On the heels of Eric Holder's dismissal of charges against the New Black Panther Party (NBPP) for harassment at a Philadelphia polling location, video resurfaced of the actions of the NBPP. Just out of curiosity, I went to the website of the NBPP to view their platform. In a nutshell, the NBPP wants the same thing as progressives, liberals and Democrats want, power.
The group's platform for black people lies in 10 items which have been paraphrased for brevity:
Freedom to determine their destiny & they have a belief in the Bible, Koran & other texts.
Full employment & wealth, power & arms in the hands of the people.
No taxes & reparations
Decent housing, free healthcare
Education
Exemption from military service
Black People's militia
Release of all blacks from international, national and local jails
Fair trials in courts
Ending of the death penalty
At the core of each platform, is victimization. Of course, without a perpetual victim and a perpetual oppressor, organizations such as the New Black Panther Party would quickly diminish.
The refusal of the Justice Department to prosecute for voter harassment merely furthers the divisiveness which allows organizations such as the NBPP to exist.
The New Black Panther Party exists for just one goal: To line the pockets of its founder and fuehrer Malik Zulu Shabazz (real name: Paris Lewis). At a "Black Power" street concert in NYC some years ago, Shabazz actually encouraged the crowd to ignore the curfew set in his parade permit: when the police moved in, Shabazz grabbed the money box and was gone in a flash -- he was no help to his audience members who were arrested. Everything Shabazz talks about ends in money that he didn't work for.
About a dozen years ago he ran for the Washington, DC City Council from the absolutely most wretched neighborhood in the city -- he didn't live there, but he rented a room at the last possible moment to qualify as a resident. Even though he had made himself Extremely Conspicuous as a campaign worker for sometime Mayor Marion Barry, and was using a lot of photos of himself beside Barry in his campaign literature, Barry refused to endorse him. Hardly anyone with any reputation endorsed him, he was reduced to bringing defrocked Nation of Islam race-baiter Khallid Mohammed to his campaign rallies as his "celebrity" supporter. His one significant campaign issue: Black storekeepers had fled that crime-ridden ward as soon as they could afford to move, and now the majority of grocery stores were these tiny aviary type stores (with ALL the merchandise and the cashiers on the other side of bulletproof glass) owned and operated by Koreans (who also would surely leave ASAP); Shabazz's plan was to drive them out and have blacks take over the abandoned stores (evidently thinking that the buildings and the merchandise would be left behind unclaimed). He ended up, IIRC, sixth in a field of 6.
When he started up the New Black Panther Party, people who had been active in the original Black Panthers denounced him as a charlatan.