Chicago Braces for Leftist Violence and Mayhem
By Matthew Vadum
The Left’s violent attacks on the yet-to-begin NATO summit in Chicago are already underway as anti-American activists hope to recreate the mayhem that accompanied the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle. Radicals clamoring for “change” have said for months that the actions in Chicago are only the beginning.
During a heart-warming “F*** the Police” protest action Tuesday night in Chicagoland, mask-wearing demonstrators clad in black clothing carried communist and anarchist flags in hopes of winning the hearts and minds of Middle America. One area resident described the raucous march as “scary.”
Leftists and union goons terrorized entire neighborhoods, creating makeshift barricades, dragging dumpsters into the streets, and upending garbage cans. One anarchist apparently beat up an 80-year-old man.
Management at a downtown housing complex in Chicago is warning residents to flee to safety before Occupy demonstrators switch into full rage-against-the-machine mode. The Library Tower Condominium Association sent out a letter indicating that management “is STRONGLY recommending that all residents find places to stay during the conference from May 18 through May 21.”
When the nations of the G8 and NATO begin meeting this weekend, the Occupy Wall Street movement and its allies plan to press their demands. Occupiers want an economy-killing “Robin Hood Tax” to be imposed on financial transactions, an international agreement to curb carbon emissions, and “a nuclear-free Middle East” (translation: the unilateral nuclear disarmament of Israel), according to Adbusters, Kalle Lasn’s left-wing magazine that helped to lay the groundwork for the Occupy movement. Chicago demonstrators won’t be able to protest the G8 summit unless they’re willing to do a lengthy weekend commute. That conference was supposed to take place alongside the NATO conference in Chicago but was relocated to Camp David in Maryland.
The steadily increasing levels of violence from Occupiers may be related to anarchists’ apparently growing influence in the movement. “Anarchist occupiers are energized and their visceral tactics are attracting members,” according to Adbusters, which praised the brutal techniques anarchists used during May Day actions. “Now, the power of the Black Bloc is growing within Occupy and pushing the movement in unexpected directions.”
Useful idiot Aaron Hughes, an organizer with Iraq Veterans Against the War, will also play a role in the protests this weekend. He said he intends to lead a cohort of veterans to the NATO summit. Hughes and other misguided souls plan to return –John Kerry-style— the service medals they earned in Iraq.
Meanwhile, President Obama’s favorite labor organization, the Service Employees International Union, is subsidizing demonstrators by providing Washington, D.C. office space worth $4,000 a month to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Interviewed in that space one Occupy activist ill-suited for abstract thought, Johnny Mandracchia, shared his unusual definition of the word violence with Katie Pavlich of Townhall magazine. It is not violence to smash the windows of a Starbucks coffee shop, said the self-described anarcho-syndicalist, “because Starbucks isn’t a private business – it’s a corporation.” Such acts, including the burning of police cars, are merely examples of vandalism, he said.
While Professor Mandracchia was imparting his novel ideas about law, Obama pals Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn were busy helping the anti-American activists who hope to violently disrupt the approaching NATO summit in Chicago.
Ayers and Dohrn are the close personal friends of Obama who launched his political career with a fundraiser in their Chicago living room when he ran for the Illinois state senate. The small-c communist confab for cash took place several years after the conclusion of a lengthy firebombing campaign conducted by the now-married couple’s terrorist group, the Weather Underground. Ayers and Dohrn escaped justice on a legal technicality after law enforcement personnel failed to cross every “t” and dot every “i” in their quest for evidence against the couple.
Some Obama critics say Ayers may have even written Obama’s well received first autobiography, Dreams From My Father.
Freshly returned from a sojourn in Marxist fantasy land, Dohrn seemed to echo the late radical lawyer William Kunstler’s infamous observation that the police constitute “an army of occupation” in American cities.
Although the security dragnet enveloping Chicagoland is prompted by a well-founded belief that Occupy-associated groups and fanatics like Dohrn pose a threat to public safety, the wrinkly terrorist bomber blames NATO for the creation of “restricted zones” and “the shutdown of universities and colleges, the shutdown of businesses, the closings of the major museums here, it is being treated as really a practice military zone.”
What Dohrn really means is that the so-called right of unhinged nihilistic protesters to run wild in the streets is more important than the right of Chicago’s citizens to defend their persons and property from attack.
Predictably, for propaganda purposes Dohrn deliberately misdescribed the NATO conference as “war games,” evoking images of destroyers on Lake Michigan shelling the Sears Tower.
Dohrn told fellow travelers such as host Amy Goodman at “Democracy Now!” that instead of getting together in Chicago representatives of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization should be meeting “in an underground bunker or on a remote island.” For her part, Goodman euphemistically described Dorhn and Ayers merely as “two veteran activists.”
Zoe Sigman of Occupy Chicago amplified Dohrn’s points at a press conference.
Sigman called NATO leaders “warmongers” invading Chicago and “the military arm of the 1 percent.” The “warnings of violence downtown echo the reality of police repression” that some Chicagoans face in their everyday lives. “NATO,” Sigman said, “is a symptom of the global system of violence and oppression at the hands of the 1 percent.”
Of course Sigman did not discuss Occupy Wall Street and the spectacularly violent satellite protests it has spawned in cities across the U.S. and around the world. Radical activists are responsible for hundreds of crimes, including assault, rape, arson, rioting, robbery, and a host of others. But deluded true believers don’t quite see it that way. They see the police and institutions as the problem.
Ayers told Goodman that the authorities in Chicago are the real troublemakers.
“What they’re doing and what they’ve been doing for months is to kind of deflect attention from NATO onto the idea that somehow the protests create a threat,” he said.
“They’re shutting Lakeshore Drive. They’re shutting the trains. They’re closing exits off the freeways. And they’re creating a kind of culture of fear,” said Ayers, an expert in creating a culture of fear.
“We insist that this is a family-friendly, nonviolent, permitted march. And all the kind of hysteria about what’s about to happen is really brought on by the police. I don’t think anything is going to happen, except that they are creating the conditions for a police riot, once again. They’re creating the conditions for more repression. And this is a very bad thing.”
Far-left activists from the Catholic Worker movement kicked off “A Week Without Capitalism” in Chicago by invading an office building housing the Obama reelection campaign headquarters. They claimed to be advancing “nonviolent resistance to the corporate G8/NATO agenda.”
On the other side in Chicago is Mayor Rahm Emanuel, himself a radical Saul Alinsky-inspired thug, who previously served as Obama’s White House chief of staff. Emanuel has beefed up security in the Windy City and taken other steps such as boosting fines for resisting a police officer in anticipation of the demonstrations.
Thousands of out-of-state police officers are streaming into Chicago to help deal with Ayers’s family-friendly nonviolent demonstrators. Law enforcement personnel would be wise to bring their batons and gas masks.
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