With All Due Respect, Rudy – Please Shut Up!
The murders of two New York City police officers last weekend is another grim reminder that there’s a painfully persistent racial divide in this country.
Not the murders themselves — their aftermath.
To be clear, Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were the victims of the acts of a raging madman.
Even with ample evidence that 28 year-old Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley hadn’t been remotely connected to the (mostly) non-violent protests that have occurred across the country recently, some people have carelessly linked his blood thirst to the words of others.
Before Brinsley traveled from Md. to New York City, he shot his 29 year-old ex-girlfriend in Owings Mills, Maryland. There’s nobody trying to figure out that connection to anything. His irrational behavior didn’t start after he pulled the trigger in Maryland. Nor, did it begin when he pulled that same trigger on a street in New York.
Brinsley had been unmoored from rational thought long before the last Saturday’s devastating events.
Why then, would the president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, Pat Lynch, launch a personal attack against New York Mayor Bill de Blasio?
“There’s blood on many hands tonight. That blood on their hands, starts on the steps of City Hall, in the office of the mayor,” Lynch said just a few hours after the shootings.
There’s obvious friction between New York’s police and Mayor de Blasio. But those kinds of words won’t help.
Making de Blasio the easy target for personal blame, especially when there are so many complicated sociological factors that have rubbed tensions raw in recent months, can only serve to heighten, not lower, emotions.
There’s a particularly peculiar bit of news coverage that took place after the shootings that was engaged in by a television station in Baltimore that would support the notion that many protesters are, indeed, in favor of doing harm to police officers.
According to reports on WBFF-TV, during the “National Justice for All March” in Washington, D.C. on December 13th, there were rally-goers who chanted, “We won’t stop. We can’t stop, so kill a cop.”
That video was used as proof that, according to a reporter, the anti-police sentiment reached a turning point this weekend in New York when two officers were gunned down in cold blood.
Unfortunately, it appears the station used a truncated and edited version of what had really been chanted.
“We won’t stop. We can’t stop. ‘Til killer cops, are in cell blocks,” is the unedited version of what was said.
There’s no denying that there has been some violence among protesters across the country. But there have been tens, perhaps, hundreds of thousands of protesters, in dozens of cities. None of them led to gunfire.
Yet, ex-New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani rushed to a Fox News studio the morning after the police shootings, and he placed responsibility for them squarely on the shoulders of President Obama.
“We’ve had four months of propaganda, starting with the president, that everybody should hate the police,” said Giuliani. “I don’t care how you want to describe it — that’s what those protests are all about. Hatred?
If President Obama had engaged in hateful propaganda, then why did it take nearly a month for somebody to catch a bus from Baltimore to Brooklyn to exact their senseless revenge?
Giuliani didn’t stop at criticizing the president.
He believes that protests, alone, breed violence – even the non-violent ones.
“The protests are being embraced, the protests are being encouraged. The protests, even the ones that don’t lead to violence — a lot of them lead to violence — all of them lead to a conclusion: The police are bad, the police are racist,” said Giuliani.
Once again, Giuliani doesn’t have a shred of proof that an armed, psychotic gunman, who hadn’t been known to have joined any protest, acted as a direct result of anything but the voices in his own head.
Giuliani just doesn’t seem to be as fond of speech as free as his.
Perhaps, I’m not as fond of his.
Edward A. Owens is a three time Emmy Award winner and 20 year veteran of television news. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net