Jack Cashill's New Favorite Killer

The WorldNetDaily columnist's soft spot for murderers continues with his insistence that anybody but George Zimmerman is responsible for Zimmerman's alleged criminal behavior, as well as his race-baiting of the black teen Zimmerman killed.

By Terry Krepel
Posted 7/15/2014

WorldNetDaily columnist Jack Cashill has long had a soft spot for murderers who kill the kind of people Cashill doesn't like. He penned a seven-part series at WND asserting that anti-abortion activist James Kopp was being framed for the 1998 death of New York abortion doctor Barnett Slepian -- a conspiracy inconvenienced by the fact that Kopp eventually pleaded guilty to the murder. He also falsely suggested that Eric Rudolph was similarly being framed for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing and another bombing at an abortion clinic.

In George Zimmerman -- who was acquitted of murder last year in the killing of Florida teen Trayvon Martin -- Cashill has found another killer whose only supposed crime is killing someone who deserved it. Cashill wrote an entire book on the subject -- the WND-published "If I Had A Son," which lionized Zimmerman and trashed Martin as a hoodie-wearing black thug.

WND actually called Cashill a "Zimmerman expert" in one article. Well, more accurately, Cashill is an expert at being an apologist for Zimmerman, insisting that he can't be held responsible for his increasingly violent behavior.

As before, Cashill's killer-coddling is blowing back on him. As Zimmerman continued to have brushes with the law, sales of his book tanked -- less than a month after its release, it was ranked No. 35,910 on Amazon's sales list. Yet Cashill has continued to be Zimmerman's biggest champion, blaming putting the blame on Zimmerman's actions on anyone but Zimmerman.

In a Nov. 19 WND article, Cashill deflected Zimmerman's recent arrest on domestic-violence charges by pushing the idea that Zimmerman has post-traumatic stress caused not by, you know, killing someone else but, rather, by being held accountable for it:

Journalist and author Jack Cashill, who covers the Zimmerman case in his new book, “If I Had a Son: Race, Guns, and the Railroading of George Zimmerman,” believes that the Florida man’s latest actions are uncharacteristic of the person Zimmerman was before the Trayvon shooting and may be a sign that he is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

“I’ve talked to his father and his brother and they said he’s just not the same person. I would say PTSD is probably a pretty good description of what’s going on,” Cashill told WND. “They took his job, took his marriage, the whole thing cost him tremendously and the media gloried in his screw-ups.”

[...]

Cashill said believes Zimmerman exhibited the thousand-yard stare, the limp, unfocused glaze of a battle-weary soldier that is often a symptom of PTSD.

“He had the thousand-yard stare. You saw it during the trial. He didn’t look sane when he was in that trial – he was utterly disengaged,” he explained. “That he is suffering from some total breakdown seems totally obvious at this point.”

[...]

Cashill said he believes the media and federal government’s relentless pursuit of Zimmerman drove the man to ruin his own life.

“Soon as the verdict came in, everything changed,” he said. “There’s a weekend of hubbub, but then they didn’t want to talk about it anymore. They didn’t want to revisit it because they know how guilty they are. His life is ruined by what they’ve done to him.”

Aren't conservatives like Cashill supposed to be all about personal responsibility. Well, apparently not when it conflicts with Cashill's ideological agenda.

Cashill doubled down in a Nov. 20 column, blaming not only the media but also Zimmerman's now-estranged wife and soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend for his current condition:

Between April 2012 and July 2013, Zimmerman’s life fell apart. He showed up at the trial dead-eyed, grossly overweight, and financially and emotionally bankrupt.

The local NAACP, with which he had worked on a civil rights case a year earlier, had betrayed him. The state of Florida had sacrificed him to the mob.

His president denied him. The media had rendered the mid-Florida ether so poisonous he could scarcely leave the house. His wife no longer loved him and was eager to tell the world about it.

Zimmerman’s acquittal settled nothing. The death threats amplified. The attorney general continued to hound him despite full clearance by the FBI more than a year prior. And the media cried “Injustice!”

“I still see sadness in his eyes,” said his brother Robert soon after the acquittal. “He was definitely not the same person I had seen a few days before the incident.”

In the last two years, Zimmerman has experienced more betrayal on more levels than most of us will in a lifetime.

Now, it appears that his latest “victim,” girlfriend Samantha Scheibe, was soliciting national media interviews weeks before their well-publicized dust-up.

Regardless of the circumstances, each misstep Zimmerman has made post-trial has left the media giddy. They seem to think it vindicates their utterly subversive rush to judgment.

The fact is that the Zimmerman they now happily trash is the Zimmerman they helped create. Whatever happens going forward, the blood is on their hands.

Again, in Cashill's eyes Zimmerman has no responsibility for his own behavior.

Trashing Trayvon again

Another Cashill attempt to trash Martin came in the form of a Jan. 18 WND article:

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has announced new guidelines for classroom discipline that he says are intended to end racial disparities in discipline and punishment in America’s public schools.

But several educational experts and commentators have blasted the move as an attempt actually to erect a race-based system of punishment in public education.

Journalist Jack Cashill, who has covered racial issues extensively and whose latest book, “If I Had a Son: Race, Guns, and the Railroading of George Zimmerman,” investigated the racially charged trial of Zimmerman, told WND that several school districts throughout America, including Trayvon Martin’s Miami-Dade School District, have already implemented similar guidelines and are partially responsible for the tragic end of Trayvon Martin.

“In a way, the Miam-Dade School Police Department was ahead of its time in trying to racially balance the criminal activity of its students. Trayvon Martin was the beneficiary of that policy, meaning that the crimes he committed that otherwise would’ve gone into juvenile justice, were treated as mere school disciplinary problems,” Cashill explained.

To Cashill, Trayvon would still be alive today if his school district had treated his actions in the appropriate manner.

“Trayvon Martin would be alive if Miami-Dade School District had treated his infractions as crimes and his parents would then have been aware of what he was up to and they would not have allowed him to roam the streets as though he were just a mischievous teen and not a likely criminal,” Cashill stated.

And what is this supposed Martin "descent into criminality" to which Cashill refers? Curiously, this article does not detail those offenses, which strongly suggest they could not have been that serious, let alone worthy of automatically branding him as a criminal.

Needless to say, Cashill is exaggerating things. The Miami Herald reported that while Martin was caught with jewelry and a screwdriver (the alleged "burglary tool"), but he refused to say where the jewelry came from, and he was never disciplined over the incident. And Martin was not caught with marijuana; according to the Herald, he was caught with a bag with marijuana residue.

Further, WND falsely attacked the Department of Justice's discipline guidelines as "a race-based system of punishment in public education." To the contrary: The guidelines remove race as a factor in discipline, given that current zero-tolerance policies disproportionately result in minority students being unfairly and excessively punished.

But as we've seen, facts don't matter to WND or Cashill, and the former teed up the latter to rant about race:

“When Holder was called onto the carpet for his release of the New Black Panthers involved in voter intimidation, Bartle Bull, a civil rights lawyer, commented that this was the most egregious voter intimidation case he had ever seen and Holder called those comments an insult to ‘my people,’” Cashill explained.

“The fact is that Holder has created two different systems of justice – one for everyday Americans and the other for ‘my people.’ Unfortunately, that causes more problems for ‘my people,’ not fewer problems.”

In Cashill’s opinion, these policies have proved to be disastrous for the black community and have created more problems, not less.

“Over the last 50 years, virtually every policy designed to help black people ends up hurting black people and this one seems particularly ill-designed. It is designed to simply appease and not to resolve. If you don’t discourage bad behavior, you encourage it. You can’t be neutral about it,” Cashill said.

As usual, Cashill is ignoring an inconvenient fact: No voter, white or otherwise, has ever come forward to say they were intimidated by the New Black Panthers.

Yes, something was learned

Cashill's Feb. 26 WND column is headlined "2 years post-Trayvon and nothing learned." That's not quite true -- along with fellow WNDer Colin Flaherty, Cashill has learned how well race-baiting plays with WND readers. Indeed, the first thing Cashill tells us is that blacks are just a bunch of thugs, even if President Obama doesn't agree:

Like all men of color, said Obama, he knew what it was like to be followed in a department store or have women clutch their purses upon seeing him enter an elevator.

Even if true, Obama neglected to mention the motive behind this seeming bad behavior. Like Obama’s own grandmother, even the relatives of young black men know that they commit more than their share of crime, far more.

Obama did acknowledge that young men black men “are disproportionately both victims and perpetrators of violence,” but he abandoned this thread prematurely.

Although he had the opportunity to shake up the debate, he instead pulled his ultimate punch, not in what he said, but in what he did not say. He let the idea stand that Martin was one of the victims of violence, but not one of the perpetrators.

If the president had called attention to the fractures in Martin’s domestic life, his suppressed criminal record, his all but unseen descent into drugs and violence, and especially his reckless attack on Zimmerman, Obama might have lent a dollop of moral seriousness to his remarks.

Continuing his defense of George Zimmerman -- whom he lionizes in his recent book -- Cashill tells us that everyone but Zimmerman was to blame for Trayvon Martin's death:

Here is the real injustice. In the two years since Trayvon Martin died, roughly 15,000 black Americans have been killed by other African-Americans.

If asked, I doubt if Barack Obama could name a one of them. I doubt if Holder could either. In these last two years, in these last five, neither has made a serious inquiry into why young black males kill and get killed at such a frightening rate.

It is so much easier and so much safer to blame George Zimmerman.

Yeah, putting blame on the guy who had a gun and shot Trayvon Martin to death is just too easy.

Still defending

The dismissal of Zimmerman's libel lawsuit against NBC in late June prompted a new round of defense from Cashill. In a July 2 column, Cashill insisted that "Zimmerman made about as unlikely a racist poster child as America could produce," shortly after making sure his readers know that the person Zimmerman shot to death was a "black teen."

This was followed by an unbylined July 12 WND article that is mostly a lame attempt to revive interest in Cashill's book. Cashill is given free rein to paint Zimmerman yet again as a victim, declaring that his trial was the first time in American history, “the White House, the Justice Department and the media conspired to put an innocent man in prison for the rest of his life.” The article repeats Cashill's image of Martin as "a 17-year-old man who called himself “No Limit Nigga” and was into guns, drugs and street fighting."

The article also notes that "A year after the jury verdict that acquitted Zimmerman on all counts, Cashill believes little, if anything, was learned from this ordeal." Of course, Cashill learned the value of race-baiting, so yes, there was something learned.

Cashill is clearly misguided on many things, but his constant excuse-making for Zimmerman could have larger consequences. If Cashill continues to finger-point and makes no effort to get Zimmerman the help he obviously needs, Cashill will be the one with blood on his hands.