WHY DID IT TAKE A BRITISH WRITER? – AT 12:01 P.M. ET:  We've said here before, and I see that many others are now making the same point, that often the most incisive commentary about America is written by friendly British writers.  One of the best is Toby Harnden of London's Telegraph.

We all watched the circus surrounding the execution of Troy Davis in Georgia last week.  Whether you favor or reject the death penalty, I would hope reasonable people would be repelled by the twisting of facts, the outright lies, and the blatant anti-Americanism surrounding "protests" in the case.  The usual suspects were involved, of course, including Jimmy Carter and Demond Tutu, and of course the European leftists were out in force with their "I am Troy Davis" sweatshirts.  They claimed that Davis was actually just a sweet innocent, a victim of American racism.  Harnden exposes the fraud:

We saw “I am Troy Davis” T-shirts being worn as far afield as London, the message being that Davis was somehow plucked randomly from the streets and arbitrarily condemned, perhaps because he was black.

Unfortunately, little about the Davis case fits this naïve picture. A jury of seven blacks and five whites found that Davis, who had a street name of “Rah”, standing for “Rough As Hell”, had been pistol-whipping a homeless man in a Burger King car park and had shot a police officer, Mark MacPhail, dead when he intervened.

Again and again, courts confirmed the Davis conviction as being on legally solid ground. Lynchings were carried out by racist mobs rushing to judgement, dragging their quarry out to string them up from a tree. To describe a two-decade legal process that twice went to the highest court in the land as a “lynching” is to try to strip the word of all meaning. 

And...

I wonder, too, whether all this just makes the agony of victims’ relatives more acute. The actor Alec Baldwin used the Davis case to attack the MacPhails, stating on Twitter: “Wonder if the McPhail [sic] family will seek death penalty for US leaders who killed thousands of US soldiers and countless innocent Iraqis."

Most Americans were unmoved by the slick publicity campaign surrounding the Davis case, preferring to rely on the sober assessments of the courts rather than the likes of Alec Baldwin, the European Union (who one might have thought would have had other things to worry about) and people campaigning via Twitter.

COMMENTARY:  Solid commentary from Toby Harnden.  Unfortunately, I didn't see anything quite as good on this side of the Atlantic. 

The leftists were trying to create another Mumia case.  You remember him, I'm sure.  He was the guy in Pennsylvania convicted of murdering a police officer, and who actually never denied his guilt.  He is still on death row after decades of appeals, and a major international campaign proclaiming him a victim of American racism. 

The leftist line never changes.  The leftists just pick new "victims" to exploit.  The only victims in the Mumia and Troy Jackson cases were the police officers who were murdered.

September 25, 2011