Tag: protests

A Brutal Suppression of Speech

Denial of civil liberties, accompanied by punishment for anybody who exposes those violations, has become commonplace in contemporary America.

Yet, nothing that the nation has experienced — and that the more discerning protest — prepared us for the grotesque spectacle on display in the brutal suppression of free speech on university campuses. 

What we witness is the iron fist of autocracy employed to intimidate, to hurt, to deter those who would question — however peaceably — the right of the powers-that-be to impose their confected version of the truth on the public. Moreover, it is grounded on an arbitrary assumption of power having no basis in law or customary practice.

Two singular features of this situation focus our attention. First, there is the stunning near unanimity of agreement by all segments of society’s elites on the rightness of the ruling narrative — and on the actions they take to enforce it. 

That is to say:

1) casting the issue as the dangerous radicalization of students by nefarious forces;

2) smearing demonstrators as “anti-Semites” — despite the large numbers of Jewish participants;

3) blanking out any reference to the cause and motivations of the protest: Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians; and

4) the need to crack down hard on these seditious students — physically by rioting police, and administratively by summary expulsions and suspensions without a semblance of due process.

These assertions emanate from the mouths of elected officials, police commissioners, media personalities, pundits and — most distressing — university presidents as well as boards of regents and trustees. 

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Mayor defends NYPD response after officers seen punching pro-Palestinian protesters

New York City Mayor Eric Adams defended the police department’s response to a pro-Palestinian street demonstration in Brooklyn over the weekend, calling video of officers repeatedly punching men lying prone on the ground an “isolated incident.”

“Look at that entire incident,” Adams said on the “Mornings on 1” program on the local cable news channel NY1. He complained that protesters who marched through Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge section on Saturday had blocked traffic, spit at officers and, in once instance, climbed on top of a moving city bus. “I take my hat off to the Police Department, how they handled an unruly group of people.”

“People want to take that one isolated incident that we’re investigating. They need to look at the totality of what happened in that bedroom community,” Adams added.

Footage shot by bystanders and independent journalists shows police officers intercepting a march in the street, shoving participants toward the sidewalk, and then grabbing some people in the crowd and dragging them down to the asphalt. Officers can be seen repeatedly punching at least three protesters, in separate incidents, as they lay pinned on the ground.

A video shot by videographer Peter Hambrecht and posted on X shows an officer in a white shirt punching a protester while holding his throat. Hambrecht said the arrests took place after police told the crowd to disperse.

“They were aware they might get arrested, but many times people use that to justify the beating which is obviously ridiculous,” Hambrecht told The Associated Press in a text message.

Independent journalist Katie Smith separately recorded video of an officer unleashing a volley of punches on a man pinned to the ground, hitting him at least five times with a closed fist.

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Newly Published Records Show FBI Officials Were Instructed To ‘Stand Down’ The Day Before Jan. 6 After Targeted Individuals From a Group They Had Infiltrated Decided Not to Come to DC

The Federal Bureau of Investigation continues to cover-up how the government entrapped Americans who demonstrated at the January 6 Save America rally.

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the FBI released a trove of internal documents on May 7 on “The Vault” section of its website titled “United States Capitol Violence and related Events of January 6, 2021 Part 35.”

Email correspondence among FBI officials in the days leading up to Jan. 6, real-time reactions to violence at the fedsurrection, and guidance of the bureau’s response to the Capitol riot are among the 107 pages of newly released documents.

But the most interesting aspect of the FOIA drop is the information the bureau concealed. The increasingly lawless agency, that continues to surveil and terrorize Americans who protested that day, heavily redacted nearly every page of the records, hiding all evidence potentially indicating malfeasance.

Despite a frustrating number of the pages being redacted,  some interesting tidbits remain among the scraps.

An email thread with the subject line, “Stand down. See Below” was sent at 5:46 pm the day before the massive crowd of demonstrators was bombed, gassed and shot by police at the Capitol.

“We are standing down in [REDACTED]. The predicated subjects have been [REDACTED]. [REDACTED] is being informed. The only people from the group who are continuing to DC are non-subjects, who are not carrying weapons, and appear to be solely involved in legal First Amendment protesting,” states one of the emails from the thread.

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Texas pardons US Army sergeant Daniel Perry who was convicted of murder for shooting AK-47 wielding BLM protester during 2020 riot

A Texas man convicted of shooting a Black Lives Matter protestor dead during the 2020 riots has received a pardon. 

Daniel Perry, a US Army Sergeant, was found guilty in April 2023 of murdering protestor Garrett Foster in Austin, and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. 

Texas Governor Greg Abbott requested the parole board looked into his case to discuss a possible pardon just days later, which led to a unanimous approval vote that was announced Thursday. 

In a statement after the vote was announced, Abbott cited Texas’ ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws, which allow people to use deadly force if they feel they are in imminent danger. 

‘Texas has one of the strongest ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive District Attorney,’ Abbott said.

‘I thank the Board for its thorough investigation, and I approve their pardon recommendation.’ 

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UCLA attackers exposed: meet the violent Zionist agitators LA police haven’t arrested

The Grayzone has obtained a dossier detailing the identities of the Zionist hooligans who assaulted UCLA anti-genocide student protesters. It was sent to LA police, but no arrests have been made. And the cops still can’t explain why they disappeared for hours during the mob attack.

On April 30, thirty people were injured when a mob of Zionist hooligans savagely assaulted the pro-Palestine UCLA encampment shortly before midnight. For over three hours, local and campus police stood down as the masked thugs assaulted students, journalists, and even officers of the law with fireworks volleys, pepper spray, and metal pipes. Though multiple attackers have been identified by community members on social media, to date there have been no arrests of pro-Israel goons.

The Grayzone has obtained a dossier composed by anonymous sleuths claiming involvement with the UCLA student protests which apparently identifies some of the attack’s perpetrators. The students emailed the document to the UCLA administration and police (UCPD), as well as Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. It contains detailed information about the identities of those who were filmed carrying out wanton violence.

Los Angeles-area police have arrested droves of students protesting Israel’s US-backed genocide in Gaza, accusing over 40 students and journalists of “conspiracy to commit burglary” for attempting a sit-in on school grounds. Yet local authorities have made a grand total of zero arrests in the coordinated Zionist mob assault against UCLA anti-genocide protesters on April 30. 

The LA Times has reported that local law enforcement is relying on sophisticated facial recognition technology to hunt down the attackers. But as the UCLA sleuths’ dossier makes clear, many assailants have already been identified by matching their identities with social media profiles.

The UCPD and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department did not respond to questions from The Grayzone about whether the persons identified in the dossier were under investigation, or had been taken into custody.

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START THE COURT MARTIAL PROCEEDINGS: DC National Guard Whistleblower Alleges Trump’s Commander-in-Chief Powers Were Revoked by Military Brass During January 6 Capitol Riot

In April the House Subcommittee on Oversight held a hearing with National Guard whistleblowers who stepped forward to correct the media lies and dishonest narrative by Democrats on the January 6 protests and riots.

Four members of the National Guard testified that they were ready to be deployed on January 6 but THE PENTAGON held them back!

This directly brings General Milley’s actions into question!

Kash Patel tipped us off last month that there were more reports like this coming.

National Guard whistleblowers: Command Sgt. Major Michael E. Brooks, Colonel Earl G. Matthews, Aaron Dean Retired, and Captain Timothy Nick stepped forward and testified before Congress to correct the record on January 6.

As The Gateway Pundit previously reported, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Washington DC Mayor Muriel Bowser were both warned about the security situation prior to January 6th, and both turned down National Guard troops at the US Capitol that day.

Pelosi and Mayor Muriel Bowser turned down thousands of National Guard troops at the Capitol on January 6 for political reasons.

Chris Wray’s FBI also refused to notify the Trump administration and his cabinet secretaries that they believed there could be violence like the mass protests at the Capitol that took place that day.

Nancy Pelosi also refused the National Guard at the US Capitol due to politics.

Capitol Police Chief Steve Sund said he asked House and Senate security officials for permission to request that the D.C. National Guard be placed on standby in case he needed quick backup. But they both turned him down.

John Solomon from Just The News released an explosive report in 2022 that revealed Capitol Police were first warned about possible violence at the January 6th protests TWO WEEKS before the planned rallies.

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New Columbia Wrinkle: Police Takedown Facilitated By Faculty Member Who Serves On NYPD Anti-Terror Squad…Conspiracists Cry Foul

The recent ousting of students and professional agitators from a Columbia University building was led in part by a Columbia adjunct professor who is also the civilian Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence and Counterterrorism for the NYPD.

The story is from The Grayzone, a media project headed by Max Blumenthal, Jewish blogger and former Clinton aide. That said, the article is written with a decidedly pro-Palestine bent. Author Wyatt Reed describes the Columbia uprising as a “protest model [that] has since spread to over 100 other universities in the US, and even been taken up abroad, with similar actions occurring at Leeds University in the UK and the Sorbonne in Paris”, as if it were organic, and not, in fact, funded by groups such as the Soros-backed U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR).

Still, Reed injects some salient points into the Columbia conversation. He correctly notes that, “During the NYPD’s triumphant May 1 post-raid press conference, Weiner blamed ‘outside agitators’ for triggering the military-style police crackdown at Columbia. However, she refused to name the outsiders supposedly on the scene.”

Next, Reed asserts that Weiner falsely used the terroristic past of an elderly Columbia encampment visitor–Nahla al-Arian, 63, as preface for police intevention:

“…a brief visit to Columbia by Nahla Al-Arian, who Weiner incorrectly described as ‘the wife of somebody who had been convicted for material support to terrorism.’

‘That’s not somebody who I would want necessarily influencing my child if I were a parent of somebody at Columbia,’ Weiner commented.

Nahla’s husband, Palestinian academic Sami Al-Arian, had been indicted on flimsy terrorism charges in 2003, but a jury refused to convict him. Nevertheless, her brief stop at the Columbia encampment — where she says she did not even interact with any demonstrators — was cited by Adams during three separate media engagements to justify the police repression.”

–Ibid., editorial emphasis.

Further, Reed points out, somewhat ominously, that Weiner is the granddaughter of one of the creators of the hydrogen bomb:

“Weiner is the granddaughter of Stanislaw Ulam, the Polish Jewish mathematician who helped conceive the hydrogen bomb as part of the Manhattan Project. “I’m very proud of that legacy,” Weiner said of her grandfather’s work upon being appointed as NYPD intelligence chief.“

–Ibid.

Reed stops short of calling Weiner a Mossad asset, but he sets the table elaborately, stopping just short of lighting the dinner candles:

“The NYPD’s Counterterrorism Bureau currently maintains an office in Tel Aviv, Israel, where it coordinates with Israel’s security apparatus and maintains a department liaison. Weiner appears to serve as a bridge between the Bureau’s offices in Israel and New York.

A 2011 AP investigation revealed that a so-called ‘Demographics Unit’ operated secretly within the NYPD’s Counterterrorism and Intelligence Bureau. This shadowy outfit spied on Muslims around the New York City area, and even on students at campuses outside the state who were involved in Palestine solidarity activism. The unit was developed in tandem with the CIA, which has refused to name the former Middle East station chief it posted in the senior ranks of the NYPD’s intelligence division. 

The ‘Demographics Unit’ appears to have been inspired by Israeli intelligence as well. As a former police official told the AP, the unit attempted to ‘map the city’s human terrain’ through a program ‘modeled in part on how Israeli authorities operate in the West Bank.‘”

–Ibid., editorial emphasis.

To sum up: Rebecca Weiner is, plainly, a liaison between the NYPD and Columbia University. The police division she works for was formed as a response to 9/11, and was done so with Israeli intelligence guidance, as would seem a natural fit for a country that has dealt with Middle East terrorism for decades.

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As Peace Protests Are Violently Suppressed, CNN Paints Them as Hate Rallies

As peace activists occupied common spaces on campuses across the country, some in corporate media very clearly took sides, portraying student protesters as violent, hateful and/or stupid. CNN offered some of the most striking of these characterizations.

Dana Bash (Inside Politics, 5/1/24) stared gravely into the camera and launched into a segment on “destruction, violence and hate on college campuses across the country.” Her voice dripping with hostility toward the protests, she reported:

Many of these protests started peacefully with legitimate questions about the war, but in many cases, they lost the plot. They’re calling for a ceasefire. Well, there was a ceasefire on October 6, the day before Hamas terrorists brutally murdered more than a thousand people inside Israel and took hundreds more as hostages. This hour, I’ll speak to an American Israeli family whose son is still held captive by Hamas since that horrifying day, that brought us to this moment. You don’t hear the pro-Palestinian protesters talking about that. We will.

By Bash’s logic, once a ceasefire is broken, no one can ever call for it to be reinstated—even as the death toll in Gaza nears 35,000. But her claim that there was a ceasefire until Hamas broke it on October 7 is little more than Israeli propaganda: Hundreds of Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces and settlers in the year preceding October 7 (FAIR.org, 7/6/23).

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The May 4th Deaths: Kent State 54 Years Ago

On May 4, 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen killed four college students and wounded nine others – one of them, Dean Kahler, is paralyzed below the waist – on the campus of Kent State University. Nobody was found guilty of the bloodletting.

On that awful day, Guardsmen fired M-1 rifles, .45 pistols and a shotgun for 13 seconds, killing Allison Krause and Jeffrey Miller, ROTC student William Schroeder and Sandra Scheuer who was on her way to class, while wounding nine others. Many Americans were outraged at the shootings but the vast majority were not, apparently believing that a nation at war was threatened by “radical” challenges on college campuses and elsewhere and that a government at war was perfectly justified in spying on its dissenting citizens and sending provocateurs to disrupt antiwar opponents. (On May 14-15, 1970, in Jackson, MS., Phillip Gibbs, a Jackson State junior, and James Green, a bystander and high school student, were killed by officers called to the scene following disturbances and student protests against the Vietnam war and continuing bias against blacks. A dozen students were also wounded by gunfire. Again, no one was ever convicted. (See, for example, Tim Spofford’s Lynch Street: The May 1970 Slayings at Jackson State College Kent State University Press).

Antiwar protests in Kent erupted following Richard Nixon’s TV speech announcing on April 30 that the US had invaded Cambodia, thus expanding a war he had once pledged to bring to an end. The following day Nixon denigrated antiwar students as “bums.”

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Campus Protests: The Kids May Not Be Alright, But They Are (Mostly) Right

I’m too young to remember the campus convulsions of the 1960s, but older friends who were there tell me that the growing campus protest movement against US support for Israel’s war in Palestine bears a striking resemblance to those days.

I happen to support that movement’s goals, at least to the extent of wanting to see the US government butt out of other people’s arguments.

I’m told by some “pro-Israel” friends that the student protesters are all “anti-semites” and “supporters of Hamas,” and that if I support them I must also hate a particular ethnic group and support terrorism as a tactic.

But I don’t hate any ethnic groups, nor do I support Hamas any more than I support the Israeli Defense Forces.

I don’t doubt that SOME of the student protesters fall into the “hater” category, simply because the protests are a convenient bandwagon for “haters” to ride on. The next large political event I attend that doesn’t have a least a few weirdos hanging around, trying to grab a little unearned credibility by association, will be the first.

I just want a government that claims it works for me to stop handing out weapons and cash to other governments. Especially, though not only, to crybully regimes that constantly play the victim while also occupying territory outside their borders for decades on end, imposing apartheid regimes on the inhabitants of those occupied territories, murdering anyone who resists (along with many who don’t), etc.

To the extent that the kids on campus are seeking the same thing, they’re doing God’s work and have my full support.

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