A Chance to Learn up in Smoke?

Michelle Malkin outlines at some length a kind of fraud that keeps cropping up from the left, namely the misattribution of crimes to bigotry. (I think she errs in calling them "hate crimes.") She discusses the latest of these, a spree of church burnings in the St. Louis area:

[A]gitators did their best to fan the flames over the latest alleged wave of race-based black church burnings in October. On Twitter, social justice activists resurrected the #WhosBurningBlackChurches hashtag. "Black churches are burning again," Oklahoma State University professor Lawrence Ware lamented in Counterpunch. The far left propaganda outfit U.S. Uncut concluded unequivocally: "Racists in Ferguson Burn Down 5 Black Churches in 9 Days."

Except, they didn't. Again.

Last week, police charged 35-year-old David Lopez Jackson, who is black, with setting two of the fires. "Forensic evidence linked him to the fire on Oct. 18 at Ebenezer Lutheran Church, 1011 Theobald Street," the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported, and "video of his car near New Life Missionary Baptist Church, 4569 Plover Avenue, links him to the fire there on Oct. 17, police Chief Sam Dotson said." Jackson is a suspect in the other fires and additional charges are pending. [format edits]

It is tempting to call the purveyors of such nonsense hypocrites, since this is the same crowd that hawks the notion of "microaggression." That charge is true, but it doesn't go far enough. This practice is obscene. It is a cynical attempt to expropriate past atrocities with real victims, many of whom heroically fought injustice on a scale most of us are lucky enough to be unable to imagine. That is sickening enough on its own, but even more so is the end, ultimately injustice (often in the form of a redistribution of wealth.) But, to top all of that off, many will forgive the fraudsters on the ground that their hearts are supposedly in the right place.

A more rational assessment of such behavior is to ask the following question: "If you can't even get facts straight, why should I believe your claims to be on my side or trust any advice you might have to offer me?" Every alleged beneficiary of the left's proposed largesse ought to consider such a question.

-- CAV