Posted on July 23, 2013

Feeling the Heat

Ben Stein, American Spectator, July 22, 2013

{snip}

I had a tough time sleeping last night. The Trayvon Martin case is worrying me. I’ll tell you a few reasons:

First of all, the media have made this case into the lynching of Zimmerman supposedly because he murdered an innocent sweet little black child. But according to what I read, Zimmerman — while a fool — was attacked by Mr. Martin, who was far from unarmed. He was armed with his skills as a martial artist and his strength and size. He wasn’t the sweet altar boy shown on the cover of magazines and on TV. He was a big, strong kid with a history of drug use and a bit of bragging online about his fighting skills. He didn’t start a conversation with Zimmerman when Zimmerman got out of his truck. He attacked Zimmerman, who possibly would have been killed if he had not defended himself.

This is the story the jury heard. This is the story that made the jury unanimously acquit Zimmerman. The media have been telling a fairy tale designed to whip up race hatred.

It horrifies me that the media has tried to turn this sad case into an occasion to make black people hate white people. It horrifies me that Mr. Obama has joined in. His assertion that he could have been Martin is breathtakingly dishonest. If Obama had been Martin, he would have talked Zimmerman out of his watch and his wallet and then gotten a scholarship to college for writing about it. Martin was a dangerously violent kid. Obama was and always has been a politician.

But it’s worse than this: the black community in this nation is in crisis. It has a disastrous situation in terms of education, lack of work habits, complete collapse of the family, wild overuse of drugs, violence, and generally behavior that is destructive to itself and far too many other people. (Obviously, this applies only to some black people. I work every day and you work every day with black people who are in fine shape, much better shape than I am in.)

The least of the problems that black people face in the USA right now is attacks by heavy set volunteer watchmen in gated communities. That’s not even on the radar screen as a serious problem. For Mr. Obama and other “black leaders” and media people to pretend that it is is simply nonsense.

There is real anarchy in many parts of the black community in the USA. For Mr. Obama and others to act as if the real problem is white people locking their car doors at stop lights when black people approach them is just plain poppycock. The black community is not in danger from white people: it is in danger from itself.

{snip}

Among the liberal media, who have really been missing someone to hate for a long time, the Zimmerman case is heaven-sent. They take this poor soul, trying to patrol his community, who is getting beaten to within an inch of his life by a black kid and who saves his own life — and they make him into a Klansman. Into a whole posse of Klansmen.

It’s distressing. Black people have a brutally painful history of suffering in this country. It is a shameful story. It is in the past as far as being caused by white people as a day by day matter. It definitely is not in the past in the black consciousness. They have every reason to feel angry about it. But things have gotten so incredibly, unbelievably better in the last generations in terms of white attitudes that to seek to whip up old animosities while ignoring the present catastrophe in the black community is a disgraceful distraction by the President and “black leaders.”

{snip}

{snip} It terrifies me that we are pretending that the likes of George Zimmerman are a problem when we have real problems. It terrifies me that a man with the power of Eric Holder can use an explicitly racist, anti-white approach to a complex case that is itself a sideshow.

{snip}