After I once criticized President Obama for appearing to abandon Israel by being rude to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, my mailbag quickly overflowed with anti-Semitic attacks. The writers proudly signed their names to the kind of vile slurs on Jews usually whispered in private.
The president bore some responsibility for that tide of sludge. Not that Obama was guilty of personal anti-Semitism, but his behavior was a whistle the anti-Semitic dogs heard loud and clear. Unintentionally, he gave them license to come out of hiding.
So it is with Mayor Bill de Blasio and the cop-haters. There is no way he wanted to see NYPD officers murdered, and his distress is surely genuine. But he is accountable nonetheless.
“Once a bullet leaves a gun, it has no friends,” the late Sen. Pat Moynihan once said. That is the nature of power, too. Those who have it must take extra care to be precise in their words and actions, lest they unleash the dogs of hell.
The mayor failed that test miserably. He can run from the consequences, but he can’t hide. His mayoralty is sunk unless he comes to grips with the fact that he lit the fuse that led to Saturday’s explosion.
For two years, starting with his 2013 campaign, he painted a target on the NYPD. Many of us warned repeatedly that he was playing with fire, but he saw his election as a blank check.
With Al Sharpton protecting his radical flank, the once-amiable back-bencher from Brooklyn has grown pompous with power. He fancies himself the leader of a national movement, and is comfortable lecturing the public and even the Democratic Party about its shortcomings. He has a habit of silencing critics by declaring, “I am right.”
Again and again, he depicted the great and gallant NYPD as an occupying army of racist brutes and foolishly boasted that he had warned his biracial son that the police were a danger to him. Just Friday, he met with demonstrators despite the fact that five cops had been assaulted in the so-called peaceful protests, and despite a video in which hundreds if not thousands of protesters are seen demanding “dead cops.”
As John Lindsay and David Dinkins learned, you cannot govern New York if you are hostile to the police. But even those mayors never experienced the shunning dished out to de Blasio Saturday night at the hospital.
The instant when scores of officers turned their backs on him was spontaneous, but reflected the hostility he spent two years creating. He earned their wrath.
As it stands, the bonds between City Hall and the Thin Blue Line are not merely strained. They are severed.
That is a threat to the entire fabric of the city. If it is open season on cops, nobody in New York is safe. Gun-toting maniacs like the one who assassinated Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu will not be stopped by reason or appeasement.
They are evil, and they feel emboldened by the demonizing of cops. Give them an inch, they will take a mile. They won’t stop until they are stopped.
That is the lesson of the last 20 years. The crime wave that swept the nation was stopped in New York under the leadership of Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg.
They didn’t do it with midnight basketball or compassionate-sounding social programs. Nor are New Yorkers inherently less violent and more honest than the people of Chicago or Detroit or Baltimore.
Gotham became the safest big city in American only through smart, aggressive policing that was demanded by two mayors who knew the difference between good and evil. Their relentless approach to arresting criminals and preventing crime was not without risks or mistakes. But their approach worked beyond imagination and amounted to a man-made miracle.
The lesson they left was that, as mayor, you are either with the police, or you are against them. No matter what you say about respecting them or how many tears you shed when you try to comfort grieving families, the choice is binary.
That fact is nowhere to be found in the progressive playbook, which sees everything through race and class. But it is how the real world works.
Yes or no? De Blasio said no to the police, and now he reaps the whirlwind.