Why isn't this murder?

[Al B. Sure!]

http://news.yahoo.com/justice-trayvon-alabama-man-critical-condition-mob-beating-053222142.html

Mobile police need your help to catch a mob that beat Matthew Owens so badly that he’s in critical condition.
According to police, Owens fussed at some kids playing basketball in the middle of Delmar Drive about 8:30 Saturday night. They say the kids left and a group of adults returned, armed with everything but the kitchen sink.
Police tell News 5 the suspects used chairs, pipes and paint cans to beat Owens.
Owens’ sister, Ashley Parker, saw the attack. “It was the scariest thing I have ever witnessed.” Parker says 20 people, all African American, attacked her brother on the front porch of his home, using “brass buckles, paint cans and anything they could get their hands on.”
What Parker says happened next could make the fallout from the brutal beating even worse. As the attackers walked away, leaving Owen bleeding on the ground, Parker says one of them said “Now thats justice for Trayvon.”

[DaShi]

The loons are like 85% of Blacks right now on this issue. Seriously.

(and 90% of white liberals)

Right.

So according to loinburger's post, 99% of White conservatives are loons on this issue. Seriously...dude.

[Al B. Sure!]

Right.

So according to loinburger's post, 99% of White conservatives are loons on this issue. Seriously...dude.

I'm judging by what I've seen on facebook and the arguments I've gotten into on facebook about this. I know only one Black guy who believes this is second degree murder and Zimmerman racial profiled but he doesn't think this is a hate crime and thinks it was a terrible mistake. He's the only Black person I know or who knows someone I know to take that reasonable position. Everyone else is nutty on this.

[DaShi]

I'm judging this on the comments of only the people whose comments I've seen. I know only one White guy who believes that Zimmerman was acting solely in self-defense. He's the only White person I know or who knows someone I know to take that reasonable position. Everyone else is nutty on this.

[giblets]

The loons are like 85% of Blacks right now on this issue. Seriously.

(and 90% of white liberals)

White liberals aren't forming mobs and beating people "for Trayvon".

[Al B. Sure!]

I'm judging this on the comments of only the people whose comments I've seen. I know only one White guy who believes that Zimmerman was acting solely in self-defense. He's the only White person I know or who knows someone I know to take that reasonable position. Everyone else is nutty on this.

Nah not white liberals.

Maybe white conservatives, yeah. I will say that. The white conservatives I've seen on boards and the few I know online that have talked about this have been sympathetic to Zimmerman.

[Zevico]

Blogger "Ace" collates three links to three separate stories:

http://ace.mu.nu/

"Ace"'s article is as follows:

20 Blacks Beat White Interloper With Makeshift Bludgeons; Victim In Critical Condition; One Attacker Said, "Now That's Justice For Trayvon"
—Ace

No national media coverage.

And this is the third racially-motivated attack in which the attackers explicitly cited "Justice for Trayvon" as a motivation or excuse for the brutal attacks.

1. The Baltimore Beating. This was the videotaped gang attack on a drunk St. Patrick's day reveler whose crime was Walking While White (Content Warning). [Zev's edit: link http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=ddf_1333831275

Baltimore's Chief of Police says it's not a hate crime. He's very worried about the politics.

There's one problem with that: the attackers say otherwise. The man identifying himself as the cameraman who giddily filmed the attack on the white tourist says:



2. The Chicago Mugging. Less vicious than the others-- this was merely a 2-on-1 attack. A veritable Marquis de Queensbury affair.

[Zev's edit: http://www.myfoxchicago.com/dpp/news...burb-20120420]

Although they did punched the downed victim repeatedly in the head.

Hayes and a 15-year-old Chicago boy walked up behind the 19-year-old man victim and pinned his arms to his side, police said. Hayes, 18, then picked up a large tree branch, pointed it at the man and said, “Empty your pockets, white boy.”

The two allegedly rifled through the victim’s pockets, then threw him to the ground and punched him “numerous times” in the head and back before running away, police said. Hayes and the boy are black; the victim is white.

After being arrested, Hayes told police he was upset by the Trayvon Martin case and beat the man up because he was white, Cook County State’s Attorney’s office spokeswoman Tandra Simonton said, citing court records.

3. The latest "Justice" attack, in Mobile, Alabama.
[Zev's edit: www2.wkrg.com/news/2012/apr/23/man-beaten-mob-critical-condition-ar-3659891/ ]

According to police, Owens fussed at some kids playing basketball in the middle of Delmar Drive about 8:30 Saturday night. They say the kids left and a group of adults returned, armed with everything but the kitchen sink.

Police tell News 5 the suspects used chairs, pipes and paint cans to beat Owens.

Owens’ sister, Ashley Parker, saw the attack. “It was the scariest thing I have ever witnessed.” Parker says 20 people, all African American, attacked her brother on the front porch of his home, using “brass buckles, paint cans and anything they could get their hands on.”

...

What Parker says happened next could make the fallout from the brutal beating even worse. As the attackers walked away, leaving Owen bleeding on the ground, Parker says one of them said “Now thats justice for Trayvon.”

I repeat: No national coverage of this racial hate crime pattern in the media.

Apparently some victims are unworthy, and some hatred and violence is justified.

Is Obama going to say anything? Call at least one of the victims? Attempt to bring calm? Attempt a "Sister Souljah" moment (which could actually benefit him politically) and call out violent black racists?

Apparently not, and the media has decided that's their preferred political strategy, too.

Real lynch mobs in place of virtual lynch mobs.

[Zevico]

Victor Davis Hanson summarises matters

1) If one suggests that there may not be, at least as yet, enough evidence to overturn the initial police decision of not charging Mr. Zimmerman with a crime, then one is a de facto racist.

In other words, the liberal position of letting all the evidence be reexamined in a dispassionate fashion is now illiberal. And the illiberal one of charging someone with a felony without established probable cause is liberal. But just arresting and charging a suspect to let a judge or jury post facto decide whether there was ever probable cause for such an arrest is neither liberal nor consistent with American jurisprudence.

2) It is clear now that the African-American civil-rights hierarchy is concerned largely with maintaining power and influence by promulgating the theme of unending white racism — and the need for its exclusive agency to find redress and reparations from that eternal fact. That is a serious charge, but one easy to substantiate — whether we compare the commensurate outrage accorded the Duke case, the Skip Gates mess, the Tawana Brawley hoax, or the present Trayvon Martin tragedy, with the veritable neglect about the carnage of young African-American males in our cities, or the deliberate distortion that white-on-black crime is an epidemic when, in fact, black-on-black crime is — in addition to the fact of vastly higher incidences of black-on-white crime.

And the professional grievance industry has achieved many of its aims. The latter common occurrences earn scant public attention; the former rare incidents, lurid hysteria. The disturbing truth is that to examine the black-on-black crime might raise uncomfortable inferences that such violence cannot be entirely explained by contemporary racism, and arises from issues as wide-ranging as illegitimacy, male parenting, literacy, education, family structure, disproportionate rates of criminality and drug use, misogyny in popular culture, etc. — crises that often demand more than just government attention and funding.

If the Black Caucus or Black Panthers or Sharpton/Jackson industry can “prove” that Mr. Martin was “executed” or “assassinated” by a white oppressor due to his skin color alone and that this outrage was covered up by a racist white establishment, then their presence is vital to curb such an “epidemic”; if the case has nothing to do with race, or if it proves a difficult and complex case of self-defense, then once again they are relegated to the hard, unheralded — and unpopular — work of addressing the root causes of inordinate black crime that earns few profits and little publicity.

3) If the media had erred in one or two case in either its emphases or its facts, or erred on both sides of what apparently has become an ideological divide over the case, few could complain. But from Day One, the media has tried to promulgate an unambiguous narrative of a diminutive African-American preteen model student executed by a white racist vigilante with a shady past, a narrative that the facts, at least as we know them thus far, does not substantiate: The usually printed photos of Mr. Martin did not reflect that he was 17 or 6′2″; there was no firm evidence that Mr. Zimmerman used a racial epithet in contrast to the firm evidence that NBC doctored a tape to suggest a racist motive on the part of the shooter; the rubric “white Hispanic” was used, although the media does not employ it elsewhere; the assertions that Mr. Zimmerman was lying about his injuries were not, as alleged, proved by the police video, but far more likely disproved by it; there is still no firm proof about which of the two in the fight called out for help; there is now firm proof of an altercation prior to the shooting; Mr. Zimmerman’s past does not quite fit the portrait of a white vigilante with racist tendencies; nor does Mr. Martin’s quite fit the initial picture of a model student — information about the two that is either irrelevant or germane, but not applicable to just one of the two involved in a fight; and so on.

4) In explosive matters of racial controversy, we can expect the president and the attorney general to be of either no help or to make things worse. President Obama fanned the flames in the 2008 Reverend Wright disclosures, the Pennsylvania primary, the Gates mess, and was utterly incoherent in the Martin matter; the attorney general has now weighed in so often on the question of race, and in such an inflammatory fashion (“cowards,” “my people,” accusations of congressional racism, etc.) that his only recourse is far wiser silence.

5) To suggest all of the above is to earn almost immediate condemnation as a racist, not because any of it is refutable, but because some do not wish to be reminded that so far the case on its merits has little to do with race, and is instead yet another fatal shooting where it is difficult to ascertain a proper charge — whether of murder/manslaughter or self-defense — a quandary repeated hundreds of times each year throughout the country with near-zero national public interest.

How sick we have become as a nation, when preferring not to prejudge a case until an inquiry reviews known evidence and searches for new information is considered racist; and wishing to inject race in order to do the opposite is not.

Or put another way:

1) So far there has been very little new light shed on exactly what happened on the night of the shooting. It is likely that Mr. Zimmerman will be arrested on some sort of charge, local, state, or federal, and more likely that most will believe that such an arrest is as much a necessary price to soothe racial passions as it is likely to be based on careful review of existing evidence.

2) Identity in this ill society is everything — something to be put on and taken off as one sees advantage. Civil-rights supporters prefer to wear hoodies in rallies and demonstrations in solidarity with the hooded Mr. Martin, but prefer the media to continue to show pictures of a young-looking victim in football attire that better offers a sympathetic portrait to the general public. Hispanic and Democratic George Zimmerman, had he Hispanicized his name (something like a Jorge Zimmerman, or had he used his mother’s Latino maiden name), would have either found a supportive chorus from Latino activists, or the entire case of Latino-black crime would not have had commensurate resonance. If Mr. Zimmerman were applying for a civil-service job, no one would have created the new rubric “white Hispanic.” Even at this late date, if he were to use his mother’s maiden name as part of a hyphenated last name, he would earn more empathy. Unfortunately, he found himself pigeonholed as a white conservative vigilante, not a Hispanic Democrat, and that has made all the difference in his media profile.

3) The hysteria is not just over the death of a young African-American male, because hundreds are tragically killed to near silence every year, 94 percent of them by other African-American males. Nor is the outrage over a supposed white war against black men, given that in incidents of interracial crime, the latter kill the former far more frequently. Nor is it just over the decision, so far, of the police not to arrest and indict George Zimmerman, because hundreds of black assailants of other blacks each year find themselves not charged for capital crimes, because of the proven difficulties of obtaining critical affidavits, and the reluctance of eye-witnesses to come forward in the inner-city. In general, there are no marches or demonstrations over what has become a case of sheer carnage of one particular racial and gender group in our cities, or the frequent inability to bring murder suspects to trial. Finally, if the deceased had been white, and there are numerous whites killed each year in self-defense cases, with the facts as we know them so far unchanged, there would be zero national interest.

4) There are no such things any more as overtly recognized racial smears, at least not in the absolute sense. They now depend on perceptions of who says what and why, a relative condition. The country is obsessed with decoding a scratchy tape to ascertain whether Mr. Zimmerman said “cold, coons, goons, or punks,” with the idea that if the garbled word proves a racial slur, then we have the magical key that will supposedly unlock the case — even as the late Travyon Martin self-identified himself with the N-word on his Twitter account and used it of his friends. No one can explain why Mr. Martin felt a need to so self-identify; no one seems to care; and no one can provide rules of the conditions under which (who says it, and when, why, how) society must deplore the use of such an epithet.

5) The country is unhinged and pays no attention to simple logic. The mother of Trayvon Martin deplores society’s supposed media obsession over her son, even as she seeks to trademark her son’s name for traditional marketing purposes, after avowing her legal efforts are only to protect his legacy. We are to deplore the use of past information about Mr. Martin that might lend background information to the case (past suspensions, possible drug use, alleged possession of possible stolen items, etc.) that seems at odds with the narratives provided by the media, but simultaneously must be told that in the past Mr. Zimmerman was a vigilante, racist, had brushes with the law, was a bad credit risk, etc. In short, we are to accept that background information is a relative issue, and a necessary means only if it leads to proper ends.

6) There really is no law. The Martins have legitimate questions about the absence of an indictment, as do many in this country who are unhappy with the use of self-defense pleas. That said, no one believes the Black Panthers will be charged with a felony for posting an open-season bounty on Mr. Zimmerman; no one believes that Spike Lee’s deliberate attempt to incite a mob reaction at the Zimmerman residence will even be considered a misdemeanor; and no one believes that a crowd of protestors detouring into a pharmacy to loot it will face arrests for theft. Everyone believes that if he were to emulate any of the above behavior in a non-racially-charged case, he would most surely risk some sort of legal repercussions.

7) There can be no more presidential editorializing. In this case, the Gates matter, the Fluke incident, and the Giffords tragedy, the president weighed in only to find his commentary either unsupported by facts, premature, prejudicial, or abjectly partisan. Nor will the attorney general weigh in, given that he has lost credibility after nonsensically calling the nation “cowards” for not wishing for a dialogue on race on his terms, referring to African-Americans as “my people,” and alleging racism as the cause of congressional questioning of his handling of the Fast and Furious debacle.

8) Mr. Zimmerman indeed may be guilty of second-degree murder, some sort of manslaughter, criminal negligence, or innocent by reason of self-defense. But we are at a point now where such considerations have become secondary to the larger agendas of activists. Mr. Sharpton, Mr. Jackson, the Black Panther Party, the Black Caucus, Spike Lee, and others may feel their invective and shoot-from-the-hip allegations are necessary to ensure an indictment, given the history of racial bias in this country; but fairly or not that aim seems secondary to their larger interests in racial scapegoating and acrimony for careerist reasons. Of course, they are not worried about such criticism, but it nonetheless is widely shared, as the opportunism and lack of ethics of the current self-identified civil-rights establishment is becoming a national consensus.

9) Most who editorialize so passionately on this case, black and white, live in cities, but most likely as far away from those neighborhoods and inner-city schools where murder is an epidemic as they can. They are engaging in de facto profiling in every aspect of their and their childrens’ lives, based on general perceptions, personal experience, and statistical data. Profiling and stereotyping are for others; a “good” or “safe” area is for the more sensitive and educated.

10) If an outsider were dispassionately to collate the public statements of the Black Caucus, the number of widely publicized racial controversies, and the charges of racism and counter-racism in the last three years, then one would conclude that racial relations, at least at the media and sensationalized level, from 2009–2012 were both far more emphasized and far worse, and the country far more polarized, than at any time in recent memory. In short, we are entering a dangerous phase in which millions of Americans have resigned themselves to allowing elites to construct one sort of reality, while they disengage from it and privately live quite another.

[Al B. Sure!]

Your livelink edit doesn't work. There's no video there.

[DaShi]

OMG! Conservative writer puts conservative spin on the incident! Wow!

Anyway, he's entirely wrong.

[Zevico]

Your livelink edit doesn't work. There's no video there.

Fixed. Or just click here: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=ddf_1333831275

[Al B. Sure!]

Oh yeah I saw that. They beat him and took off his clothes. That **** was all over World Star Hip Hop.

That's the other problem. WSHH promotes that ****.

[Zevico]

if you're peddling the notion that race relations may be strained in only the USA

I'm not. In fact I'd say the truth is much to the contrary. It's just a shocking disappointment to witness this kind of race hustling and violence in a modern democracy, and to see those who enabled (and currently enable) such violence thanked as "partners" by its present Administration. It's nothing more than an assault on reason itself.

[Hauldren Collider]

Oh, the irony. Black lynch mobs. **** the media, but especially **** Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

[Kidlicious]

I'm fairly certian that the watchman didn't just get out of his car and instantly shoot the kid. However, according to the obviously biased article Al quoted, the only details given about what happened were exactly that.

So, why wasn't he charged with murder? Because more information is needed.

Good post