New York’s Independence Party is at a crossroads: The 325,000 members of our state’s third-largest party need to decide whether they want to function as an organization of influential political reformers or as a fringe cult of personality.

Unrepentant anti-Semitic remarks by its radical leftist local leader Dr. Lenora Fulani are threatening to overshadow the reform role that has led to its success to date.

The Independence Party has grown dramatically over the past decade, benefiting from the rising tide of independent voters across the state. In New York City, the ranks of non-affiliated voters have grown more than 300% in the past 12 years alone. Much of the Independence Party’s growth has come from their wily use of the name “independence,” which causes many individuals who wish to register as “independent” to enroll in their ranks.

Mainstream politicians from both parties – from Attorney General Spitzer to Senator Schumer and Mayor Bloomberg – have sought their ballot line. The party has so far devoted much of its influence toward championing election reforms. It lobbied the state Senate to pass a bill that would bring direct ballot referendums to New York. It advanced a court case that would allow the state’s 2.4 million non-affiliated voters to vote in their primary. They helped persuade Mr. Bloomberg to move forward with a charter reform to bring nonpartisan elections to New York City. The Committee for a Unified Independent Party, which runs its office out of the Independence Party headquarters, helped to defeat a move by the Democrats and Republicans in New Hampshire that would have compelled independents to register in their ranks if they wanted to participate in the state’s traditionally open primary.

But while the Independence Party has been a vehicle for election reform and increased voter choice, there is troubling evidence that its local party leadership is descended from a radical far left late-1960s tradition. The shadowy figure who commands personal loyalty from the local senior staff is Fred Newman, Ph.D. in philosophy, race baiting playwright, and practitioner of “social therapy.” In the early 1970s, he formed a group called Centers for Change, which he described as a “Marxist-Leninist-Maoist organization,” as well as the International Workers Party. In 1979, after breaking with Lyndon LaRouche, he helped found the leftist New Alliance Party, which nominated Dr. Lenora Fulani for president in 1988, beginning a process of qualifying for millions in matching funds. The New Alliance Party failed to achieve broad appeal, and in the aftermath of Ross Perot’s 1992 Reform Party bid for president, it merged with far more moderate independent groups to form the Independence Party.

But while the vast majority of Independence Party members are reform-minded centrists, the radical roots of this inner group keep surfacing and holding the party back.

The most recent firestorm occurred in an interview last week with NY1, when Dr. Fulani refused to apologize for statements in which she said that Jews “had to sell their souls to acquire Israel” and had to “function as mass murderers of people of color” to keep it. In an interview with The New York Sun on Thursday, local Independence Party leader Jackie Salit also refused to distance herself from those comments, apparently as a matter of principle. Later in the day, Dr. Fulani released a statement saying, “Those who know me know my life’s work has been to produce better communication between different communities in the city. I look at the current discussion as part of that.” Even this carefully chosen language falls short of anything resembling an apology.

Now Mayor Bloomberg is attempting to distance himself from her remarks by calling them, accurately enough, “phenomenally offensive.” The chairman of the state party, Frank MacKay, quickly released a statement saying, “Dr. Fulani is not a spokeswoman for the New York State Independence Party, its members or the many candidates that seek and obtain our party line for their elections in good faith and with respect to our political reform agenda.”

But the New York Times, in its understandable haste to condemn Dr. Fulani’s comments, overreached considerably in an editorial called “Boot the Fake Parties,” writing “the bizarre New York system allows fringe parties onto the ballot … It’s time for New York’s politicians to get rid of copycat parties. And while they are at it, they can stop bowing and scraping to the likes of Dr. Fulani.” The problem is the Times’s failure to distinguish between the important role that third parties can play in democracy and the cult of personality that seems to have emerged around Dr. Fulani and Fred Newman.

Fusion parties have been positive forces in New York politics since the days of Fiorello La Guardia by helping to cobble together reform coalitions that could topple the corrupting influence of Tammany Hall. It was a role filled until recently by the Liberal Party, which would lend its endorsement to reform Republicans like Mayor Giuliani whose presence on the their line in 1993 against Mayor Dinkins helped make him palatable to many local voters who felt the city was in need of change, but who were otherwise reluctant to vote Republican.

In recent years, the Independence Party label has played a similar role. The vast majority of New Yorkers who have cast ballots on the Independence Party line have no knowledge of or interest in the extremist politics that have infused the local party. The answer to this crisis within the Independence Party is not to restrict the number of parties on the ballot in New York State, but instead to further encourage the impulse of reform. The challenge for Mayor Bloomberg and other influential independent-minded New Yorkers, as well as the 325,000 members of the Independence Party across the state, is to rise up and take control of their party away from the likes of Dr. Fulani and Fred Newman. Real political parties are principled movements larger than any individual. It is time for the Independence Party’s members to evolve past these extremists and act truly independent by kicking the bums out.