What's Wrong With This Picture?

Four cops killed by an African-American parolee in a city where cops have killed several African-Americans in the past several years and some people actually believe that evens the score? Obviously, the people who feel this way live by the "eye for the eye" Old Testament laws and not the "turn the other cheek" New Testament fulfillment of those laws. If people in Oakland, California, knew anything about Old Testament law, they might not be so quick to sanction mass murder! I realize the killing of Oscar Grant by a BART cop, the fourth such killing in Oakland I believe enrages African-American citizens, but are there people there really glorifying murdering police officers in retaliation? How can anyone really believe it's o.k. to kill people to avenge the death of someone else? It may have something to do with the U.S. being one of only a couple of Western nations that have a death penalty. Or it may have something to do with something else. I don't understand. However, there are some people who seem to have this all figured out according to their own beliefs. Read the following takes on the cop murders and the people killed by the BART cops from the right and left:

March 25, 2009
"Blacks in Oakland celebrate racially motivated murder of four white police officers."
Council of Conservative Citizens News Team(CofCC.org)

"San Francisco Area Black Newspaper praises killing of four white police officers. Calls the killer one of the 'heroes in the human rights struggle for Black people in America.'
The slaughter took place in the Bay Area, the same vicinity as the 1973-1974 'Zebra Killings.' The Zebra Killers and Nat Turner’s band who killed 60 white people in 1831, are among the most prolific serial killers in US history.
The Zebra Killings were carried out by a Nation of Islam splinter group, known as the 'Black Angels of Death.' They awarded points to members for the number of whites killed. The exact number of victims is unknown, but many police officials have put the number at 72.
From View from the Right.
A friend in law enforcement in the Bay Area wrote me,
There were massive parties all over Oakland celebrating the shooting that night. During the interviews on TV there were 20 or 30 people in the background screaming 'F*** the police!' and 'They got what they deserved!' It was everything the officers could do to restrain themselves.
Bay View, a radical rag which calls itself a 'National Black Newspaper,' celebrates the mass murder as 'what some in the Black community see as a day of heroic resistance against the police,' under the headline, 'Police 2, Oakland residents 4.'
A columnist for the paper, Jean Damu, writes, 'When the full story is finally told and, though not likely freely admitted by many, deep within the spiritual thinking of numerous African Americans, an emotional candle will be lit in memory of Lovelle Mixon.'
How many within the black community resonate to these views? More than complacent whites would like to believe, I suspect.
The behavior of blacks in Oakland mimics that of blacks in St. Louis when a black spree killer murdered two cops, three Kirkwood City council members, and the mayor. The killer’s family members defended him on the news and many local blacks openly celebrated the murders."

"Oscar Grant Killed in Cold Blood by BART Cop"
International Communist League
"OAKLAND, January 12—Seething anger against rampant, and routine, humiliation and terror at the hands of the racist cops was ignited in Oakland, California, over the coldblooded execution of a 22-year-old black man, Oscar Grant, by a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) cop on January 1. The killing of Grant was a shot literally heard round the world in multiple video clips by other passengers in the station which were streamed online.
'We Are All Oscar Grant,' declared signs and chants at a January 7 protest of more than 700 people—including blacks, Latinos, Asians and whites—outside the Fruitvale BART station where Grant was killed. Pointing to the Zionist military onslaught in the Gaza Strip, other signs called to 'End Government Sponsored Murder in the Ghettos of Oakland and Palestine.' Rage and despair in the face of the tired appeals for 'calm' and deadly illusions in 'police reform' peddled by black elected officials and preachers exploded in the streets of downtown Oakland later that night. The Partisan Defense Committee—a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League—sent a protest letter demanding that all charges be dropped against the more than 100 protesters who were beaten and arrested by an army of riot-equipped cops.
While his cops fired tear gas and rubber bullets at protesters, black Democratic Party Oakland mayor Ron Dellums promised to bring the Oakland Police Department into the “investigation” of Grant’s murder. That will be a gigantic boost to the cover-up machine that BART has already set in motion. In 2002, three cops from the notorious Oakland police gang, the 'Riders,' which was unleashed as part of the racist 'war on drugs,' were completely exonerated of 60 counts of savage beatings and frame-ups. Meanwhile, the Oakland cops continued to gun down young black and Latino men with impunity. In this case, the BART cop who killed Grant has opted to resign while the Feds and California attorney general Jerry Brown are intervening to try to keep a lid on 'tensions.'
At the Oakland protest, placards from the ANSWER coalition, led by the reformist Party for Socialism and Liberation, called to 'Jail Killer Cops!' In your dreams. The capitalist rulers are hardly going to jail their own police guard dogs. And, even if one cop were charged and imprisoned, it wouldn’t stop police brutality and terror. The cops serve, together with the military and the prisons, as the core of a state whose purpose is the repression of the working class and oppressed by any means necessary. From the December 31 shooting of Robbie Tolan, who had been forced to lie down in the driveway of his family’s Houston-area home, to the killing of Adolph Grimes III, who was shot 14 times—12 times in the back—outside his grandmother’s house in New Orleans on New Year’s Day, racist cop terror runs rampant in capitalist America.
For its part, the International Socialist Organization (ISO) has responded to the spate of cop killings under Dellums’ 'stop crime' reign with the argument that: 'Rather than spending millions hiring more inexperienced cops, what would make a real difference in tackling crime would be to hit it at its roots—poverty—by rebuilding Oakland’s crumbling schools and providing decent-paying jobs that would give Black, Latino and poor Oakland residents a real opportunity' (Socialist Worker, 14 August 2008).
The ISO’s cringing faith in the capitalist rulers to provide money for jobs, education and health care at the expense of their repressive apparatus serves only to mask the true nature of this system. Those whose rule is based on exploitation shell out to those they exploit and oppress only what they can realize back in profit. And the racist rulers of America have no use for a whole generation of black youth who were once kept on the bench as a 'reserve army of labor.' Now what U.S. capitalism offers them is jail, a slow death from disease, malnutrition and drugs, or a fast one, gunned down on the streets by the cops or killed in the prison execution chambers of America.
The situation cries out for revolutionary leadership, to organize the social power of labor and unite behind it all the oppressed in a struggle for state power that gets rid of the whole racist capitalist system and opens the road for genuine freedom for all. This is the class-struggle perspective put forward by the Bay Area Labor Black League for Social Defense, which is fraternally allied with the Spartacist League/U.S."

Both sides are stoking the fires of hate and neither, at least in the above articles is being objective. Both are pushing their own political agenda, otherwise, the article written by the right would have also talked about the number of lynchings of blacks by whites and the article written by the left would have mentioned the killing of whites by blacks. I did find an observation made by an African-American citizen of Oakland that mirrors my own views on this latest American tragedy:

"The shootings [of the four police officers] are a tragedy of epic proportions, and should never have happened. Someone wrote that the system failed him [Mixon} and that city leaders failed him, and I suggest his family failed him. I’m a single father, was raised in Oakland and am currently raising a teenage daughter in Oakland. It’s all about personal choices. When he had the choice to use a gun and go to prison or go home to his family, he chose to use that gun and go to prison. He chose to miss a date with his parole officer, which showed he was not a good candidate for parole. I mean what’s a parolee that’s trying to straighten up his life doing carrying an automatic pistol and then firing it at two officers because they pulled him over? And then he runs to his sister’s house and gets an assault rifle and shoots three more cops, wow! He had the opportunity to be educated, but didn’t take advantage of it. (I took my Oakland education and went to law school.) There certainly is a time and place to voice grievances over the behavior of some Oakland police officers, but Lavelle Mixon was no Oscar Grant. As such, he cannot be a martyr for the good black men that are killed wrongly by officers under the color of authority. Oakland has a high crime rate, which Mr. Mixon has contributed to on at least two known occasions. Oakland has a high poverty and a high unemployment rate, but Mr. Mixon didn’t appear to be trying to bring himself and his family out of poverty. In sum, here is a man that shunned educating himself, and instead of trying to get into college, and out of the “hood” decided that being a gangster was more cool, and we all know what happens to gangsters" posted by Cave Man 3/27/09 on NEWS ONE for Black America.