The Patriot Post® · Obama, Not Cops, Is Stoking Racial Tensions

Responding to the murder of three law enforcement personnel in Baton Rouge on Sunday, the Investor’s Business Daily editorial board writes:

Hours after three Baton Rouge police officers had been killed, and two others injured and one was clinging to life, Obama took to the podium in the White House to decry the attacks. “Nothing justifies violence against law enforcement,” he said. “Attacks on police are an attack on all of us and the rule of law that makes society possible.” So far so good. But then Obama went on to blame “inflammatory rhetoric” and “careless accusations thrown around to score political points or to advance an agenda,” and complained that “around-the-clock news cycles and social media sometimes amplify these divisions,” as do “political conventions.” The mainstream press, all gathered in Cleveland for the Republican National Convention, took Obama’s cue and started blathering on about how the GOP needs to tone down its rhetoric. But it’s not generic political rhetoric … that has fueled the spate of cop shootings. It is specifically anti-cop rhetoric, which has sought to portray police officers as inveterate racists who are randomly and wantonly killing innocent black people. And it is this rhetoric that Obama himself has been aiding and abetting for years.

Meanwhile, writing in City Journal, Heather Mac Donald opines:

It is possible that the Dallas killers and the Baton Rouge killers had not heard Obama’s most recent speeches on criminal-justice racism, or even the many that preceded them. But even if the cop murderers had not encountered Obama’s exact words, the influence of his rhetoric on the hatred in the streets is absolute. Obama’s imprimatur on the Black Lives Matter demagoguery gives it enormous additional thrust and legitimacy, echoing throughout public discourse into the most isolated corners of the inner city. … [W]e are quickly reaching the worst days of the nightmare 1960s, when it seemed that the very foundation of society was breaking apart. The difference between the 1960s and today is that the hatred of law enforcement and of whites is being stoked by the highest reaches of the establishment. Universities sometimes seem like little else than factories of desperately ginned-up racial grievance. … The country has been pretending that the main source of racism today comes from whites. Anyone who has spent time in the inner city and even more middle-class black precincts — such as college campuses — knows differently. … Sorry, Mr. President, those who tell the truth about crime and policing are not part of the problem and they bear no responsibility for the massacre of cops. The killing of cops is furthered exclusively by those peddling a false narrative that cops harbor lethal bias toward blacks. Obama should call for the Black Lives Matter movement to fold its tent — and he himself should start telling the truth about inner-city crime.