Jennifer Rubin has a great story over at Pajamas Media about the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and the real reason why the New Black Panther story might have been dismissed. As she says, “The notion that civil rights laws apply to all citizens, and are not on the books merely to protect minority groups or to pursue white racists, is an anathema to the liberal civil rights establishment and their sympathetic partners in the Justice Department.”

You can see this attitude at work in a story that Drudge is linking to about an attack on a student on a school bus in Belleville, Mo. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch quotes a police spokesman as saying, “The beating could be racially motivated.” There is also a video that shows this vicious attack on a white high-school kid by black students with other students cheering the beating. If the races were reversed, there is no doubt that the Civil Rights Division under Acting Assistant Attorney General Loretta King would already have issued a press release about its intent to probe the beating and pursue a possible hate-crimes prosecution under 18 U.S.C. §245. The sentence upon conviction that the Division would be requesting would involve multiple years of punishment. However, the “new, invigorated” Civil Rights Division under Eric Holder is deafeningly silent today over this apparently racially-motivated crime. That comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with the liberal ideologues who inhabit the Division. The only way they will investigate this case is if they are embarrassed into it by outside attention in the media.