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Sheriff David Clarke Declares War: ‘Black Lives Matter Is The Enemy’

By Aric Mitchell
Published on: 15:32 PST, Jul 18, 2016

Sheriff David Clarke of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, just declared war and named Black Lives Matter as the enemy.

Clarke, an outspoken African-American conservative, lambasted BLM for putting the lives of police officers in danger after the deadly shootings in Dallas and Baton Rouge.

In a blistering op-ed entitled “This is a war, and Black Lives Matter is the enemy,” written for The Hill, he called the string of police shootings a “civil war” in progress.

“The murders in Baton Rouge, and before them Dallas, were not acts of domestic terrorism but guerrilla urban warfare against the police — who represent law and order — against the Constitution, and against the American way,” the David Clarke op-ed began.

Clarke said that as a people, Americans “need to declare that we stand with rule of law, and not with the false tales of the revolutionary Marxist forces, who most recently have rebranded themselves from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter.”

This is hardly the first time that such accusations have been hurled at Black Lives Matter since the group sprung up to protest the deadly police shootings of young black men, notably 12-year-old Tamir Rice and 18-year-old Michael Brown.

The recent murders of five Dallas Police officers drew the most fervent criticism due to the fact that the shootings happened in the midst of a Black Lives Matter protest.

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani pre-cursored the David Clarke criticism by stating that Black Lives Matter was “inherently racist” in an interview reported by CNN.

“It’s inherently racist because, number one, it divides us. All lives matter: White lives, black lives, all lives. Number two: Black Lives Matter never protests when every 14 hours somebody is killed in Chicago, probably 70-80 percent of the time (by) a black person. Where are they then? Where are they when a young black child is killed?”

As damning as that indictment of the movement is, Giuliani was the undercard to what Sheriff David Clarke had to say in a recent interview with CNN’s Don Lemon.

Clarke all but directly accused BLM for the hatred towards police and the uptick in racially motivated shootings of police officers.

The Sheriff reminded Lemon of how he said two years earlier that BLM protests would fuel an increase in violence against police officers.

“This anti-cop sentiment from this hateful ideology called Black Lives Matter has fueled this rage against the American police officer,” he added.

Lemon took the opposite stance of Sheriff David Clarke, attesting that BLM just wants peace and “coming together in the country,” but his guest was having none of it.

“You don’t believe that for one minute, do you?” he asked before asking whether Black Lives Matter planned to protest the deaths of the officers in either city or, as Giuliani suggested, they planned to protest “black-on-black crime,” adding that black people had more to worry about from other black people than “the American police officer.”

Between Clarke’s op-ed and his interview with Lemon, it’s pretty clear to see where the Sheriff stands on President Obama as well.

In fact, he called the president a liar in the Lemon interview and charged that Obama has fueled hatred of police officers with rhetoric like the lengthy statement he released to the official White House website in the aftermath of the Alton Sterling and Philando Castile shootings.

In his statement, the President said that “as a nation, we can and must do better to institute the best practices that reduce the appearance or reality of racial bias in law enforcement.”

The statement has drawn criticisms from more police than just Sheriff David Clarke, and it’s likely to continue for the foreseeable future.

But what do you think, readers?

Is David Clarke right to call out Black Lives Matter and call what’s going on now a “civil war” between the protesters and police? Sound off in the comments section.

[Image via Gage Skidmore | Flickr Creative Commons | Resized and Cropped | CC BY-SA 2.0]

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