Friday, November 15, 2013

And Away We Go

Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy has finally made a charging decision in the death of Renisha McBride (3 charges: second-degree murder, manslaughter and possession of a firearm in a felony). Worthy reportedly said that race didn’t enter into her charging decision.

We’ll see if the tone improves.

Who am I kidding? It’s already getting worse.

Reverend Wendell Anthony, president of the Detroit Branch NAACP, released a statement invoking

the case of Trayvon Martin, a Florida 17-year-old who was shot and killed last year in Florida by a neighborhood watch coordinator. That man, George Zimmerman, followed Martin and shot him during a scuffle and was acquitted of second-degree murder this year.

Well, that’s not accurate, but why worry about that now?  More odd is why Anthony wants to go the Trayvon route at all.  The Trayvon Martin case gave the Martin protesters everything the McBride protesters say is all they want  – an arrest, a trial, answers, justice – and Zimmerman was ultimately exonerated.  Not only was Zimmerman found to have acted in self-defense, but Martin was revealed as a violent and formidably aggressive 160-pound young man whose impulsive and savage assault on Zimmerman was the proximate cause of Martin’s death.  So wouldn’t invoking the Trayvon Martin case be kind of like invoking the fugitive Richard Kimble’s case in a situation where a doctor is accused of murdering his wife?

Why do that? Just kidding. I know exactly why; Anthony wants to drag Trayvon into this because he knows that American blacks refuse to accept the Zimmerman verdict.  Wendell wants to incite that resentment by offering the McBride case as a race-based do-over.

Dawud Walid, the Muslim Brotherhood spokesman recently shoving his snout into Detroit’s crowded “civil rights” trough, makes my point.

“When we look at the Trayvon Martin case, we believe jury selection did play a role in terms of the eventual outcome,” Walid said. “We believe it's important there are people of color on that jury. There needs to be people from Detroit on that jury.”

Walid’s transparently racist, and corrupt conception of the justice system is that jurors are nothing more than appointed representatives of their several victim communities, expected to render verdicts that satisfy their ethnic constituents’ thirst for payback.  But beyond that, just how does Walid get to demand people from Detroit as jurors? The incident didn’t happen in Detroit. This is a Dearborn Heights case. (Anyway, the jury will be drawn from all of Wayne County, including Detroit).

My doctor warned me that too much irony makes me colicky, but I have to comment about how these “Justice for [Your Name Here]!”  guys always demand that both jury selection and the jury’s pre-determined verdict should be based on, well, racial profiling. White defendants who kill black victims are always let off by white jurors!   Think of his demand for black jurors as Walid’s  way of channeling George Zimmerman telling that 911 dispatcher: “these assholes, they always get away.”

As far as I’m concerned, at this stage Worthy had what she needed to charge Wafer. It was important that the charging decision be done the right way – not in response to mob demand – which was the initial injustice (but hardly the only one) of what was done to George Zimmerman. Unlike what happened to Trayvon Martin, nothing released to the public so far indicates that Renisha McBride did anything to provoke Wafer to shoot her – an uphill climb for his defense.  We still haven’t heard the details of what his defense will be.

I do know that when Wafer’s side of things is revealed, (which, who knows, may turn out to be compelling), it won’t make any difference to the entrenched loudmouths determined to exploit this thing four ways from Sunday.  This narrowness may be emotionally excusable for McBride’s family, but not for outsiders who’ve never met the young lady – just appointed themselves as advocates and spokesman for The Cause.  They ought to have a duty to remain objective.  (Hey, stop that laughing over there!)

That was the real lesson of the Trayvon Martin case: “we don’t care about the facts and never did. We’ll make do with our own.”

Sad how the last thing the civil rights industry cares about these days is anyone’s civil rights.

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