Who is responsible for violence when the verbal gasoline of hate speech is splashed across an already emotional crowd, and the temperature of that crowd is raised to the point of ignition by an expert at oratorical arson like the Reverend Al Sharpton?

Mayor Giuliani is to blame, intoned liberal New York politicians and pundits. He had been cold and unsympathetic to the family of Patrick Dorismond, the third unarmed black man gunned down in thirteen months by New York City police. It was following the 26-year-old Haitian-American's funeral mass that an angry crowd of at least 2,500 marchers and mourners had been conjured by the righteous voodoo politics of Sharpton. This crowd—inflamed by the presence of police in riot gear—knocked over police blockades, broke the leg of one officer, and by confrontation's end hospitalized 23 policemen and four onlookers. Twenty-seven demonstrators were arrested.

In trying to identify who is responsible for a crime, prosecuting attorneys begin with a question: cui bono? Who benefits? Who has a selfish motive? A man is murdered, so his nephew who stands to inherit $10 million is a logical suspect. Two people clearly benefited from the rage and racial polarization that flared in Saturday's violence—the Reverend Sharpton, and the woman running against Mayor Giuliani for U.S. Senate, Hillary formerly known as Mrs. Clinton.

Sharpton's career, notoriety, and power have been built from such racial confrontations. He came to national attention in 1987, accusing a Dutchess County assistant district attorney of being one of a gang of whites who purportedly raped black fifteen-year-old Tawana Brawley and left her smeared with excrement and swastikas. Her claims were found to be a hoax, and after the victim of his defamation won a lawsuit, a court ordered Sharpton and two co-defendants to pay $345,000.

In 1991, Sharpton spoke at the funeral of a black child in Brooklyn. The Hasidic Jews involved in the traffic accident that took the child's life, Sharpton preached, were "diamond merchants." Sharpton then led 400 angry demonstrators through the Jewish neighborhood of Crown Heights, a marcher at his side carrying a sign reading: "The White Man is the Devil." A Kristallnacht of four nights of rock and bottle throwing at Jewish homes followed. A young Talmudic scholar, Yankel Rosenbaum, was surrounded by thugs yelling "Kill the Jew." He was stabbed to death, but before dying, identified the man who stabbed him. This young black, apprehended with the bloody knife in his pocket, was found not guilty by a racially mixed jury during the administration of Giuliani's predecessor, New York's first black mayor, David Dinkins. Dinkins' Police Commissioner, Lee Brown, declared that "Sharpton came close to the line of inciting [to riot] but did not actually cross it."

In 1995 in Harlem, when, during a tenant–landlord dispute, Freddy's Fashion Mart attempted to evict a black-owned record store, Sharpton organized protests against what he called a "conspiracy" by a "white interloper." It was, as one of Sharpton's lieutenants told protestors, a "Jewish department store." After one demonstration, a protestor ran into the store, gunned down several employees, and set it ablaze. Seven, including Hispanics and a black security guard, died. As Boston Herald columnist Don Feder wrote of this carnage, "Don't fault Sharpton for not being inclusive."

But in the case of Patrick Dorismond's death on March 16, the Reverend Sharpton neglected racial inclusiveness. The undercover drug policemen who confronted the unarmed security guard were all Hispanic. The officer who shot Dorismond when the young man reportedly scuffled with him and grabbed for his gun is Detective Anthony Vasquez.

If Mr. Dorismond had been white and succeeded in killing Vasquez with his own gun, possibly Sharpton and probably Hillary Clinton would now be protesting the murder of this noble "person of color" by another evil white man. But Dorismond is black, so both politicians have chosen to avoid mentioning that the undercover police officers in this case are also of politically correct race and ethnicity. This inconvenient fact might break the hypnotic voodoo spell of the drama they are staging.

The media have been broadcasting this drama pretty much as Al and Hillary scripted it. But look closer and other inconvenient facts reveal the fantasy being spun for the public mind. We are being told, for example, that police in riot gear set off rage in an otherwise quiet crowd. The reality is that the New York City police arrived wearing low-key outfits and blue baseball caps. They were then barraged with hundreds of bricks and glass bottles filled with urine with which these "quiet" protestors had come armed. Giuliani was right to call what happened "an orchestrated attack on police." Only after being assaulted, with many officers suffering head and face injuries, did the police return wearing riot helmets and carrying shields.

Such "Street Theatre" was a standard tactic of the 1960s radical left at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and elsewhere. Attack the police, then rely on your ideological comrades in the media to broadcast only the police reaction as if the "pigs" had initiated the confrontation.

Almost certainly to Al and Hillary's disappointment, the police last Saturday were not lured into overreaction … not by bottles, bricks, signs depicting Rudy as Hitler, nor the burning of the American flag ripped from Dorismond's coffin. Media cameras apparently caught no perfect propaganda shots of officers clubbing their attackers—or you would have seen that footage hundreds of times by now.

Hillary, as former Justice Department attorney Barbara Olsen reminds us in her bestseller Hell to Pay, during the 1960s was an activist supporter of the Black Panthers, including in a case where Panthers had murdered a black man who would not bow to their demands. She also embraced the teachings of radical organizer Saul Alinsky. Among Alinsky's dictums for "pure attack" is: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."

How soon we forget the lessons of three decades ago. What Hillary Clinton and her ardent supporter Al Sharpton are doing to attack Giuliani comes straight from the tactics textbook of the 1960s Marxist Left.

The Reverend Jesse Jackson has a supporting role in their script. On hiatus from Decatur, Illinois, days ago he breezed into New York City (or, as he has called it, "Hymietown") to help Hillary and sunbathe in the glow of TV camera lights. Jackson knows how this game is played. In 1989 he reportedly told the father of a black Bensonhurst teen killed by white thugs during the administration of white Democratic Mayor Ed Koch, "That boy lying in there is going to make David Dinkins mayor." Without medical credentials, Rev. Jackson diagnosed Mayor Giuliani as "mentally disturbed." Prior to any investigation or trial, he proclaimed that Mr. Dorismond's death was "murder." Hillary had used the same tactics of divide-and-conquer racist personalizing and polarizing when she declared the shooting of African immigrant Amadou Diallo "murder" (speaking from Sharpton's own podium) days before a jury, whose foreman and four of whose members were black, found the accused policemen not guilty of any charges.

A little green man arriving from Mars would discover cognitive dissonance in New York. Turn on the liberal media and he would see Mayor Giuliani depicted as a reincarnation of Mussolini, brutal and with ice water in his veins instead of blood. He would conclude that trigger-happy New York City police spend every hour of the day emptying their guns into every innocent man on the streets. He would be told that Giuliani has given his Gestapo a license to kill, and that people on New York's streets live in terror of the police.

But when this Martian turns his computer to the cold, hard reality of facts, a very different picture emerges. In 1990, under Mayor Dinkins, 41 suspects were shot to death in confrontations with police. This is 372 percent more killings by police than the eleven that happened last year with Rudy Giuliani in control of the police. What makes this dramatic drop in police shootings all the more remarkable is that New York City has 11,000 more police today than in 1990, but only 27 percent as many deaths because of police gunfire.

Even more dramatic than the Giuliani drop in deaths caused by police is his success in reducing deaths caused by murderers. New York City in 1990 had 2,350 murders. Last year that number fell to 635. That is 1,715 fewer murders per year, or an average of 4.7 fewer New Yorkers murdered every day.

Former prosecutor Rudy Giuliani's tough policy against crime saves more lives every three days than have been lost in the eleven fatal police shootings during the past year. A significant share of these lives saved are black. And millions of lives have been made better, as New Yorkers walk their streets feeling safer than they did when soft-hearted, soft-headed liberals governed the city. Arrest rates are up by 90 percent, and—surprise, surprise—all kinds of violent crime have decreased dramatically during Giuliani's tenure.

New Yorkers are intelligent, you would think. They do not want to go back to the nightmare days when liberals like David Dinkins and Al Sharpton excused and thereby encouraged violence; when people constantly looked over their shoulders in fear.

But usually bright New Yorkers have been gulled and conned by propaganda tactics that to anybody outside the relentless doublespeak brainwashing of that state's Orwellian liberal media are easy to recognize.

The latest Zogby International Poll finds that the Dorismond tragedy has vaulted Hillary Clinton ahead of Giuliani for the first time in this Senate race, 45 to 42.3 percent, a ten-point turnaround in her favor. "It's not that she's doing better, it's that he's doing worse," John Zogby told Associated Press. "We've seen the tide turn."

Giuliani's greatest achievement was to bring improved peace and safety to his city. By deliberately mobilizing forces of hate and racial division to undermine this perception, Hillary and her close ally Al have turned New Yorkers in her favor by the minimum margin a Democrat needs in the city to win statewide—66 to 28 percent over Giuliani. Even though this propaganda attack implicitly accuses Hispanic cops of wrongdoing, her margin of victory among Hispanics has risen to 81 percent. (Did having Bill Clinton set free those convicted Puerto Rican terrorists do the trick—however much it undermined the safety of New Yorkers?) Even Upstate, although Hillary's approval only inched up by four points, Giuliani's fell precipitously, from 53 to 44 percent.

Most surprising of all, support for Hillary among New York Jewish voters, a traditional pillar of Democratic strength, has during the past week shifted from 51–42 for Hillary to 56–28—one small step for her, one giant plunge for Rudy. But these are the people who have died at the hands of anti-Semites whipped up by Hillary's comrade Al Sharpton. Hillary herself, as I detailed here last November 24, has a disturbing past suggestive of her own anti-Semitism. How could any Jew who remembered what people resembling Hillary and Sharpton did to foment past pogroms and exterminations ever consider voting for her?

I can only guess that their reason comes from a deep-rooted psychology that Hillary is now manipulating. It's reflected in the grim dialog "joke" told among landsmen:

"Jacob, why are they dragging us towards those ovens???"

"Be quiet, Sid. Don't cause trouble."

It is, of course, Al Sharpton who, for his own power and glorification, is causing one bloody racial and anti-Jewish incident of trouble after another. But many Jews seem to believe, as they did during the 1930s in Germany, that it is better to appease and pay off the anti-Semites than to confront and defeat them as Giuliani has done.

For Hillary and Al Gore and Bill Bradley, their other reason for kneeling to kiss the ring of Al Sharpton is clear. Blacks are the voting bloc on which the power of the Democratic Party depends. Large numbers of blacks are swayed by the racist and divisive rhetoric of demagogues like Sharpton, who organized and asked the lead-off question at the Harlem Democratic presidential debate. Since leaders such as Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and the Nation of Islam's Louis Farrakhan voice hatred for Jews, the Democratic Party, by its assent, is becoming America's anti-Semitic political party. It demonstrated as much during its 1984 National Convention, refusing to allow a vote from the floor on a platform measure condemning anti-Semitism because the statement might offend the Rev. Jesse Jackson and his ally Farrakhan. As even liberal reporter Mara Laisson of National Public Radio noted on FoxNews Channel, last week Hillary was repeatedly asked by reporters if she saw anything—anything whatsoever—to criticize in the behavior or language of Rev. Al Sharpton … and Hillary refused to answer the questions.

Is it any wonder that some are starting to re-name the Democratic Party "Anti-Semocrats" or "Mobocrats" to acknowledge the controlling power of those like the black David Duke, Al Sharpton, in setting its divide-and-conquer racist politics, its redistributionist agenda, and its course Leftward?

Giuliani was correct, of course, to observe that Saturday's mini-riot was what happens "when you allow demagogues to take over for political and divisive purposes." Before this riot, Hillary accused the Mayor of "dividing the City" along racial lines. Sigmund Freud might have seen her statement as what he called "projection," whereby the mind of a thief sees everybody around him as a thief. But she is far colder and more calculating, using the tactics she learned at Saul Alinsky's knee to freeze, personalize, and polarize as a path to her own political power.

(Having already used Housing and Urban Development Secretary Andrew Cuomo to confiscate $60 million of federal housing money from Rudy's dispersing power, the megalomaniac Hillary will next demand that federal monitors seize the power to run New York City's police, thereby devastating law and order and further splitting the city along black and blue lines.)

That power is aimed at using the New York Senate seat as a steppingstone to gain Hillary the presidency in 2004 or 2008. (Are you ready for a two-step, hopscotch presidency in the history books—Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton?) She may well succeed, especially with New York's Conservative Party willing to consider giving its votes to a candidate as extreme as anti-abortion activist Randall Terry and thereby helping the ultimate pro-abortionist Hillary Clinton win. (In 1993, Rudy became Mayor only with the margin of votes provided him by the state's Liberal Party.) The question for New Yorkers to ask: to reward this master of mayhem and mobocracy for the threats of violence and intimidation against New Yorkers that gave her victory, what cabinet post has Hillary promised to Al Sharpton? Or has she offered to make him vice president, a heartbeat away from the Oval Office?

"Sharpton and his rent-a-mob should be filling out Federal Election Commission forms for their 'in kind' contribution to Hillary's campaign," says California Republican consultant Bob Phelan. If she becomes New York's next senator, Sharpton will have provided her winning margin.

The double-edged irony in this is that some will vote for Hillary because they want to retain Rudy as their law-and-order mayor rather than have him replaced in mid-term automatically with lefties like NYC Public Advocate Mark Green. And if Sharpton succeeds in defeating Rudy by smearing him with charges of excessive police violence, Rudy will remain as mayor in control of those police. If Rudy is elected to the Senate, the city government would revert immediately to liberal Democratic control.

As the Dorismond drama played in New York City, across the continent in Murietta, California, a 24-year-old black man filed civil-rights lawsuits in state and federal courts. He had been beaten and stabbed by white racist skinheads a year earlier on St. Patrick's Day. (No wonder the government housing authority in Boston has banned any display of shamrocks in windows as a racially offensive symbol, along with the Swastika and Confederate flag.) Randy Wordell Bowen named the groups Hammerskin Nation and the Western Hammerskins in his lawsuit seeking to limit their "advocacy" of violence. According to University of Southern California law professor Erwin Chemerinsky, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling opens the way to find groups liable when their preachments produce "a substantial likelihood" of imminent illegal acts. Gee, if this applies to purportedly white racist groups, does it apply equally to Al Sharpton? We know how much he favors equality before the law.

Is violence born from immaculate conception? Does it have no father who can be held responsible? Who plants the seeds from which it grows? The mother of that six-year-old who shot and killed a female classmate in Flint, Michigan, has suggested who deserves blame. To her credit, the young killer's mother does not blame the gun. No, she implies that the guilty party is Michigan's Republican Governor John Engler, whose welfare reform forced her to go to work. Had she remained home, supported by taxpayers enslaved to serve her, this violence would not have happened. (Make a note: old form of slavery Bad, new form of welfare-state slavery for taxpayers Good.) Somehow I suspect that Hillary and Al would agree with her, but would also find the gun guilty.