Language is a swinging door, especially English, where words come and go with abandon. “Blacklash” is one of those words. When the drama index is highest, euphemisms and neologisms abound. Domestic and international angst literally produces both kinetic and rhetorical battles. Short of civil or general war, rhetorical or ideological struggles are definitive. At the moment, two notorious wars of words come to mind; the American “Black Lives Matter” (aka BLM) complaint domestically and the quarrels at home and abroad about terror, violence, and Islamic culture.

While the goals may vary, these rhetorical conflicts have much in common.  Black America and Islam are united by grievance, the perception, in both cases, that the plaintiffs are victims; preyed upon or handicapped by race, religion, politics, oppression, bigotry, history, or all of the above.

Indeed, in both cases, general and sweeping indictments of “majority” cultures are used to justify a litany of social pathologies that run the spectrum from poverty, illiteracy, addiction, crime, on to terrorism. Violence is the mastic that joins both Islamist and black American cultures.

Ironically, in both African America and Muslim countries, most of the crime, terror, and related bloodletting is self-destructive; black on black crime at home and internecine Muslim mayhem in Arabia and the wider Ummah.

Black Lives Matter?

If the truth were told in America, black lives don’t matter to African Americans any more than Muslim lives matter to Islamists abroad. Perceptions of “oppression” by African Americans, as with Islamists, are self-inflicted wounds. Police violence is a statistical footnote in the gross context of pathological social mayhem,

If black men behaved better in America there would be no need for a disproportionate police presence, no need for confrontations in black communities. If Muslims behaved better globally, there would be no need for coalitions, “humanitarian” interventions, or air strikes anywhere. Violence begets violence.

Statistical evidence for social or behavioral deficits in black America is overwhelming. Pathologies include semi-literacy, crime, welfare dependencies, substance abuse, obesity, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, single parent homes, abuse of women, and abortion just to name some of the more obvious problems. America is host to the only obese underclass in the world.

In America, 325,000 black men and women have been killed by other blacks in the past 35 years. When Rudy Giuliani mentioned these grim statistics recently, he was excoriated as a racist. Black-on-black crime in America is routinely dismissed by entitlement shills as “structural racism.” See any version of the “knock out game” for a more accurate take on contemporary racism and its victims.

A black woman in America is five times as likely to have an abortion as a white woman. Seventeen million black babies have been aborted since 1973. Death by “choice” in black America is almost twice the death rate from all other causes.

The right to an abortion may be settled law, but the moral issue is still a bleeding ulcer. And if numbers matter, the enormity of genocide/population control orgy is another self-inflicted wound.

Killing minorities in the womb, or at birth, in the name of women’s rights is a little like endorsing ISIS and ethnic cleansing in the name of human rights. The body parts bazaar at Planned Parenthood is another symptom of mission creep at the temple of good intentions. Nobody wants to know how many black organs are pedaled by Planned Parenthood today.

Islamic America

There is at least one American exemplar where politics, religion, and social pathology intersect in significant ways. The Nation of Islam in America is a strange bird even in a global aviary of diverse Islamic militants, cults, and sects. NOI combines Black Nationalism with exclusionary Islamist theology.

Indeed, the Black Muslim movement argues for the resegregation of the races in much the same way that Shia and Sunni Islamists call for Islamic religious monoculture. Inclusion and tolerance is not the strong suite of the NOI or any of the larger Islamist movements.

The NOI arguably represents a cult-like extreme. Yet, as a general proposition, NOI complaints echo the special pleading and distortions that characterize race arguments in the United States.

Crime weary Americans fear or distrust an angry black minority for the same reason it fears barbarous Muslim terror and bombs. Behavior and bigotry are different things. When violent behavior validates a culture, the fault is not in bias -- or in anyone’s stars. All behaviors inform all beliefs.

Too many Mohammedans, now on a global scale, use terror, bombs, or worse to leverage real or imagined grievance. Nonetheless, Europeans and Americans take great pains to minimize atrocities committed in the name of God, a prophet, and “sacred” books.

The so-called “Islamophobia” phenomenon, like perceptions of racism, is a self-inflicted wound. Elevating a murderer to a martyr is not the path to moral equivalence or social justice. Brute force rationalized by dubious religious writ is theocratic fascism not religious freedom. 

Endemic terrorism, or crime, persists for two reasons, tolerance and success.  European and America targets are willing to excuse the ideology and culture that supports indiscriminate terror. In turn, Islamists have little reason to change their behavior. Similar imprudent indulgence insulates violent rap rhetoric, thug, or criminal behavior in Black America.

Blacklash is blowback

Five memes dominate street credibility in the US: Islam, hip-hop/rap, college/professional athletics, criminals, and ex-cons. One in three black male Americans is likely to have a prison record, a principal reason that explains the shortage of African-American cops. American prisons now double down as a primary recruiting venue for cults like the Nation of Islam.

Positive black role models, including Martin Luther King, are often marginalized in black America as “Uncle Toms” or “Aunt Jemimas.” Success stories like Ben Carson, Clarence Thomas, Janis E. Brown, Thomas Sowell, Allen West, Star Parker, or Walter Williams are seldom held up as role models for black children.

Instead, the media celebrates rappers, athletes, entitlement/reparation shills, and media mimbo/bimbos like “Whoopie” Goldberg, Jesse Jackson, Jerimiah Wright, Al Sharpton, and Donna Brazile.  

Black Americans felons too are often celebrated as yet another class of victims, not convicted punks. Fortunately, the victim narrative and the excuse litanies are, at last, showing signs of wear.

A new black narrative

The BLM movement, in particular, is starting to experience some blowback. Black intellectuals and some prominent black police chiefs have come forward to change the conversation, arguing that Black culture and behavior, not racism or police persecution, is at the heart of African American darkness.

Deenen Borelli, author of Blacklash, is one of those new voices. Borelli pulls no punches. She lays the blame for the new American “plantation,” black pathology and dependency, on failed government social policy and failed politicians like Barack Obama.

If Dee Borelli is polemical fire, Ben Carson is rhetorical ice. 

Indeed, Ben Carson has the potential to repair the damage done by Barack Obama. On Meet the Press recently, Carson answered a “gotcha” question about Muslims. He candidly expressed the opinion that a Muslim “shouldn’t” (not couldn’t) be President of the United States. Carson thus became the first candidate from either party to underline the incompatibility of American and Muslim values. Courage is its own reward.

It matters not whether Carson gets first or second chair in 2016, he has already changed the conversation on culture, victims, race, reparations -- and, I hope, foreign policy.  Ben Carson may be the diagnostician that provides a new prognosis for race relations -- a new cure where success and civility eradicates the social melanomas of black dependency and white resentment. Political candor and healing, call it a “blacklash” of civility and common sense, seems to be just what the doctor ordered for America.

GMD writes about the politics of national security.