President Barack Obama holds a press conference at the conclusion of the three-day U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C., on August 6, 2014. [State Department photo/ Public Domain]
“This is a bit rich coming from someone who sat with his wife contentedly in the pews of Jeremiah Wright’s Chicago church for 20 years listening to his white-baiting apologia for black violence and international terrorism, including the 9/11 attacks,” observes Conrad Black in American Greatness.
Obama Strains Credibility
The clear meaning of Obama’s remarks (is) that President Trump is contributing to a climate of violence by making statements that emphasize racial distinctions. There is no truth to this; the president has made no such statements. It strains credulity to imagine there is something racist about wishing to restrict the right of entry to the United States of people from terrorism-plagued or sponsoring countries, or to establish a border where people are admitted according to agreed forms and methods.
President Obama’s assertion on Monday that “No nation on earth comes near” the proportions of the mass violence problem of the United States is false. The Crime Prevention Research Center has made an exhaustive study of the incidence of mass killings, following the FBI definition excluding incidents that kill fewer than four people and gang fights over turf, or incidences of authentic guerrilla war. By these standards, covering from 1998 to 2015, and 53 attacks and 57 shooters within the United States and 2,354 attacks and over 4,800 shooters in the rest of the world, the U.S. accounts for 1.49 percent of the world’s killings, 2.2 percent of the attacks, and 1.15 percent of the public shooters, although the United States has 4.6 percent of the world’s total population.
Out of the 97 countries rated, the United States ranked 64th in attacks and 65th in fatalities. And the other countries compared were not the world’s 96 least organized and civilized national jurisdictions.
Nothing will be achieved in the sterile debate between enemies of the National Rifle Association and advocates of better mental health checks, or by the partisan name-calling of the most stupid of the Democratic contenders (cue Beto O’Rourke). They have empurpled the air with claims that Trump is a racist.
Sheriff Bull Connor of Selma, Alabama in 1964 was a racist; so is Al Sharpton. No leading figures in either party of the country today is a racist, and white supremacy is no worse than other notions of racial supremacy. The president was right at Charlottesville in 2017 when he said that Antifa was as bad as the Nazis and the Klan.
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