By Morgan Whitaker
Rev. Al Sharpton hit back at Fox News host Bill O’Reilly on Friday’s
show after the conservative pundit revealed his $25,000 donation to
Sharpton’s charity in order to prove, in his words, “what kind of person
Sharpton is.”
“He’s been portraying me as a racist and a brutalizer of the poor,”
O’Reilly said on his Thursday program. ”A few years ago Sharpton told me
that his charity in Harlem, New York, was out of money and that it
could not provide Christmas presents and Christmas dinners to hundreds
of poor people in Harlem. So I gave Sharpton a $25,000 donation to
provide the gifts and the food.”
Sharpton said on Friday’s PoliticsNation that O’Reilly’s story is far more revealing of the conservative’s own nature.
“Bill doesn’t realize it, but this story actually reveals what kind
of person he is,” he said. “It says more about him that it does about
me. Because Bill gave that money privately to someone he’s publicly
called a quote ‘race hustler’ working in what he calls ‘the grievance
industry’ — That’s his term for the civil rights work that I do.”
“What are we supposed to think about a man who is privately generous,
but who says the most vile and divisive things in public?” he
continued.
In the weeks following the verdict in the Trayvon Martin case,
O’Reilly launched a series of attacks on Sharpton for his reaction to
that verdict, including calling for a Justice Department civil rights
investigation.
More recently, Sharpton had called out O’Reilly for referring to
people on food stamps as “parasites,” prompting O’Reilly to reveal his
donation.
“The sad truth is,” Sharpton said. “The good that Bill did with that
check is far outweighed by the vile and hateful things he says on the
air, night after night. Bill is playing to the extremists in his
audience.”
No comments:
Post a Comment
Spammers, stay out. Only political and video game discussion here.