‘Blanking Out’ Cop Killers

The FBI recently issued a report warning of the dangers to law enforcement from what it calls “Black Identity Extremists” (BIEs). The report identified six targeted attacks against police since 2014, explained the ideological motivations behind these crimes, and predicted there will be similar attempts to murder police. Sober, fact-driven, and couched in the official legalese of bureaucracy, it is hardly a radical document and can’t even be called “political,” beyond a bias against murdering cops.

Nonetheless, it has inspired extraordinarily hostile commentary from black activists and their apologists in the media, complete with numerous articles suggesting the FBI has committed some kind of civil rights violation by publishing it. This dangerous reaction shows how devoted the “mainstream” remains to the narrative of black innocence and victimhood, even if it leads to the deaths of more police officers.

As the brief report makes clear, law enforcement is under attack by a loose network of activists who are targeting police as part of an effort to overthrow a “racist” system. “BIEs have historically justified and perpetuated violence against law enforcement, which they perceive as representative of the institutionalized oppression of African Americans,” the report notes. However, it also notes that BIEs “had not targeted law enforcement with premediated violence for the nearly two decades leading up to the lethal incidents observed beginning in 2014.”

What changed? “The FBI assesses it is very likely this increase [in attacks] began following the 9 August 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the subsequent Grand Jury November 2014 declination to indict the police officers involved.”

This sparked a series of attacks on police fueled, in the FBI’s opinion, by “incidents of alleged police abuse against African Americans.” The FBI thus recognizes “perceptions of police brutality” as “organizing drivers” for attacks against police. In all six attacks on police profiled in the report, the FBI argues it is “very likely” that the motivation was “retaliation.”

Dallas Police HQ after the shooting deaths of five police officers. (Credit Image: © Ian Vogler/Mirrorpix/Newscom via ZUMA Press)

For each of the six attacks, the report presents evidence for the attacker’s identification with Black Identity Extremism as indicated by social media posts, tattoos, manifestos, and explicit declarations of hatred against whites.

Interestingly, in four of the six cases, suspects were also identified with the “Moorish” movement, including two cases in which suspects had “Moorish identification cards.” Blacks claiming to be “Moors” often assert they are part of a self-governing nation and don’t have to obey the U.S. government’s laws, thus becoming an African American variant of the “sovereign citizen” movement.

The FBI notes “Moors” have traditionally not deliberately sought to attack the police. Violence that did occur usually resulted from “encounters with law enforcement,” as might be expected when “Moors” deny the authority of the police officer who is confronting them.

What is truly striking about these attacks since 2014 is their “premeditated, targeted aggression” against law enforcement. This does not reflect “Moorish” ideology but a conviction that law enforcement is oppressing blacks.

Interestingly, the report calls these attacks a “resurgence,” and refers to history of which most Americans are unaware: the violent activities of a group known as the “Black Liberation Army” [BLA].

“From 1970 to 1984, the BLA was involved in at least 38 criminal incidents, including 26 armed assaults, 3 assassinations, 4 bombings, and 4 hijackings and hostage takings. Almost half of these attacks took place in predominantly African American neighborhoods and targeted law enforcement officers without regard to their race according to an open source database.”

What is occurring now therefore isn’t something new, but is an echo of another time when political extremists attacked the police. And the justification then, as now, was because police are “representative of a perceived oppressive law enforcement system.” The FBI concludes that future controversial police shootings of blacks will be “drivers” for more premeditated attacks.

What is left out of this report is who is promoting this narrative of police oppression of blacks. The answer of course is the media, which gleefully spread nonsense about “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” myth. Such fables can have fatal consequences. Blacks who hear “mainstream” news organizations accuse police of gunning down black children for no reason and without consequences can hardly be blamed for considering law enforcement an occupying army. It’s not surprising many want to “retaliate.”

Indeed, the media’s reaction to this very report shows reporters have learned nothing. A hopelessly biased story from the AP (republished by the “conservative” Newsmax) portrayed the report as the return of COINTELPRO in the 1960’s, when J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI “spied on activist groups without evidence they had broken any laws.”

But of course, the FBI also monitored and disrupted white extremist groups during this era, not because laws were being broken, but because Hoover wanted to keep tabs on all groups he saw as ideological threats. For example, George Lincoln Rockwell would sometimes report suspicious activities of his contacts to the FBI so as to stay on the right side of the law, unaware the FBI was behind the suspicious activities in the first place. As recently as 2000, the FBI recruited a spy who reported on groups as unthreatening as the Council for Conservative Citizens.

More importantly, the real case leftists and their fellow activists who call themselves “journalists” seem to be making is that there is no such thing as a “Black Identity Extremist,” or that such a person would be praiseworthy. You can now even buy a T-shirt with the words on it. (An analogous shirt worn by a white person would be career suicide in a country the media confidently tells us is dominated by “white privilege.”)

Leftists fail to understand that the people profiled in the FBI’s report are not included because they have an extremist ideology — the report would have been much longer if that were the criterion — but because they attacked or murdered police officers. Their declared motives are clearly relevant.

The New York Times says the very expression “black identity extremist” is “frightening and dangerous.” Black leaders and activists are reportedly “outraged” by the report. The ACLU warns that this could be a prelude to increased surveillance of innocent blacks, and that the FBI should instead keep an eye on “white supremacists.”

The ACLU is not alone in criticizing the FBI for hyping a supposedly non-existent threat when the real problem is whites. For example, in a piece arguing the FBI must “explain” itself, black columnist Clarence Page blithely claims the FBI report describes “a threat that may not exist — or at least, not in the way that the FBI describes it.” He complains that the report simply “describes a half-dozen highly publicized killings of police officers by black perpetrators,” implying that the coverage of these attacks was exaggerated and that these premeditated attacks were random, unconnected events.

Yet he then warns darkly of “a rally by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., [that] led to one death and more than a dozen injuries.” Of course, the violence in Charlottesville was caused by antifa and facilitated by actions of local and state governments. This was hardly a premediated and ideologically inspired assault on police, but Mr. Page wants to see the FBI “using its resources to pursue actual terrorists,” by which he appears to mean people like the Charlottesville demonstrators. Pro-white speech is the same as violence and is a national threat; deliberate violence against police is of no political significance.

Much of the media criticism of the FBI report reflects leftist fears of the rise of white advocacy. The FBI report supports our arguments. If we were not seen as a threat, it would not be controversial.

As the AP article observed:

Before the Trump administration, the report might not have caused such alarm. The FBI noted it issued a similar bulletin warning of retaliatory violence by ‘black separatist extremists’ in March 2016, when the country had a black president, Barack Obama, and black attorney general, Loretta Lynch.

Now, because whites are showing some signs of waking up, the Left want to shut down honest discussion about the color of racial terrorism. To borrow a term from Ayn Rand, they want us to “blank out” both the attacks on police and the motivations of the attackers. The murders of police officers thus become as unknown as the violent history of the Black Liberation Army.

The FBI does not need to justify itself to the press. Reporters need to explain why they are so willing to defend cop killers, uphold racial double standards, and mislead their readers. Indeed, the absence of any mention of media bias was the glaring flaw of the report. Journalists have blood on their hands. It might be a “Black Identity Extremist” who murders a police officer, but the press certainly helped drive him to it.