When Missouri State Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson said in an early Tuesday morning press conference that 31 more people had been arrested overnight in Ferguson, he noted that not everyone arrested was from Ferguson. Some were from California and New York, and they were there deliberately to make trouble. Said Johnson: “Our officers came under heavy gunfire. This was not an act of protesters. This was an act of violent criminals.”
Johnson asserted that the arrests underscore that outsiders are the ones making trouble during the protests that ensued after the August 9 shooting of Michael Brown, 18, by a Ferguson police officer.
It happened at about 9:40 p.m. last night “when bottles were thrown from the middle and the edge of the crowd. These criminal acts came from a tiny minority of troublemakers,” explained Johnson. These acts were committed by those determined to extend and expand the riots and not by those peaceably protesting: “Protesters are peaceful and respectful. They don’t clash with police. They don’t throw Molotov cocktails.” He displayed two guns and a Molotov cocktail officers had seized from some of those arrested.
Johnson didn’t get much support from a politician from St. Louis who claimed that the rioters were just boys letting off steam and that little could be done about that. Said Anthony Bell, a ward committeeman from St. Louis, 10 miles southeast of Ferguson, the protesters are just “releasing frustrations. We’ve got to let them vent.” Besides, there is little Johnson could do to control them anyway, he said: “To get them to go home is going to be difficult. The young people who come into the world nowadays, they have minds of their own.”
One of those from out of town was Marc Lamont Hill, a contributor from CNN, who observed the violence being wrought in Ferguson by outsiders firsthand:
It was a peaceful rally. I was at the rally, at the church….
I was standing there talking to them. They said they were committed to having a peaceful march….
Two things seemed apparent to me: one was that [some] young people … moved beyond an area that [was restricted]: the command center. They attempted to enter that area … somebody did.
Second … there is a small group of people who are doing something different and out-of-step from everyone else. They’re out-of-towners. The ones [in that group that] I spoke to are actually from Oakland. I saw them last night past curfew. I saw them this morning. They are the ones who initiated violence.
Some of those “outsiders” are proud to call themselves “comrades” and “soldiers” who are engaged in a “battle” while denouncing the police as “pigs” and “assassins.” From the front page of the New Black Panther Party’s website comes the following collection of incendiary exclamations about the situation in Ferguson:
All comrades are alive and well … unnamed men in ski masks blasting on the crowds … believed to be pigs agitating … slander campaign … from the assassins of Michael Brown….
Pigs tear-gassed the St. Louis residents … Panthers in the middle … riot gear … and returned push with bottles thrown, bricks, and available self-defense options.
This is in line with the NBPP’s worldview that anyone white or Jewish or wearing a policeman’s uniform is the enemy to be vanquished in the battle to establish black rule. According to a report from the Anti-Defamation League:
Much of the NBPP’s ideology derives from the notion that African-Americans continue to suffer as a result of a racist white power structure that has oppressed them politically and economically since slavery. The primary perpetrators of this institutional racism, according to the NBPP, are whites, whom it views as ultimately responsible for Black exploitation; Jews, whom it sees as wielding disproportionate control of political and economic affairs; and law enforcement, which it sees as facilitating racial injustice on the ground.
The NBPP claims it is justified in its violence because violence was first visited upon blacks. Its Nationalist Manifesto states: “Even as they [the white race] exterminated the American Indians and the Australian Aborigines, so too, every plan, every scheme, points to their murderous intent to liquidate the African people.”
The intent of the National Black Panther Party was made clear when it descended upon Sanford, Florida, following the shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in 2012. At the time three party leaders held a group phone call to plot strategy to disrupt and disturb the tentative peace in Sanford:
We got to suit up and boot up … and get prepared for the war that we’re in…. This stuff got to boil over, and all your greats talked about that happened to be bloodshed involved with revolution — true revolution means some bloodshed, so there‘s blood being spilled because there’s a new life that is beyond this bloodshed.
Another unwelcome outsider sticking its nose in where it doesn’t belong is the United Nations. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called on authorities in Ferguson to abide by “international standards in dealing with demonstrators.” As Alex Newman noted elsewhere today in The New American, those “standards” are vastly different from what most people think, citing the ruthless communist regime that rules mainland China and Putin’s totalitarian government in Russia. As Newman explained: “Most of the UN’s member regimes are notorious for actual human rights abuses. The UN’s military forces, called ‘peacekeepers’ in a perfect example of Orwellian thinking, are marauding all over the world while engaged in heinous abuses — especially against Africans and their descendants.”
And then there are the “tourist looters” who have descended like locusts onto the hapless merchants of Ferguson. Writers from the Washington Post were shown a sheaf of more than 50 arrest reports by a local police officer, who explained: “It’s like looting tourism. It’s like they are spending their gas money to come down here and steal.”
There are the “Occupiers” as well, who have come to town to show the locals how to assemble homemade gas masks. And sensing another opportunity to insert the federal government where it has no business, the president is sending his enforcer-in-chief, Attorney General Eric Holder, to oversee personally the federal investigation into what happened that Saturday in Ferguson.
Members of the mainstream media have also seized the opportunity to advance the liberal line that local police cannot be trusted and have been indirectly advocating mayhem by publishing a continuing flow of lurid articles and photos designed to outrage uninformed citizens around the country about what is happening in Ferguson. Fox News Channel’s “MediaBuzz” host Howie Kurtz observed:
Some liberal outlets [are] creating almost a lynch mob mentality around this — [such as] the Huffington Post today, [with a] screaming banner headline, “Arrest Him.”
Now, [neither] the Huffington Post, nor you or I, knows exactly what happened [in Ferguson during the shooting]. When you cross that line into becoming an advocate … demanding that somebody be prosecuted before the facts are in, while the investigations are going on, you’re grandstanding, you’re trying to keep the story alive.
The good news is that the public isn’t buying the liberal view of what happened in Ferguson on Saturday afternoon, August 9. Rasmussen Polls reported today that only one in three readers think the media’s coverage of Ferguson is good or excellent, while one-quarter say the media has done a poor job in covering events there.
As long as the opportunity exists to promote their agendas, the various criminals, miscreants, and demagogues on the street, at the United Nations, in the White House, and in the New Black Panther Party will continue to wreak havoc on the innocents — black and white — caught in the political crossfire in Ferguson, Missouri.
UPDATE: Sources are now reporting that 78 people were arrested overnight on Monday, with just four of them being residents of Ferguson. 56 were from outside the city and 18 were from out of state.
Photo of a protest in Ferguson, Missouri: AP Images
A graduate of Cornell University and a former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at www.LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
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