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Giuliani Race-Baits Brooklyn Jews

If Bloomberg loses, it could be Dinkins redux, he implies

by
Michael Weiss
October 20, 2009
Giuliani campaigning for Bloomberg on Sunday.(NYTimes.com)
Giuliani campaigning for Bloomberg on Sunday.(NYTimes.com)

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani stumped for incumbent Mayor Michael Bloomberg over breakfast at the Jewish Community Council in Borough Park, Brooklyn, on Sunday. Rather than simply saying Bloomberg’s done a helluva job, worthy of that third term he gave himself license to run for, Giuliani sounded a warning note about what life in the city used to be like and what it can be like again if Mike isn’t returned to office: crime and chaos and a pandemic “fear of going out at night and walking the streets.” As if people didn’t know exactly what Giuliani was talking about, he added, “You know exactly what I’m talking about.”

The comment, delivered as it was among Orthodox rabbis and Jews old enough to remember the black-Jewish Crown Heights riots of the mid-’90s (and to remember that Giuliani’s predecessor as mayor was David Dinkins, who, like Bloomberg challenger Bill Thompson, is black), drew the expected fire from Thompson’s campaign, but also from Brooklyn City Councilman Bill de Blasio, who told the New York Times that Giuliani was on the “verge of race-baiting.” Even Giuliani’s admiring biographer, the conservative historian Fred Siegel, was appalled. “It’s smart to have Rudy out there, but not in this way,” Siegel told the New York Observer. “You want a positive appeal to draw ethnic voters to the polling place. But the overtones here are double-edged.” Siegel also said that Bloomberg’s follow-up to Giuliani’s remark—to compare New York to Detroit, where “gains are always in danger of being turned around”—was neither “neither morally defensible nor politically sensible.”