OPINION:
The Black Lives Matter movement was built and perpetuated on numerous lies, and yet their cause continues to be championed by President Obama and democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
The group’s grievances came into light after the fictional account of the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Chants of “hands up, don’t shoot,” echoed throughout social media as the perfect representation of how mistreated the black community was by law enforcement.
Even after The Washington Post called the meme one of the biggest lies of 2015, social justice activists continued to use it to rally emotion for their cause. A St. Louis jury couldn’t confirm testimonies that Brown had ever been holding his hands above his head when confronted by law enforcement, neither could a Department of Justice investigation.
What was disclosed was Darren Wilson, the officer involved, had acted in self-defense and had reason to fear for his life. Brown fought with Mr. Wilson and tried to take his gun.
Yet, the “hands up” gesture endures within the Black Lives Matter Movement as if it were truth. Al Sharpton has continued to reference it during social justice rallies and it is invoked in signs and gestures at Black Lives Matter rallies.
But that’s not the only untruth Black Lives Matter perpetuates — both online and at their rallies. The group, and all of its umbrella organizations, has claimed that every 28 hours a black man is killed by a police officer.
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This claim is also incorrect — a lie. The figure comes from an April 2013 report called “Operation Ghetto Storm,” by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. The report “is a window offering a cold, hard, and fact-based view into the thinking and practice of a government and society that will spare no cost to control the lives of Black people,” the preface reads.
All it is, is propaganda.
The Washington Post’s fact-checker gave the claim four Pinocchios, saying the victims studied in the report were not all unarmed, and they were not all killed by the police. Ouch. The group was including those who rushed and or ambushed police in their report as well as those killed by “police officers, security guards or vigilantes.” As you can imagine, the term vigilantes was loosely defined.
A Harvard study has also disproved Black Lives Matter’s notion that there’s racial bias in police shootings.
The paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, which examined thousands of incidents at 10 large police departments in California, Florida and Texas, concluded that police were no more likely to shoot non-whites than whites after factoring in extenuating circumstances.
“On the most extreme use of force — officer-involved shootings — we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account,” said Harvard economics professor Roland G. Freyer Jr. in the abstract of the July 2016 paper.
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Another lie, debunked.
The Black Lives Matter movement — and Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton — also tell half-truths when it comes to using their statistics. Yes, blacks are arrested at twice the rates of whites, but it’s majority black communities where the crime largely exists.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, blacks were charged with 62 percent of all robberies, 57 percent of murders and 45 percent of assaults in the 75 largest U.S. counties in 2009, though they made up roughly 15 percent of the population there.
Translation: Black neighborhoods are getting policed, because they need to be policed. They’re crime-ridden, with blacks disproportionately — eight times — more likely to commit a violent crime than whites and Hispanics combined.
The Black Lives Matter movement also purposely avoids black on black crime — it seems that black lives matter only if they’re killed by whites.
According to Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of “The War on Cops,” there were 6,095 black homicide deaths in 2014— the most recent year for which such data are available — compared with 5,397 homicide deaths for whites and Hispanics combined. Almost all of those black homicide victims had black killers.
Now, there are some Black Lives Matter groups who are calling for Mr. Obama to take executive action to defund police departments that “don’t value black lives.” Talk about a break down of law and order.
Black Lives Matter is an extreme organization that was built on, and is growing its base online, with lies and propaganda. Instead of the president and Mrs. Clinton kowtowing to the group and singing its praises for raising social awareness, it should debunk the myths it perpetuates and call them out for what they are — a fringe, extremist group that manipulates statistics to prove their false narrative.
The country would be much better off having a discussion on race when all parties come to the table truthfully, without a radical agenda.
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