On several occasions during the course of his presidency, Barack
Obama has said some unhelpful things.
Let us go back to July 2009 when President Obama
infamously said that the police department in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, had “acted stupidly” in arresting his friend Harvard
Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. despite
stating moments earlier “not having been there and not seeing
all the facts.” This did not deter President Obama from suggesting
the arrest was racially motivated.
Well, Cambridge Police Sergeant James Crowley stood his
ground and Obama found himself on the receiving end of a public
backlash. Slightly over a week after injecting himself into a local
matter, Obama and Vice President Biden hosted Sgt. Crowley and
Professor Gates for a “beer summit,” which largely resolved the
matter.
So perhaps President Obama had this episode in mind when
he was asked by a reporter about last month’s shooting of Florida
teenager Trayvon Martin after introducing Dr. Jim Kim as his
nominee for the presidency of the World Bank in the Rose Garden
last Friday. Obama began his reply by cautiously stating, “Well,
I’m the head of the executive branch, and the Attorney General
reports to me so I’ve got to be careful about my statements to make
sure that we’re not impairing any investigation that’s taking place
right now.” It was a promising start but it
did not end that way:
I think all of us have to do some soul searching to figure out
how does something like this happen. And that means that examine
the laws and the context for what happened, as well as the
specifics of the incident.
But my main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin.
If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon. And I think they are right
to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with
the seriousness it deserves, and that we’re going to get to the
bottom of exactly what happened.
While President Obama refrained from stating that the
Sanford Police Department had acted stupidly, the “If I had a son,
he’d look like Trayvon” line stuck. A short time later, GOP
presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich lambasted President Obama for
taking that line. Gingrich
said, “What the president said, in a sense, is
disgraceful. It’s not a question of who that young man looked like.
Any young American of any ethnic background should be safe, period.
We should all be horrified no matter what the ethnic background.”
The former House Speaker went on to say, “Trying to turn it into a
racial issue is fundamentally wrong. I really find it
appalling.”
Indeed, if President Obama did have a son he would not
look like Aaron Thomas Nemelka, the 19-year old Private First Class
who was
gunned down along with twelve other soldiers by Major Nidal
Malik Hasan at Fort Hood on November 5, 2009. So do Pfc. Nemelka’s
parents have any less right to expect that all of us take what
happened at Fort Hood with the seriousness it deserves and get to
bottom of it? I ask because the bottom fell out when the Obama
Administration made
no mention of Hasan or what motivated him to gun down his
fellow soldiers in its report on the Fort Hood shootings in January
2010. Apparently, the Fort Hood shootings were nothing more than an
act of “workplace
violence.” In which case, I guess that makes the attacks on the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon were the biggest acts of
workplace violence in American history. But it would miss the point
entirely.
In retrospect, no one should have been surprised at the
Obama Administration’s foregone conclusions. Even as it became
known that Hasan had
shouted Allahu Akbar and had business cards in his possession
bearing the inscription “Soldier
of Allah,” the day after the shooting President Obama
said, “I would caution against jumping to conclusions until we
have all the facts.” President Obama then proceeded to the real
business at hand that day, which was to give an address boasting
about a bill he had just signed extending unemployment benefits.
There was no time for President Obama call upon the nation to do
some “soul searching to figure out how does something like this
happen.” The loss of our soldiers at Fort Hood simply didn’t evoke
the level of emotion in President Obama that the loss of Trayvon
Martin did.
It isn’t to say that one cannot lament the death of a
17-year-old boy with his whole life ahead of him. It also isn’t to
say there aren’t questions that must be asked in this case and
these questions are currently being asked by both federal and state
authorities. But in the event George Zimmerman is charged in
connection with Martin’s death, it’s going to be awfully hard to
find a jury pool that hasn’t heard Obama say that Martin reminds
him of the son he never had and the powerful imagery that conveyed.
President Obama has once again fanned the flames of racial tension
without knowing for a fact that race is an issue in the first
place.
As of now, we don’t know if Zimmerman uttered a racial
slur during his 911 call or if race motivated his actions in any
way, shape or form. But we do know that Hasan was shouting jihad at
the top of his lungs when he murdered Pfc. Nemelka and twelve of
his fellow soldiers in cold blood. President Obama’s refusal to
acknowledge the truth of what happened at Fort Hood is a grave
disservice to Pfc. Nemelka’s family and all the other military
families who lost loved ones that day. It is a stain on his
presidency and, sadly, it appears another one has begun to take
form.
