UNDER SIEGE: Antifa Rioters Throw Cans, Shoot Fireworks at Cops in Battle for Columbus Statue

Chicago descended into a war zone on Friday night as a protest at the Christopher Columbus statue in Grant Park devolved into a violent riot, complete with assaults on police and an attempt to pull down the statue of the Genovese Catholic who connected the Old World and the New.

“Columbus was a murderer! Columbus was a thief!” rioters chanted, according to The Chicago Tribune. Hundreds of protesters took part in a Black Lives Matter rally that also championed Native Americans. At about 7 p.m., one of the protesters shouted that Chicago police had gone to protect the Columbus statue.

Black-clad rioters — who might be associated with antifa — rushed to the stone wall around the statue and began pelting nearby police with cans and fireworks. When some rioters attempted to scale the wall, police batted them away with their batons. One rioter shouted, “This is not the way!” as his fellows threw fireworks and other incendiary devices at police officers.

Police reinforcements arrived, and officers decided to use pepper spray to counter the rioters. Police reclaimed the statue, but the rioters remained close by. The rioters organized a bike chain to square off against police near the park.

The violent riot injured about 18 police officers, some of whom were hospitalized, police spokesman Thomas Ahern told The Chicago Tribune. The cops arrested about a dozen rioters, who face pending charges ranging from battery against a police officer to mob action. At least five civilians were hospitalized from the area, Chicago Fire Department spokesman Larry Langford reported.

While the statue remained standing after the incident, it and the surrounding wall had been defaced with anti-police graffiti.

The true story of Columbus

Leftists have demonized Columbus, blaming him for the evils that followed his historic connection between Europe and the Americas. While the “Columbian Exchange” that followed his historic voyages did involve the enslavement of native Americans and the introduction of Old World diseases that decimated native populations, the exchange also introduced long-term benefits to both the Americas and Eurasia. Some of the foods from Europe and Asia helped Native Americans stave off food scarcity and starvation, and Europeans introduced written languages, the compass, the navigational map, and new forms of crop rotation.

As for Columbus himself, he is far from the simple villain many leftists make him out to be.

As Aileen Riotto Sirey, founder of the National Organization of Italian Women, and Angelo Vivolo, president of the Columbus Heritage Coalition, noted in an article for the New York Post, slavery was already in America before Columbus landed. “So were cannibalism and human sacrifice, neither tolerated in the Old World,” they noted. The great pre-Columbian American empires sacrificed enemies captured in war and even their own children. Some ate the flesh of enemies to take their strength.

Columbus aimed to introduce the value system that eradicated human sacrifice in Europe — Christianity. In fact, according to sociologist Robert Woodberry, the missionary spread of Christianity has promoted democratic values across the world. In fact, the brand of Catholic Christianity Columbus aimed to spread to the New World also condemned the abuse of Native Americans.

Columbus aimed to extend Christianity to regions where it did not exist. “This conviction that God destined him to be an instrument for spreading the faith was far more potent than the desire to win glory, wealth, and worldly honors,” according to historian Samuel Eliot Morison.

Historian Carol Delaney also debunked claims that Columbus supported genocide. “Columbus strictly told the crew not to do things like maraud, or rape, and instead to treat the native people with respect,” she told the Knights of Columbus. “There are many examples in his writings where he gave instructions to this effect. Most of the time when injustices occurred, Columbus wasn’t even there. There were terrible diseases that got communicated to the natives, but he can’t be blamed for that.”

Interestingly, Columbus also adopted an indigenous child as his son.

Columbus was far from perfect, but he was also not the villain oft portrayed today. Many wrongly demonize him as the scapegoat for the evils of European colonialism and slavery in the Americas. This simple view must be rejected.

Chicago police were right to defend the statue of Columbus, and rioters who proclaimed themselves on the “right side of history” are profoundly wrong.

While Americans on both sides of the aisle have loudly denounced the horrific police killing of George Floyd, the riots that broke out across the country in his name have destroyed black lives, black livelihoods, and black monuments. At least 22 Americans have died in the riots, most of them black. America needs a return to law and order.

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Does Jihadis’ ‘Conception of Islam' Really Rely on a 'Flawed Reading of the Koran’?

Robert Spencer

Maybe it’s something in the water over at National Review. The magazine claims to be conservative, and to be dedicated to upholding the values of Western civilization. Sometimes it lives up to that. Often it is sensible. More often, however, it is weak, cowardly, and submissive to the left. And sometimes it is so far away from the truth and common sense that it takes one’s breath away. Back in 2011, the magazine featured hard-left Soros operative Matt Duss, a friend and associate of the likes of Linda Sarsour, hitting David Horowitz and me for committing the trumped-up leftist propaganda sin of “Islamophobia.”

This new piece, “Reclaiming the Path of Moderation in Islam,” is not nearly as appalling as the magazine’s publishing of Duss, which was tantamount to the Washington Post publishing me criticizing Sarsour. The new article is a fairly standard workout of the establishment Republican position that Islam is a religion of peace that has nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism, and NR is nothing if not weak Romneyite establishment Republican gruel. But it is still yet another example of the magazine’s loss of the plot.

The subtitle is “Fundamentalists are gaining momentum across the Muslim world, but their conception of Islam relies on a flawed reading of the Koran.” Ah yes, I do believe we have heard that before, about six million times: if only Islam were properly understood, you see, then it would be as cute and cuddly as a child’s teddy bear, but these “fundamentalists” (a word that arose from controversies within Protestant Christianity and is essentially meaningless in an Islamic context) get it all wrong.

The author, young Mathis Bitton, an NR intern, doesn’t explain why these “fundamentalists” all misunderstand Islam in essentially the same way, or how this “flawed reading of the Koran” captures the imagination of so many young Muslims across the world, such that the presumably true and peaceful version they supposedly learn at home and in mosques is powerless in the face of its appeal. One would think that if the true, peaceful Islam were as easy to access and understand as young Bitton suggests here, “deradicalization” programs wouldn’t prove to be such a singular failure everywhere they’re implemented, and jihad groups’ recruitment efforts among peaceful Muslims wouldn’t be so consistently successful.

Bitton tells us that according to “the leading scholar” Mohammad Hashim Kamali, “the Koran teaches believers that ‘religious diversity is divinely willed, which inspires, in turn, coexistence with, and tolerance of, others as a spiritual and not just an ethical imperative.’”

After Demonizing All Who Opposed Jihad Terror, Catholic Mag Wonders Why No One Speaks Out Against It
“Religious diversity is divinely willed” echoes the Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together that Pope Francis signed along with the Grand Sheikh of al-Azhar. That document says, “The pluralism and the diversity of religions, colour, sex, race and language are willed by God in His wisdom, through which He created human beings.” This is a Qur’anic idea (10:99), as Bitton also notes. But the Qur’an does not say that Muslims are to accept this state of affairs complacently. In fact, the Qur’an teaches exactly the opposite: “And whoever desires other than Islam as religion – never will it be accepted from him, and he, in the Hereafter, will be among the losers.” (3:85) And not only will Allah not accept any religion except Islam, but the believers must fight unbelievers “until religion is all for Allah” (Qur’an 8:39). More on that below.

Bitton also informs us that “beyond a set of metaphysical claims, Islam proposes a way of life, a culture, and a political project. It is also a religion of jihad, that is, of spiritual conquest.”

The eighth sura of the Qur’an is entitled “The Spoils of War” (Al-Anfal). What kind of “spoils of war” ensue from a “spiritual conquest”? In that chapter, we read this: “And know that anything you obtain of war booty – then indeed, for Allah is one fifth of it and for the Messenger and for near relatives and the orphans, the needy, and the traveler” (8:40). How does one turn over to Muhammad or the Islamic authorities a fifth of the war booty from a spiritual conquest?

But Bitton does go on to contradict himself, and to let slip that the Qur’an has more in mind than a “spiritual conquest”:

Time and again, the Koran invites believers to “fight [the enemies of Islam] until there is no persecution” (al-Baqarah 2:193), and to “fight in the way of God against those who fight against you” (al-Baqarah 2:190). But these endorsements of defensive warfare, of which terrorists make extensive use, all belong to a specific part of the Muslim corpus: the story of the Prophet Mohammed at war. In times of conflict, Islam does seem to endorse certain forms of violence that can, if interpreted along literalist lines, justify murderous actions committed against supposed enemies and perceived persecutors.

The Qur’an does enjoin defensive jihad, but it also mandates offensive jihad. Bitton doesn’t quote this: “And fight them until there is no fitnah and religion is all for Allah.” (8:39) Or this: “Fight them until there is no fitnah and worship is for Allah” (2:193). How can jihad warfare be purely defensive if it is not to end until religion is all for Allah, or as Islamic law has it, until non-Muslims have either converted to Islam or (in the case of the People of the Book) accepted the hegemony of Islamic law? If fighting can’t stop until religion is all for Allah, it can’t stop when the aggressor stops attacking.

Muhammad’s earliest biographer, an eighth-century Muslim named Ibn Ishaq, explains the progression of Qur’anic revelation about warfare. First, he explains, Allah allowed Muslims to wage defensive warfare. But that was not Allah’s last word on the circumstances in which Muslims should fight. Ibn Ishaq explains offensive jihad by invoking Qur’an 2:193: Muslims must fight until Allah alone is worshipped. Ibn Ishaq gives no hint that that command died with Muhammad.

Ibn Ishaq’s explanation of the progression of Qur’anic revelation is what leads jihadis — and mainstream Islamic theologians — to state that coexistence has been abrogated by the commands to wage defensive and offensive jihad. The great medieval scholar Ibn Qayyim (1292-1350) also outlines the stages of Muhammad’s prophetic career: “For thirteen years after the beginning of his Messengership, he called people to God through preaching, without fighting or Jizyah, and was commanded to restrain himself and to practice patience and forbearance. Then he was commanded to migrate, and later permission was given to fight. Then he was commanded to fight those who fought him, and to restrain himself from those who did not make war with him. Later he was commanded to fight the polytheists until God’s religion was fully established.”

National Review should not be so irresponsible as to publish this nonsense, which will only foster even more complacency among establishment Republicans regarding the jihad threat. Despite leftist rioting claiming all the headlines, that threat still exists.

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A Black Portland Cop Says Rioters Are Racist. Leftists Immediately Confirm It

A black police officer says there are racist white people stage-managing the riots in Portland, Oregon and “they’re not even from here.”

Officer Jackhary Jackson was featured in a video released by the Portland Police Bureau explaining what it’s like to be on the front lines after more than six weeks of rioting.

His observations are in line with what others are seeing in the riots since the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in late May.

Antifa and Black Lives Matter protesters are being imported to Seattle and Portland. Minnesota officials initially were convinced that rioters who burned down the Third Precinct and other buildings, causing hundreds of millions of dollars of damage, were from elsewhere, but the majority of arrested rioters were from the state. Some rioters who did travel to Minneapolis to riot, burn and loot were rolled up by the feds. The federal Department of Justice has begun to arrest and prosecute rioters who crossed state lines to commit riot, arson and other crimes.

It’s been obvious that the violent protests, allowed by a politically pliant Portland city hall, haven’t been about George Floyd for a very long time. The idea is to foment chaos and violence and to keep it going. The willingness of the elected officials to tolerate civil unrest, at the expense of other peoples’ security, is scandalous. The police officers’ union has accused the Leftist politicians in Oregon and specifically Portland of defending the violence.

Racist Rioters Get Support From City Hall

Officer Jackson finds it ironic that “if you’re at a Black Lives Matter protest you have more minorities on the police side than you do in a violent crowd.”

He says the rioters scream racist things at black officers and accuse him of “hurting my community” because he’s a cop.

And you have white people screaming at black officers ‘you have the biggest nose I’ve ever seen.’ You as a privileged white person telling someone as a person of color what to do with their life and you don’t even know what I’ve dealt with what these white officers that you’re screaming at. You don’t know them. You don’t know anything about them. I got to see folks that really want change like the rest of us that have been impacted by racism and then I got to see those people get faded out – by people who have no idea of what racism is all about. Never experienced racism.

It gets worse.

‘Frightening’ Rioters Who ‘Don’t Know History’

Officer Jackson said the rioters, most of whom are white, are “using are the same tactics that are used against my people. And they don’t even know the history. They don’t know what they’re saying. Coming from someone who graduated from PSU with a history degree, it’s actually frightening. You know they say if you don’t know your history you’ll repeat it and and watching people do that to other people.”

White protesters stage-manage the riots.

A lot of times someone of color – black, Hispanic, Asian, come to the fence and directly want to talk to me. ‘Hey, what do you think about George Floyd? What do you think about what happened about this? I go up to the fence, someone white comes up ‘F the police, don’t talk to him.’ That was the most bizarre thing because I could see it coming. I even had a young African American girl tell me ‘why is it you guys aren’t talking to us?’ Honestly, I think this was the 23rd day of doing it and every time I try to have a conversation with someone who looks like me someone white comes up – blocks them – and tells them not to talk to me. And right when I said that, this white girl pops up in front of us and said, ‘he said that was going to happen.’ And straight up, ‘I’ve been called the n-word. She’s been called the n-word, why are you talking to me this way? Why do you feel that she can’t speak for herself to me? Why is it that you feel you need to speak for her when we’re having a conversation?’

White Rioters Hit Black Cop With Racist Epithets and Rocks

Officer Jackson says in addition to being told his “you have the biggest nose I’ve ever seen” he’s been pelted with rocks, bottles of frozen water. He wonders why it was that a black-owned-business was the first one looted.

Then when you go to a gentrified community and one of the pictures I saw, one of the first places that was looted was a black-owned business, I mean, they, they’re not even from here. They don’t even know what they’re doing. They say they are peacefully protesting, but it’s not peaceful. It’s violent. My cousin attended one of the marches and he left. He said ‘this has turned into something else. This is weird.

You know what’s weirder? The way Leftists trolling the police Twitter timeline immediately confirmed that they are racist.

Several called Officer Jackson a “token”:  No good cops in a racist system PPB. Interviewing a Black cop is tokenizing. I’d rather see defunding and abolition to create a truly just and equitable form of community care.

Here’s another way to call Officer Jackson a token: Trot out the black man.  Great performance, a real well written publicity piece.

Someone immediately did a back ground check on the officer in an attempt to intimidate him by doxxing him. Recently, antifa’s hackers doxxed the entire Portland Police Bureau officer’s roster.

Oregon Politicos Defend Antifa and BLM Rioters

Politicians find it politically convenient to blame President Trump for riots that have been going on for weeks.

Portland’s mayor and U.S. Senator Ron Wyden have blamed President Trump for injuring an imported antifa protester from Texas who got hurt while attacking federal officers. The federal officers are ordered to protect the federal courthouse, which had been under attack for days.

Wyden called the rioter a “peaceful protester” and claimed that the officers deployed to protect the courthouse were President Trump’s “secret police.” Yes, Oregon politicians are that unhinged.

Wyden and Mayor Ted Wheeler, along with their fellow elected Leftists might want to heed Officer Jackson’s words before they line up behind racist antifa and Black Lives Matter protesters.

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How to cancel ‘cancel culture’

If we were to rework the famous lament by German pastor and theologian Martin Niemoller, it might go something like this:

“First, they came for the ­authors, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t an author.

“Then they came for the comedians, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a comedian.

“Then they came for the scientists, the economists, the academics, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t one of them.

“Then they came for the journalists, and I didn’t speak up because I was not a journalist.

“Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up.”

Each week brings more episodes of what, rightly or wrongly, we call “cancel culture”. This week, writer and editor Bari Weiss resigned from The New York Times citing the paper’s “illiberal environment”. Weiss wasn’t cancelled, but she is leaving because intolerance at the heart of cancel culture has settled into the NYT.

The New York Times hired Weiss after admitting that its one-eyed coverage of the 2016 presidential election failed readers. With another presidential election looming, Weiss fired off a powerful letter to NYT publisher AG Sulzberger lamenting that “intellectual curiosity” had become “a liability at The Times”.

“Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor,” she wrote in reference to the narrow range of views favoured by the newspaper, and the ousting of NYT opinion editor James Bennet for running an opinion column that upset the sensibilities of some NYT staff.

Diversity of opinion took another hit this week when influential writer, editor and author of The Conservative Soul, Andrew Sullivan, announced his resignation from New York magazine. Posting on Twitter, Sullivan said that it was “pretty self-evident” why he was leaving, and he would discuss the “broader questions involved” in his final column due out on Friday in the US.

We can throw our arms up in dismay, frustration, even outrage at the daily loss of intellectual ­diversity. But it will be much more productive if, for the sake of democracy, we stand up against the blatant intolerance of cancel culture that has been repackaged by social justice activists as “the reckoning”.

Our modern liberal democratic project is just that. It’s recent. And it’s not writ in stone that it will succeed. It is a wholly human project that needs more people to defend it than not against those trying to replace it with something less liberal and less democratic.

And the heavy lifting will come down to each of us because elites can’t be relied on. University leaders rarely defend intellectual freedom. Business leaders promote faux diversity that doesn’t include differing opinions. The Morrison government has an economic crisis on its hands. And we are paying for a human rights commissioner who remains a mystery to most Australians because he hasn’t uttered a peep about the dangers of rising intolerance towards freedom of expression. Keeping your head down is no way to defend our most fundamental human right.

The sad truth is that cancel culture has been happening in different ways for many decades. Salman Rushdie copped a fatwa from Islamist extremists for writing a book called Satanic Verses. And now fatwas of a different kind come from within the West, our own mob culture hunting down dissidents and wrecking careers over differences of opinion.

The rot set in when we attached legal consequences to offence. It was an invitation for people to take offence and then impose their own version of justice without heading to a court or a human rights commission. We have a marketplace of outrage that routinely dismantles a marketplace of ideas and social media platforms that provide the perfect breeding ground for more short-form outrage and mob rule, rather than nuance, thoughtful ­argument and debate.

While we might disagree on whether any particular episode is cancel culture or not, we can surely recognise a growing intolerance towards people expressing a ­diverse range of views. That intolerance delivers a triple whammy. First, it hinders our ability to sift the good ideas from the bad ones. Second, by shutting down robust debates, cancel culture will create unhinged, self-professed martyrs who thrive in online echo chambers, nurturing their hatred and bigotry far away from logical argument. And finally, the practitioners of cancel culture will stoke deep resentments that can easily be exploited by leaders who may not be defenders of a truly liberal democracy.

Earlier this week, long-time art curator Gary Garrels resigned from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art after a staff petition sought his removal for “his toxic white supremacist beliefs regarding race and equity” when curating art collections. At a recent meeting over Zoom, staff confronted him with an earlier comment he made following a presentation about new acquisitions by artists of colour. Garrels is reported to have said, “Don’t worry, we will definitely still continue to collect white artists.” During the meeting last week, Garrels, who is one of America’s most prominent curators, said that not collecting the work of white men would amount to “reverse discrimination”.

Museum staff sought and succeeded in getting rid of the curator. And next up is the banishment of art by white people. This is nothing short of cultural apartheid.

When mobs tear down statues, that is a form of cancel culture familiar to the Taliban. In a vibrant democracy we should have robust, passionate debates about these matters and then decide whether a statue remains, is removed or needs better explanation.

When staff at publishing house Hachette threatened to stop working on a new children’s book by JK Rowling last month, that is cancel culture too. To its credit, Hachette defended free speech as a cornerstone of publishing, saying: “We will never make our employees work on a book whose content they find upsetting for personal reasons, but we draw a distinction between that and refusing to work on a book ­because they disagree with an ­author’s views outside their writing, which runs contrary to our ­belief in free speech.”

Cancel culture is killing comedy. Comedian Ricky Gervais says his mockumentary series The ­Office couldn’t be made today. The BBC cancelled an episode of Fawlty Towers last month because it might offend some people. True, the broadcaster corrected the mistake after a public furore, but note that the default setting was to cancel a comedy because they didn’t think we could be trusted to watch something from a different era.

If comedy stops being confronting for fear of being cancelled by a new generation of self-­appointed cultural dietitians, we will lose more than our sense of humour. We will lose our ability to explore difficult subjects in myriad ways.

Over the last fortnight, the “Letter on Justice and Open Debate” published in Harper’s magazine and signed by 150 artists, authors, academics and other public intellectuals has attracted both kudos and criticism. Slamming it as “late, limp, and self-serving,” Gerard Baker in The Wall Street Journal pointed out that “only a handful of them spoke up when the mob was trying to cancel conservative thinkers”.

Sure, it’s a shame that some public intellectuals took so long to stand up for intellectual diversity. But, it’s also a case of better late than never. This is also how good ideas come to the fore when they are defended. Slowly, more and more people come to realise which ideas are better, why they matter, and why they need defending over and over again from bad ideas that have a habit of re-emerging.

Cancel culture is one of those really bad ideas. When illiberalism spreads, it’s only a matter of time before the cancellers come for you.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 
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