The Obama Justice Department let the New Black Panther Party off the hook for voter intimidation in a federal election but this week the radical group leader, King Samir Shabazz, who led that effort got busted on gun charges.
New York police spotted Shabazz wearing a bulletproof vest in Harlem, stopped him and discovered he was carrying a loaded and unlicensed gun, according to a newspaper report in Shabazz’s hometown of Philadelphia. He was jailed and slapped with charges of illegal gun possession and illegally wearing body armor. Now he could actually go to jail.
This is the same thug who says black people should create militias to exterminate whites, skin them alive, pour acid on them, sick pit bulls on them, bust their heads with rocks and even raid nurseries to “kill everything white in sight.” The same newspaper quotes the Black Panther leader, a Philly street preacher, on a black-power radio show: “I would love nothing more than to come home with a cracker’s head in my book bag.”
The news article points out that “such sentiment hasn’t gotten him arrested.” But Shabazz did get charged for violating federal law during the 2008 presidential election when he and his Black Panther posse blocked a polling station in Philadelphia, clad in paramilitary outfits and brandishing weapons. The Black Panthers intimidated voters as well as poll watchers by verbally threatening them, hurling profanities and racial epitaphs.
Under the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the Department of Justice (DOJ) brought a voter intimidation case against the Black Panthers, which have been labeled a hate group by a number of leftwing nonprofits for their anti-white and anti-Semitic rhetoric. For instance, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry, describes the Black Panthers as a “virulently racist and anti-Semitic organization whose leaders have encouraged violence against whites, Jews and law enforcement officers.”
Led by Shabazz, the Black Panthers violated the section of the Voting Rights Act that prohibits intimidation, coercion or threats against any person for voting or attempting to vote, according to the complaint filed by the feds in 2009 in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia. The DOJ also pursued an injunction preventing any future deployment of or display of weapons by Black Panther members at the entrance of a polling location.
But a few months later the Obama DOJ quietly dropped the charges and it all disappeared like a bad dream. Judicial Watch investigated and after suing the DOJ, obtained explosive documents that show Obama political appointees were intimately involved in the decision to dismiss the voter intimidation case against the Black Panthers. The documents directly contradict sworn testimony by Obama’s Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, Thomas Perez, that no political leadership was involved in the decision.
Adding to the scandal, a veteran DOJ civil rights attorney who worked on the Black Panther case accused the agency of racial bias for dropping charges against the group and resigned over the “corrupt nature of the dismissal.” During testimony before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the whistleblower, J. Christian Adams, said there’s a pervasive and open hostility towards equal enforcement of the law in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division.
