Topic: WorldNetDaily
When Fox Lake, Ill., police officer Joseph Gliniewicz was found dead of a gunshot wound in September, WorldNetDaily wasted little time in exploiting his death to blame blacks in general and Black Lives Matter in particular.
WND columnist Ilana Mercer invoked Gliniewicz's name to rail against a “Racial-Industrial Complex” that has been "schooling Americans in the fiction of systemic black oppression by white America."
Columnist Pat Buchanan similarly invoked Gliniewicz to complain that "Among liberal elites and the Black Lives Matter crowd, an old notion is regaining ascendancy – cops are the problem and police are all too often the oppressors."
A Sept. 6 WND article cited how Gliniewicz was "the latest law enforcement officer to become a murder victim this year," then quoted Jesse Lee Peterson claiming that he "blames much of the [anti-police] violence on Black Lives Matter itself" and asserting that Black Lives Matter is "akin to the KKK and the skinheads.” And a Sept. 8 WND article played this bit of guilt by association:
Black Lives Matter activists at the Minnesota State Fair chanted “pigs in a blanket, fry them like bacon” two days before Fox Lake, Illinois police officer Lt. Joe Gliniewicz was shot to death.
“They’re putting the lives of police officers at risk by encouraging other angry people to hate the police and target them,” said Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, a civil-rights leader, WND columnist and author of the new book “The Antidote.” “This is an evil group.”
“I haven’t seen such hate since the New Black Panther Party started going after whites several years ago,” he told WND.
Except, as it turns out, none of that is true. Investigators have found that Gliniewicz's death was a "carefully staged suicide" designed to obscure the fact that he had been stealing money from a police mentoring program for several years, and that he tried to hire a hit man to kill a village administrator who was looking into his financial improprieties.
Will WND publicly retract its attempts to blame Gliniewicz's death on Black Lives Matter? Will Peterson publicly apologize as well for his false attacks?
Don't count on it.
Not only has WND failed so far to report that Gliniewicz's death was a staged suicide by a corrupt officer, his name remains at the top of WND's "big list" of "deadly attacks on America's law-enforcement officers in 2015."
