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Demonizing Donna Hanover

by Robert Lederman

robert.lederman@worldnet.att.net
May 17, 2001

Rudy Giuliani's wife, Donna Hanover, recently moved to the top of the list of people the Mayor and his underlings have smeared with lies, insults and disinformation. Like the cancer that is eating away at his prostate, Giuliani has turned the final act of the eight year tragi-comedy known as the Giuliani miracle to the devouring of his own family.

It is simplistic to see this as nothing more than a bitter divorce battle. The Mayor is doing to his wife exactly what he has done to millions of other people as a prosecutor and Mayor. Nothing is sacred, nothing is beyond the pale, and nothing is too indecent to be used in the all-out effort to destroy. For Rudy Giuliani no lie is ever too big. If anything, the bigger the lie the better.

This is a man who used his inaugural and state of the city addresses to call for a more civil society; who demanded that New Yorkers treat government officials and the police - even when they are actively violating our civil rights under his orders - with courtesy and respect; who wanted public art museums closed because they showed a single painting that offended the sensibilities of some New Yorkers; who routinely tells reporters they should be ashamed for asking him personal questions.

The lesson to be understood from this latest bizarre twist to the Giuliani saga is not about divorce, or prostate cancer or airing one's dirty linen in public. The cruelty, self-serving lies and utter lack of decency displayed by Rudy Giuliani and his surrogates in dealing with Donna Hanover is the exact technique they have used throughout his administration.

It's easy to feel sorry for Ms. Hanover - by all accounts a decent woman and good mother - and most New Yorkers have readily moved to her side in this struggle. for most of us it was harder to understand things from the viewpoint of Rudy Giuliani's previous targets and victims.

Squeegee guys, homeless people and panhandlers didn't have her telegenic good looks and most of us felt little sympathy when they were crushed by Giuliani. His blitzkrieg attacks swept them from our streets with little opposition or outrage.

Few cared when vendors and cabbies were demonized in the name of quality of life. They were marginal people, immigrants, and according to the Mayor, a public nuisance.

For most Whites there was little outrage when unarmed innocent Blacks were gunned down by the police or hundreds of thousands of Black and Latino youths were illegally arrested for loitering outside their own apartment buildings. As long as we imagined ourselves to be safer we approved of the blatant racial profiling.

While virtually no one believes the lies Giuliani and his attack-attorney, Raoul Felder, are telling about Ms. Hanover, we were all too ready to believe that welfare recipients didn't want to work or that the Mayor was "helping" them with his workfare program. We read hundreds of newspaper accounts about protestors being arrested and few people questioned whether this was a violation of the most fundamental right of speech rather than a matter of insuring public safety.

Likewise we read of hundreds of artists being arrested with none ever being brought to trial and thousands of works of art confiscated and destroyed, yet we shrugged off the comparisons to Nazi Germany as a fanciful exaggeration. When Giuliani created an art decency committee we accepted his lies that it was about the misuse of tax dollars rather than the pursuit of Nazi-like censorship.

When The Mayor "celebrated" Martin Luther King's birthday by dining with infamous neo-Nazis, Jorg Haider, we swallowed his explanation that he didn't know who Haider was - despite the fact that Mr. Haider has an entire contingent of NYPD bodyguards with him whenever he visits New York and that Jewish leaders had begged the Mayor not to allow Haider to run through their neighborhood in the NYC Marathon.

In 1989 when employees of Federal prosecutor Rudy Giuliani were accused of forcing a Holocaust survivor whose entire family was murdered at Auschwitz to sit in front of a blackboard on which they had written Arbeit Macht Frei, work shall make you free - the motto over the gates of Auschwitz - we accepted Giuliani's alibi that he knew nothing about it and had no idea how it had been written there. Likewise, in 1989 Giuliani was able to claim he had no knowledge that his law firm was representing the family business of Auschwitz's mad doctor, Josef Mengele.

When Giuliani tried to smear innocent NYPD shooting victim Patrick Dorismond as a criminal, and justify the police shootings of Amadou Diallo and Gidone Busch most New Yorkers were willing to accept it as the price of quality of life, a justifiable price as long as we weren't the ones paying it.

We even believed the Mayor when our own senses told us he was lying. When he lied over and over again about the signs at the Diallo rallies - most of which I personally painted - claiming the signs said the police were Nazis and the NYPD was a KKK organization, his lies were accepted and continue to be repeated to this day by his surrogates. Yet, anyone watching the coverage could plainly see that the signs said Giuliani was a Nazi and Giuliani was a KKK-like racist.

Street artists have a lot of first hand experience of the depths to which Giuliani's lawyers and spokespeople are willing to go when protecting his interests. In our lawsuits the Mayor's Corporation Council lawyers have repeatedly lied to Federal judges about matters as simple as what NYC laws actually exist. Former NYPD spokesperson Maralyn Mode used to tell reporters that I had never been arrested despite the fact that many of my 41 arrests were broadcast - in some cases live - on television with the same reporters present at many of them.

Lying is the main technique behind Giuliani's so-called accomplishments. Whether he's taking credit for other people's efforts as he did with David Dinkins and the NYPD or forcing his police officials to falsify statistics to make it appear that crime goes down everyday in blood-soaked NYC, there's not a single number issued by this administration that can be taken at face value. Giuliani "protecting" us from the fake West Nile Virus "epidemic", the welfare and workfare "miracles" and just about every other issue associated with Rudy Giuliani are similarly a mass of lies and falsified statistics.

As we approach the election of a new Mayor the term, "Giuliani Legacy", is on every candidate and reporters' lips. Can the truth finally be told or must we wait until this monster is completely out of office?

His "legacy" is a mangled web of brutality, intimidation, cruelty, cronyism, corruption and illegality. Like the improved economy and crime reduction, whatever good was accomplished here in the past eight years either took place independently of Rudy Giuliani or was accomplished by others and falsely claimed by him. Like the inevitable effects on his children that will follow the shameless attacks on his wife, the real social and economic cost of his policies will only begin to surface after his ability to intimidate, censor and bully is ended.

Every New Yorker has been harmed by this Mayor because we have all lost some portion of our freedom.

Our public parks and streets have been privatized. Our tax dollars were given to billionaires like George Steinbrenner and David Rockefeller rather than used to repair the streets or improve the schools. Our cultural institutions are afraid to show politically sensitive art for fear they will lose their funding.

The price of Giuliani's quality of life has been steep. The non-criminal children of hundreds of thousands of hard-working minority parents were illegally stopped and frisked by the police and will never feel at ease around a police officer again. Many were falsely arrested and put through the criminal court system, making it impossible to get a decent job or go to college.

In this one-time center of dissent and free speech New Yorkers have become afraid to attend a lawful demonstration or to even make a protest sign for fear they'll be falsely arrested. Thanks to Rudy Giuliani we've been gassed in our homes with poisons invented by the Nazis. Malathion and Anvil permanently degrade our environment and circulate throughout our bodies.

Hundreds of thousands of law-abiding citizens of all races have criminal records thanks to this Mayor which will follow them for life based on jaywalking, smoking a joint or drinking a can of beer on their front stoop after work. The decent police officers that make up much of the NYPD will have to spend 20-year careers working in a city where millions view them as the enemy rather than as enforcers of the law and protectors of public order.

The Giuliani Legacy? Just ask Donna Hanover. At least she didn't vote for him.

To a Directory of Mr.Lederman's Essays

Robert Lederman is an artist, writer and activist and is also the President of the street artist advocacy group, A.R.T.I.S.T.
Click here for an archive of A.R.T.I.S.T. related news articles on the Freedom Forum website

His essays and Op-Eds have appeared in hundreds of alternative publications as well as the Daily News, Penthouse, Africa Sun Times, Street News and The Shadow.
Lederman was falsely arrested 41 times for his anti-Giuliani activities and was never convicted of any of the charges. As a result of the arrests, he's won four Federal lawsuits and overturned three laws.
He is best known for having created hundreds of paintings of Mayor Giuliani as a Hitler like dictator which were carried in demonstrations throughout the eight years of the Giuliani administration. Images of his paintings and articles about his arrests and lawsuits have appeared on all of the major television networks hundreds of times as well as frequently appearing in the NY Times, Daily News, NY Post, Newsday, Newsweek, People, The Washington Post, LA Times and NY Magazine.

Robert Lederman,
President of A.R.T.I.S.T.
(Artists' Response To Illegal State Tactics)
robert.lederman@worldnet.att.net

For a detailed exposition on the West Nile issue
http://www.nospray.org/
For an article on the Manhattan Institute go to
http://www.konformist.com/2000/rudyg.htm

If you would like to help oppose the spraying,
please write to the
No Spray Coalition
PO Box 334
Peck Slip Station
NYC, NY 10272-0334
or call the No Spray hotline at (718) 670-7110.

Any funds you can send to help continue the lawsuit
and this work are greatly appreciated.

Important Note:
Mr. Lederman has explained that his articles posted here are not to be taken as official statements by the No-Spray Coalition of which he is a member or of the "No-Spray" lawsuit in which he is a plaintiff.

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