My young paleoconservative friend Jack Kerwick has posted on his website his own distribution of blame for what befell two police officers shot by a black thug in Brooklyn last Saturday, as revenge for the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. Jack has extended the burden of responsibility from protestors screaming “kill a cop” and those Democratic politicians who backed these protestors to the media and academy that has preached anti-white hate for decades. This extension of responsibility seems entirely justified, and having listened to the inflammatory speech of academic lunatics, I couldn’t imagine more vicious hate-language in a Nazi rag than what I heard coming out of the mouths of “sensitive” academics. Needless to say, the language in question came from white people denigrating their own race rather than from designated Aryans attacking a Jewish minority. But this has always made the anti-white invectives of academics seem for me even more bizarre.

Still and all, the (for me) most obnoxious response to recent racial tensions has come, predictably enough, from the paid voices of the Murdoch-media- Empire. These news-interpreters have carried the practice of having one’s cake and eating it at the same time to new ludicrous heights. In recent days I have begun to feel sorry for Bill de Blasio and even Eric Holder, the sins of whom seem to consist of not having spun the narrative about the deaths of Brown and Garner in quite the same duplicitous way as Fox-news.

Listening to O’Reilly, Krauthammer, and other authorized “conservative” pundits, I would believe the following: the policeman who shot Michael Brown in Ferguson may have had sufficient cause but those who strangled to death Garner in Staten Island got away with obvious manslaughter. According to our spokesmen for the establishment Right, white racism continues to fester in the US, and grand juries remain suspect. Nonetheless, we should not jump to the conclusion that Brown and Garner were the victims of specifically racist brutality, a charge that has not been proved. Should I venture to point out what has already been proved: that Eric Garner was a longtime petty thief with a massive criminal record, that local merchants in Staten Island, some of whom were black, summoned the police to get him out of their stores before he committed mischief, and that Garner died not in the grip of a policeman (while resisting arrest) but later on the way to a hospital.

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Giving the news stories a specifically neocon political spin, National Review columnist Ira Strauss insists that the protestors who contributed to the tensions leading to the slaying of two police officers are representatives of “anti-Western ideology.” The “culpability” for the shootings in Brooklyn, according to Strauss, falls ultimately on those who preach hatred against the “West.” This offense, which is “cultivated in universities across the country as the cutting edge of moral thinking,” has become, according to this account, a widespread critical problem. Strauss includes among those affected by it those who rage “against the groups and religions identified as pro-Western.” My eyes focus here inevitably on the term “pro-Western.” How is Strauss defining his key word? Is a “pro-Westerner” someone who defends the Holy Roman Empire or the nation state system that was peculiar to the Western world in centuries past? Is a pro-Westerner someone who relishes Mozart’s operas, Shakespeare’s tragedies or Dante’s Commedia? Allow me to speculate on what Strauss may really have in mind. A “pro-Western group” is one that supports the foreign policy of Strauss’s employers. Being “pro-Western” means favoring the post-Western reconstruction of the geographical space that once belonged to Western Christendom on the basis of American liberal internationalism. Apparently those who balk at this project may be compared to black racist killers and Islamicist bomb-throwers. Perhaps I’m being unfair but it is difficult for me to read the word “pro-Western” in neoconservative publications without suspecting the usual propagandistic intent.

I have been struck by the unexpected boldness shown by former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani in explaining that white policemen in his city risk their lives while protecting blacks from being killed by other blacks. Although I applaud Giuliani for making this observation, we might consider the downside of the situation he describes. The police in our cities are being asked to patrol neighborhoods in which they are profoundly hated and where the inhabitants endorse overwhelmingly those whom Fox-news denounces as “race hustlers.” It is unfair to ask officers of any race to face such a situation, which is not likely to improve in the foreseeable future. I would note that my father while police commissioner of Bridgeport, Connecticut, worked persistently to enact a policy that would allow firefighters to stay out of areas in which they were harassed and even physically assaulted while trying to put out fires . To the extent my father’s well-advised policy was followed, more lives were saved than lost. Perhaps Al Sharpton could arrange for the protection of his fans in Bedford Stuyvesant. The police department should be spared this thankless duty.