The New Black Panthers, Same Old Left

One of the hallmarks of Left is its tendency to nestle up to Power, particularly the sort of Power that isn't afraid to use violence to get what it wants. This seems counterintuitive at first, as leftists like to portray themselves as peace-lovers. But think of the Left's ongoing love affair with the murderous Che Guevara, their pilgrimages to kiss the ring of Fidel Castro, and more recently, its endless excuse making for anyone who lobs a bomb at Israel. The enthusiasm for Hugo Chavez by, among others, Sean Penn, Bill Ayers, and to a lesser extent, President Obama, is probably another example of this. So long as the threatened violence can in some sense be characterized as revolutionary, transgressive, or liberating, Leftists' legs get all tingly.

The classic example, of course, is the New Left's support for the Black Panther Party in the late '60s and early '70s -- on the one hand making peace signs and urging the country to make love not war, and on the other providing political cover and financial support for what was, at its core, a gang of violent, murderous thugs. To learn more about the Left and the Panthers read this chilling 1993 piece by David Horowitz, describing how his friendship with the Panthers ended when they killed his friend Betty Van Patter; and the chapter in Horowitz and Peter Collier's Destructive Generation on the rise and fall of Huey Newton, which you can download here.

In this context, the Obama Justice Department's decision to dismiss a clear-cut, slam dunk, voter discrimination case against an outfit calling itself the New Black Panther Party calls to mind that saying about history repeating itself. As readers may recall, members of the NBPP were caught on videotape in military garb brandishing nightsticks outside a Philadelphia polling place on election day. Career civil rights attorneys at Justice filed the suit just before Obama took office, and were on the verge of obtaining a default judgment against the NBPP, which had failed to respond to the suit, when the political appointees inexplicably pulled the plug. Jennifer Rubin provides the gory details in a must-read article in the Weekly Standard.