The Big Lie behind ‘Black Lives Matter’

The Big Lie behind ‘Black Lives Matter’

by Dennis Prager April 21, 2015 12:00 AM

The “Black Lives Matter” campaign is based on as big a lie as the “campus rape culture” lie, the Rolling Stone magazine gang rape at the University of Virginia fraternity lie, the gang rape by the Duke University lacrosse team lie, the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” Ferguson lie, and all the other lies that animate leftist hysterias.

Building hysterias based on falsehoods is a primary modus operandi on the left. One can even say that without hysteria there is no Left.

First a lie or exaggeration is manufactured. Then it is repeated over and over by the mainstream media and myriad left-wing groups; academics hold conferences and write thoughtful-sounding op-ed pieces about the fake issue; meanwhile activists on its behalf demonstrate, taking over public buildings and highways, sometimes violently.

The latest left-wing hysteria is “Black Lives Matter,” based on the lie that black lives don’t matter because white police kill blacks wantonly.

Two weeks ago the cover of Time featured the words “Black Lives Matter” in stark white letters on a black background. The cover also featured photos of what appears to be the morally inexcusable fatal police shooting of Walter Scott, a black man, as he ran away from a routine police stop. Credit the Left with never giving up. In North Charleston, South Carolina, the Left finally found its seemingly perfect example of a wholly unjustified police killing of a black man. Hence the Time cover.

The problem with the mantra and the hysteria is not that no blacks are ever killed unjustifiably by police. The problem is that it is so rare as to constitute a libel.

In 2013, of America’s 6,261 black homicide victims, more than 6,000 of them — 97 percent — were killed by people other than police. About 3 percent of black homicide victims were killed by police. And of that 3 percent, nearly every one was armed and dangerous. To label that an epidemic of police racism is a libel.

In addition, more than nine out of every ten blacks murdered were murdered by another black person. Now that is an epidemic — an epidemic of black murderers. (In response, it is pointed out that about 83 percent of whites are murdered by whites. But there is no equivalency here. Blacks murder at nearly eight times the rate whites do — 34.4 per 100,000 versus 4.5 per 100,000.)

In the eyes of Americans who value truth, the black and white leftists who blamed the Ferguson, Mo., police officer for Michael Brown’s death despite knowing absolutely nothing about what actually happened look like demagogues now that the truth has come out. That’s why so many police officers turned their backs on New York’s left-wing mayor, Bill de Blasio, when he attended the funerals of the two New York City policemen murdered by a black man angry about Ferguson and the Staten Island death of Eric Garner (another black man who died at the hands of police who, as in Ferguson, were not indicted). They were repulsed by de Blasio’s generalizations about police racism.

So here is a truth. The Left is not only engaging in demagoguery and creating hysteria when it claims that “Blacks Lives Matter” in reference to police killings of blacks. It is also not telling the truth. Black lives don’t really interest the Left. If they did, the Left would focus on all the black murderers taking black lives.

The Left’s overriding interest lies elsewhere: in defaming America, with its “legacy of slavery,” “institutional racism,” and “white privilege,” and in depicting white police as racists. To understand the Left one must first understand that it hates conservatives more than it loves almost anything.

Because if it really believed that “Black Lives Matter,” its message would be “Black Murderers Matter.”

— Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His book, The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code, was published recently by Regnery. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com