The Independent would like to issue a retraction and apologize for any inconvenience due to an error made in the January 8 issue. David Benjaih was asked to put together the following statement to clarify our error and his remarks.
“The head of Operation Push has been on the record as being on smack and juice,” an interesting quote, don’t you think? But what does it mean? Nothing at all to me, and I’m the person purported to have said it in the January 8 issue of the Independent. What I actually said: “The head of Operation Push has been on record as being prejudiced against Jews.” Close, but no cigar.
According to Wikipedia, Jesse Jackson claimed to be in the “Equal Rights Movement” in 1965 and started Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) in 1971, ostensibly for equal rights for all beings. How then could this man of equality make a statement in a January 1984 (the year of his first bid for the Presidency of the United States) conversation with the Washington Post referring to Jews as “Hymies” and to New York City as “Hymietown”? During that year, he also started the Rainbow Coalition for the equality of peoples of all races and creeds (smacks of demagogic pandering).
Also stated in Wikipedia, Jackson quit University of Illinois, where he had a football scholarship in 1960, because of a supposed racial bias that would not allow him to play quarterback on the team. In reality the starting quarterback that year was an African American, and Jackson was on academic probation at the end of his second semester.
In reference to Wikipedia, he attended Chicago Theological Seminary but dropped out in 1966 to concentrate on the Equal Rights Movement (an honorable choice), and was afterwards ordained in 1968 without a theological degree.
There are numerous other issues with this coalition that led me to feel that they would not be an appropriate organization to charter at our institution. As a member of the Senate at NEIU, and particularly as the Chairman of the Charter and Rules committee, I feel it is my responsibility to be concerned with how groups may impact our multi-cultural environment, and to do my utmost to see that all groups are fairly served, without any prejudice. To this end I commonly discuss these issues with my constituency, and my statements in the senate and voting record are reflections of those concerns of the SGA and myself.
Senator David Benjaih
Chairman, Charter and Rules Committee