The Patriot Post® · Cops & BLM: A Grotesque Double Standard
Welp, that didn’t last long. Freshman “pro-choice” Democrat Representative Cori Bush, whom we acknowledged on Mother’s Day weekend for her deeply moving and powerful testimony in support of both motherhood and life, has since reverted to form.
Bush, the St. Louis pastor and political activist who masquerades as a member of Congress, took to the floor last Thursday to heap praise upon a fellow Black Lives Matter agitator and cop hater — a Palestinian who prayed aloud outside the Ferguson Police Department for the death of its police officers in 2014 and tweeted the vile BLM chant “Pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon.”
“St. Louis and I rise today in solidarity with the Palestinian people,” Bush began, “and in memory of our brother, Bassem Masri, a Ferguson activist who was with us on the front lines of our uprising for justice following the police murder of Michael Brown Jr. … As a Palestinian, he was ready to resist, to rebel, to rise up with us as our St. Louis community mourned [Brown’s] state sanctioned murder, and as we demanded an end to the militarized police occupation of our communities.”
Bush kept using the word “murder” to describe what happened to the thuggish Mike Brown — he of the “hands up, don’t shoot” lie that suckered so many biased journalists, professional football players, and Democrat presidential candidates. But “murder”? We don’t think that word means what Bush thinks it means. And neither does the St. Louis grand jury that refused to indict officer Darren Wilson, nor the Obama Justice Department, which thoroughly investigated the shooting of Brown and refused to charge Wilson with any federal civil rights charges because the shooting was justified.
It was an odd and strained tribute — one that compared the Ferguson, Missouri, riots of 2014 with the deadly Palestinian terrorism of today. “Palestinians know what state violence, militarized policing, and occupation of their communities look like,” Bush said, “and they live that reality of having to go through checkpoints while trying to live their lives.”
Clearly, it’s acceptable for a member of Congress to laud a cop-hating “St. Louis Palestinian,” but what if a cop criticizes the Marxist movement known as Black Lives Matter and the nationwide riots it led last year?
As James Varney of the Washington Times reports, “In recent weeks, two policewomen in New Jersey were fired or demoted for calling BLM protesters 'terrorists,’ and a police officer in Virginia was canned for criticizing political leaders who side with racial justice rioters. Sara Erwin was a police officer in Hopewell Township, New Jersey, when she sounded off on Facebook last year. … In the post, she denounced the tactics of Black Lives Matter and asked people supporting the movement to un-friend her. ‘Just to let you know — they are terrorists,’ she wrote in June 2020. ‘They hate me. They hate my uniform. They don’t care if I die.’”
It’s hard to argue with Erwin’s sentiment. When a group chants, “Pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon,” it’s reasonable to assume that, yes, it hates you.
It’s true that cities and municipalities would prefer that their cops refrain from sounding off about hot-button, heat-of-the-moment issues that fall within their jurisdiction. “But if an officer is punished for doing so,” writes Power Line’s Paul Mirengoff, “it should be pursuant to a policy that was communicated to that officer before he or she made the comment deemed objectionable.”
Indeed, only one viewpoint is being punished in such instances. As the Times notes, “In the most recent examples, all of the officers took what might be dubbed a conservative or pro-police viewpoint and were harshly disciplined.”
It’ll be interesting to see how these cases play out legally. Because these days we seem to be administering justice according to four separate tiers: one rich, one poor, one liberal, one conservative.