If Lady Justice isn’t dead in America, she certainly in the least has dementia. Many may conclude this after yet another apparent inversion-of-justice case in which a victim is allegedly being punished while his victimizer goes free.
As ARL Now reports today:
The owner of the Arlington [Virginia] Smoke Shop in Green Valley says charges have been dropped against the alleged burglar shot by a store employee.
Jowan Zuber said this week on a GoFundMe page for the employee, Hamzeh Abushariah, that the “mastermind of the burglary” was “allowed to walk free” by prosecutors — while Abushariah remains under house arrest, facing serious charges in connection to the March 29 shooting.
Two other alleged burglars are still facing charges, after police say they broke into the store at 2428 Shirlington Road early in the morning and attempted to steal items. Abushariah was sleeping in a backroom of the store at the time, but woke up and grabbed the store’s gun. Zuber says the person who was shot is being “protected” by prosecutors.
“I can’t believe they’re protecting the criminal,” he said last night on Tucker Carlson Tonight , his second appearance on the top-rated Fox News opinion show. “I’m sure if the criminal broke into their house they would be doing 10 years in jail right now.”
The Daily Caller provides some more background on the case, writing:
Zuber claims that his employee awoke to loud noises and he encountered the three masked suspects in the dark store.
“Hamzeh was so afraid for his life,” Zuber told WMAL radio host Vince Coglianese.
He fired shots with the store’s gun and closed the door to call the police, Zuber said.
… Arlington Police said one of the suspects was struck and suffered serious but non-life-threatening injuries.
In an April court hearing, the prosecutors showed the judge a video … capturing Abushariah “shooting one of the burglars ‘point-blank in the back,’” according to WJLA.
Zuber told the Caller that … the video … “clearly showed that the [burglary suspect] lunged toward Hamzeh when he opened the door. Just imagine you waking up at 4:50 a.m. You open your door and a six foot man wearing all black and a mask lunges in front of you. What would you do?”
Unsurprisingly, Commonwealth’s Attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti declined comment, telling ARL Now that “we are very limited in what we can say about cases.” But Zuber isn’t limited, and he told WMAL Monday that he just “can’t believe Joshua Katcher, the prosecutor, was defending the criminal and was acting like his lawyer.”
And perhaps putting the case in perspective is what Zuber said a police officer who responded to the burglary told Abushariah. “Why didn’t you run out the back door?” Zuber reports the cop as asking.
There’s the rub: At issue here is a conception of “proportionate force” greatly at odds with the American norm, but one commonly embraced by leftist jurisdictions. While more conservative states such as Missouri have enacted “Stand Your Ground” laws, liberals expect would-be victims to run away like a mouse — or be squashed like a bug.
Of course, this ensures that the criminals, emboldened and fearing no immediate consequences, will victimize more innocents in the future, perhaps claiming lives in the process.
Yet this story is becoming all too common. Recently there was the case of the McCloskeys, a St. Louis couple target by an ideologically driven prosecutor, apparently for political and racial reasons, after they wielded weapons while defending their home from a menacing Black Lives Matter mob.
Then there was the shocking story of a Virginia mother and young child who, being attacked by “protesting” miscreants, were told by a dispatcher there was nothing the police could do and that they should complain to city hall.
It’s no surprise that the latter incident and that of Abushariah both occurred in Virginia, a state in which leftist Democrats seized complete control just last November. This serves as a warning, too: This inversion of justice will spread as long as leftism does.
“Justice inversion” is just a part of our “moral inversion,” which is a function of the moral decay sweeping the West. This is stating the obvious, really, since “justice” is actually a virtue, meaning, one element in the set of objectively good moral habits.
Losing touch with morality will involve losing sight of justice, and this defect is plain in the above cases. No one with a sound sense of justice would subordinate victims to victimizers.
This didn’t come out of nowhere, however. As The New American pointed out today, leftists now — 1984-style — are even claiming that 2+2 can equal 5. I mention this because I’ve been warning for decades that relativism, the attack on objective reality, is our age’s characteristic philosophical/cultural disorder. With it infecting minds everywhere (only six percent of teens surveyed in 2002 believed in “morality,” objective by definition), it’s no shock that it’s bleeding into everything — even mathematics.
It’s also no shock that people who’d entertain mathematical mayhem wouldn’t be able to tell victim from victimizer. When you allow the moral anarchy called relativism to reign in minds and hearts, societal anarchy will eventually result. This will be followed by tyranny as the powerful start to control others with a standard completely relative — to themselves.
Image: screenshot from YouTube video
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.
