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The Radical Protesters Who Plan to ‘Shut Down the DNC for Gaza’

Palestinian Americans and folks who sympathize with the plight of Gazans see the DNC as their Selma. These guys are ready to generate viral social media footage of their membership being removed (by the Chicago Cops) from the streets immediately surrounding the United Center... in their minds just like MLK.


The Dems and mainstream media may try to downplay the hijinx but they will be overwhelmed with social media footage. Does anyone remember a single speech given at the 1968 convention? Nope. Will Kamala or any other Dem party member's message get transmitted over the noise outside?


I wouldn't count on it.


The Radical Protesters Who Plan to ‘Shut Down the DNC for Gaza’

Their story begins in Atlanta, with the antipolice protests of 2020.

By Jillian Kay Melchior, WSJ

Aug. 16, 2024 1:25 pm


An anti-Israel protest in New York’s Times Square, July 31. Photo: Milo Hess/Zuma Press

The specter of 1968 haunts this year’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Protests turned into riots outside the DNC there 56 years ago, and footage calls to mind this year’s anti-Israel mobs. Democrats may hope that Kamala Harris’s ascension and her shunning of Gov. Josh Shapiro will appease the far left. But radical protesters scorn the Democratic Party and still want to create chaos in Chicago.


“Whether it’s Genocide Joe, or Killer Kamala, the butchers of Gaza cannot be allowed to gather in Chicago undisturbed,” the self-described anti-imperialist organization Behind Enemy Lines proclaimed in an Instagram post last month. It called for protesters to “make it great like ’68” and to “shut down the DNC for Gaza!” The group is coordinating with Palestine Action US, which encourages vandalism and other unlawful acts, and Samidoun, the “Palestinian prisoner solidarity network,” which cheered Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre.


Those are the usual suspects. Another factor is driving the protests toward escalation. The anti-Israel crowd has united with radical environmentalists and antipolice activists who have spent years honing unlawful tactics, which include setting up encampments, vandalizing property, brawling with the cops and “de-arresting” their comrades—physically intervening to prevent an arrest, including by pulling someone away from the police. They spent the last school year sharing their peculiar expertise with college students, and they’ve been core participants in this summer’s protests in New York City and elsewhere.


Their story begins in Atlanta, with the antipolice protests of 2020. Weeks after George Floyd’s murder, police there responded to a call about a man who had fallen asleep in a Wendy’s drive-through. Rayshard Brooks, 27, failed a sobriety test, resisted arrest, punched an officer, grabbed another officer’s taser and fired it. Police shot and killed him. Rioters burned down the Wendy’s, attacked the state police headquarters, occupied the Wendy’s property, and declared it an “autonomous zone,” where an 8-year-old girl died in a shooting before the encampment was broken up.


Less than a year later, Atlanta announced the development of a police training facility on forestland in DeKalb County. Some of the previous summer’s protesters dubbed the facility “Cop City” and vowed to stop it. Like many militant leftist movements, Stop Cop City, as supporters call it, is decentralized and non-hierarchical. “A wide array of folks” are involved, but they share an overarching “anticolonial” and “anticapitalist framework,” says Kamau Franklin, executive director of the Atlanta-based nonprofit Community Movement Builders.


He adds that the forest site makes the facility “a place where both environmental concerns and overpolicing concern matched up.” Stop Cop City activists occupied the woodland around the planned facility, and law enforcement says the forest has been booby-trapped. The radical website CrimethInc described notices warning “that trees in the area have been ‘spiked,’ with the consequence that cutting them could damage saws and possibly injure those utilizing them.”


Like many of the movement’s supporters, Mr. Franklin won’t condemn unlawful tactics: “We don’t have to just obey a system that doesn’t listen to us.” Opponents sought a voter referendum on the training facility but haven’t succeeded in putting it on the ballot and have sued to challenge the signature-gathering requirements. Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens said in April that the facility will be completed this year.


On Jan. 18, 2023, law enforcement sought to clear occupied forestland. According to court filings from the Georgia Attorney General’s Office, state troopers ordered Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán, 26, to exit a tent, then fired pepper balls when that order went ignored. Terán “responded by firing a gun,” wounding a trooper. They returned fire, killing Terán.


Police recovered Terán’s “handwritten diary,” submitted as evidence in legal proceedings and subsequently sealed by court order. It includes a list of “ideas for praxis” that includes “destruction of city property & prop vandalism,” “sabotaging police equipment & vehicles,” “evade arrest by any means necessary” and “neutralize threats promptly.” There are multiple drawings of burning police cars and dead officers. Written in all caps: “Burn police vehicles!,” “kill cops!” and “riot cops don’t want to give us rights. So, set them on fire!” Another entry: “If the cops kill me I want you to riot, to kill as many of them as you can.”


Last August Attorney General Christopher Carr obtained an indictment against 61 defendants who are alleged to have “knowingly joined the conspiracy in an attempt to prevent the training center from being built.” It accuses participants of a range of charges including domestic terrorism, arson, money laundering and violating the Georgia Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. I contacted the lawyers for all the defendants listed in recent court filings. Not all responded, but those who did said all 61 have pleaded not guilty or intend to do so.


The Stop Cop City radicals are part of a nationwide network that recruits supporters with different but overlapping grievances. As Israel fights Hamas, they argue there’s a link between the Atlanta police-training facility and the war in Gaza. Among the veterans of the Cop City protests in Atlanta is Calla Walsh of Palestine Action US. In a November podcast with the anarchist website It’s Going Down, a Stop Cop City organizer identified only as Sam said, “If we want to stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine, we have to attack the United States military apparatus and the United States law-enforcement apparatus, and one of the premiere nexuses of that apparatus is Cop City.”


Stop Cop City organizers note that U.S. police officers have trained in Israel through the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange, a joint project between Georgia State University and various American and foreign law-enforcement agencies. Mr. Franklin suggests “training and tactics and strategies that they’ve been using against Palestinians” may be turned “against black and brown communities” in the U.S. (Neither the university nor the exchange responded to a request for comment.)


He also draws a broader ideological connection between Cop City and Gaza: “This is about, both domestically and internationally, Western dominance over land resources and people.” He claims that “if the state of Israel was created out of Germany, I would be the first and biggest supporter.” Instead, Palestinian Arabs were forced “to move off their land to create the state of Israel,” which became a “sort of an outpost for Western hegemony in the Middle East.”


Asked about Oct. 7, Mr. Franklin says: “All of it is legitimate resistance in my view.” Israel has “the most sophisticated modern warfare weapons. . . . Palestinians have makeshift weapons that they use, but yet they’re considered the people who are terrorizing other folks, right? . . . The language that is used does not give due course to the oppression that’s happening against the Palestinians. And then what we get is an ‘oh my God’ reaction on Oct. 7.” He sees this as part of “a purposeful narrative that says somehow white lives are more important than other people’s lives, that says somehow people should accept their oppression.”


Hamas attacked as the Stop Cop City activists were conducting a “mass action speaking tour” with visits to more than 70 cities—and planned events at college campuses including the City University of New York, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of California Berkeley—all of which later saw disruptive anti-Israel protests.


The tour’s organizers said their goal was to prepare “hundreds of affinity groups for the action.” They expected “these presentations and discussions to feed into regional training days organized in hubs across the country, which will give people tools,” including “tactical and safety training, and the confidence to participate in mass direction action.” Such “action” includes vandalism, encampments, blockades and other unlawful tactics.


College students “don’t need me to radicalize them,” Mr. Franklin says. But some inclined to radicalism made the “logical leap” that “the resistance that’s been happening against Cop City is also resistance that should be happening against the genocide.” The campus protests “rose up on their own,” he says. “It hasn’t been like, you know, we’ve picked up the phone and told these students, ‘Hey, y’all go on campus and do A, B, C.’ ”


But he’s “willing to talk to any student organizer about the little that I know about how to organize on campus.” On Sept. 6, Mr. Franklin offered detailed lessons about establishing encampments during a panel at Columbia University. After the Columbia encampment formed in April, a self-described Stop Cop City organizer held a teach-in. Social-media footage shows him encouraging students to “start an affinity group of three to seven people that you can deploy in actions together.” He also urged them to adopt “a policy of nondisavowal, which means that when the radicals go and set s— on fire,” others “are not condemning them.”


On April 25, Stop Cop City organizers tweeted about an encampment on Emory’s quad “open to everyone who opposes the genocide in Palestine and construction of Cop City.” On May 1, CrimethInc published an anonymous report describing how protesters at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign prepared to confront the police: “Comrades with more on-the-ground experience” shared “knowledge gained from the Emory encampment and the Stop Cop City/Defend the Forest movements.”


The campus protests have hailed Terán as a “martyr,” and some of his Stop Cop City comrades question whether he fired a gun at the troopers. In April National Students for Justice in Palestine shared a photo of a banner at the Columbia encampment that features his portrait under the slogans “Glory to the Martyrs” and (in Spanish) “Tortuguita lives” and “the fight continues.” Similar messages appeared at encampments at Cal Poly Humboldt and Yale this spring. Social-media footage from the University of Southern California features chants of “Viva, viva, Tortuguita.”


As the school year ended, the protests spilled beyond campus, with the Stop Cop City movement featuring prominently. A July 4 protest in New York City featured a huge banner proclaiming “Stop Cop City” and “Free Palestine,” with Arabic writing below. Several Palestine Action US posts celebrating acts of vandalism against perceived supporters of Israel also reference Cop City.


Mr. Franklin told me in June that his ambition is to carry out “the largest demonstrations at a convention that we’ve ever seen.” Ms. Harris’s replacement of Joe Biden, he said later, “provides some cover but not enough to stop all the protests that are going to happen. . . . For those like me who see both as part of the same machine, it does not matter.”


The 2020 protests took a toll on the Chicago Police Department, which last month had fewer than 11,600 officers despite a budget for nearly 12,750. The local police will get help from state and federal law enforcement, and it’s possible they’ll succeed in containing the protests in 2024 where they failed in 1968. Even if so, expect to see more lawlessness and disorder on campuses and city streets this fall.


Ms. Melchior is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.

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