The Great Smoky Mountain Journal

OUR VIEW

Posted: Tuesday, January 01, 2019 02:36 PM

OUR VIEW: As Cowards In Broward Play Politics The Solution To Nation's Violent Attacks On Schools Is In Middle

17 innocent souls lost their lives back on February 14 thanks to a deranged psychopath known as Nikolas Cruz at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Fourteen of those 17 were freshmen students who were average age 14 or younger.

The Great Smoky Mountain Journal spoke last night to one of the teachers there, Joanne Wallace, who has been at the high school for two years now. She attended several viewings and funerals the past few days and said the community there in Parkland, while strong, is still hurting over these tragic events. (I encourage you to listen to our interview with Joanne!)

One of the things I took away from our interview with Joanne is there is a great need for we as a nation to look inside and instead of arguing over guns, and instead of demonizing the National Rifle Association, we need to look at the real core issue in all tragedies, not just the one in Parkland. That is how our leaders, at all levels of government, deal with a crisis

In addition to our current debate over how to avoid another tragedy like this—a debate that needs to move beyond mere political posturing—we need to look seriously at how our leaders deal with a crisis.

This is a fundamental issue for our country.

America seems to have forgotten the essence of leadership.

This concern has been especially raised by the cowardice and performance—or failure thereof—of the Broward County Sheriff’s Office in the shooting and its aftermath. The cowards from Broward shamed themselves while letting children get gunned down by a maniac who should not have been within a 1000 yards of the school to begin with. More on that in a moment.

The main deputy in question here, is one who, in his role of the school resource officer, did not engage the shooter, but stayed outside the school building along with three other Broward County officers. To me, that is a reflection on training and leadership of which Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel has showed little if any of. Even he declared that the deputy had failed to do his job even though the deputy's lawyer went on television this week already declaring his "client" was not a "coward."

When you have to hire a lawyer to tell the world that, you're a coward. Your actions should speak louder than your words.

The leadership lesson to be learned is in the behavior of Israel. The law enforcement community is not the same as the military, but the two are as close a set of “cousins” as one can find. Their ethos of service, their ideal of protecting the public, and their determination to leave no one behind all mirrors the military. Police officers have a right to expect their leadership to operate on a similar plane with the military’s ideal of leadership.

Sadly, Israel has done anything but that.

He immediately threw his deputy under the bus as he piled blame on him in follow up television interviews. He then went on a rant in a town hall against Dana Loesch, spokesperson for the National Rifle Association a few days later. More on that too.

He has basically tried to absolve himself of all responsibility, saying he has provided “amazing leadership” to his department, according to his own statements.

If what Israel did was "amazing leadership" in this tragedy then I'd hate to see bad leadership in Broward County.

Israel's actions were anything BUT amazing; they were disgusting and selfish. However, when one realizes Israel's ties to former Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and other radical groups with ties to terror, the disgust turns into a feeling that we would expect nothing less from.

This crisis of leadership is emblematic of leadership failures across our society.

Real leaders take responsibility for everything their people do, and fail to do. Israel said he gave the school resource officer a weapon and training, but that he is not responsible for the officer’s lack of heart to take action.

Seriously, sheriff? Training the spirit to protect is not part of a leader’s job? So you have no responsibility for the performance of your people?

That is a cowardly supposition, and an inaccurate one. If your deputies failed to go to the sound of gunfire to save those children, it is on you. If he was too incompetent to recognize the shooter was still firing inside the building, it is on you, sheriff. Leaders take responsibility.

Servant leaders work to empower their people in order to accomplish the mission. Beyond that, they give their troops the credit in success. But most importantly, if they fail, the true leader stands up and says, “It’s on me.”
 

In addition to his failure as a leader, Israel's politicization of this tragedy was even more reprehensible and disturbing.

During a town hall meeting days after the tragedy, CNN put on an atrocious spectacle  hosting a production that was, as Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and the Chicago Tribune’s John Kass both remarked, a re-enactment of the Two Minutes’ Hate scene in George Orwell’s classic novel 1984.

It was a remarkable example of shameless exploitation and ideological hate-mongering put on by the failing news network directed at the National Rifle Association.

Among the worst actors this disgraceful play was Israel, who was exposed during the meeting as a  partisan Democrat political hack masquerading as the sheriff in Broward County where the Parkland massacre took place.

Israel engaged in a ridiculous back-and-forth with National Rifle Association spokeswoman (and stand-in for Emmanuel Goldstein) Dana Loesch, in which Israel offered one of the stupidest and most demagogic statements in recent memory, notable mostly for its having captured the zeitgeist of the gun-grabbing Left in the aftermath of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School carnage.

“You just told this group of people that you’re standing up for them,” Israel scolded Loesch. “You are not standing up for them until you say, ‘I want less weapons.’”

Loesch was attempting to explain that the NRA is for improving the federal system of background checks which failed to identify Parkland killer Nikolas Cruz as a dangerous psychopath when Cruz attempted to spend a chunk of the life insurance payout from his adopted mother’s death on a personal firearms arsenal, and that a better-functioning government implementing the laws already on the books, which the NRA has long argued for, would do more to stop the next Parkland from happening than any leftist gun-control fantasy.

For her statements she was hooted at and called a murderer by the unhinged children in the audience.

Israel may have had his big moment playing to the crowd on CNN, but his stature in the eyes of most in this nation has sunk to the level of where it should be - that of a gutless, spineless, partisan, moronic coward. Did I leave anything out?

What the public didn’t know at the time of Israel’s speechifying was that on the day of the shooting, a Broward deputy sheriff was stationed at the school.

When the shooting began, Israel’s armed deputy hid outside in safety and remained there.

But if the good sheriff — a political cat — had explained that business about his frightened deputy, he’d have ruined the show. So he kept his mouth shut.

That wasn’t the half of it. By the weekend it came out that Scot Peterson, the school resource officer who neglected to engage the shooter as he was duty-bound to do, wasn’t alone…

Not one, but four sheriff’s deputies hid behind cars during the shooting, police claimed Friday.

In addition newly released records revealed the Broward County Sheriff’s Office had received at least 36 calls about the troubled teen over the past few months alone.

Sources from Coral Springs, Fla., Police Department tell CNN that when its officers arrived on the scene Wednesday, they were shocked to find three Broward County Sheriff’s deputies behind their cars with weapons drawn. Peterson resigned a week ago today once it became national news that he failed to run to the sound of the guns. He should have been fired on the spot.

Yet Israel, who unquestionably knew his people had abjectly failed to protect the young people of Broward County, has spent the two weeks since the shooting pushing a political narrative that is irrelevant — demonstrably irrelevant — to solving the problem of school shootings.

How many times was Israel’s department called to deal with the domestic incidents Nikolas Cruz precipitated at his house? There had been 23 calls to his department involving Cruz, 18 of which directly involved his behavior. What had Israel done within his current powers as a law enforcement officer to prevent that tragedy? Nothing. There are reports that there were as many 36 calls in past 90 days regarding Cruz that the Broward County Sheriff's office ignored. The Federal Bureau of Investigation failed as well.

It's Scott Israel's failures that resulted in 17 murders at the hands of a madman that was known to the authorities, not the NRA!

It’s even worse than you know. A viral indictment of Israel making its way around the internet connects this manifest failure to a collaborative plan between the school district and sheriff’s department not to investigate crimes committed by schoolchildren in Broward. If that indictment is true, Cruz’s massacre was a lot more foreseeable than we realize.

Sunday morning CNN’s Jake Tapper bolted from his network’s promotion of Israel to utterly dismantle the sheriff in an interview after he boasted of “amazing leadership” in Broward County, in an example of actual journalism rarely practiced there.

The lesson of Parkland is that government doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because it’s too often run by political hacks, usually of a leftist variety, incapable of doing a proper job.

The solutions to these shootings will never be found in the discourse and knowledge of such individuals on the extreme fringe whether they be right OR left!

To me the issue is about protecting our most precious treasure - the children. We can do this without shredding the civil liberties of law-abiding citizens in this nation. We can also do this without using and exploiting emotional and traumatized teens to demand gun laws be changed when in fact none of that would have prevented this senseless shooting.

What would have prevented it was Nikolas Cruz being locked up three months ago when the Broward County Sheriff's office was notified he was a danger to himself and to the community.

We do need to change something. We need to change leadership at the FBI and Broward County Sheriff's Office. That would be a start.

Christopher McDonald, Publisher, Editor in Charge

Great Smoky Mountain Journal