Thursday, April 26, 2012

George Zimmerman: the black, Hispanic, Peruvian, kind-hearted non-white, not-racist poster boy

Bookworm
Apr 25 2012


“Facts are stubborn things.”

I love that quotation. John Adams said it back in 1774 when he took on the unpopular job of defending the British troops charged with the killings in the event now known as the Boston Massacre. Arguing off those same stubborn facts, Adams was able to get those troops acquitted.

“Facts are stubborn things.” You can lie about them and you can try to bury them, but they have a bad habit of revealing themselves. Sometimes, these revelations can take decades or even centuries, but sometimes — especially in a modern media age — those stubborn facts demand to be heard within days or weeks of the initial lies.

And so it is with the lies the media told about George Zimmerman.

“He’s a white man.” Wrong, so the media came up the tortured white-Hispanic. Turns out that even that is wrong. Zimmerman is also part black. Brutally Honest has the perfect summation: “In a delicious irony, it is Zimmerman who might actually look more like the son Obama never had.”

He’s a racist. Wrong, because it was revealed that he worked hard on behalf of a young black man he thought was wrongfully accused.

He’s an evil, paranoid man who constantly called the cops because of imaginary terrors in his neighborhood. Wrong. Aside from the fact that he called infrequently, he was the rock of the neighborhood:

George Zimmerman was known as a trusted aid to most of his black neighbours in the gated community of Sanford, Florida that was plagued by a string of burglaries in the weeks leading up to the shooting of Trayvon Martin, according to an investigation by Reuters.

It reveals that the community, previously a family-friendly, first-time homeowner community, had been devastated by the recession that struck Florida, and transient renters began to occupy some of the 263 town houses in the complex.

During that time, it was Zimmerman, who emerged as a sympathetic figure, offering his and his wife’s support to any homeowners who had been robbed or felt fearful.

I don’t know whether George Zimmerman committed a crime. I do know that the American media did. Zimmerman is said to have wept for what he did. I doubt anyone in the media is shedding tears for grossly maligning a good man’s character or for stirring up violent racial animus in America.

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