Posted on 08/16/2014 3:12:04 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
ENCINITAS, California — Ferguson, Missouri, and the inexplicable shooting of teenager Michael Brown, represents not only the latest episode of America’s urban war against black men—it will be far from the last.
Still unresolved is another horrifying racial incident in Miami Beach, Florida. Police there have still failed, ignominiously, to clear the air about the street slaying of motorist Raymond Herisse. Herisee, 22, was killed on a South Beach street in his vehicle in a barrage of firepower that entailed more than 100 rounds of ammunition.
Herisse was taken out, reports the Miami Herald, “in a frightening war-like moment that his family likens to being executed by a police firing squad.” [May 25, 2013]. No less than twelve officers were involved in an assault that left the young man with sixteen bullet wounds, slumped in his seat. Four bystanders were seriously wounded.
Again, the Miami Herald: “Two years and multiple lawsuits later, Miami Beach police have yet to produce evidence that Herisse did anything to deserve a death sentence.” Police have claimed that the man was speeding recklessly and hit an officer on bike patrol. No substantiation, including any witness or video footage, has been produced.
Let’s skip past the clichés as in, “If it had been a white victim,” etc. The reality is more repetitive than any cliché. From Mississippi to Los Angeles to St. Louis to Miami, white officers beating or killing black men, in displays of force and brutality that are inconsistent with any forms of social or legal codes, has been—and remains—rampant.
From the odious gang-murder of 14 year-old Emmitt Till in 1955 (he smiled at a white woman) to the shooting of Trayvon Martin (as if we don’t know the real story here) to a million unknown victims of this American slaughter, the life of a black male has never really amounted to much. We white folks fear black men so we acquiesce to a cycle that is infinitely more gruesome than the worst notions of them that we have carried.
What of the mass carnage ongoing in Chicago and so many other urban centers, not to mention the preeminence of black-on-black crimes that plague us? Unforgivable and intolerable—these are the only answers. And shame on the African American community and its many gratuitous “leaders” who offer nothing but steam and publicity stunts while their—and our—children are perishing in our streets and prisons.
But that doesn’t obscure the reality that our police squadrons, armed with military-level arsenals, and our vigilantes, driven by hate and police-like fantasies, remain free to reduce the humanity of any given black male into road kill. You could have just asked the late Rodney King, beaten senseless by LA police in 1991. The media kept on labeling him as “motorist Rodney King.” But he—and Raymond Herisse and Michael Brown were not motorists. They were men.
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in the San Diego suburb of Encinitas, California. He may be contacted via ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com
Those HAVE to be non-Orthodox rabbis. Orthodox rabbis are overwhelmingly very conservative. Rabbis for Obama must be made up of the Reform “rabbis”, including women (which is contrary to Jewish law). I simply hate the association between any rabbi of any ilk and Obama. I feel like it besmirches Jews. Not that the lib-Jews didn’t do a great job of besmirching themselves by voting for Slime-in-Chief.
The police do not receive any sympathy from me after they have become thugs themselves. They are militarized tyrants, shooting dogs and tasering people like idiots.
they are surely very non orthodox rabbis ..
It's no joke. There really was such a group, mostly Reform, in both 2008 and 2012.
Did you notice that this Rabbi Ben Kamin brings up Emmitt Till and then in the same sentence goes to Trayvon Martin, mentioning the latter only with a snarky, parenthetical "as if we don't know the real story here"? Well, I'm sure that Kamin doesn't really know the real story in the Trayvon Martin incident, but he should at least know that Martin wasn't killed by a white cop. George Zimmerman was neither "white" (he didn't fit the left's definition of "white") nor a cop!
I id a search on them after posting that reply...and as goofy a name as rabbis for obama seemed....they do indeed exist...
That idiot Kamin is indeed a Reform rabbi.
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