Topic: WorldNetDaily
Jack Cashill is desperately trying to keep his bomb of a George Zimmerman-defending book (as of this writing, it's No. 199,906 at Amazon) in the headlines, which WorldNetDaily, as publisher of said bomb, is happy to oblige. His latest attempt comes 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 "descent into criminality" to which Cashill refers? Curiously, this article does not detail the offenses, which tells us they could not have been that serious, let alone worthy of automatically branding him as a criminal.
Cashill wrote in an April 2013 WND article that "Martin had been suspended twice already that school year for offenses that should have gotten him arrested – once for getting caught with a burglary tool and a dozen items of female jewelry, the second time for getting caught with marijuana and a marijuana pipe," and that Martin was never charged because the school has a diversion program purportedly designed to artificially reduce the arrest rate of the school's students.
Needless to say, Cashill is exaggerating things. The Miami Herald reports 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 is falsely attacking 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, and 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 tees 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.
And Cashill is certainly never going to admit that George Zimmerman, whom he lauds in his bomb of a book as a civil-rights martyr, has committed more crime than Martin did before his death, and that's not counting Zimmerman's shooting of Martin. After all, unlike with Martin, Cashill has absolved Zimmerman of responsibility for his criminal behavior.
