Racial arsonist Rudy Giuliani eyeing another White House fantasy bid?
[Editorial]
At a time when level-headedness is most needed two racial arsonists, Patrick Lynch and Rudolph Giuliani are busy making irresponsible statements following the shooting death of two New York Police Department (NYPD) officers by a man who said he was avenging the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner at the hands of police officers.
The gunman, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who drove from Baltimore, ended up taking his own life.
Brinsley was intent on killing any NYPD officer he came across yesterday. He ended up killing Officer Rafael Ramos and Officer Wenjian Liu, shooting them as they sat inside a police vehicle near the Tompkins Houses in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy section.
Brinsley had posted his intentions on Instagram saying, “I’m putting wings on pigs today. They take 1 of ours…let’s take two of theirs.” He also posted the following hasgtags: RIPErivGarner (in reference to Eric Garner) as well as RIPMikeBrown.
President Obama has condemned the killings of the officers.
Yet within hours of the officers’ killings police union leaders and one of America’s most racist politicians were already trying to use the tragedy to suppress peaceful protests against brutal cops, when in fact they should have a keen interest in helping to weed them out.
Speaking as if he was addressing a political campaign rally Patrick Lynch, the leader of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association (PBA) blamed mayor Bill de Blasio for the officers’ killings. “There’s blood on many hands tonight,” Lynch said. “That blood on the hands starts on the steps of City Hall in the office of the mayor.”
In an obnoxious attempt to criminalize all those who oppose police brutality and the perversion of the justice system in the cases of Michael Brown and Eric Garner and other cases, Lynch claimed demonstrators “incited violence on the street under the guise of protest that tried to tear down what New Yorl Police officers did everyday.”
This is the same Patrick Lynch who also claims Daniel Pantaleo did not apply a chokehold on Eric Garner even though the video evidence is there for the whole world to see.
Working from the same script, the Sergeant’s Benevolent Association leader Ed Mullins issued a similarly obnoxious attack on Mayor de Blasio, claiming, “Mayor de Blasio, the blood of these two officers is clearly on your hands.” Mullins also reportedly said of de Blasio, “It is your failed policies and solutions that enabled this tragedy to occur…I only hope and pray that more of these ambushes and executions do not happen again.”
Clearly the police and detective unions are coordinating their responses. They are taking advantage of the tragedy to try and prevent people from denouncing brutal cops like: Darren Wilson who killed the unarmed Michael Brown in Ferguson, firing off 12 shots and shooting Brown seven times, including in the right eye and the apex of his head while he was falling dead; and, Pantaleo, who could have easily arrested Garner if that was his intention, by drawing his weapon and ordering him to turn so he could be handcuffed, instead of jumping him from behind and strangling him to death.
Lynch and Mullin often complain that people who protest against police brutality unfairly paint the entire police force with a broad stroke. Yet these two men have no problem trying to link all the tens of thousands of demonstrators who oppose police abuse to the killer of the two NYPD officers.
Elsewhere Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York City mayor, continues his despicable behavior and decline into lunacy of recent weeks by claiming that president Obama is somehow to blame for Brinsley’s execution of officers Ramos and Liu.
“We’ve had four months of propaganda, starting with the president, that everybody should hate the police,” Giuliani said when he appeared on Fox News. “I don’t care how you want to describe it — that’s what those protests are all about.”
Giuliani recently wondered why Black people were protesting the execution-style killing of Michael Brown considering that most Black people who die are killed by other Black people — as if this somehow deprived African Americans of the right to protest police brutality. (He should also say whether he believes White people shouldn’t dare complain of any abuse by Black folk since 80% of White people are killed by fellow Whites)
On that occasion he was destroyed by Michael Eric Dyson.
Giuliani is disingenuous. He’s trying to stoke racial tensions between Blacks and White around the country by turning the opposition against brutal cops and judicial corruption into a Black-versus-White narrative. His blatant racism is repudiated by the facts; demonstrators have been multi-ethnic and multi-racial and many White leaders have also denounced the killings of Brown and Garner and the failure of the grand jury in each case to indict the officers.
Giuliani, has earned his reputation as a failure and that’s why he was emphatically rejected by American voters when he tried to run for president in 2008. He’s evidently gearing for another run and thinks that by adopting a “tough on the Negroes” and “tough on crime” approach he could win the Republican primary.
This is the same man who, in a most shameful display many years ago, joined 10,000 police officers, including drunken ones, who were demonstrating outside City Hall in the ugly incident organized by the PBA when David Dinkins, New York’s first African American mayor, was in office.
During the protest the officers repeatedly referred to Dinkins as a “nigger” with Giuliani strutting around with them like a Grand Wizard. Some of the drunken officers even broke through police barricades creating conditions under which a sitting mayor could have been harmed; Dinkins wasn’t in his office at the time.
And what was Dinkins’ sin? As the New York Times reported he was proposing “to create an independent civilian agency that would look into police misconduct” which the PBA opposed.
Now Giuliani wants to “niggerize” de Blasio like he and the rowdy cops, encouraged by the PBA, did to Dinkins in 1992.
And one wonders how tough on crime he was when his own daughter Caroline was arrested for shop-lifting four years ago. Given that Garner was strangled for allegedly selling loose cigarettes, how would have Giuliani felt if an NYPD officer had applied a chokehold on Caroline?
The summary execution of NYPD officers Ramos and Liu, or of any police officer is wrong and must be condemned; just as the police execution of unarmed civilians, Black males included, is wrong and must be condemned.
It’s reprehensible to see police union chiefs and washed out politicians abuse the memory of the officers to block the constitutionally- guaranteed right to protest or to advance another White House fantasy bid.
