By Mecca Fowler
Editor’s note: The opinions expressed here are those of the authors. View more opinion on ScoonTV.
The left has an ugly habit of defending criminals instead of the criminal’s victims when it comes to violent crime. There are various cases where some liberals praise criminals as martyrs, rather than criminals who may have kept their lives had they not been committing crimes. Maybe because of the way the media portrays the situations people do not know any better, but it is 2022 and even when confronted with the truth, they find themselves doubling down or being outright ugly towards the victims.
One of the first times I saw this was in the highly publicized trial of Kyle Rittenhouse. Rittenhouse visited Kenosha during the 2020 protests that were the aftermath of the police shooting of Jacob Blake. During the protests, several young white men attempted to assault Rittenhouse. In self-defense, Rittenhouse shot three of the men, fatally wounding two of them. During the entire news coverage of the trial and even afterward, liberals (including the President of the United States) continued to emit more empathy to Rittenhouse’s assailants than to Rittenhouse himself. In fact, many could not stand that he was found not guilty of murder although the facts were made clear during the trial that he was attacked by the deceased.
Earlier this month in New York City, Jose Alba, a 61-year-old bodega worker was violently attacked by Austin Simon in the store Alba was working in after Simon’s girlfriend exited the store complaining about a failed transaction. Simon stormed into the store and started attacking Alba while Simon’s girlfriend allegedly stabbed Alba. In self-defense, Alba grabbed a knife and defended himself, killing his attacker. Democratic Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s response was to charge Jose Alba with second-degree murder and weapons possession but not charge the girlfriend for attacking Alba, according to the New York Post. After significant public backlash over the incident, Bragg decided to later drop the charges against Alba.
Another anecdotal but still applicable case where liberals seemingly had more empathy for the aggressor than the victim happened recently. In Minneapolis, a young mother of two, Arabella Foss-Yarbrough, called the police on her neighbor, Tekle Sundberg, after he allegedly fired several shots into her apartment. When police arrived, they had a 6-hour stand-off with Sundberg, attempting to convince him to surrender to arrest. The police ultimately ended up sniping him after they thought he had a gun pointed toward them.
Later, when Foss-Yarbrough attempted to go back to her apartment to pick up some belongings, she found a large group of family and friends of Sundberg protesting and hosting a ceremony commemorating his life. Of course, because Sundberg is black and lost his life in the hands of police, demonstrators made him out to be a victim and martyr. His family even worked with attorney Ben Crump to drum up support for an investigation into the two police officers who sniped Sundberg.
She confronted the demonstrators, telling them that they needed to leave and that Sundberg’s demise was not another “George Floyd situation,” referencing the 2020 killing of Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis Police. She looked distressed standing outside her car screaming about her side of the story and how Sundberg attempted to kill her. “I am a woman of color. If I would have lost my life, would you guys do this for me?” she exclaimed.
“My kids have to deal with this and probably have a mental illness now because they almost lost their lives,” she said. “There’s bullet holes in my kitchen because he sat in the f–king hallway watching me move. He tried to kill me in front of my kids.”
The demonstrators reacted by downplaying her role as the victim, with one even telling her to shut up. They also said the protest was not the place to share her story since, according to Sundberg’s family, they were protesting Sundberg’s killing by police, not his actions toward her. Still, they were hostile. One young woman can even be seen on camera getting in Foss-Yarbrough’s face.
The lack of empathy and utter contempt for Foss-Yarbrough is disgusting and heartbreaking. The side that is supposed to be more empathetic and compassionate has a very ugly side as we have seen. During the Rittenhouse and Foss-Yarbrough situations, it seemed as if no prominent liberals in the media stood up for them to add common sense and rational context to the situations. In all of these situations, the people who survived could have very much been dead had they not pivoted and thought on their feet within a moment’s notice. And in each of these situations, the perpetrators that ended up losing their lives had the choice to not put themselves in the situation, but they chose to anyway. Liberals need to take a long hard look at how they would have responded had the shoes been on the other foot.
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