A tragedy exploited
By Michael Graham | Wednesday, March 28, 2012 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Op-Ed
We should have known the minute we saw Al Sharpton.
As soon as this opportunistic, race-baiting buffoon (or as he’s known by his friends at MSNBC, “respected journalist”) showed up in Sanford, Fla., to whip up fear and hate, all of America should have stopped right then and reconsidered our rush to judgment.
A week ago, the story of Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman was the story of an innocent black kid targeted, stalked and executed by a trigger-happy white man for no reason other than hate.
A week ago, George Zimmerman was the evil offspring of Jim Crow and Barney Fife — an overzealous cop-wannabe with an anti-black attitude.
Today we know that Zimmerman is, in fact, Hispanic. That he’s a registered Democrat. That he had not, as was widely reported, called 911 some 46 times in the previous year. (Zimmerman made 46 such calls since 2004).
More important, we have more facts about what happened that night: physical evidence (grass stains, blood and bruises) and eyewitness testimony tending to corroborate Zimmerman’s claim that Martin was assaulting him when Zimmerman fired in self-defense.
Does this mean Zimmerman is innocent? Does it mean Martin deserved to die?
Of course not.
What the facts today — as opposed to the assumptions of a week ago — do prove is that claims that this case is part of some “USofKKKA” conspiracy were always an opportunistic, hate-inspiring lie.
But given the sources — Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, the New Black Panther Party and the mainstream media — why should we be surprised?
Apparently we’ve learned nothing from the Tawana Brawley or Duke lacrosse cases. Self-serving race-activists tell their tales and the American media follow blindly along.
Indeed, so desperate was The New York Times [ NYT] to maintain the “racist shooting” narrative, it began using a phrase to describe Zimmerman that readers could not recall ever seeing before: “white Hispanic.” The category “white Hispanic” is usually reserved for Census data. It’s certainly not used in news reporting or by Hispanic activists (just ask La Raza).
Does The Times really want to throw what’s left of its credibility away on a story like this? There’s so much obvious injustice in our world, why embarrass yourself by trying to spin this messy case into a cause celebre?
It didn’t have to be this way. The New Black Panther Party didn’t have to offer a $10,000 bounty on Zimmerman. Filmmaker Spike Lee didn’t have to help them by tweeting out the Zimmerman family’s address. President Barack Obama didn’t have to participate by injecting race into the conversation himself (“If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon”).
What could have happened in Florida is what happened in Boston last week. When the jury in the Mattapan massacre case failed to reach a verdict against alleged triggerman Dwayne Moore — accused of murdering four black Bostonians, including a 2-year-old — there was anger and outrage.
But unlike Al Sharpton, Pastor William Dickerson of the Greater Love Tabernacle Church in Dorchester didn’t shout threats or suggest eminent retaliation. Instead he acknowledged it was “a verdict we did not suspect,” then he urged parents to work at preventing future tragedies rather than raging against those in the past.
Contrast the community leaders in Mattapan, where weeks of testimony and evidence seemed to indicate overwhelming guilt in a horrific, child-killing crime, vs. Sharpton and Co. in the Martin case, where the evidence is, at best, unclear and new information is still coming out about the two men involved.
Who is doing more to serve the cause of justice? The verdict is obvious.
Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/opinion/op_ed/view.bg?articleid=1061120476 |
