"Terrorist Bill Ayers tells Bill deBlasio to be Proud of Supporting Marxists
http://t.co/rb0ctoH55I #TCOT pic.twitter.com/jJFr7wUGDv" @KfromLI
— God, Guns, & Freedom (@VitoBagofDonuts) December 23, 2014One of the most frequently quoted and photographed Ferguson protesters was charged Saturday with setting fire to a Berkeley convenience store earlier this week.Yes, "disbelief."
St. Louis County police arrested Joshua Williams, 19, of St. Louis, on Friday after several local media outlets and store surveillance captured images of him trying to set a pile of wood on fire outside the QuikTrip on North Hanley Road early Wednesday.
Williams confessed to setting fires at the store in a videotaped interview, according to court documents.
Police say Williams entered the QuikTrip shortly after looters shattered its glass doors during protests of the death of Antonio Martin, 18, who a police officer had shot earlier at the Mobil on the Run store across the street. Surveillance footage from the Mobil store shows Martin point what police say is a gun at a Berkeley officer before the officer fatally shoots him.
Williams can be seen in videos both inside and outside the looted QuikTrip, authorities said.
On Friday night and Saturday morning, a small group gathered at the St. Louis County Justice Center to protest Williams' arrest. Some were in disbelief over his reported confession and said the video images are not clear enough...
We have heard a lot lately about tensions between the police and the communities that they serve, and the urgent need to reduce them. Here’s an easy first step: Stop lying about the cops.Keep reading.
The “national conversation” about race and policing we’ve been having ever since Michael Brown was shot by Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Mo., last summer has been based on lies. The lie that Officer Wilson shot Brown while he had his hands up and was pleading “Don’t shoot.” The lie that New York City policemen targeted Eric Garner for a violent arrest because he was black. The lie, peddled especially by the progressive prince of New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio, that the police are racist.
These are the lies that fuel hatred for the police, because if the police routinely execute black men in cold blood and serve a thoroughly racist system, they deserve to be hated. They should be the subject of nightly protests. They should be showered with obloquy. They should be harried by Attorney General Eric Holder. They should be considered a stain on the national conscience to be extricated at all costs.
This is the line of reasoning that leads to protesters chanting: “What do we want? Dead cops. When do we want them? Now.”
His rote praise of the police notwithstanding, especially now that he is under so much political pressure after the murders of Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, Mayor de Blasio is deeply invested in this smear. It is why he has made career anti-police agitator Al Sharpton practically deputy police commissioner. It is why he considers the police a clear and present danger to his biracial son, Dante. It is why he said the tragic death of Eric Garner in police custody was the product of “centuries of racism.”
The logic of the de Blasio view tends toward the conclusion that the police are unbelievably insidious: They recruit people of all races to go into dangerous neighborhoods on the pretense of protecting innocent people there, when in reality the mission is to harass black kids and, should the opportunity arise, kill them. If this were true, it would make the police as a class not just racists, but sociopaths...
Casket of slain NYPD Officer Rafael Ramos escorted out of Christ Tabernacle Church in Queens http://t.co/03aiGSGXCh pic.twitter.com/b2HzEdw0Jn
— ABC7 Eyewitness News (@ABC7) December 27, 2014As Mayor Bill de Blasio took the podium Saturday at the funeral of P.O. Rafael Ramos, thousands of police officers in the streets watching video of the service inside turned their backs, in unison, to the monitors.
Instead of listening to Hizzoner, whose brief remarks were carried live on large speakers and screens outside the Glendale church, the cops chatted and generally ignored the eulogy.
The mayor — whom union officials have said has “blood on his hands” for rhetoric that has created a dangerous atmosphere for cops, and led to the assassinations of Ramos and his partner, Officer Wenjian Liu — arrived 30 minutes early to the service at Christ Tabernacle Church with wife Chirlane McCray by his side.
A huge crowd of officers refused to acknowledge de Blasio, who quietly greeted Police Commissioner Bill Bratton and his wife before slipping into the funeral home adjoining the Glendale house of worship through a side door.
I previously have written about the activities of anti-Israel activists in fomenting confrontation in Ferguson and New York City:
Intifada Missouri – Anti-Israel activists may push Ferguson over the edge.I have a column at The NY Post on the subject, Partners in protest: The anti-Israel, cop-bash link.
Anti-Israel activist still stoking fires in #Ferguson.
“Pigs in a blanket” chanted in #Ferguson long before #NYPD executions.
Ever since a Staten Island grand jury found no probable cause to indict a police officer in the death of Eric Garner, the protesters in this city have shown disregard for the law.
They have also been accompanied by ugly calls for “dead cops” and chants likening the NYPD to the KKK. No surprise, it crossed into violence with some smashing windows on a police car and others assaulting cops during the occupation of the Brooklyn Bridge.
But instead of demanding protesters obey the law, the mayor and others for too long validated an anger based on a smear: that cops do not value black life. Not once did we hear Mayor de Blasio or Al Sharpton state the obvious: If Eric Garner and Michael Brown had in fact put their hands up and not resisted arrest, they would be alive today.
This was followed by the official indulgence of protesters who deliberately blocked traffic, tried to disrupt events, from the Thanksgiving Day parade to the Christmas tree lighting, and later occupied the Brooklyn Bridge.
A week later, Ismaaiyl Brinsley posted “they take 1 of ours . . . Let’s take 2 of theirs” and executed Officers Ramos and Liu as they sat in their car.
So let’s not pretend any of this is about the right to protest.
It’s lawlessness — done in a clear attempt to hold this city hostage — that is the real problem. And the city authorities who have until now winked at it.
Cop-bashing New York mayor Bill de Blasio seems genuinely surprised at the ferocious backlash against him in light of the execution-style weekend killing of two local cops.Keep reading.
After spending the past year in office attacking police, the mayor is now scrambling to put the pin back into the grenade he threw into the local body politic. His crusade against the police goes back at least to his election campaign last year when he caustically criticized then-mayor Michael Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk policy.
De Blasio is appealing for calm and for a temporary suspension of the ugly anti-police protests his incendiary rhetoric has spawned.
Strangely, this far-left radical who, like his ally in the White House never puts politics aside for the benefit of the community, is now asking New Yorkers to do precisely that.
So far the New York Police Department isn’t in a mood to forgive de Blasio who has teamed up with racial arsonist Al Sharpton to lay waste to what’s left of civil society in the Big Apple. Before the two murders Sharpton had been leading marches where the demonstrators chanted, “What do we want? Dead cops.” Taking cues from the Westboro Baptist Church, Sharpton followers showed up at one cop memorial service chanting and heckling the mourners.
NYPD union leaders have asked de Blasio to skip police funerals and a large gathering of cops turned their backs on the mayor as he showed up Saturday at the Brooklyn hospital where the lifeless bodies of officers Rafael Ramos, 40, and Wenjian Liu, 32, had been taken after they were shot dead by an adherent of the Religion of Peace.
The shooter, Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley, was a Muslim apparently upset at what he believed were the racist killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. and Eric Garner in Staten Island. He indicated he was planning to kill “pigs,” and as Robert Spencer notes, “Brinsley’s Facebook page featured a photo of the Qur’an open to the eighth chapter, where Allah exhorts the believers to ‘strike terror into the hearts of the enemies of Allah‘ (8:60).“
Since de Blasio was sworn in last New Year’s Day, New Yorkers have, in fits and starts, begun to realize that they elected a dangerously erratic Sandinista-loving radical as mayor. Although de Blasio’s reaction to the cop murders strikes many in the punditry as incompetent, they are being charitable. De Blasio’s behavior reflects his pathological, hateful, profoundly anti-American ideology. He can’t conceal his contempt for those whose job it is to promote law and order.
This is what happens when a small-c communist becomes mayor of the nation’s greatest metropolis...
Opposition to Mayor de Blasio has literally reached new heights http://t.co/8AQqVwkZUE pic.twitter.com/Gjwm9qYjRB
— New York Post (@nypost) December 26, 2014Disgusting, divisive, and just plain sad.@nypost
— Walter James Casper (@repsac3) December 26, 2014Pro-Israel student activist and TruthRevolt contributor Daniel Mael has come under fire from campus progressives and fellow students for writing about a Brandeis student representative’s tweet declaring that she had “no sympathy” for the two NYPD officers murdered in Brooklyn Saturday. Since the story went viral, Mael has become the target of personal threats and a campaign to see him suspended or expelled from the school.Keep reading.
In his piece Saturday, Mael quoted multiple Twitter posts by Khadijah Lynch, at the time the Undergraduate Department Representative for Brandeis’ African and Afro-American Studies program, which expressed her lack of “sympathy” for the two police officers murdered earlier that day. “i have no sympathy for the nypd officers who were murdered today,” she wrote Saturday, followed by “lmao, all i just really dont have sympathy for the cops who were shot. i hate this racist fucking country.”
Mael followed the quotes with other inflammatory statements posted by Lynch, including posts asking “what the fuck even IS ‘non-violence’,” decrying “Zionism,” declaring “the fact that black people have not burned this country down is beyond me” and “I am in riot mode.”
TruthRevolt contacted Lynch for clarification about her statement about the NYPD officers; she responded by saying that any publication of her Twitter posts was “slander.” Mael reported that Lynch then returned to Twitter to say that she needed to “get my gun license. Asap.” and that “amerikkka needs an infitada” (a violent uprising).
This is the second time in recent weeks that TruthRevolt has been accused by left-wing activists of defamation for simply quoting them. The abortion activist and actress Lena Dunham went so far as to serve this publication with a cease and desist for reporting statement made in her own book.
When Mael’s article went viral, Brandeis officials distanced the school from Lynch’s comments, calling them “hurtful and disrespectful,” and African and Afro-American Studies Department Chair Chad Williams issued a statement announcing Lynch’s resignation from her position as student representative for the program. Williams also denounced online criticism of Lynch, which he described as “horrifically racist, sexist, Islamophobic and threatening physical violence.”
Now Brandeis students supportive of Lynch are attempting to start a movement to have Mael either suspended or expelled...
Bill de Blasio, like his progressive political idol Barack Obama, is finding out that you can’t do the New Politics if you don’t pay attention to the old politics.Man, that's harsh --- and it's Politico, a left wing rag!
In Obama’s case, it was a failure to recognize the threat posed to him by Republicans who didn’t buy into his calls for a post-partisan partnership with Congress. For New York’s ambitious liberal mayor, it was an inability to keep long-simmering tensions with the city’s traditionally powerful police department from boiling over in the last few days.
Just over a year after sailing into office with 72 percent of the vote on a message of transformational change, de Blasio found his mayoralty subsumed by a torrent of anger, unleashed by the murder of two police officers in Brooklyn Sunday by a troubled gunman who said he was killing “pigs” to avenge the deaths of two men by cops in Staten Island and Ferguson, Missouri. By Monday, de Blasio was lashing out at the press corps that covers him, trying to paper over public divisions with his own police commissioner and coping with what friends described as the emotional blow of facing public rejection by many in the nation’s biggest police force. “He’s pretty badly shaken,” one told us.
That a civic tragedy would so quickly devolve into a full-blown political crisis for the new mayor was testament to the vehemence of anti-de Blasio elements in the police union – and the mayor’s mistaken belief that his 2013 victory gave him the right to shred an old Gotham political playbook that dictated a mayor show deference to the NYPD.
You can’t be big-city mayor and alienate the cops – and that’s just as true now as it was under three-term New York City Mayor Ed Koch, or even a century ago.
“Koch was loved by the cops and always told all his successors that you must have the support of the cops, that the cops can be your best friend. If Koch were alive today that’s what he would tell Bill de Blasio,” said George Arzt, former press secretary to Koch, whose election in 1977 election greatly improved City Hall-police relations.
De Blasio “needs to press reset in his relationship with the cops,” Arzt said.
Good luck with that. The bad blood between the NYPD and de Blasio is nothing new – it dates back to an election campaign centered on de Blasio’s withering criticism of the Bloomberg administration’s stop-and-frisk policy, and his close alliance with the Rev. Al Sharpton, who has organized scores of protests targeting cops over their behavior toward urban blacks.
According to a former de Blasio aide, during the general election campaign in 2013, de Blasio’s team was even convinced that members of his police detail were eavesdropping on his private conversations in his city-assigned car. Things got so bad that de Blasio, according to the staffer, would step into the street to make sure he was out of earshot of plainclothes officers...
Op-Ed: Bill de Blasio’s arrogance puts cops in cross hairs http://t.co/v9VsjqMVTP pic.twitter.com/3Os7zX2rtI
— New York Post (@nypost) December 22, 2014‘What do we want? Dead cops!” So chanted marchers at one of the protests organized in the last month against the failure of grand juries to indict white officers in the death of black crime suspects Michael Brown and Eric Garner. On Saturday they got their wish, as a black assailant citing revenge for Brown and Garner traveled from Maryland to murder two cops sitting in their patrol car in Brooklyn.Yeah, sing it brothers.
“They were quite simply assassinated, targeted for their uniform,” New York Police Commissioner William Bratton said, and so they were. Garner and Brown were resisting arrest, but the two young officers never had a chance even to pull their guns. They had been marked for death near a high-crime housing project they were trying to protect against criminal predators.
Mayor Bill de Blasio , Attorney General Eric Holder and President Obama were all quick to condemn the shooting. And let’s stipulate that no one other than the alleged shooter, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, is responsible for pulling the trigger. Chased into the subway by police, he then shot himself.
But this double assassination is also a moment of clarity about how thin the line in any society is between order and anarchy. America is full of Brinsleys who no longer abide the norms of civilized behavior, if they even know what those norms are. They need but the slightest excuse to take justice into their own hands and go on a rampage.
Especially in urban America, the police walk that line between civilization and mayhem every day. Yet since the Garner and Brown episodes, the progressive leaders in New York and Washington have talked and behaved as if the police are society’s main problem.
They have honored with joint public appearances and private meetings such racial agitators as Al Sharpton who want to stop the “broken windows” policing that has done so much to reduce crime in poor minority neighborhoods. Mr. Holder has sent federal agents to second-guess grand juries and “reform” local police as if he assumes these police chiefs and prosecutors are biased. The New York City Council staged a “die-in” as fallen victims of police.
And progressives have failed to denounce protestors who have disrupted civic life, rampaged through stores, and even assaulted police who tried to arrest law-breakers. All of this has contributed to a public climate of suspicion and hate against police in which a man like Ismaaiyl Brinsley can in his deranged mind think it is justified to stalk and execute two cops on the beat...
Conservatives know very well that attempts to politicize violence on the part of the mentally ill is deeply unfair. They know that liberal claims that either the Tea Party or conservatives such as Sarah Palin were somehow responsible for the 2011 shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was sheer slander. If some angry supporters of the police now try to say Obama, Holder, or de Blasio approved or countenanced the actions of Ismaaiyl Brinsley, they are just as wrong. Obama, Holder, and de Blasio have all rightly condemned the murder of the two officers.That's quite fair. But keep reading.
But once we acknowledge that, we cannot ignore the fact that the discussion about race and the police in this country has gotten out of control in recent months and that these same political leaders who should have been seeking to restrain the public from drawing extreme and general conclusions about two very extraordinary cases instead kept the pot boiling for political advantage.
Even worse than that, they have empowered and legitimized racial demagogues like Al Sharpton who have sought to profit from exploiting these tragedies to promote their own agendas. In turn, Sharpton and those like him who are given prominent air time on networks like MSNBC and CNN have encouraged protesters who have not only engaged in violence but often openly called for the killing of police, a stance that has been openly endorsed by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and other radicals.
The act of a single possibly mad gunman does not mean that Americans must never question the actions of police or ponder broader issues about race. It is misleading to claim that those who have raised such questions have given a green light to the murder of police officers. Yet those who have sought to take two very different and quite unusual incidents in Ferguson and New York and weave them into a neat narrative of racism and anti-black violence by police have done very much the same thing. The difference between the two is that the media spent much of the last four months seeking to establish that wrongheaded narrative as a fact while they will, quite rightly, give no credence or air time to those who will blame Obama for cop killers....
If there is any reproach today that should be laid at the feet of Obama, Holder, and de Blasio, it is that by helping to foster one false set of assumptions, they have now left themselves vulnerable to questions about their own willingness to accept and exploit calumnies against the police and the justice system.
The people of New York chose "a progressive path"?
Recriminations against de Blasio began within hours of the news that the officers had been shot at point-blank range as they sat in their patrol car near a housing project in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn — and that the gunman had been motivated to kill them as retribution for the black men whose deaths at the hands of police in New York City and Ferguson, Mo., have sparked protests around the country.
A video of the arrival of de Blasio and Police Commissioner William J. Bratton at the hospital where officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos had been taken showed dozens of police officers silently turning their backs.
“There’s blood on many hands tonight,” Patrick Lynch, president of the largest police union, said late Saturday. “Those that incited violence on the street in the guise of protest, that tried to tear down what New York City police officers did every day. We tried to warn it must not go on, it shouldn’t be tolerated. That blood on the hands starts at the steps of City Hall in the office of the mayor.”
Although New York is a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than 6 to 1, de Blasio is its first Democratic mayor in 20 years, and his stewardship of the city is being watched nationally as a test of unabashedly liberal leadership. After his landslide victory, he declared: “Make no mistake. The people of this city have chosen a progressive path. And tonight we set forth on it together, as one city.”
.@BeccaJLower @AaronWorthing Khadija has "protected her tweets": https://t.co/pqha58HnS0 http://t.co/TaN93kn5Dp
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) December 21, 2014
