Posted on 04/17/2003 8:18:52 AM PDT by Doctor13
“The unrest began Monday night, when demonstrators broke out 28 windows,” CNN reported in an April 11th article. The report went on to say that “ about 150 demonstrators -- young people, -- marched through city streets, overturning news racks and breaking windows” injuring 65 people.” Baghdad? No, Cincinnati in April 2001, exactly 5 months before the World Trade Center was destroyed by terrorists.
On April 12,2003 the same behavior taking place in Baghdad after more than 25 years of terrorism with hundreds of thousands of executions and tortures ordered by Saddam Hussein was reported by CNN as the “chaos and looting that engulfed Baghdad.” Time Magazine dubbed the behavior in Baghdad as “an interlude of morbid anarchy” and the Arab network Al Jazeera blamed twelve years of sanctions that “have crippled Iraq” for the cause of “anarchy.” CNN correspondent Martin Savidge described the looting going on in Baghdad as “a sense of lawlessness” while admitting the U.S. Marines were still dodging “potshots from forces loyal to the crumbling Iraqi regime and working to disarm a city bristling with weapons.”
Isn’t there something a wee bit hypocritical in CNN’s reporting? Has CNN EVER labeled the many years of looting and destruction of property perpetrated by blacks as “a sense of lawlessness?” I don’t think so.
Many American civil rights and anti-war activists follow Martin Luther King’s lead in embracing civil disobedience as a means of achieving their goals and the media provides sympathetic reporting for them even when those tactics become violent. During the looting and rioting of Cincinnati in 2001, (CNN reported: http://www2.cnn.com/2001/US/04/10/cincinnati.protest.04/)“ Protesters, angered by the fatal weekend police shooting of an unarmed black man, set fire late Tuesday to a market in a historic area of Cincinnati and looted buildings. Similar protests erupted Monday afternoon after a public safety committee meeting at City Hall, said NAACP Cincinnati Chapter President Norma Hope Davis, who was there to meet with city officials concerning Thomas' death.
“Demonstrators broke 28 windows in the City Hall building overnight Monday. ‘We're trying to help express community outrage and make sure this doesn't happen again,’ Davis said.” Somehow, a mere two years ago when American blacks were involved, CNN presented the kind of behavior we are seeing in Iraqi citizens in reaction to getting rid of Saddam Hussein as “community outrage” that sort of went a bit too far. Yet looting in Baghdad “is a sign that America lost the war” according to anti-war commentator William River Pitts. In an article on Monday he wrote: “The orgy of looting that has broken out in Iraq is, basically, the Shia robbing the Sunni. An ever-rising boil of gunplay between these two groups is putting a match to the fuse of religiously based civil war, and the American troops have done nothing to stop it except recruit members of Hussein’s feared police force to try and restore order. So much for regime change.”
Somehow, I doubt Pitts would characterize the 1992 Watts rioting by blacks destroying Korean owned businesses as “the blacks robbing the Koreans.” In October 2001 Pitts wrote we were “losing the war (in Afghanistan) … because of dangerously poor leadership in Washington D.C.”
CNN reported the 1992 behavior of blacks following the acquittal of four Los Angeles police officers in a trial in which they were charged with beating black motorist Rodney G. King as “looting and mayhem that was “set off by a court decision.” In three days in South Central Los Angeles 55 people died violently, more than 2,300 were injured and 1,100 buildings were destroyed at a cost of more than $1 billion. LAPD Sgt. Greg Dust said of that period of time: “It was worse than being in Vietnam. At least in Vietnam, I could shoot back."
Yet, black leaders of that riot were not even condemned, much less called anarchists. In fact, a sympathetic jury in Los Angeles later awarded Rodney King a $3.8 million settlement for the pain he suffered while resisting arrest.
No one suggested that those riots were “an interlude of morbid anarchy” or even “chaos.” They were presented in a Time/CNN poll as an indication of “vast differences in how whites and blacks perceived police officers — and each other.”
This time, however, ordinary Americans seem to be noticing the media hypocrisy. Mike Mattox, one of my readers wrote: “All we are hearing now from an hysterical liberal press is looting and ‘can't we police Iraq’...
“A few years ago the lights went out on the East coast, there was massive looting in New York. Just last year, at a Seattle festival, a young man who was in the crowd tried to help a young woman who was being molested by a group of thugs. The young man was knocked to the ground and kicked to death. Is that OK in the U.S. but an Iraqi father killing the man who tortured and raped his wife and daughter is somehow bad?
“Yet our sick liberal press continues to make an issue of some looting in Iraq (of mostly government facilities and Saddam Palaces) by a people who have suffered far more provocation that our rioters and looters in the U.S. suffered when the lights went out on the east coast…
“We have suffered far more civil disobedience and riots right here in the U.S. and I never heard the liberals call for more police. Or even blame the rioters.
“There is no rioting, per se, in Iraq. They are not burning police cars or pulling innocent truckers out of their truck (Reginald Denny) and smashing them in the head with bricks or even massive looting or burning of local businesses. ALL OF THIS HAPPENS IN THE UNITED STATES.”
At this writing over 2000 Iraqis have come forward at the invitation of the American military to help maintain order by patrolling Baghdad streets with the American troops, repair the electrical and water systems or protect the hospitals from looters. Many who came forward were Iraqi police officers that are willing to cooperate with the Americans for the benefit of the people of the city, which appears to upset anti-war doomsayers like William River Pitts.
Unfortunately, in 1992 neither the NAACP nor any other black community group volunteered to walk side by side with members of the LAPD to maintain order on South Central Los Angeles streets. If 2000 South Central Los Angeles citizens had been willing to take some responsibility for their own future, as citizens of Baghdad have done, I expect the 1992 problems of South Central Los Angeles would have been resolved by now, instead of remaining the same or getting worse as has been the case in LA.
(www.bannerofliberty.com)
"Comparing Iraqi "Anarchy" with (not "to") American Demonstrations"
My apologies to Mary Mostert.
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