KARIN McQUILLAN: President Obama vs. George Zimmerman: America Loses ****
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/07/president_obama_vs_george_zimmerman_america_loses.html
BREAKING: Judicial Watch has obtained documents disclosing that the Department of Justice actually helped organize demonstrations and protests against George Zimmerman.)
As the Zimmerman prosecution falls apart, the country faces the threat of race riots. A case that lacked any evidence of malicious murder was wrongfully brought to court under political pressure. And our president, who instigated this mess, is floating above it all, having moved on to other things. Will Obama speak out to avert the racial violence he set in motion? Unless he sees some political advantage, the answer is no.
The Zimmerman case began with the media making up a racist story: a black kid carrying candy is shot in cold blood by a white man in a gated community. It was a story that sent fear and anger through black people across the country. President Obama was in a low point in his re-election campaign, trying to gin up the black vote. Zimmerman, as a scapegoat, was used as a chance for Obama to bond with fellow blacks. So, making history, the president of the United States intervened in a criminal justice matter to foment race-hatred and fear. President Obama himself made it an issue of skin color: “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon Martin.”
Once the president of the United States weighed in, Zimmerman had a target on his back. An ounce of election advantage to our privileged, Ivy League president versus the ruination of a Hispanic man’s life — it was an easy choice for Obama. Obama’s great appeal to voters in 2008 was his self-presentation as a black man without animus or grievance, eager to move the country beyond divisions of all sorts — black and white, red and blue. In reality, Obama is obsessed with divisions — race, class, gender — and is expert at fueling war between us, to his political advantage.
Obama has used accusations of racism before, to rally his troops and attack his political opponents. Opposition to ObamaCare? Racist. Opposition to big government? Racist. His core liberal supporters like this stuff, and the other voters give him a pass on this, as on everything. The election analysts were predicting that even black turnout could dip in 2012. Obama moved from racial slurs on opposition groups to attacking a particular individual citizen. Zimmerman was sacrificed.
The Sanford police had concluded, based on a careful gathering of evidence, that they had no case for murder or even manslaughter. Being caught up in a tragedy is not a crime. Zimmerman had a right to self-defense. After Obama’s intervention, the police were overruled, and a case of malicious, racist murder was taken to court.
The liberal media piled on. American blacks were purposefully stirred up, angered, heartbroken, then mollified. Obama underlined his racial identification with their grief and outrage, capitalizing on the poignant childhood photo of Martin, his imaginary son.
Zimmerman didn’t get to be the president’s imaginary son. Wrong color. Zimmerman got to be the enemy.
Of all Americans, blacks should believe in their hearts that a man is innocent until proven guilty, no matter the color of his skin. Instead, too many black Americans have allowed themselves to be manipulated by the liberal media and self-serving politicians to become a lynch mob, threatening violence if the trial doesn’t convict. Evidence that things are not as bad as they thought only makes them angrier.
Jonah Goldberg writes at RealClearPolitics:
The Washington Post reported this week that civil-rights activists in Florida are dismayed that the George Zimmerman murder trial in Florida isn’t racially divisive enough. “It makes you feel kind of angry and kind of bad that race is not a part of this,” the Rev. Harrold C. Daniels, told the Post. “It’s a missed opportunity.”
The “problem,” as even the Martin family’s attorney concedes, is that there’s just not much evidence that Zimmerman was motivated by racial animus. You’d think that would be good news. But it’s not because so many people invested in the idea that “Trayvon Martin is Emmett Till!” in the words of one demagogic radio host, and countless other commentators.
Teenage blacks aren’t gunned down by racist whites in America anymore — if they were, we would all be reading headlines on that case. But Democrats rely on angry, scared blacks to be their loyal base. So the media and the president had to make do with Martin and Zimmerman. So far, the trial has, witness by witness, destroyed the prosecution’s case, but the liberal community has not let go of its narrative — a white man in a gated community killing a kid with candy because he was black.
Nothing in their story proved true.
It wasn’t a white man; it was a Hispanic.
George Zimmerman is not a racist. He is an outstandingly race-blind man who was raised with two black children his mother was a nanny for, who were beloved by his family and remain close to this day.
The prosecution cannot make a case for racism, because they would have to allow the following as evidence:
Zimmerman conducted a one-man crusade to get justice for a black homeless man beaten by a policeman’s son.
In late 2010, a homeless African American man, Sherman Ware, was knocked unconscious for no reason whatsoever by the son of a Sanford City police officer, George was upset that the son was not arrested and that no one seemed to care about the homeless man. George produced and distributed a notice of what had happened and rallied support for the homeless gentleman. George put this notice on vehicles and passed it out at churches as services ended. Eventually, largely due to George’s efforts, the police officer’s son was charged with the assault.
Zimmerman and his wife mentored two black children, and helped their mother with home repairs.
Although George was working full-time and going to school, he made it a priority in his life to do as much for these children as possible. When I met these two young children I did not know who they were, I asked where they knew George from. They replied ‘he’s our mentor’. I was unsure what these two young people meant by the word ‘mentor’ so I asked them what that was. Their reply was that “George takes us places, helps us with things, and teaches us to do the right things. We really love George”. George also assisted their mother as much as possible with any repairs or help that may be needed around their house. Unfortunately, the mentoring program ended. However, George and Shellie continued their activities on their own. When George’s mother asks why he had to travel to such a dangerous area to mentor children, George’s reply was ‘Mom, I really love these kids and if I don’t go, they won’t have anyone”.
It was not a privileged white gated community, but an interracial place peopled by upwardly mobile working- and middle-class families trying to remain safe in a high-crime neighborhood. Zimmerman got along well with his black neighbors.
Prior to George’s arrest, the media asked two African American neighbors of George if he was a racist. One said that she knew George very well, nothing about George portrayed in the media was accurate, and that to this day she would trust George Zimmerman with her life. The other commented that George Zimmerman was the only individual, black or white, that had introduced himself when she was moving in. He gave her his phone number and said if there was anything she needed at any time, please call him or his wife. She is totally convinced that the individual portrayed in the media is certainly not the George Zimmerman that she knows well.
Nor do they know much about Trayvon Martin’s downward spiral after this father’s second divorce, when he was forced to leave the stepmother he grew up with most of his life. They believe in the cultivated image of a kid “carrying candy” and “iced tea,” and they resent speaking ill of the dead.
The truth is different. Martin had gone to the 7-11 to buy a cigar under the counter, which he and his friends used to fill with marijuana, called a “blunt.” He bought Skittles and Arizona Watermelon Fruit Juice Cocktail to lace with codeine from cough syrup to get high with, a druggy concoction called “Lean.” We know all this from his online chat with friends about blunts and Lean, testimony from his cousin to the police, and the store video camera.
Martin was not the small sweet-faced boy shown in the media photos, but a big, angry 17-year-old. He was recently suspended from school when they found that his backpack held burglary tools and 12 pieces of stolen women’s jewelry and a watch. It is not unlikely that he was out on that rainy night casing houses to burgle.
Jack Cashill spells out “What the Media Choose Not to Know about Trayvon”:
In the past year or so, his social media sites showed a growing interest in drugs, in mixed martial arts-style street fighting, in a profoundly vulgar exploitation of “bitches.”
Trayvon posed for one photo with raised middle fingers, another with wads of cash held in an out-stretched arm. One YouTube video shows him refereeing a fight club-style street fight. A cousin had recently tweeted him, “Yu ain’t tell me yu swung on a bus driver,” meaning, if true, that Trayvon had punched out a bus driver.
Zimmerman never saw the cute little boy that the TV audience did. He saw a full-grown man, a druggy, a wannabe street fighter, the tattooed, gold-grilled, self-dubbed “No_Limit_Nigga.”
There is no evidence that Martin was chased and cold-bloodedly gunned down. That’s another fabrication. Zimmerman was on the phone with the dispatcher almost the entire time. He says Martin jumped on him from the shadows and began beating him as he headed back to his truck. Their location in the housing development, not far from Zimmerman’s truck, supports Zimmerman’s account, not the imaginary chase scene. There is an eyewitness to the beating, who saw Martin on top, beating Zimmerman “mixed martial arts-style.”
Each mother claims that it is her son’s voice calling for help on the 911 tape. But the wounds were on Martin’s fist and on Zimmerman’s face and skull. The eyewitness saw Martin on top of Zimmerman, raining blows on him. Martin’s own father and brother initially told police they did not think it was Martin’s voice yelling for help. The one witness told police at the scene that it was Zimmerman calling for help.
The defense asked Good to confirm what he told Serine immediately after the shooting: “So I open my door. It was a black man with a black hoodie on top of the other, either a white guy or now I found out I think it was a Hispanic guy with a red sweatshirt on the ground yelling out, ‘Help!'[“]
Yet the liberal lynch mob acts as if their initial made-up story is still the true version. The black community is disappointed that the prosecution didn’t present evidence of malicious racism and murderous intent, needed for the second-degree murder charge to stick.
The prosecution had no such case to be made, but Democrats know who is guilty — the man the liberal media and press fingered. Evidence and lack of evidence in a court of law do not impress them.
So they ignore all the details, since the details don’t support their rush to judgment.
Here is Juan Williams, hardly a race-baiter:
So, if a black guy shot a white kid, and they said, ‘Oh, the kid was carrying Skittles and iced tea, but you know what these punks get away with it all the time.’ People would say forget who was on top of who and who was punching who. Why was a guy with a gun deciding that he had to act violently with a teen with an iced tea?
Juan is acting like we don’t know the answer to that question: the guy with the gun was on the ground having his head bashed into a cement sidewalk by a teenager bigger and stronger and meaner than he was, when “the teen” reached for the guy’s gun and said, “You’re going to die tonight.” That’s why the guy shot the teen. Wouldn’t you defend your life, Juan? Why does iced tea enter in? Why does race enter into this? There is no reason to think George Zimmerman would make it all up so he could shoot a black kid.
What is going on here is a tragedy for the whole country, a tragedy of many black lives blighted.
Thomas Sowell, in a superb column entitled “Who Is Racist?,” writes:
Is this what so many Americans, both black and white, struggled for, over the decades and generations, to try to put the curse of racism behind us …
What went wrong? … black leaders have ranged from noble souls to shameless charlatans. After the success of the civil rights insurgency, the latter have come into their own, gaining money, power and fame by promoting racial attitudes and actions that are counterproductive to the interests of those they lead.
Groups that rose from poverty to prosperity seldom did so by having racial or ethnic leaders. While most Americans can easily name a number of black leaders, current or past, how many can name Asian American ethnic leaders or Jewish ethnic leaders?
The time is long overdue to stop looking for progress through racial or ethnic leaders. Such leaders have too many incentives to promote polarizing attitudes and actions that are counterproductive for minorities and disastrous for the country.
The Civil Rights Movement had aims so lofty they seemed impossible. Then we accomplished them. Martin Luther King and his supporters united to fight not just segregation, but the evil of racism that lay behind it. It took most of the country working together, black and white, Republican and Democrat, Christian and Jew. We succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. Discrimination was ended in America. Within a generation, racism became rare and socially unacceptable. According to the world map of racism compiled by the World Values Survey, only 3.8% of Americans are reluctant to have a neighbor of another race. Within two generations, we elected a black president.
Yet despite all the practical gains by blacks, defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory. The Zimmerman trial reveals how black racial pain is kept alive. Liberal carpetbaggers foment black racial fears and resentments for their own political and media power and financial gain.
Black children who are told that that the game is rigged against them, who live close to the boil of churning racial anger, are cheated of Martin Luther King’s success. They have been handed over to the Jesse Jackson race-hustlers and the Al Sharpton race-baiters and the Barack Obama manipulators. Perpetual victimhood, and the accompanying fear, pain, anger, resentment, and self-pity, are not emotions that promote success in life. The doors of opportunity may be open, but too many black children, especially boys, are hobbled and don’t develop what it takes to walk through.
Trayvon Martin was one of their victims. So is George Zimmerman. Thanks to President Obama, so is the whole country.
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