A week ago, New York City police officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were murdered in an act of premeditated assassination by a man who was patently inspired by — indeed, was a documented participant in — a radical movement that has brazenly called for cops to be murdered.
To be sure, not every radical in the movement is down for the cop killing, no more than every Islamist thinks jihadist terror is the best route to imposing sharia. But cop killing is undeniably an aim of a not insignificant part of the movement’s hard core, and a good many more members applaud it even if they would not carry it out themselves. Cop killing is thus a foreseeable, if not inexorable, consequence of tolerating the movement as a well-intentioned display of our commitment to free speech.
