The BBC, Et al.

By Patrick Hall

Recently, I attended a family get-together in Cologne, Germany, celebrating an in-law’s 80th birthday. Later that evening, I happened upon a BBC Europe news broadcast of United States Attorney General Merrick Garland’s June 15th press conference highlighting the conclusions of the George Floyd investigation. To paraphrase the Attorney General’s findings, he proclaimed that the 2020 “murder” of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police was part of a pattern, if not practice, of excessive force used by the police and years of unlawful discrimination against black Americans in particular. Garland went on to infuse the subjective, politically mind-numbing, if not intellectually lazy, charge of systemic or institutional racism at the core of black suspects’ ill-treatment by Law enforcement.  The BBC also made it a point to connect the Daniel Penny and Jordan Neely incident in its broadcast. Daniel Penny is a Marine Veteran who intervened on a New York City subway to subdue Mr. Neely, a black man and “career criminal,” from harming people on the subway car he and others shared. The UK news anchors were quick to “George Floyd or Michael Brown” the tragedy, all in the name of serving the myth of “innocent” black suspects being killed because of a supposed intractable racist subculture that permeates here in the United States.

Of course, concurrent with the BBC broadcasts were interviews of black politicians like Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), who faithfully repeated the secular catechesis, the false narrative, “or lie,” of law enforcement indiscriminately killing black men in the United States.  It was the same type of deception or deceitfulness that l chronicled several years ago in an article entitled A Bakery in Ghent. Here, a young Belgium couple, whom I met at a bakery in Ghent, Belgium, was curious how I, as a black American, dealt with the killing and bigoted behavior exhibited by law enforcement in the United States. Of course, I gave my usual answer that the greatest danger to black men did not come from law enforcement or racist policemen. The biggest danger and/or threat of violence “consistently” comes from and is initiated by Blacks.  As I highlighted in that article, I received a look from the young Belgium couple as if I had just grown two heads.  But ever since my epiphany dealing with the black community and the police back in the late 1980s, which I discussed in a 1998 article in Commonweal Magazine, the myth of racist law enforcement continues unabated.

Unfortunately, what is especially disturbing is that the image or storyline is always predictable when you see the George Floyd tragedy highlighted in international news agencies like Reuters, Ouest-France, Der Spiegel, the UK, and the Associated Press. It invariably paints America Law Enforcement and our men and women in blue in a less than favorable light. The police are often portrayed as armed thugs out to kill innocent black men like George Floyd, who has become a “dubious martyr” or a symbol of police maleficence here in America. This, despite what is now coming out more clearly after the officers' conviction, is that Mr. Floyd had enough fentanyl in his system to kill a horse, plus the fact that the officers repeatedly tried to get Mr. Floyd back into the police car. The only thing that is shown ad infinitum in the United States and International Press, like the BBC et al., is the video of Derek Chauvin with his knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck.  Thus, the deliberately false picture of the police being out to kill American Black men is burned into the frontal cortex of Europeans like the young Belgium couple, as well as other individuals whom I have had conversations with over the last 13 years while visiting the UK and the EU.  Even the new media in the small Eastern European country of Lithuania, which one of my oldest children now calls home, conspicuously spreads the distortion that blacks here in America are being killed or somehow egregiously mistreated by racist law enforcement. In a July 3rd news story appearing in Xinhua News, operated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), hundreds of people on Friday joined a march in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, to show their solidarity with George Floyd. Once again, the storyline, even among some in Lithuania, is heralded “as an unarmed black man suffocated to death by a white police officer in the mid-western U.S. state of Minnesota last week.”

It also doesn’t help that rich and influential black celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and former President Obama have given their imprimatur to the myth of racist police and American Law enforcement in their visits to places like Switzerland, France, Germany, and the UK. Not a word is uttered by other black celebrities that “Blacks kill Blacks” with impunity. The topic is never breached in their minds, or what regrettably goes as critical thought among the Black celebrity class.  It’s just way too cool, politically edgy, an avenue to demonstrate their “TRUE BLACKNESS” or down-with-cause posture to tout that systemic racism within law enforcement is indiscriminately killing black men.

Here is another exhausting and fatiguing postscript that accompanied Attorney General Garland George Floyd’s findings. While channel surfing, I accidentally picked up a “slick and polished” news story about George Floyd and racist American Law Enforcement on CGTN or the Chinese Global Television Network. This news network is a mirror image of any American news broadcast like NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox News, and MSNBC. I couldn’t discern any major differences in how CGTN news reporters, different from the liberal media, take that the George Floyd tragedy is just a metaphor for the “systemic racism” that exists in America and among the police.