Karen Triggiani emails me this essay by Dennis Prager:
On Aug. 7, 2010, The Washington Post headline read, “Beer warehouse shooter long complained of racism.”
Of course, Thornton was fired for stealing beer, and there was video proof of him doing so. But this fact — the one indisputable and most pertinent pre-murder fact — got lost within the larger context of Thornton’s claims of being a victim of whites.
Those preoccupied with Thornton’s charges of workplace racism might wish to reflect on this: Racist and other bigotry-based murderers always blame their victims. Medieval Christians who murdered Jews blamed the Jews for poisoning wells, baking Christian children’s blood in their matzo or some other terrible crime. Whites who lynched blacks blamed those blacks for rape or some other crime. Nothing is new about the Thornton racist murders except that the society in which in it occurred concentrated on the racist’s excuses rather than on his murders.
Just as leading liberals would not ascribe Islamist motives — until there was no possibility of denying them — to recent Muslim attacks on Americans, the liberal media, i.e., almost all news media in America, does not brand these Connecticut murders for what they are: racist. That is why Thornton told the 9-1-1 operator, “I wish I could have gotten more of the people (i.e., whites).”
We are repeatedly told by liberal whites and blacks that America needs an honest dialogue on race. Needless to say, they don’t mean it because the moment a white or black says anything critical of black behavior, he is labeled racist or Uncle Tom. So most non-liberal whites and blacks just keep quiet.
One result is this morally upside-down reporting of the murders in Connecticut.
Another example is the liberal narrative on blacks in prison — “there are more black men in prison than in college.” Every decent American regards this fact as a major tragedy. But most Americans believe that the fault lies primarily with the black criminals, not with a racist society. Most Americans believe that blacks who mug, rape, rob or murder commit those crimes for the same reason whites do — they lack a sufficiently strong moral conscience.