Posted by
Patrick Henry on Wednesday, July 21, 2010 10:45:46 AM
During the run-up to WWII, Adolf Hitler and his circle of cronies demonized Jews
by posting signs warning communities against them, forcing them to wear humiliating
identification placards around their necks and accusing them of horrible crimes in every
mainstream medium, including newspapers, books and films. The formula was "demonize,
isolate and exterminate."
A similar strategy was counseled by communist community organizer Saul Alinsky who
is credited with inspiring Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, among others. The basic
tenet is that if you disagree with someone's ideas you should plaster them with the
most onerous label you can think of, thereby discrediting them in the eyes of the herd
that will not dig beyond the rhetoric to get at the truth. The tactic will also draw attention
away from your own failures, weaknesses and lies.
In his well-publicized recent rant, NAACP President Ben Jealous demonized "racist
elements" in the Tea Party movement, and demanded their public rejection and expulsion.
In so doing he elevated a theme begun by left wing Democrats and some in the liberal
media. The "racist" charge is based entirely on speculation about Tea Party motives,
alleged verbal insults by some Washington, D.C. demonstrators which were denied and
remain completely undocumented and unproven, and the Tea Party's nonstop criticism
of Barack Obama which, according to the left, must be racially motivated. In other words
it is a bald-faced lie that those on the left wish to believe, have no proof of and have a great
vested interest in propagating.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, once a major player
in the strife for racial justice, has become little more than a race-baiting shill for the
Democratic National Committee. This devolution has been accompanied by its unabated
slide into irrelevancy. It is an irony that their current president's name is "Jealous." because
it is clear that a once proud and valuable organization, no longer able to claim the high
ground of independence and no longer productive of newsworthy activity is flatly jealous
of Tea Party activists who have stolen the media limelight, for better or worse. So the
NAACP has resorted to labeling, name-calling and race-baiting in order to steal back
some of that limelight for themselves. How pathetic and impotent.
While the tactic fires up those on the left who had already begun employing it, it has
quickly become a two-edged sword for the NAACP which has been loth to condemn
the blatant racism of blacks such as Samir King Shabazz, who openly called upon
blacks to "kill krackers and their babies," and brandished a billy club outside a polling
place in Philadelphia, or other black radicals like Louis Farrakhan or the Reverend
Jeremiah Wright.
And the incompetence of the organization came into focus once again in the Shirley
Sherrod debacle that is still playing out. Sherrod, you remember, was caught on tape
explaining that she, in her capacity as an administrator for a farm aid agency, purposely
diluted help she gave a white farmer facing foreclosure because "so many black farmers
had lost their farms." Eager to get out front on the matter, Ben Jealous condemned her
actions as racist. But when Sherrod explained herself, and the full tape was aired, it
seemed that she was using the story as an example of an error she had made based on
a prejudice she should not have had. This morning, Jealous reversed his position,
exonerating Sherrod and calling on the USDA to reinstate her. Ooops!
What gets lost in this is the troubling implications of the account Sherrod gave on the
tape of how the white farmer "thought he was better than she was," "talked down to
her" and how through it all she realized that it wasn't about black against white, but
about those who don't have against those who do. In other words, her discrimination
was okay, just misplaced. It shouldn't have been about race, but about class. In any
case, her admission that she purposely withheld the "full force of what I could do" to
help the farmer means she discriminated, over and out. The law does not allow for
discrimination on the basis of class any more than it does on the basis of race. Sherrod
was wrong then, and she's wrong now, and Ben Jealous is too color blind to admit it.
The race-baiting is a mere distraction from the earth-shaking priority of seeing the
ranch of the late Michael Jackson turned into a California state park, for which the
NAACP is lobbying hard. When an organization has nothing better to do than call
names and attach labels absent proof of the charges, and tout a memorial for a dead
rock star, one has to wonder why it exists. Oh yes, there is that Democratic shill
thing. But the Brown-Shirt-type demonization engaged in by Ben Jealous leads
skeptics to wonder what the differences really are between such tactics employed
by the NAACP and the left against the Tea Party and those employed by the Nazis
against Jews. The answer? ZERO! Sieg Heil, NAACP! Sieg Heil, Ben Jealous!