Surreal revelation that Officer Crowley and Henry Gates are both preferred participants at the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum ofTolerance.
Thursday is B-Day at the White House, with President Obama expectedto share a brewski with Harvard prfoessor Henry Louis Gates and theCambridge police officer who arrested him, Jim Crowley.
Much has been made over the fact that friends of both Gates andCrowley say they are the last people you’d expect to find in the middleof such an incident. And now The Wall Street Journal’s SpeakEasy blog provides some Jewish-themed evidence:
In 2007, Crowley attended a three-day program for police officerson racial profiling at the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum ofTolerance in Los Angeles. He so impressed the staff there that he wasinvited back a year later for an advanced seminar, museum officials say.
Crowley’s attendance at the Jewish civil-rights organization’s programshasn’t been previously reported, though it is widely known that hetaught his own course on the subject at a local police department.
Sunny Lee-Goodman, director of the “Tools for Tolerance” lawenforcement program at the Museum of Tolerance, says attendees of the“Perspectives on Profiling” program explore the perils of racialprofiling. Using interactive exhibits at the museum, officers studyboth the Holocaust and the civil-rights movement in America. Officersalso engage in soul-searching about their own prejudices.She says of Crowley: “He stands out to me. He was oneof those people who really engaged in sessions, who really showed ahigh level of understanding of the issue.”
As it turns out, according to the WSJ, Gates is also “prominently featured” at the center’s law enforcement training programs:
At the center’s New York tolerance center, etched on a wall nearinspirational words from Gandhi and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., isa quotation from Gates: “There is no tolerance without respect. Thereis no respect without knowledge.”