The Beltway Sniper Case: What's Race Got to Do with It?

Well, I guess I had it all wrong. It seems that race was a non-factor in the Beltway Sniper case. I know that, because New York Daily News columnist Pete Hamill told me so. In a race-obsessed column, Hamill informed the reader again and again, that this was not about race.

"'I woke up and turned on the TV, and I was shocked,' an anguished black friend of mine said yesterday. 'I felt a little stab in the heart, too. This is definitely not a black thing. I mean, this is all black folks need right now.'"

"And we should remember one man whose face became familiar as the melodrama played out: Charles Moose.

"He did not choose to be forced into an international spotlight. But he did what a responsible cop must do. He was cautious, tight-lipped, occasionally irritable. And we saw him change. He dropped little hints of what he knew, using "them" instead of "he" or referring to the shooters in other ways in the plural. And his anguish seemed to intensify as communications were opened with the killers.

"Almost certainly this was because he knew they were black. He is clearly a decent, tough, disciplined black man, an American before he is anything else. But he also must have known what my friend knew yesterday: Black people didn't need this. He almost certainly knew one other large truth: Race had nothing to do with it."

Maybe I'm out of line here, but I thought responsible cops enlisted the public's help in catching bad guys. That's certainly what they do when the bad guys are white, and they usually do so, when the really bad guys are black. But Chief Moose and his fellow D.C.-area chiefs did the opposite. Early on in the case, though Moose & Co. had not a scintilla of evidence pointing to a white man, they told officers to look for a white or a Hispanic man. At the time, Chief Moose told the public that he was not closing out any possibility, including a white woman. But he was fibbing: He had foreclosed on the possibility the killers were black men.

Indeed, Muhammad/Williams and Malvo were pulled over no less than five times by police, and the license on their Chevrolet Caprice taken down no less than ten times, yet were able to continue on their way unhindered. Are we supposed to believe that "anti-profiling" (or rather: anti-common sense) ideology had nothing to do with the ability of Muhammad/Williams and Malvo – a middle-aged American man and an unrelated boy with a Jamaican accent – to drive around unmolested in the D.C. area with out-of-state plates? Imagine a middle-aged white man driving around with an unrelated, foreign boy. I think police would have demanded some hard proof that the two were stepfather and stepson.

Chief Moose's later knowledge that the fugitives were black caused him anguish, but "race had nothing to do with it."

I'm not sure when it became clear that the killers were black, but one of the suspects called the police tipline five times. Muhammad/Williams is a northern black; an experienced listener will almost never mistake the voice of a northern black for that of a white. (As a Yankee, I find the differences between the voices of black and white Southerners to be less distinctive.)

And one of the suspects left at least two notes, one of them four pages long. During six-and-a-half years of teaching all levels of college English, I learned that the mistakes of black and white and Hispanic writers have different signatures. (Some members of each group cannot be identified from their writing, but I did not teach students with that level of education, and the police were not facing Andover-schooled killers, either.) One phrase quoted from the letter read, "Word is bond" – a distinctively black phrase.

Once Chief Moose knew the killers were black, he refused to divulge this information. Had he been more forthcoming, would black bus driver Conrad Johnson still be alive today? We will never know.

Note that it was not the police, but a white Christian man, 61-year-old trucker Ron Lantz, of Ludlow, Kentucky – from the group that is the source of all of the world's ills – who caught suspects John Allen Muhammad/John Allan Williams and Lee Boyd Malvo aka John Lee Malvo. (And the evil, white Christian southern male Lantz said he would not accept any reward due him; instead, he wanted the money to go to the dead victims' survivors.)

Pete Hamill is a working-class, Irish, Rooseveltian Brooklynite. He often idealizes the Brooklyn of his 1940s and '50s youth, which drives many younger lefties nuts, since that was the Brooklyn of Italians, Jews, Irishmen and Swedes. It is impossible to praise working-class, white Brooklynites for the world they made, without at least implicitly damning the blacks who unmade it. The "integration" of Brooklyn destroyed it, and racial socialists cannot abide to hear anything positive about working-class whites, anyway. And so if Hamill is not to betray the white, working-class heroes of his childhood, he has to go silent about race ... or become shamelessly patronizing, as in his praise of the Montgomery County (Md.) Police Department's Chief Charles Moose. (Hamill also took the opportunity to make a frivolous statement on behalf of gun control, insisting that Muhammad/Williams would never have killed anyone, had rifles not been available.)

After the arrests were made, Al Sharpton said, "we are proud, profoundly proud, of Chief Moose." "We" apparently means all black folks. But why would all black folks be proud of Chief Moose? How would Sharpton have reacted, if the chief had been white, and white folks had expressed their "pride" in him? The second question was rhetorical.

Note that this praise comes from a man who since the 1980s, has done everything in his power to handcuff white policemen and empower black criminals, murderers included.

What's race got to do with it? As far as Pete Hamill and Al Sharpton are concerned, EVERYTHING.

To comment on this article or express your opinion directly to the author, you are invited to e-mail Nicholas at adddda@earthlink.net .

Perfectly alright in your double standard world to get whitey, aye rdb3?

Where did I say that, ricpic? Where did I say that I wanted to get anyone?

Also, how can you even ask this question when the post I responded to in this case was deleted? You don't have any context by which to judge, but you think I want to somehow "get whitey."

Go away, newbie.

No mercy.

A white police chief would have taken all that and more -- demands for his dismissal.

Then demands for dismimissal would have to cover more than Moose (other chiefs involved, FBI, other heads of the Taskforce). All those that have such a hard on for Moose evidently suffer from a lack of viagra.

Unless one can prove that Moose had knowledge of the perps being black, then I think that they should just be quiet until they can provide the evidence.

In America I thought you are innocent until proving quilty.

While I was typing this respone, Fox News just played a recording of the call of October 15, which was not phoned into the Tip line but to Rockville City Police. The voice to me sounded as if he could have been a young hispanic, foreign, it had an accent. You would not readily assume it was a black male.

If you have not heard it, turn on one of the cable news stations, I'm sure they will play in numerous times today.

In Moose's statement of that day, he asked the caller to call back, because the person the caller talked to could not understand the caller.

Recording of Malvo's phone call to Rockville City Hall is being played on Fox News. Respond what you believe you detect in the voice of the caller.

I wonder if the recepient of the call is still employed by Rockville City Police.

One of the perps had also called CNN and CNN also blew the call off as a prank call.

Sniper Call? Suspect's Voice Heard on Tape ABCNEWS has obtained a tape of a call authorities believe sniper suspect John Lee Malvo made to police in Maryland during the hunt for the D.C.-area serial sniper.

"We are the people that are causing the killing in your area," the caller said to a police operator in Rockville, Md. "Look on the tarot card. It says, 'Call me God. Do not release the threat.'"

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