By Rabbi Michael Leo Samuel
CHULA VISTA, California — Jesse Jackson once said that he gets nervous whenever he sees a group of young black men standing on a corner doing nothing—and he’s not the only one.
By now, most of you may have heard about a game called “Knockout.” In places like Crown Heights in Brooklyn, where Jews and blacks live peacefully together, young black hoodlums play this game to see how many Jews they can “knockout” by punching them in the head as these pedestrians walk down the streets. After a person has been knocked out, the black youths dance around the victim and high-five their fellows for their achievement.
The violence perpetuated has caused numerous concussions, disfigurements, and deaths.
The social problem of “Knockout” is getting exponentially larger because many of the large media outlets such as ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and MSNBC refuse to do a story about it. Jewish communities are reluctant to talk about it as well. The black youths committing the assaults have even filmed videos of the incidents showing the violence and their subsequent celebrations, including some called “Polar Bear Hunting” and “Knock the Jew.” By hiding these hate crimes from the public, the television stations are enabling this kind of behavior to continue. FOX News deserves considerable credit for breaking the story.
Thomas Sowell, an important voice sof the black community, wrote an article for the New York Post. In it, he acknowledges that such assaults on innocents are nothing new:
- Despite such pious phrases as “troubled youths,” the attackers are often in a merry, festive mood. In a sustained mass attack in Milwaukee, going far beyond the dimensions of a passing knockout game, the attackers were laughing and eating chips, as if it were a picnic. One of them observed casually, “White girl bleed a lot.” That phrase — “White Girl Bleed a Lot” — is also the title of a book by Colin Flaherty, which documents both the racial attacks across the nation and the media attempts to cover them up, as well as the local political and police officials who try to say that race had nothing to do with these attacks.[1]
Shonda Lackey speaks directly to the root of the social problem affecting young black teens.
- The plain truth is that many young black men are not being raised to be productive members of society. It seems they aren’t being raised at all. Without proper guidance from their mothers and particularly their fathers, black children struggle to develop a healthy sense of self. If these black youths don’t value their own lives, it will be difficult for them to value the life of another human being. The perpetrators involved in the “knockout” attacks don’t seem to care if their target might retaliate. They also don’t seem to care about repercussions such as incarceration. In fact, they appear to think they are invincible. [2]
I think there are several other factors contributing toward the social violence. The “New” Black Panther Party endorses inter-racial violence. The NBPP’s deceased chairman, Khalid Abdul Muhammad identified the “white man” as the “devil” and claiming that “there is a little bit of Hitler in all white people.[3]
You may remember the New Black Panthers King Samir Shabazz from the voter intimidation allegations that were leveled at him in 2008, which was ignored by the Obama Administration’s Department of Justice. In one recent broadcast, Shabazz calls for black Americans to form an army and murder white people in very explicit terms. Here are just some of his comments from the newly discovered 2012 radio broadcast.
- We gonna need preachers going into the cracker churches throwing hand grenades on early Sunday morning when the cracker got his hands up, ‘please white Jesus!’ Well we gonna throw a bomb in that Godd@mn church, burn up the cracker, burn up the cracker Jesus, and burn up some cracker white supremacy. …You’re going to have to kill some of these babies, just born three seconds ago. You’re going to have to go into the Godd@mn nursery and just throw a damn bomb in the damn nursery and just kill everything white in sight that ain’t right.[4]
Attorney General Eric Holder’s behavior is all the more suspicious in this matter. The Department of Homeland Security said recently that an African-American employee named Ayo Kimathi still runs a racist website predicting and advocating a race war. To date, he has been put on paid administrative leave and is still collecting a paycheck for his job. He has been working there since 2009. His website criticizes whites, gays, those of mixed race, and blacks who integrate with whites.
The NBPP’s ideation is deliberately stoking the fires of hatred by preparing and encouraging the racial war conflict in the United States. We have yet to hear from Jesse Jackson, Eric Holder, and the President himself condemning the violence. We have yet to see Eric Holder label the NBPP as a terrorist organization. Yet, the President had no difficulty posting the NBPP’s political recommendation on the Re-elect President Obama website and marched with Shabazz back in 2007.[5]
When revelation about this endorsement occurred, I asked: “How would the country like it if the President posted a KKK endorsement on the Presidential website?” You know the answer: people would justifiably feel outraged.
Among prominent liberal African American social leaders, only Al Sharpton has condemned the racial violence. In fact, he said he would even organize rallies to help prevent the spread of gratuitous violence. He commented, “How would we like it if it were white people preying upon blacks?” I am personally pleased to see Sharpton for taking an ethical stand on this matter. He plans to organize community rallies to confront this problem.
And for the Jewish community, we need to speak out against this serious social problem; sticking our heads in the sand is not an option—not just for the Jewish members of a community, but for anyone whom these young thugs spontaneously target for entertainment.
Let us demand that anyone supporting inter-racial violence be treated as a genuine social threat. We need to combat the violence and stop enabling it through our silence, complicity, and cowardice.
Our nation demands justice.
[1] http://nypost.com/2013/11/19/thugs-target-jews-in-sick-knockout-game/
[2] Shonda Lackey, Knock Out Black Self-Hatred http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/11/knock_out_black_self-hatred.html#ixzz2mAY92MDj
[3] http://www.wnd.com/2008/03/59326/#D39cG1uSZYZ3ByjR.99
[4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDZ6Sfbw1HY
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Rabbi Samuel is spiritual leader of Temple Beth Shalom in Chula Vista. He may be contacted via michael.samuel@sdjewishworld.com