Calling yourself antiracist or anti-fascist is no excuse for thuggery
As soon as any wave of protest begins, I always feel queasy. For people chanting about being “antifascist” or “anti-racist” will, sooner or later, begin to behave like the lowest of criminals and bullies. Sadly, the George Floyd protests have been no different.
Only, alongside the mayhem and looting, a manipulative new layer of thuggery has emerged, one that tries to call right wrong and wrong right. Thus: if you don’t support criminal behaviour in the name of the protest, you’re a racist.
When soldiers from the Household Cavalry asked permission to remove graffiti daubed on the Haig Memorial in Whitehall during the Black Lives Matter march, and began to do so in plain clothes, they were harangued by three women, one of whom filmed them, taunting: “I’m going to get their faces in… everybody say cheese.” Even more stomach-churning, however, was a video showing three women washing off Black Lives Matter slogans from a federal building in the US being verbally attacked by a woman filming from her vehicle, who accuses them of being racist for cleaning the building and exploiting their “white privilege” in doing so.
George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police was a travesty; of course it was, and America has an ignominious past where police brutality against African-Americans is concerned. It’s not hard to see why this has been a tinderbox. It’s just a shame that alongside those peacefully protesting are a sizeable contingent criminally marauding in the name of social justice; some in the name of anti-racism – as seen above – and some in the name of anti-fascism. They are leaving the graffiti – and much worse – that decent folk are being taunted for removing.
The ringleaders of the anti-fascists are the loathsome group Antifa. It is a notable irony that where there’s Antifa, there is anti-Semitism. In Los Angeles’s Jewish Fairfax district during the George Floyd protests last week, Antifa thugs channelled Kristallnacht spirit, spraying “Free Palestine” and “F--- Israel” on a synagogue, daubing anti-Semitic slogans on a statue of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Nazis, damaging three more synagogues, and smashing up a number of Jewish shops.
Alongside the destruction of Jewish property, hideous, stomach-churning scenes in the name of combating racism and fascism have included Ivy League lawyers throwing Molotov cocktails at police cruisers and, most shockingly of all, an African-American man trying to save his business in St Louis being shot to death and filmed as he lay dying.
Looting and rioting is criminal, but calling yourself an anti-fascist or an anti-racist as you do it is evil.