CLEVELAND – In what is becoming a depressingly regular occurrence in the Obama era, police officers were murdered by a black militant in a shootout in Baton Rouge on Sunday, apparently in revenge for the recent police-involved death of black career criminal Alton Sterling outside a Baton Rouge food store.

At time of writing, three police officers had succumbed to the injuries they suffered in Louisiana’s capital city. Another three were wounded.

Of course, murdering police officers has long been encouraged by activists with the Marxist, anti-American, revolutionary Black Lives Matter cult, with the support of the activist Left and financing from speculator George Soros. A year ago Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who openly advocates the mass murder of whites, called for “10,000 fearless men” to “rise up and kill those who kill us.” Like many radicals, Farrakhan mischaracterizes Black Lives Matter as a rising civil rights movement.

President Barack Hussein Obama, who a decade ago promoted inter-racial warfare in Kenya, has long tried to provoke civil unrest here in the U.S. with his hateful anti-cop rhetoric and his relentless demonization of opponents. His goal is fundamental transformation of the United States. A Red diaper baby who identifies violence-espousing communist Frantz Fanon as an intellectual influence, he has also steadfastly refused to condemn Black Lives Matter. In fact Obama has lavished attention on the movement’s leaders and invited them to the White House over and over again.

The Baton Rouge attack came 10 days after a black militant murdered five Dallas area police officers, the deadliest attack on U.S. law enforcement since Sept. 11, 2001.

A few days later Obama flew to Dallas and attended a memorial service at which he lectured the dead officers’ relatives about how racist and brutal police officers are. The very next day Obama hosted leaders of Black Lives Matter, whose members urge the murder of cops, at the White House.

The Baton Rouge attack came 12 days after local police killed homeless recidivist Sterling during an altercation. Sterling, who had reportedly threatened a passer-by with a gun, violently resisted arrest and tried to grab a policeman’s gun.

The shooter in Baton Rouge was killed by police following an exchange of gunfire outside a fitness center. He has been identified as Gavin Eugene Long, who claimed to have been a member of Nation of Islam. He also reportedly turned 29 yesterday.

Long was honorably discharged from the U.S. Marines in 2010. A fervent racist, he ranted against “crackers,” the Daily Caller reports.

Long, who also used the name Cosmo Ausar Setepenra, talked about the Dallas massacre and recent police shootings of black men in social media posts, according to Heavy. “Violence is not THE answer (its [sic] a answer), but at what point do you stand up so that your people dont [sic] become the Native Americans…EXTINCT?,” he tweeted July 13.

Referring to the death of Alton Sterling, he said, “If I would have been there with Alton – clap,” Long said in a July 14 video. In the video he also discussed black liberation theology and said he wrote a book.

“I wrote it for my dark-skinned brothers,” he said of the book.

“If you look at all the rebels like Black Panthers, Huey P. Newton, Malcolm X … Elijah Muhammad, they was light-skinned. But we know how hard y’all got it.”

In another video, Long justified his fellow ex-soldier and black militant Micah X. Johnson’s killing of cops in Dallas. “It’s justice, you know what I’m saying,” Long said.

Long may also have telegraphed his plans in a cryptic Twitter post early Sunday morning. He wrote, “Just [because] you wake up every morning doesn’t mean that you’re living. And just [because] you shed your physical body doesn’t mean that you’re dead.”

The officers Long killed are Brad Garafola, 45, Matthew Gerald, 41, and Montrell Jackson, 32.

Jackson, a black man, had poignantly sounded a note of despair in a Facebook post July 8, three days after Sterling’s death at the hands of police and as racial tensions ramped up in Baton Rouge and across the nation.

“I’m tired physically and emotionally. Disappointed in some family, friends, and officers for some reckless comments but hey what’s in your heart is in your heart. I still love you all because hate takes too much energy but I definitely won’t be looking at you the same. … I swear to God I love this city but I wonder if this city loves me. In uniform I get nasty hateful looks and out of uniform some consider me a threat. I’ve experienced so much in my short life and these last 3 days have tested me to the core. When people you know begin to question your integrity you realize they don’t really know you at all.”

President Obama commented on the killings but he seemed strange, playing against type. He sounded like a president who actually cared about his countrymen.

“These attacks are the work of cowards who speak for no one. They right no wrongs. They advance no causes. The officers in Baton Rouge; the officers in Dallas – they were our fellow Americans, part of our community, part of our country, with people who loved and needed them, and who need us now – all of us – to be at our best.”

Finally Obama sounded kind of presidential. But anyone who follows Obama knows it won’t last. He’ll undercut these remarks with cheap agitprop soon as he lectures Americans and especially cops on how racist they are.

Oh wait! He already did.

Breitbart reported yesterday that the Obama White House formally denied a petition with 141,444 signatures gathered in just 10 days to “formally recognize Black Lives Matter as a terrorist organization,” a designation this writer proposed in a recent FrontPage article.

The government doesn’t designate domestic terrorist organizations, was the official weaselly reply from those who process the petitions.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump wasted no time correctly blaming Obama for the climate of racial hatred and violence.

“We grieve for the officers killed in Baton Rouge today,” Trump wrote on Facebook. “How many more law enforcement and people have to die because of a lack of leadership in our country? We demand law and order.”

We can only hope President Obama will have the basic personal decency to stay away from memorial services for the slain Baton Rouge officers. They don’t need our Marxist president rubbing more of his cop-hating filth in their faces.

But no one has ever accused Obama of putting decency above politics.

Meanwhile, Obama’s ideological soulmates from Black Lives Matter showed up at a protest in Cleveland on Saturday near the Republican National Convention that officially convenes today.

Speakers included New Black Panther Party leader Malik Zulu Shabazz and Cornel West, a tenured militant black pseudo-intellectual. Shabazz called Trump “an uncouth racist,” adding Hillary Clinton “isn’t that much better.” Clinton will “just kill you nicely.”

At a Sunday event West called Trump a “neo-fascist catastrophe.”

Black militancy will play a huge role at the Democrats’ nominating convention that starts a week from today in Philadelphia. It will reportedly be headlined by the mothers of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown (respectively, Sybrina Fulton and Lezley McSpadden), two young black thugs killed by white men in self-defense.

This makes sense. After all, the Democratic National Committee has expressly endorsed Black Lives Matter.

This article by Matthew Vadum appeared July 18, 2016, at FrontPageMag.