The BBC is feeding the Black grievance industry and victimhood narrative, and worse, promoting the idea that all whites are racist, and blacks the victims of that racism….a very dangerous and destructive line that sets one group against another.
Justin Webb demonstrates what is so often wrong with BBC interviewers…they go in with preconceived notions that any interviewee has to then defend themselves against rather than the BBC asking neutral questions intended to genuinely discover what is going on in any given situation that has suddenly got their interest.
Webb in this interview (08:48) with British police officer Michael Matthews, author of “We Are The Cops”, who has long experience of how American police operate, began with the prejudice that American police are brutal, racist, violent and a regard themselves as beleagured ‘superheros’ setting themselves against the rest of the population, the police not being part of the community.
Matthews soon put Webb right on just about every criticism.
Webb’s approach is all too often reflected in the rest of the BBC when it comes to reporting on recent events in the US, reporting as ‘fact’ that America is a racist society and that white police officers are gunning down black men because the white officers are racist.
The BBC plays a dangerous game feeding into the black activists game of race baiting, race hustling and facilitating the grievance industry and the line that Blacks are victims of white People’s prejudices at all times.
Here are just some of the BBC’s own prejudices where it casually accepts that events in Ferguson and Baltimore and elsewhere are caused by police racism…
Justin Brotman is a human rights activist, and the son of one of the co-founders of wholesale superstore Costco. And as the voice behind the @Bipartisanism Twitter account, he became one of the main drivers of a campaign to change the public perception of what happened in Baltimore last week.
“I think what we’re seeing is a bit of a tipping point in American culture. With each incident, with video, with witnesses, we’re starting to think – wow, we really do have this problem in America,” Brotman said.
“People are starting to think ‘How many black men are in jail, and shouldn’t be? How many black men have been killed?’ That’s all starting to percolate clearly.”
So what box do we put the Freddie Gray story in?
It’s obviously a story – but it is none too rare, sadly not that unusual – and if you ask many in the black community, not in the least bit unexpected.
I heard one piece of commentary that more or less started “First there was Ferguson, now Baltimore”‘ – but in truth there has been a whole pile of incidents in between.
I haven’t the space to list them all – the 12-year-old boy shot dead in a park in Cleveland, Ohio, the student left bloody and bruised at the University of Virginia, the man fatally shot eight times in the back in South Carolina, the 44-year-old chased down and killed in Tulsa, Oklahoma, after volunteer officer pulled a firearm instead of a stun gun.
And there are more, culminating in Freddie Gray dying while in the custody of Baltimore police, after his spinal cord had been virtually severed. It’s unlikely you would sustain an injury like that simply by slipping as you stepped into the police wagon.
What the common features are of all these incidents is that the victims were black and the forces of law and order involved in them were for the most part white.
Which brings us back to the opinion piece that made the point that first there was Ferguson, then there was Baltimore. The writer is correct, insofar as they both resulted in looting, burning and vandalising – all playing out on our screens last night.
From the hapless Baltimore mayor through to the president the point has been made – rioting achieves nothing.
But, sadly it has. It has caught people’s attention – because it has conformed to the journalist’s law of what makes a story – it is rare, unexpected and unusual.
Perhaps the lesson is we need to take more notice of things that lead to the riots and sense of alienation by disaffected young African-Americans.
The white cop assaulting or shooting a black man may not be that unusual, but it has already led to dire consequences for those living in Ferguson and in Baltimore.
More black ‘victimhood’….you can’t call a thug a thug…
In the wake of violence and unrest in Baltimore, media commentators as well as politicians – including President Barack Obama – called rioters “thugs”, and were criticised for it. But the term has a much older history.
In the US, “thug” is a loaded term.
“It’s this very effective way of suggesting that the people who are doing the rioting and who are being called thugs don’t actually have a right to their outrage,” she says.
That’s partly why there’s widespread disgust in the African American community over its use. Just take the response Baltimore Councilman Carl Stokes gave to CNN’s Erin Burnett over the word.
“It’s not the right word to call our children ‘thugs,'” Mr Stokes said. “These are children who have been set aside, marginalised, who have not been engaged by us.”
Garber isn’t surprised the word has become so loaded.“In some sense, the history of language is about people trying to wield power over other people,” she says.
“And so this is just one more example of that strife and that effort.”
Here is a typical BBC, very one-sided, look at the ‘problem’…..naturally the BBC doesn’t bother with any context or challenge to the lines being fed to us that blacks are treated more harshly than whites……..
Biker gangs in Waco, Texas, shot each other up and the police moved in to stop the shootings. The police actually shot some of the bikers and arrested over 170…and yet black activists, and the BBC, are asking why there was no ‘tanks’ etc on the streets…it’s a race thing surely?
Well perhaps there were no tanks because, despite police shooting some bikers and arresting 170 or so of them, there were no mass riots, civil disorder and mass destruction in reaction to those shootings and arrests in contrast to how the black community reacted in Baltimore and Ferguson….here are those rioting bikers……
And yet there were heavily armed police at Waco…
Contrast with Baltimore and Ferguson….can you spot the difference?……
And you may remember a previous police action at Waco….guess that was police racism as well….or not as the ‘victims’ of police violence were white……….
How about those racist National Guardsmen?
or indeed back to Waco present day…….those racist cops arresting all these black boys……
