Are ‘Black Lives Matter’ Protests Being Politicized By Democrats? – OpEd

Race relations is known to be a sensitive issue in the American political discourse, particularly the discrimination against Afro-Americans since the time of Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s has gained special significance not just in America but across the world.

But it’s also a known fact that gun culture and police brutality are quite prevalent in rural America. Every year, hundreds of Americans die at the hands of trigger-happy cops, and a preponderant number of such fatalities are, of course, Afro-Americans, which belong to the lower strata of the stratified capitalist society.

The Democrats, specifically the Clinton and Obama administrations, are as much guilty of not doing enough to curb racial discrimination, gun violence and the use of excessive force by the law enforcement, besides taking cosmetic steps and paying lip service to the critical issues, as the Republican Bush and Trump administrations.

A question needs to be asked, however, that why these consequential issues were not raised during the eight-year tenure of Barack Obama, despite being an Afro-American himself, and also during the first three years of the Trump administration, and why in the run-up to the American presidential elections in November, the mainstream media spotlight has focused on race relations.

Since the brutal killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis Police Department in May, a number of victims’ families have come forward to register their complaints, whose family members suffered police brutality months and, in some cases, years ago.

The family of Daniel Prude, for instance, who died of asphyxiation in March after the New York police put a spit-hood on his face, came forward five months later in September, and the story was immediately picked up by the mainstream media and triumphantly publicized across its gullible viewership.

Clearly, the “Black Lives Matter” protests aren’t spontaneous demonstrations, the family members of the victims of police brutality and community leaders of Afro-Americans across America are being contacted by the Democratic Party whips and being instigated to go public with their stories in the run-up to the US presidential elections in November. It’s not a coincidence that Donald Trump’s ratings are plummeting since the BLM protests broke out in May.

Here let me clarify that I’m not suggesting that race relations is an insignificant issue, but like the abortion debate in the Western discourse, the issue of racial discrimination has been politicized by the vested interests to the extent that instead redressing the grievances of non-white races, it has further polarized the society in which cosmopolitan liberal and rural conservative camps are adopting extreme stances, consequently creating a civil war-like scenario across America simply to make a political rival lose a presidential election.

Using the BLM protests as an electoral stratagem isn’t the first time the mainstream media has unleashed a smear campaign against Donald Trump’s conservative political base. Similarly, in the run-up to the US midterm elections in November 2018, the American media, the Washington Post and New York Times in particular, took the lead in publicizing the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi who was brutally murdered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018.

One apparent reason the mainstream media took morbid interest in the gory details of the grisly assassination could be that Khashoggi was a columnist for The Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man with $200 billion net worth and the owner of Amazon.

Bezos had a score to settle [1] with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman. Mohammad bin Salman hacked Bezos’ phone in May 2018 and sent the details of Bezos’ extramarital affair to the National Enquirer in January 2019, leading to Bezos’ wife divorcing him and taking a significant portion of Bezos’ obscene wealth as alimony.

Nevertheless, the Washington Post has a history of working in close collaboration with the CIA, as Bezos won a $600 million contract [2] in 2013 to host the CIA’s database on the Amazon’s web-hosting service. It bears mentioning that despite Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman being primarily responsible for the war in Yemen that has claimed over hundred thousand lives and created a famine in the impoverished country, the mainstream media hailed him as a “moderate reformer” who brought radical reforms to the conservative Saudi society by permitting women to drive and allowing cinemas to screen Hollywood movies.

So what prompted the sudden change of heart in the mainstream media that the purported “moderate reformer” was all of a sudden reviled as a brutal murderer? More than anything, it was the timing of the assassination and the political mileage that could be obtained from the Khashoggi murder in the domestic politics of the United States that prompted the mainstream media to take advantage of the opportunity and mount a smear campaign against the Trump administration by publicizing the assassination.

Jamal Khashoggi was murdered on October 2, 2018, when the US midterm elections in November were only a few weeks away. Donald Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner in particular are known to have forged close business relations with the Saudi royal family. It doesn’t come as a surprise that Donald Trump chose Saudi Arabia and Israel for his maiden overseas visit in May 2017.

Thus, the corporate media’s campaign to seek justice for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi in October 2018 was actually a smear campaign against Donald Trump and his conservative political base, which became obvious after the US midterm election results were tallied.

Even though the Republicans retained their 51-seat majority in the Senate, the Democrats controlled the House of Representatives following midterms by gaining 39 additional seats and brought impeachment charges against Donald Trump, though he was acquitted by the Republican majority in the Senate.

Clearly, two factors were responsible for the surprising defeat of the Republicans in the US midterm elections. Firstly, the Khashoggi murder and the smear campaign unleashed against the Trump administration by the neoliberal media, which Donald Trump often pejoratively derides as “Fake News” on social media.

Secondly, and more importantly, the parcel bombs sent to the residences of George Soros, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, several other Democratic Congressmen and The New York Times New York office by Cesar Sayoc in October, 2018, on the eve of the midterm elections in November.

Although the suspect turned out to be a mentally ill Trump supporter, he was likely instigated by shady hands in the American deep state, which is wary of the anti-establishment rhetoric and non-interventionist tendencies of the so-called “alt-right” administration.

That the accused had a history of mental illness [3], childhood sexual abuse, substance abuse, including anabolic steroids and cognitive difficulties, including dyslexia, doesn’t come as a surprise because it’s always easy to manipulate and trap such gullible patsies into perpetrating heinous crimes.

In fact, the case of Cesar Sayoc can be compared to another iconic “patsy” in the American political history, Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin of John F. Kennedy, who was picked up as a scapegoat because he had visited Russia and Cuba before the hit-job in order to put the blame for the high-profile political assassination on the communists.

Not surprisingly, he was silenced by Jack Ruby before he could open his mouth and prove innocence in the courts of law. The cold-blooded murder of the only other non-interventionist American president, besides Donald Trump, was obviously perpetrated by a professional sniper on the payroll of the American deep state.

It was not a coincidence that Kennedy was killed in November 1963, and months later, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution authorized Lyndon B. Johnson to directly engage in the Vietnam conflict in August 1964 on the basis of a false flag naval engagement.

It’s obvious that the American deep state, comprising the State and Defense department bureaucracies, the Democratic and Republican Party establishments and the mainstream media, was responsible for the assassination of Kennedy. Most likely, the deep state turned against Kennedy after the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis and Kennedy’s pacifist rhetoric and conciliatory approach toward Washington’s arch-rival, the former Soviet Union, in the backdrop of the Cold War.