The latest shootings of policemen in Ferguson and the town’s riots last year were incited by race-baiting black leaders — such as Barack Obama and Eric Holder. So says black minister Jesse Lee Peterson, head of the Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny. Moreover, says the reverend, blacks are fertile ground for racialist propaganda because bigotry is rife in their community and, as a consequence, they “are acting like the Ku Klux Klan.”
Writing at WND.com, Peterson cites the self-defense shooting of Michael Brown by ex-Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson as a case study in the above phenomena. Despite three autopsies and an official Department of Justice report exonerating Officer Wilson, a surprising number of black Americans still believe he’s guilty — and Obama still feeds that delusion.
As an example, Peterson points to a black Ferguson resident who, after being asked on Fox News, “Do you care that two officers were shot in Ferguson?” replied, “No, I care that Darren Wilson got away with murder.” But if such people can’t be bothered with facts, it’s partially because the media, black leaders, and others are peddling fiction.
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The media provided 24/7 reportage on Ferguson when they still had even the slightest wiggle room to claim that Brown was a “gentle giant” shot with his hands up. But the DOJ report and other irrefutable evidence to the contrary receive relatively little attention.
Obama likewise has done a clever, devious pivot. He made his first public statement on the recent Ferguson shootings on Jimmy Kimmel Live, saying, “There was no excuse for criminal acts” but then condemned the Ferguson police for “institutional racism.” Note this statement’s effect: People inclined to believe the gentle-giant myth or who are just ill-informed will think, “Yeah, that’s the ‘institutional racism’ that got Brown killed by a ‘racist’ cop.” So Obama is perpetuating the thoroughly debunked falsehood that Brown was murdered by focusing on a tangential but less easily debunked falsehood.
Of course, Eric Holder’s DOJ is playing the same game. The very week it issued the Brown-shooting report it made sure to muddy the waters and deflect attention from it with a second report, entitled Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department. In it, as Dr. Thomas Sowell writes, “Sweeping assumptions take the place of facts, and misleading statistics are thrown around recklessly” as it claims that “law enforcement in Ferguson has a ‘disparate impact’ on blacks and is ‘motivated’ by ‘discriminatory intent.’”
“Disparate impact” refers to the phenomenon whereby rules or standards may cause some groups to be “underrepresented” or “over-represented” in some arena. Of course, this is always the case. Standards for fashion models have a disparate impact on the ugly, educational standards have disparate impact on the unintelligent, and employment standards have disparate impact on the uneducated. Yet for decades now disparate-impact statistics have been presented as de-facto evidence of unjust discrimination. To illustrate the point, applying disparate-impact doctrine to the NBA or boxing — in which whites are tremendously “underrepresented” — would inform that basketball and boxing officials are unfairly discriminating against whites. Perhaps coincidentally, though, disparate-impact doctrine is only applied in situations in which it advances the left-wing agenda.
And so it is with Ferguson. The DOJ claims that since blacks constitute 86 percent of Ferguson traffic stops while being only 61 percent of the town’s population, anti-black bias must exist. Why, Attorney General Holder even warned that the Ferguson Police Department might have to be dismantled.
But what needs to be dismantled is the DOJ’s sound-bite misuse of statistics, a shallow analysis that misleads via omission of facts. First, many (if not most) of any town’s traffic stops involve people from outside its jurisdiction. As to this, commentator and Missouri resident Timothy Birdnow tells us that surrounding communities with major through streets into Ferguson are approximately 75.21 percent black on average. He then points out, “Ferguson has a number of major thoroughfares, including Interstate 270, Chambers Road, North Florissant Road, and West Florissant. It is a natural route for the largely black population to reach the commercial centers in Florissant (and Ferguson has a few of its own).”
This factor considered, the black population-black offender gap narrows to 11 percent, yet there’s more to it. As Birdnow also tells us, “Many of the white drivers who pass through Ferguson are older; much of the white population of North County is aging, while the blacks driving through the community tend to be younger. Police are more likely to stop — and arrest — young people in general than older individuals, and older drivers tend to be more obedient of the traffic laws.”
This raises another point: Since law enforcement has a “disparate impact” on younger people as well, why isn’t it claimed that the police discriminate against them? For that matter, since men are assuredly ticketed more often than women, why doesn’t the DOJ accuse Ferguson of anti-male bias? It’s because disparate-impact doctrine is applied not in accordance with principle, but prejudice.
And that’s something that, Rev. Peterson points out, racial hustlers never miss a chance to inflame. He writes, “Obama also sent White House aides to Brown’s funeral; and he designated Al Sharpton (of all people!) as his point man on race. And Eric Holder told blacks that police profile and harass minorities without cause.”
It is because of such propaganda, says Peterson, that the last few years have seen so many “knockout game” attacks on whites and “15 instances of whites being set on fire by blacks across 12 states.” In fact, he likens Obama to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, whose November 2014 words, “We’ll tear this g-d d-mn country apart!” at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland, were followed by the murder of two NYC cops by a black Muslim Baltimore resident. “Coincidence? I don’t think so!” remarks Peterson.
But Peterson also avers that Obama is simply “following the teachings of the godfather of community organizing, Saul Alinsky, who said that in order to agitate for ‘change,’ people need to be set on edge and rubbed raw: ‘The despair is there; now it’s up to us to go in and rub raw the sores of discontent, galvanize them for radical social change.’”
And Obama is an old hand at this, as a mostly forgotten, June 5, 2007 incident evidences. Speaking to “a predominantly black audience at Hampton University … in a ghetto-style accent that Obama doesn’t use anywhere [else],” as Thomas Sowell reported in 2012, then-Senator Obama claimed that post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans was denied the kind of disaster relief New York City received after 9/11 and Florida got after Hurricane Andrew. This was because mostly black New Orleans “they don’t care about as much,” said Obama, with “they” being the white establishment. The reality?
Just two weeks prior, on May 24, 2007, the Senate had taken a vote that led to New Orleans getting twice as much money as New York City and Florida combined.
One might think that maybe Obama didn’t know of the vote.
Except that he was present in the Senate on the day it was taken.
So, apparently, Obama told a lie for the purposes of fomenting racial hatred — the kind of hatred that, historically, has led to the murder of millions.
This race-baiting works, says Rev. Peterson, because “[b]lacks today are acting like the Ku Klux Klan. They have become what they hate.” And his prescription is what you might expect from a minister: forgiveness.
Hatred is like darkness: The more there is, the less you can see. But forgiveness dissipates that mind’s-eye-clouding emotion so the light of Truth can shine in, allowing people to be seen as they are. And then sometimes we’re surprised to learn who really sports the halos — and who has the horns.
