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| Screenshot from last nights local NBC news broadcast - wonded mther |
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 it’s 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 - seeking to eliminate it.
But as is almost always the case with the 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 brings 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. 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 ad Jefferson. All of which is being reported by the media without comment. That obscures the legitimate grievances from the illegitimate ones. By their silence it the media actually conflates the agenda of movement attempting to hijack the protests for its own purposes
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 can pave to. Left as is, that might be the road we are currently taking.