[David Horowitz is the author of Blitz: Trump Will Smash the Left and Win, which was released June 2 by Humanix Books: Order Here.]
In a twisted way it is fitting that the most destructive week for America in living memory should be topped off by a memorial featuring the nation’s chief racial arsonist Al Sharpton. The memorial remembered pieces of the life of George Floyd who was brutally killed by a policeman pressing his knee on Floyd’s neck until he shut off the handcuffed man’s air supply and he died. Not the least unexpectedly, the malevolent Sharpton used the platform the mourners provided to stoke the fires of racial hatred, attacking all of white America because black America’s problems and miseries stemmed from the fact that “for 401 years white America has had its knees on our necks” – or words to that effect.
Sharpton’s four-hundred and one years ago was actually 1619, when the creation of the United States of America was still 168 years in the future, but why quibble over arithmetic when you are intent on indicting a whole race of people so you can blame them for your problems? “Four-hundred years of slavery” of course has long been a common battle cry of the racial demagogues who 50 plus years ago overwhelmed and then corrupted the civil rights movement turning it into a racial shakedown operation after the death of Martin Luther King.
That American knee that Sharpton kept referring to , of course produced the revolutionary declaration that all men are created equal and have a God-given right to liberty, which ended 3,000 years of normalizing slavery – which still exists in Africa today. That American knee inspired 350,000 mainly white Union soldiers to lay down their lives to free African slaves, and through many years of struggle created a society in which American blacks have more rights, more power, more wealth, privilege and opportunity than blacks anywhere on earth including all the black nations in Africa which have been independent for 60 years and all those in the West Indies, which in the case of Haiti have been self-ruled for over 200 years.
The protests fueled by accusations of white racism and police brutality existing as a systemic American problem are based on easily disproven lies. As Heather MacDonald summarized the real world facts in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on June 4, “However sickening the video of Floyd’s arrest, it isn’t representative of the 375 million annual contacts that police officers have with civilians. A solid body of evidence finds no structural bias in the criminal-justice system with regard to arrests, prosecution or sentencing. Crime and suspect behavior, not race, determine most police actions.”
The real world statistics are these: “In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015. That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects.
“In 2018, the latest year for which such data have been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population. The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post defines “unarmed” broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.”
Where once black victims of racial violence were attacked by racist mobs, virtually every alleged black martyr in the last fifty years – including George Floyd – was either a criminal resisting arrest, like Eric Garner, or caught in the crossfire of some engagement involving criminal activities such as Breonna Taylor. This does not mean they deserved to die or that every cop involved was innocent. It just means that the victims were in a situation involving crime where the risks to life and limb were imminent and real.
Garner and Taylor are two of the names that were routinely brandished by “protesters” justifying their law-breaking violations of curfews or city ordinances not to block streets without permits, or defacing, destroying and torching local businesses. As someone who engaged in protests in his youth, I can tell you it’s not too difficult to distinguish crowds that are potentially dangerous to you and others, versus the kinds of protests that Martin Luther King led which threatened no one. In a year of democracy protests in Hong Kong not a single store was robbed or ransacked.
Nor is it difficult to see or understand that there was no rationale provided by the death of George Floyd to justify the menacing crowd that massed on the border of the White House night after night and eventually torched the church across the street. President Trump denounced the killing of George Floyd when it happened and called his family to extend his sympathies. The president had no power to affect the police forces at whom the protesters directed their anger. That power belonged to local Democrats and particularly progressive Democrats entirely. But there were no demonstrations holding the Democrat city councils, or the Democrat prosecutors and attorney generals accountable, yet these were the officials who administered and oversaw the Minneapolis police force as they did any of the municipal police forces in the cities burning across the country.
That this monstrous sham perpetrated on the American people and used as an excuse to burn American cities should be capped off by an incendiary racist diatribe at George Floyd’s memorial was as fitting as it is tragic.
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