Victor Davis Hanson
"Note further that the community of Ferguson dissenters was not much worried that strong-armed robbery occurred, or that a town cannot long exist with youths walking in the middle of the street under the influence or assaulting police officers, or disobeying orders to cease and desist, or postfacto rioting and looting as much as the fact that in the shoot-out, a white policeman shot a black unarmed assailant. That fact, too, will be silently noted."
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"Note well that last week a Bosnian immigrant was beaten to death by young African-American and Latino teens. Other such black-on-white cases are said to have preceded and followed the murder. The usual official bureaucratese followed the shooting: that such targeted violence had nothing to do with race, that it could not be a hate crime, and that it was not associated with Ferguson, etc. Was there rioting or a Justice investigation over the unwillingness of authorities to cite this as a hate crime? Certainly, two messages were implicit about the killing of Zemir Begic: had he been African-American and his assailants white, Ferguson-like violence may well have followed; and had he had a gun and shot his hammer-welding attackers, he might well have found as bleak a future as did George Zimmerman or Darren Wilson for shooting and killing an attacker who did not wield a firearm." Emphasis mine, TD
"... "So another unspoken lesson from Ferguson may be that unarmed assailants such as Brown — or Trayvon Martin — can, just as armed suspects, pose as great challenges to those who confront them, in the sense that being assaulted by them might now be seen as preferable to using a firearm in self-defense, with the subsequent ruin that follows.
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"Note well that last week a Bosnian immigrant was beaten to death by young African-American and Latino teens. Other such black-on-white cases are said to have preceded and followed the murder. The usual official bureaucratese followed the shooting: that such targeted violence had nothing to do with race, that it could not be a hate crime, and that it was not associated with Ferguson, etc. Was there rioting or a Justice investigation over the unwillingness of authorities to cite this as a hate crime? Certainly, two messages were implicit about the killing of Zemir Begic: had he been African-American and his assailants white, Ferguson-like violence may well have followed; and had he had a gun and shot his hammer-welding attackers, he might well have found as bleak a future as did George Zimmerman or Darren Wilson for shooting and killing an attacker who did not wield a firearm." Emphasis mine, TD
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