At the time, displeased with then-Attorney General Robert Abrams' failure to prosecute against Pagones, Sharpton angrily compared Abrams to Hitler. But when asked to denounce his ally Louis Farrakhan for Farrakhan's anti-Semitism--Farrakhan called Jews bloodsuckers and their faith a "gutter religion"--Sharpton demurred, explaining, "I don't publicly denounce anyone."Oh.

Lest you worry, Sharpton is an equal-opportunity agitator. The Freddy's protests were an eerie echo of protests Sharpton supported five years earlier of Korean grocery stores. Equally racially-charged protests urged an end to shopping "with people who do not look like us." Disaster was avoided when police discovered and safely removed 19 gasoline bombs on the roof of one of the Korean-owned stores.

Sharpton's record, littered with lies, bigotry and intentional fanning of the flames of violence, has not changed over time. Just last year, Sharpton supported and then spoke on the stage of a hate rally in Harlem featuring Khalid Muhammed, whose bigoted remarks about "faggots," Roman Catholics, their "cracker" Pope and "peckerwood Jesus" and the "hook-nosed, bagel-eating, lox-eating, perpetrating-a-fraud so-called Jew" were too much even for Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, which fired him as spokesperson. The rally ended with--what else?--a riot.

Sharpton's record on violence and bigotry is clear. Yet, last Wednesday, Sharpton took his seat on the dais as an official guest of Harvard Law School, and the overwhelming majority of the student body and faculty was silent. The few who dared challenge Sharpton's appearance were booed and hissed by a crowd packed with Sharpton supporters.

Only two questions remain in the air. Why would anyone think that Sharpton was an appropriate guest at Harvard? And why did so many members of the Law School and others in the Harvard community lack the moral courage to say so?

Aharon J. Friedman and Avi M. Bell are students at the Harvard Law School.