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| Wounded mother - Screenshot from last night's local NBC news broadcast |
Black people are still being killed. Despite all of the
protests and public angst over racism in this country, black people are a lot
more likely to be shot and killed than white people. I see it almost every night
on the local 10 o’clock news here in Chicago. But it isn’t the cops doing
it. It is black gang violence. Innocent
black people - often children - are being shot and killed by neighborhood gangs at war with each other.
Not that the innocent are the targets. But because they get in the line of
fire. Or shot because of mistaken identity.
As I have been saying here for weeks now, black lives do matter. However, if I have any criticism of these protests, it is the lack of any attention being paid to the much bigger problem of black on black
violence.
Nevertheless, I understand why the focus is on the police. The callous murder of
George Floyd - a black man - by a white cop recorded on a smartphone is the ‘shot heard around the world’. Making racism based violence the number one issue of the day. That video has generated many other videos of unjust killings of black people by
cops. Making it obvious to any ethical person
that this is a real problem that needs to be corrected. And why I support these
protests – albeit with reservations related to the spread of COVID-19.
That being said, there are two things wrong with the movement
aside from the heath issue. One is the above-mentioned lack of attention to
black on black violence. The other being the actual movement known as ‘Black Lives
Matter’ – which I do not support. The mainstream media, however, fails to identify and separate this movement from the vast majority of good people protesting racism and seeking to
eradicate it.
But as is almost always the case with liberal ideology these days -
in the attempt to appear as unbiased as possible, liberals are afraid to criticize
anything to do with the just cause they support. The truth be damned if in any
way it undermines their cause.
Which is why we need intelligent and well read people like
Jonathan Rosenblum to point out these media deficiencies. Perhaps better termed
distortions - by virtue of their omission of uncomfortable truths. It is true that he is a political conservative. But that should not detract from the facts he presents. Which he brought to light in last week’s Mishpacha Magazine:
The furies of modern iconoclasm have been loosed in both America and Europe, as long-standing statues are pulled from their pedestals and smashed by mobs, and to much less salutary effect. Once loosed, those furies will not be soon put back into the bottle. The renaming of a few Southern army bases — Fort Bragg, Fort Denning — after long-forgotten and mediocre Confederate generals will not suffice for the howling mobs.
They have their sights on far bigger targets: Christopher Columbus, Winston Churchill, the American founding fathers...
The goal, as black professor John McWhorter wrote of the New York Times “1619 Project,” which portrayed black slavery as the motive force of all American history, is to demonstrate that the American experiment in self-government is nothing to celebrate.
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison stand negated by a one-word description — “slaveholder.”
All that was only for the purpose of defending slavery, according to the Times — a view now buttressed by a Pulitzer Prize, even though the 1619 Project was eviscerated by every prominent American historian, black or white, conservative or liberal.
The role of the bold assertion of the Declaration of Independence that governments “derive their just power from the consent of the governed” in the history of democratic self-government is no longer worthy of our attention nor a source of pride. For the words are those of a slaveholder.
These truths are completely ignored by the mainstream media. The phrase ‘black live matter’ is used to describe the legitimate goals of most protesters without identifying the radicals that are calling the shots in some cases. Which is surely the case in the destruction of statues of American icons like Washington and Jefferson. All of which is being reported by the media without comment. That obscures the legitimate grievances and the illegitimate ones. By their silence the media actually conflates the radical agenda of a movement attempting to hijack the protests for its own purposes with the legitimate agenda of the protesters.
There needs to be more voices like Jonathan’s to make these distinctions better known. The radical agenda of the movement ought to be condemned by all decent Americans regardless of race.
The ill feeling towards the police expressed by protesters makes doing something about it all the more difficult - if not impossible. It is after all the police that are charged with enforcing the law. They are the ones the public in those neighborhoods should turn to to fight crime.
But with all this animosity directed towards them, the police are now the last ones black people feel they can turn to. Which makes a bad situation a lot worse.
As I have noted many times, most cops – whether black or white - are good people. They are not motivated by racism. The cops in those neighborhoods need to be supported and given a mandate to root out this evil from their midst. If the vast majority of good people that populate those neighborhoods worked with the police, it would go a long way towards reducing if not completely eliminating that violence.
Of course that alone would not be enough. Another bastion liberalism, Chicago’s judiciary, is blinded by their desire to overcome racism and have issued overly lenient jail sentences to violent criminals. Something Chicago calls revolving door justice. Violent criminals are often returned to the streets almost as soon as they are imprisoned. That too has to change.
These truths are self evident. Truth should be the guiding policy of the media. It's too bad that they are ignored in the pursuit of a noble goal. They may have the best of intentions. But we all know where that road is paved to. Left as is, that might be our destination.
