President Barack Obama is warning his allies in the Black Lives Matter movement to tone down their politically damaging hateful and violent rhetoric.
The direct and indirect warnings came several times during his 40-minute speech at the July 12 memorial to the five Dallas cops killed by an anti-cop African-American racist.
“When anyone, no matter how good their intentions may be, paints all police as biased, or bigoted, we undermine those officers that we depend on for our safety,” he said. “And as for those who use rhetoric suggesting harm to police, even if they don’t act on it themselves, well, they not only make the jobs of police officers even more dangerous, but they do a disservice to the very cause of justice that they claim to promote.”
‘With an open heart, we can abandon the overheated rhetoric and the oversimplification that reduces whole categories of our fellow Americans, not just opponents, but to enemies,” he said.
“I understand these protests — I see them. They can be messy. Sometimes they can be hijacked by an irresponsible few. Police can get hurt,” he said.
The warning are likely needed because the Dallas murders have graphically underlined the spreading violence by anti-cop African-Americans radicals in the urn-up to the November election.
After the Dallas shootings, several more cops were targeted and wounded by gunmen in the last week amid increasing public worry that Obama’s top-level support for the BLM movement has ignored a low-level “war on cops.’
So far, at least, 26 cops have been killed on duty in 2016, marking a 65 percent increase over 2015.
Public recognition of the spreading violence will likely kill support among voters for Obama’s campaign to federalize some essential tasks of state and local police forces, such as training and procedures, and also could wreck Hillary Clinton’s chances in November.
Obama complied with his own instructions to the BLM group, and made sure to repeatedly praise cops during the Dallas commemoration.
“But as the men we mourn today, these five heroes knew better than most, we cannot take the blessings of this nation for granted. Only by working together can we preserve those institutions of family and community, rights and responsibilities, law and self-government that is the hallmark of this nation” he said.
Obama also pushed the BLM movement away from politically risky street events towards more political lobbying.
“With an open heart, those protesting for change will guard against reckless language going forward. Look at the model set by the five officers we mourn today … embark on the hard, but necessary work of negotiation, the pursuit of reconciliation,” he said.
Obama’s focus since August 2014 on police shootings has released a huge and difficult-to-control wave of emotion from African-Americans.
For example, an African-American news anchor called the Dallas cop-killer a “martyr.” A June 9 video showed a BLM mob berating and threatening a Fox News reporter. Rev. Curtis Gatewood, an organizer with the NAACP in North Carolina complained July 10 that the Dallas shooter was lynched. On July 12, Gatewood wrote on Facebook;
Make no mistake, by taking this Black “suspect” and demonizing and using a killer robot to blow him up in this unprecedented and barbaric manner and without a trial in a court of law is the truest and most literal example yet of a “high-tech lynching.” Ironically the most vicious Uncle Thom to ever serve – Clarence Thomas was the one who coined this phrase – “high tech lynching.” I would be interested in knowing if Thomas, this supposed judicial expert, would actually be conscious enough to know a TRUE “high-tech lynching” when he sees one.
Read more about Gatewood here.
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