'Mostly Peaceful Protests' - Daniel Greenfield

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by Daniel Greenfield

Peaceful protests don’t turn violent. Only violent protests do.

49 Chicago police officers were injured by rocks, pipes, and fireworks while trying to defend the statue of Christopher Columbus in Grant Park. Despite their valiant defense of the man who discovered America, Mayor Lori Lightfoot sided with the BLM mob and had the statue removed anyway.

3 law enforcement personnel with the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Protective Service may face permanent eye injuries after having lasers shined in their eyes by Black Lives Matter rioters.

12 police officers were injured in Seattle by attackers throwing rocks, bottles, and fireworks.
These are some of the injuries suffered by large forces in a matter of days. By early June, I had tracked the cases of over 400 injured law enforcement officers in under two weeks of BLM riots. A month later, there are too many cases and too little reporting to even begin assembling any kind of complete picture.

A week after I complied my list, over 350 NYPD officers had been listed as injured in the BLM riots. By the middle of June, 75 law enforcement officers had been injured in the Denver Black Lives Matter riots.

Rifles, explosives, lasers, power tools, and firebombs are routinely used at the mostly peaceful protests.

Law enforcement officers have come away from what the media continues to falsely describe as "mostly peaceful protests" with fractured skulls, eye and ear injuries, and broken bones. Officers have been hit with bricks, baseball bats, and broken bottles. They've been shot, stabbed, and run over by vehicles.

The full total is not in the hundreds: it’s in the thousands. That’s a war zone.

And that’s just the law enforcement officers. No count has been kept of the civilians assaulted by the rioters. No one has assembled a list of store owners beaten and robbed by Black Lives Matter rioters.

Rough estimates place the scale of damage in the billions of dollars. Walgreens alone suffered $75 million in looting damage. Minnesota estimated damage to 1,500 businesses totaling $500 million.

This is wildly inconsistent with the media’s repeated false claims that the Black Lives Matter riots have been “peaceful”, “mostly peaceful”, “largely peaceful” or any other weasel words and modifiers.

Protests that injure thousands of police officers and cause billions in damage are not mostly peaceful.

They are mostly violent.

Carnage on this scale is not an accident or the work of a handful of unrelated people, as the media continues to falsely insist. When riots wound thousands and cost billions, the violence is not the aberration, it defines what the protests are and what they are intended to accomplish.

When marchers at a peaceful protest bring along crowbars, fireworks, and baseball bats, it’s not a peaceful protest. A genuinely peaceful protest would not allow marchers to bring weapons.

"The violence and pain and hurt that's experienced on a daily basis by black folks at the hands of a repressive system should also be visited upon, to a degree, to those who think that they can just retreat to white affluence," is not what a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest organizer sounds like.

The calls for violence and the acts of violence that define Black Lives Matter are not peaceful.

If Black Lives Matter were a peaceful organization, it would not draw its inspiration from Assata Shakur, who is wanted for murder by the FBI, and was the first woman on the Most Wanted Terrorist List.

Nationwide riots by a group that draws its inspiration from a domestic terrorist are not peaceful.

The media has covered this up by making a mockery of cause and effect and offering ridiculous euphemisms for violence that explain how mostly peaceful protests have ravaged entire cities.

“Protesters in California set fire to a courthouse, damaged a police station and assaulted officers after a peaceful demonstration intensified,” ABC News offered. According to the media, when a peaceful demonstration “intensifies”, buildings start burning and police officers are assaulted.

But if violence is the result of a peaceful protest “intensifying” then it’s not a peaceful protest. Intensifying a thing brings out its true nature, rather than transforming it into something it’s not.

“Boston's Peaceful Protests Turn Violent at Night,” a Voice of America headline claims.

Are Black Lives Matter protests werewolves who turn violent when they see the full moon? Does the night have some magical power that turns formerly peaceful protests into violent assaults?

"What changes a protest from peaceful to violent? Aggressive law enforcement," CNN falsely claims.

If a protest is inherently peaceful, aggressive law enforcement won’t change that. Reopen protests by conservatives faced aggressive enforcement without resulting in rioting and looting. 

Some of the worst Black Lives Matter riots have taken place in progressive cities like Portland, Minneapolis, and Seattle, under the watch of lefty politicians and black police bosses. If aggressive policing led to violent riots, the worst rioting should be in the least progressive cities, while progressive cities should be experiencing the least violent protests. Instead it’s the other way around.

The violence of the riots correlates with the left-wing politics of the elected officials in charge.

Cities with the most left-of-center politicians are likely to experience the worst riots. It’s not aggressive law enforcement that causes violent riots, but the lack of decisive intervention against the rioters.

The media has tried to blame the police and the time of day for the riots, instead of the rioters.

A peaceful protest is not defined by the absence of violence, but by the presence of peaceful intent. The repeated false claims that the protests are peaceful completely distort the basic meaning of the word.

The media continually claims that every riot is really a peaceful protest that unexpectedly turned violent. But a peaceful protest wouldn’t turn violent. Only violent protests turn violent. A peaceful protest aims at peaceful change. A violent protest begins with hateful rhetoric and ends with violence.

A Neo-Nazi rally doesn’t turn violent. A Communist march doesn’t turn violent. Black Lives Matter was founded by self-described Marxists. The movement is interlaced with ties to the Nation of Islam. The rhetoric of its marches is violent, punctuated with obscenities, false claims of genocide, and racist taunts aimed at white people. These are not the components of a peaceful, but of a violent racist movement.

Black Lives Matter marches are mostly peaceful in the way that KKK marches were mostly peaceful.

Violent movements are not violent all the time. Not even the most violent fanatic is always violent.

The false claim of “mostly peaceful protests” rests on that strawman. But Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, and Jeffrey Dahmer were mostly not killing people. That didn’t make them mostly peaceful. A murderer can spend 99.0% of his time not killing people, only to be deemed evil for the 0.1% of the time during which he happens to be killing people. Mostly not killing people isn’t peaceful.

Rioting, burning, looting and throwing explosives only at night or on the weekend is not peaceful.

Racial nationalist groups, whether it’s the KKK or BLM, have a First Amendment right to protest. They have a right to threaten violence in the abstract, to brandish weapons, and to otherwise engage in posturing. But once that posturing turns into real violence, they don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt.

And they certainly don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt when their hate rallies repeatedly degenerate into violence in cities across the country leading to thousands of injuries and billions of dollars in losses. 

The only people who think otherwise are their political allies among Democrats and the media.

Their mostly peaceful protests have devastated cities and they mostly won’t stop lying about them.


Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/mostly-peaceful-protests-daniel-greenfield/

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