By Dennis Prager
Tuesday, December 03, 2013
Remember the terrible murder of Matthew Shepard in
Laramie, Wyo. in 1998 -- tortured, beaten and left hanging on a fence to die --
because he was gay?
The American people were led from the outset to believe
that Shepard was the victim of a hate crime, murdered because he was gay. And
that is how virtually every American still views the story. In the words of
Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.), "Matthew Shepard is to gay
rights what Emmett Till was to the civil rights movement." A play based on
Shepard's killing, "The Laramie Project" became, according to the
Wall Street Journal, "one of the most produced theatrical shows in the
country." And in 2009, Congress passed, and President Barack Obama signed,
the Matthew Shepard Law, which expanded the definition of hate crimes to
include crimes motivated by a victim's actual or perceived gender, sexual
orientation, gender identity or disability.
It turns out that Matthew Shepard's murder had nothing to
do with his being gay.
As early as 2004, the ABC News program "20/20"
broadcast (to its credit) a denial by both murderers, Aaron McKinney and
Russell Henderson, that the murder had anything to do with Shepard's being gay.
It was, they both claimed, a robbery gone bad.
"It was not because me and Aaron had anything
against gays," Henderson told ABC.
As a result, ABC News was widely attacked by all those
who had a vested interest not in truth, but in maintaining the homophobia
story: the liberal media, the gay rights movement and the lawyers for the
victim's mother.
The New York Times reported: "Those leading the
charge against the heavily promoted ABC report [included] Joan Garry, executive
director of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD)."
Sean Maloney, the aforementioned congressman who was then
the lawyer for Judy Shepard, Matthew Shepard's mother, called the program
"'just bad journalism ... there is a mountain of evidence that anti-gay
bias was a trigger for the beating that left Matthew dead after they robbed
him."
Now a book has been published, written by Stephen
Jimenez, himself a gay man, that confirms the accuracy of the 2004 ABC News
report. Matthew Shepard was involved in the hyperactive Wyoming meth drug
culture; he was murdered over a drug deal; and his primary murderer was a
bisexual who had probably slept with Shepard.
The media aspect of this case was summed up in a Wall
Street Journal review: "Mr. Jimenez's book is most useful in illuminating
the power of the media to shape the popular conception of an event. It shows
how a desire for Manichaean morality tales can lead us to oversimplify the
human experience."
That's a bit delicate. Actually it shows how powerful the
left-wing media are, how they are dedicated to agendas rather than to truth,
and how much of what Americans believe is shaped accordingly.
Remember the 2006 story about nooses that were hung by
racist white students in Jena, La. to signify lynchings?
As CNN reported: "Jena's racial tensions were
aggravated in August 2006, when three white teens hung the nooses the day after
a group of black students received permission from school administrators to sit
under the tree -- a place where white students normally congregated."
That was the national story: There was a tree near the
high school under which only white students sat, one day a black student sat
under the tree, and the next day nooses were hung from the tree. As late as
August 2007, the Washington Post still wrote about "Jim Crow-like
hangman's nooses dangling from a shade tree at the local high school."
None of this story was true.
First, the tree was never reserved for white students. As
the Associated press reported in September 2007: "According to teachers
and school administrators, students of all races congregated under it at one
time or another."
Second, the nooses had nothing to do with lynchings or
race. As the Christian Science Monitor reported in October 2007: "An
investigation by school officials, police, and an FBI agent revealed the true
motivation behind the placing of two nooses in the tree ... [They] were
understood to be a prank by three white students aimed at their fellow white
friends, members of the school rodeo team.
Remember the white lacrosse team players at Duke
University charged with gang rape of a black stripper -- and how the New York
Times and Duke University and everyone in between reported this as an example
of privileged white boys' racism?
That, too, was all a lie. The stripper made up the whole
story. (Last week, she was convicted of murdering her boyfriend. Have you read
about that?)
The list of lies is almost endless.
The New York Times reporter in the Soviet Union, Walter
Duranty, denied that there was a famine in the Ukraine in 1931-32 -- the
Communist-induced famine that killed about five million Ukrainians. And he won
a Pulitzer Prize for it.
The media portrayed the Kennedy assassination as the
product of Dallas's "right-wing" "climate of hate" -- even
though a card-carrying Communist committed the assassination.
The media told us over and over about a heterosexual AIDS
"epidemic" in the U.S. There was none. The media fabricated the
heterosexual epidemic in order to remove stigma from gay males and in order to
garner support for more AIDS research money.
Why all this mendacity?
There are truth tellers and there are liars on the right
and on the left. But for the left, truth is subordinated to whatever it is the
left most cares about: gay rights, minority rights, women's rights, government
health care and environmentalism being only the most obvious current examples.
That's why talk radio, conservative websites, Fox News
and conservative opinion pages, such as those of the Wall Street Journal and
Investors Business Daily, are so important.
Europe doesn't have them. And its population is
brainwashed. No wonder Europeans believe that America and Israel are the most
dangerous countries in the world. Their media told them so.
No comments:
Post a Comment