Race Riots in America

You've damaged your own race," said Mayor Michael Nutter to the black youths of Philadelphia whose flash mobs have been beating and robbing shoppers in the fashionable district of downtown.


"Take those God-darn hoodies down," the mayor went on in his blistering lecture. "Pull your pants up and buy a belt, 'cause no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt."


And the mayor had some advice for teenagers looking for work.


"You walk into somebody's office with your hair uncombed and a pick in the back and your shoes untied and your pants half down, tattoos up and down your arms and on your neck, and you wonder why somebody won't hire you?"


"They don't hire you 'cause you look like you're crazy."


Nutter is African-American and the first leader to speak out about the racial character of the flash mobs attacking people in one American city after another. And where are our other leaders?


At the Iowa State Fair last August, black thugs beat a white man so savagely he was hospitalized. Police only began to look into the possibility of a racial attack and hate crime after fair-goers said the thugs were calling it "Beat Whitey Night."


After Memorial Day, Chicago cops had to close a beach when a flash mob formed, attacked people and knocked cyclists off bikes.


In Miami Beach, there were beatings and shootings that same weekend. In D.C., flash mobs of black youths have turned up a half-dozen times in stores to loot clothes and merchandise and flee.


The media almost never identify the race of the thugs. Their reticence would disappear were a white mob in some Southern city to be caught beating up on black shoppers at a mall.


But the flash mob scourge hitting U.S. cities has been eclipsed by the pillaging and burning of London and other British cities in the worst violence visited on that nation and its capital since Goering's Luftwaffe executed the "Blitz.


In the past two years, Philadelphia has been tormented by several flash mobs composed of poor black teens who decide to meet at predetermined locations and then commit assorted acts of mayhem. The latest event, which took place in late July, saw 20 to 30 youths descend on Center City after dark to punch, beat and rob bystanders. One was hospitalized with a fractured skull after being kicked savagely in the head. Mayor Michael A. Nutter recently imposed a 9 p.m. weekend curfew on all minors in an attempt to curb the ongoing problem posed by these flash mobs. Nutter, who is African-American himself, then issued some tough talk to the black teens in his city, telling them that their actions had “damaged” the reputation of their own race.


It is human nature that creates prejudice, jealousy, envy, competition, strife, vanity, lust, greed, resentment and all the evils that always end up leading to violence. This means that race relations will continue to deteriorate as the economy worsens.


During the height of the American civil rights movement, the renowned educator Herbert W. Armstrong wrote from a unique perspective—not white or black, but based on the eternal truths of the Holy Bible. Mr. Armstrong taught the way to true peace and correctly identified the problems plaguing race relations. Yet, he also understood what the Bible prophesied for the near future. Basing his predictions on these prophecies, he wrote in the October 1963 Plain Truth: “Make no mistake! This is no light matter to pass over casually! Race war is coming! Racial tensions, passions and hatreds are being deliberately stirred by organized planning. It will explode into mass violence that will stagger the imagination! It will be whipped into an accelerating crescendo until human blood runs like rivers.