My old Dallas Morning News colleague Mike Hashimoto nails it:
Strikingly, investigators were still bagging evidence when Black Lives Matter and their many supporters sought control of the narrative. The protest march in Dallas, they stressed, was peaceful. Although a cornered Micah X. Johnson referenced Black Lives Matter in ultimately failed negotiations with police, there was no evidence he had any real connection to the group.
No argument here. He appears to have acted alone, or certainly outside a wide support system.
In a statement condemning the Dallas attack, Black Lives Matter said it “was the result of the actions of a lone gunman. To assign the actions of one person to an entire movement is dangerous and irresponsible. We continue our efforts to bring about a better world for all of us.”
That’s progress, says Hashimoto, because that sure wasn’t BLM’s point of view after Omar Mateen massacred people in the Pulse nightclub and said he did it for ISIS. Hash:
But winning the award for casting the widest possible net in the Mateen attack was, in fact, Black Lives Matter from its actual website:
“Despite the media’s framing of this as a terrorist attack, we are very clear that this terror is completely homegrown, born from the anti-Black white supremacy, patriarchy and homophobia of the conservative right and of those who would use religious extremism as a weapon to gain power for the few and take power from the rest. …
“Homegrown terror is the product of a long history of colonialism, including state and vigilante violence. It is the product of white supremacy and capitalism, which deforms the spirit and fuels interpersonal violence.”
Read the whole thing. Hashimoto’s point about BLM’s hypocrisy is superb. It was happy to cast insane aspersions on all its enemies, with no evidence at all. I don’t believe it’s fair to blame BLM for the murders of Dallas police officers, but according to the (black) police chief of Dallas, the killer told police who cornered him that Black Lives Matter got him riled up about white cops. Again, that’s certainly not enough to blame BLM, but it’s more than the BLM loudmouths had when they blamed everyone to the right of Pol Pot for Orlando.
What a difference between the reaction The New York Times editorial board had to Micah X. Johnson’s racist anti-cop massacre in Dallas, and its reaction to Omar Mateen’s mass murder at the Orlando gay nightclub. In its Dallas editorial, the Times struck a note of somber grief, but didn’t take a stand one way or the other:
In the aftermath, possible motives will be ticked off for the killer and any accomplices. But the police and protesters alike could only wonder what might truly account for such a level of atrocity.The police quoted the main suspect — Micah Johnson, a black Army veteran with service in Afghanistan, who was killed after being cornered — as intent on killing white people and avenging the innocent deaths of black citizens in police encounters elsewhere.
Wonder? The suspect said himself what it was: racism, anger, and a spirit of vengeance — as the Times notes in the very next sentence!
While the precise motivation for the rampage remains unclear, it is evident that Mr. Mateen was driven by hatred toward gays and lesbians. Hate crimes don’t happen in a vacuum. They occur where bigotry is allowed to fester, where minorities are vilified and where people are scapegoated for political gain. Tragically, this is the state of American politics, driven too often by Republican politicians who see prejudice as something to exploit, not extinguish.
It got worse, of course, even though there was not then and still has not emerged one shred of evidence to suggest that Republican politicians had anything to do with Mateen’s decision to attack a gay club. Mateen slaughtered those gay people in the name of a terrorist organization that routinely executes suspected homosexuals by throwing them from tall buildings. The Times editorial board, like Black Lives Matter, engaged in a vicious, disgusting smear of the people it hates.
This is particularly galling when one thinks about the way the left, broadly, has busied itself policing speech on campuses, treating so-called microaggressions as if they were war crimes.
It’s just the appalling dishonesty of the way some on the left with very big megaphones frame these debates. I’ll say it once more so you don’t misunderstand me: I don’t think it’s fair to blame Black Lives Matter for the Dallas shootings. But I’m not sorry they’re taking a big hit to their reputation. Those bullies deserve a taste of their own medicine. As for the Times, hey Liz Spayd, the new public editor, what say you about this double standard on the editorial page? Eh?
The ugly truth is that too many people on both the left and the right are being completely irresponsible with their rhetoric, stoking the flames of race hatred. It feels good to hate with everything in you. It’s addicting.