection trying to catch up with the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s motorcade. By the time the police and Hatzolah arrived on the scene a mob was already gathering to lynch the driver of the car who — bleeding from his head — was quickly spirited into an ambulance. It didn’t take long for a full-fledged riot to ensue. Blacks and other neighborhood minorities — already feeling demonized and undercut by the local government agencies who they claimed were giving whites (read: Jews) preferential treatment — were ripe for attack.
That night as the doors opened after a B.B. King concert attended by young riled-up black teenagers on the southern border of Crown Heights they heard a cry for revenge from Charles Price who told the crowd “We can’t take it anymore. The Jews get everything they want. They’re killing our children. We get no justice we get no respect. It’s an eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth!”
As store windows were shattered and mobs rampaged through the streets mothers barricaded their children inside with mattresses against the windows to prevent flying glass. Yankel Rosenblum Hy”d a defenseless Australian yeshivah student was fatally beaten and stabbed by a gang led by Lemerick Nelson.
Meanwhile police moved in reinforcements but were instructed not to interfere adding fuel to the theory quickly propagated by the media that the riots were an outcome of racial tension and would work themselves out.
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