On Monday evening, President Obama spoke at the White House annual Iftar dinner, where he continued the promulgate the unifying theme of his presidency: America is deeply racist and evil.
Speaking to Muslims, he mentioned the racist terrorist attack by Dylann Storm Roof at a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina, then compared it with a highly-covered crime against Muslims: “When our values are threatened, we come together as one nation. When three young Muslim Americans were brutally murdered in Chapel Hill earlier this year, Americans of all faiths rallied around that community.”
He then added, “As Americans, we insist that nobody should be targeted because of who they are, what they look like, who they love, how they worship. We stand united against these hateful acts.”
By way of contrast, when President Obama hosted the White House Hanukkah dinner, he reportedly made no mention of anti-Semitic crimes. Instead, he stated that he was Jewish “in my soul.” Obama also made no statement with regard to the worldwide Islamist problem of targeting people because of who they are, what they look like, who they love, and how they worship. America’s the problem, folks.
Never mind that the police say the slaying of three young Muslims in North Carolina wasn’t a hate crime, but an argument over parking. The left insists that the killings represent America’s brutality toward Muslims, and no fact pattern will be allowed to demonstrate otherwise.
President Obama’s decision to label a crime a hate crime – without any supporting evidence – follows hard on Obama’s decision to label America a continuing horror show of racism over the weekend:
Racism, we are not cured of it. And it’s not just a matter of not being polite to say n****r in public. That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not. It’s not just a matter of overt discrimination. Societies don’t, overnight, completely erase everything that happened 200 to 300 years prior.
Of course, nobody has argued that racism disappeared overnight in the United States. The fight against racism has been a long, 200 to 300 year slog, with hundreds of thousands of deaths along the way. But for Obama, none of that matters: slavery, Obama said, “casts a long shadow and that’s still part of our DNA that’s passed on.”
Slavery is not part of our DNA in any meaningful sense: slavery, like racism, was a learned phenomenon, not a biological one. For the captain of the self-appointed Party of Science™ to embrace the Lamarckian notion that racism is socially created and then passed down generation-to-generation in a genetic process demonstrates the depth of his desire to perpetuate racial conflict.
As thousands of Americans, black, white, and every other color came together in Charleston, South Carolina, once the heart of the slave-owning South, the president could have focused on how far we have come. Instead, he chose to polarize.
That is what this president does, and that is what his administration does. The media and leftist politicians have done far more to promote modern racial discord and unrest than the Confederate flag. Which is why they swivel Americans’ attention from sympathy and grief for black victims to largely-mindless debates over the historic and social value of a symbol variously understood as representing racism and/or Southern heritage.
It’s also why the media and President Obama generate controversy over the replacement of Alexander Hamilton on the $10 bill with a female player yet-to-be-named: Americans agree that women are wonderful, important, and ought to have equal rights, so the left promptly insults one of America’s most important founding fathers to create opposition they can label sexist.
For President Obama and the media, America must be portrayed as evil consistently and relentlessly. If Americans of all stripes were to realize just how wonderful and tolerant their neighbors are, why would we need the benevolent hand of an overbearing government to save us from each other?
Ben Shapiro is Senior Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the book, The People vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against The Obama Administration (Threshold Editions, June 10, 2014). Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.