It's no wonder many Americans are opposed to the harsh sights. Atlanta's self-proclaimed black mayor yesterday delivered a vocal message: "It's not a protest, it's chaos" • Opinion
National Guard soldiers defend Capitol building in St. Paul // Photo: AP
When the city of Minneapolis comes up with headlines in news contexts or in one of the Cohen brothers' works, I feel a small pinch of heart. My mother was born and raised in the city, and although I visited her only a few times as a child, I have fond memories of her. My grandfather, the late Rabbi Yom Tov Herzog, served extensively in one of the St. Louis Park neighborhood synagogues, so the album and family memory are packed with experiences from that remote corner of the American Midwest.
One of these stories deals with the grim circumstances in which my grandparents had to move, in the process that most of the Jewish community resided in. The context is the race riots of the late 1960s, which shocked the small community. Disruptions hit the city twice: in 1966 and 1967, and included long nights of arson and looting of shops on the main street of the northern neighborhood, many of them Jewish-owned.
Like today, the background to the riots was the sense of deprivation and discrimination that sparked riots all over the United States in those years, and they became a watershed in Jewish-black relations in Minneapolis. The northern neighborhood is mixed, the memories are hard, and the feelings are not letting up today.
While protesting against police violence can be justified, the extent of the riots, disturbances, arson and looting we now see suggests something deeper and more dangerous.
The sights from the streets of New York, Washington, Atlanta, Seattle and many other cities show a phenomenon that goes far beyond protest or rage. It is civil terrorism, the kind known from the Marxist revolutionary manuals of the 19th century. The rioters talk about police violence, but many of the organized groups within it are striving for something more radical: a fundamental revolution in the social and governmental order in the US. These are the elements of Antifa and BLM - the lives of blacks are considered - extremist leftist groups who seek to undermine social order in order to dismantle the social order. The "establishment," "pig capitalism," and all the centers of power considered by this radical agenda to be "oppressive" or "exploitative." Activists in these groups call police "pigs," and in the past expressed joy when police were murdered during riots.
It is no wonder that many white and black Americans oppose the harsh sights. Atlanta Mayor, herself black, delivered an emotional and poignant message yesterday. "It's not a protest, it's chaos. The protest has a purpose. When Martin Luther King was murdered, we didn't do that to our city. This city has a legacy of black mayors, in this city most business owners are black."
The challenge for the U.S. government is the preservation of the rule of law statewide. Surrender or justification of such violence is dangerous to the social fabric and, first and foremost, to minority populations, the first victim of this chaos.
