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Racist Koch Croaks At long last, on February 1 Ed Koch finally breathed his last wheezy breath. The former New York City mayor was immediately beatified by the capitalist press. Admirers and former foes alike offered tributes, among them black Democratic operative Al Sharpton. President Obama gushed that he was “an extraordinary mayor.” On the other side, hundreds of thousands of blacks, Latinos and workers who suffered through the Koch years would love nothing more than to mark his passing by dancing the hora on his grave. As we wrote in “Racist Pig Ed Koch” (WV No. 351, 30 March 1984) during his second term as mayor: “Koch is a monster who loves to hurt the poor, the minorities. He is a virulent nationalist, a right-wing extremist who believes in genocide. He gets Harlem and the South Bronx confused with the West Bank. He treats blacks and Hispanics like Arabs, and turnstile jumpers like PLO ‘terrorists.’ The only difference between him and the gang of fascist killers in Israel led by JDL Führer Meir Kahane... is that Koch made it up the greasy pole of a bourgeois-democratic society.... Otherwise, he’s as chemically pure a fascist as you get.” Koch wasn’t just another big city mayor inflicting austerity and pain on the laboring and suffering population—he positively grooved on it. A liberal Democratic Party Congressman, Koch was elected mayor in 1977 by appealing to the white “ethnic” vote. He lurked outside subway stops to greet prospective voters, “Hi, I’m Ed Koch, I’m for capital punishment.” A raving Zionist, Koch believed Jews deserved special privileges. He ostentatiously celebrated Purim in 1984 by marching through the streets of Queens alongside Ariel Sharon, the butcher of more than 1,000 Palestinian refugees at Sabra and Shatila. Upon his re-election in 1985, Koch declared that “while it was the people who elected me, it was God that selected me” (New Yorker, 23 March 1987). For Koch, the high point of his tenure was the eleven-day transit strike in 1980, during which he was conspicuous in whipping up white middle-class animosity against the heavily black transit workers union, greeting yuppies traipsing across the Brooklyn Bridge in Brooks Brothers suits and Adidas running shoes at 8 a.m. Koch and his cops carried out a war against the homeless, hot dog vendors, newsstand operators and those protesting gentrification. Presiding over black misery, in 1980 Koch’s cops carried out a brutal attack on Harlem residents protesting the closing of Sydenham Hospital, a lifeline for thousands of Harlem’s poor. Mocking the black activists, Koch donned an Afro wig and did a minstrel jig at that year’s “Inner Circle” ball. His handpicked medical examiner, Elliot Gross, routinely destroyed evidence and falsified autopsy reports to exonerate the killer cops who were gunning down black people. Koch’s admirers and liberal hagiographers both like to cite his trademark greeting, “How’m I doing?” Now, as far as we’re concerned, never better.
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