Maurice Clemmons had many enablers — starting in Arkansas with clemency-crazy Mike Huckabee and stretching to Washington state where he was surrounded by people who witnessed his threats against law enforcement and did nothing to stop the Lakewood PD massacre. This week, police charged four family and friends with aiding him and plan to indict two more. My column today steps back and looks at the past year of violence against police officers and the cultural war that has been waged against them for the past several decades. The Left has a popular mantra: “Stop the hate.” Why don’t they start applying it to the men and women who protect and serve?

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The war on cops
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2009

Faces of the fallen: Sgt. Mark Renninger, 39; Officers Ronald Owens, 37; Tina Griswold, 40; Gregory Richards, 42.

The Left’s police-hating chickens are coming home to roost. While partisan liberals have gone out of their way to blame conservative media and the Tea Party movement for creating a “climate of hate,” they are silent on the cultural and literal war on cops that has raged for decades – and escalated tragically this year.

The total number of law enforcement officers shot and killed this year is up 19 percent over last year, according to the Christian Science Monitor. More officers have died in ambush incidents this year than any other since 2000. The Lakewood, Washington massacre on Thanksgiving weekend claimed the lives of four dedicated officers getting ready for work at a coffee shop Sunday morning. Maurice Clemmons – the violent career thug who received clemency from former Arkansas GOP governor Mike Huckabee and benefited from fatal systemic lapses in the criminal justice system – had many other enablers.

Clemmons had told numerous friends and family members to “watch the TV” before the massacre because he was going to “kill a bunch of cops.” The witnesses did worse than nothing. Several have been arrested for actively aiding and abetting Clemmons – with shelter, food, money, and medical aid — before he was discovered in Seattle early Tuesday morning and shot after threatening a patrol officer investigating Clemmons’ stolen vehicle.

A militant online group called the National Black Foot Soldier Network celebrated Clemmons as a “Crowned BOW (Black on White) Martyr” and dubbed the Lakewood ambush a “preemptive strike on terrorists.” It wasn’t the only chilling propaganda cheering black-on-white police murders in the Pacific Northwest this year.

Just three weeks before the Lakewood, Wa., massacre, the region endured another police attack. Suspect Christopher Monfort was arrested last month in the targeted shooting death of Seattle Police Department Officer Timothy Brenton and the wounding of his partner Britt Sweeney. Monfort had written diatribes against law enforcement harping against white policemen.

The leader of a Seattle hip-hop/punk band commemorated the assassination with a t-shirt depicting Monfort’s face splattered with blood and overlaid with a Seattle Police Department badge under the slogan “Deliver Us From Evil.” The other side of the shirt read “most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamp.”

From where does the deadened and deadly callousness toward the thin blue line come?

How about years of cop-bashing rap from NWA’s “F**k tha Police” and Ice-T’s “Cop Killa” to Dead Prez’s “Police State” (“I throw Molotov cocktails at the precinct”) and The Game’s “911 is a Joke” (I ought to shoot fifty one officers for the fifty one times that boy was shot in New York”)?

Try the glamorization of poisonous anti-police domestic terrorist groups like the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers. Add in the mainstreaming of anti-police demagogues Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton (whose ex-wife and daughter were arrested last week after verbally abusing a Harlem cop and resisting arrest after running a red light). And toss in the global glorification of Death Row cop-killers Stanley “Tookie” Williams and Mumia abu Jamal by the Hollywood elite.

It is, in my mind, no coincidence that another of 2009’s bloodiest multiple-police shootings took place in Oakland – a hotbed of black nationalism/Free Mumia radicalism that gave us the likes of Angela Davis, Huey Newton, and Obama green jobs czar-turned-liberal think tank fellow Van Jones (whose “creative” activism and “energy” in the Bay Area won senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett’s heart). Four Oakland officers went down and one was injured when a convicted felon ambushed them during a routine traffic stop. Nearly 20,000 law enforcement officers and supporters from around the country filled a memorial event for the fallen.

President Obama — Chicago pal of police-targeting Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers and the convener of the national beer summit to indulge his race-baiting, police-bashing Harvard professor friend Henry Louis Gates — did not attend the service.