Thread: UC Berkeley Chancellor: Riots Caused by Armed Individuals in ‘Ninja-like’ Uniforms Us

UC Berkeley Chancellor: Riots Caused by Armed Individuals in ‘Ninja-like’ Uniforms Using ‘Paramilitary Tactics’



3 Feb 2017

Following the riots that cancelled the final event of MILO’s “Dangerous Faggot Tour,” The Chancellor of UC Berkeley has released a statement claiming that rather than being caused by students, they were started by “armed individuals in ‘ninja-like’ uniforms using “paramilitary tactics.”

The event was cancelled after left-wing rioters, who the university claim were not students, smashed ATMs and bank windows, looted a Starbucks, beat Trump supporters, pepper sprayed innocent individuals, set fires in the street, and sprayed the words “Kill Trump” on storefronts.

Coverage of the riots spread across the world, as people watched on in horror at a university known for its heritage of free speech being taken over by political thugs.

In an email to students, UC Berkeley chancellor Nicholas Dirks said that the university “condemns in the strongest possible terms the actions of individuals who invaded the campus, infiltrated a crowd of peaceful students, and used violent tactics to close down the event. We deeply regret that the violence unleashed by this group undermined the First Amendment rights of the speaker as well as those who came to lawfully assemble and protest his presence.”

However Dirks adds that despite going to “extraordinary lengths to facilitate planning and preparation for this event,” the efforts were undone by “100 armed individuals clad in Ninja-like uniforms who utilized paramilitary tactics to engage in violent destructive behavior designed to shut the event down.”

So-called anti fascists group have been known to infiltrate MILO events throughout the tour, with a marxist group as the “Freedom Road Socialist Organisation,” infiltrating protesters at the cancelled event at UC Davis and causing violence.

President Donald Trump condemned the riots, threatening to take away the university’s federal funding if the university “does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view.”

Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and
practices violence on innocent people with a
different point of view - NO FEDERAL FUNDS?

3:13 AM - 2 Feb 2017

We reported yesterday that the university receives over $370 million in federal funding, over half its budget.

Since news of the riots broke out, pre-order sales of Breitbart Senior Editor MILO’s upcoming book Dangerous increased by a staggering 12,740%, propelling it to the top of the Amazon best seller list.

DANGEROUS is available to pre-order now via Amazon, in hardcover and Kindle editions. And yes, MILO is reading the audiobook version himself!

http://www.breitbart.com/milo/2017/02/03/uc-berkeley-chancellor-riots-caused-armed-individuals-ninja-like-uniforms-using-paramilitary-tactics/

There was no law enforcement. The group of 100 had free-reign of the streets setting fires and breaking out windows, terrifying the other students, visitors and protesters. Police didn't try to do anything to stop them. I don't understand this.

Originally Posted by Judy

There was no law enforcement. The group of 100 had free-reign of the streets setting fires and breaking out windows, terrifying the other students, visitors and protesters. Police didn't try to do anything to stop them. I don't understand this.

Agree. Believe the police finally came and said all should leave by 9:30 but that was after this had gone on for hours. Someone probably told them to back off and maybe they hoped the trouble makers would wear themselves out. Weak decision imo.

Thank you Jean for that information. It was a small area and would seem to be relatively easy for police to have managed much earlier. Maybe they only had campus police when it started and they are much more limited in what they can do by their nature and mission. Well, it was a strange sight to see this just going on unstopped for hours.

The violent disruptors were easily identifiable by their attire (black Ninja suits).

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.f6a7b627c107

They are a group called BlacK Bloc. Sorry my computer is having problems copying, but maybe one of you can post this article for me.

‘Black bloc’ protests return for Trump era, leaving flames, broken windows from D.C. to Berkeley

By Derek Hawkins February 2

Anti-Trump protesters set a limo on fire outside The Washington Post headquarters. The car was parked on K Street in downtown Washington where police in riot gear had been trying to disperse the crowd of protesters. (Whitney Leaming/The Washington Post)

They’ve been around for decades, but in the past three months they’ve been especially visible: protesters in head-to-toe black clothing and ski masks, charging through the streets in public demonstrations, provoking police and leaving a trail of broken windows and flaming piles of debris in their wake.

Pockets of them sowed chaos during peaceful protests in Portland the week Donald Trump was elected president, smashing electrical boxes and spray-painting buildings, and prompting a volley of rubber bullets from authorities.

They turned out by the hundreds at Trump’s inauguration in January, vandalizing a Starbucks and a Bank of America and torching a limousine in downtown Washington.

And on Wednesday, swarms of them shut down a planned speech by the conservative provocateur and Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos at the University of California at Berkeley. Some 1,500 people had showed up to demonstrate against the event when a black-clad mob of a few dozen started breaking windows and setting fires at the campus.

The University of California at Berkeley canceled a talk by inflammatory Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos and put the campus on lockdown after intense protests broke out on Feb. 1. (Video: The Washington Post / Photo: AP)

Law enforcement agencies and journalists are often quick to dub such groups “anarchists” — and for the most part that’s accurate. But the practice of activists dressing in black en masse has its own unique origins and aims.

It’s called “black bloc,” and it’s a tactic — sometimes mistaken for an organization or a movement — that protesters have long used to give themselves anonymity at demonstrations, to achieve both violent and nonviolent ends.

“By putting on our masks we reveal our unity; and by raising our voices in the street together, we speak our anger at the facelessness of power,” reads a popular anarchist credo that was printed on the inside of masks distributed at a violent anti-capitalist protest in London in 1999.

Police Magazine, as you might expect, has a somewhat different impression of “black bloc.”

“In the ‘Black Bloc’ stratagem, throngs of criminal anarchists all dress in black clothing in an effort to appear as a unified assemblage, giving the appearance of solidarity for the particular cause at hand,” the magazine wrote in January 2015. “This tactic is particularly troubling for law enforcement security forces, as no anarchist rioter can be distinguished from another, allowing virtual anonymity while conducting criminal acts as a group.”

An oft-cited history of “black bloc” tactics by Daniel Dylan Young of A-Infos, a multilingual anarchist news and information service, suggests that the practice has its roots in Germany in the late 1970s. At the time, hoards of young people had taken residence in vacant buildings in inner cities, setting up cooperative houses in the bowels of abandoned warehouses and tenements. Similar communities cropped up in the Netherlands, Denmark and elsewhere in Northern Europe.

In 1980, however, the city governments began to crack down. German authorities evicted and arrested thousands of squatters that winter, triggering protests across the country, one of which turned violent in Berlin, with rioters destroying an upscale shopping area, according to Young.

“In response to violent state oppression radical activists developed the tactic of the Black Bloc,” Young wrote in 2001. By masking up in black, he wrote, activists “could more effectively fend off police attacks, without being singled out as individuals for arrest and harassment later on.”

The tactic spread to Amsterdam and other cities with large squatter populations. Toward the end of the decade, protesters were making wide use of it. In summer 1987, when President Ronald Reagan delivered his famous “tear down this wall” speech in West Berlin, he was met by tens of thousands of protesters, including a 2,000-person “black bloc,” as the New York Times reported then.

It’s not clear exactly when “black bloc” tactics crossed the Atlantic, but two large protests in 1990 — one in Washington against the Gulf War, the other in San Francisco against Columbus Day — were both disrupted by black-clad groups that destroyed downtown property, according to Young.

The tactic was hardly ever more visible than it was during the massive protests against the 1999 World Trade Organization summit in Seattle. Demonstrations began peacefully, but several hundred “black bloc” activists — described by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer at the time as “masked anarchists wearing black” — smashed windows, looted stores and vandalized buildings. The confrontation, dubbed the “Battle in Seattle,” delayed the start of the meeting and cast a shadow over the proceedings.

Young said those protests cemented the tactic’s use in the United States.

“The Black Bloc in Seattle inspired a renewed interest in militant protest tactics which do not placate authority or bow to its power,” he wrote. The protests there, he added, “also inspired radical anarchists to stop hiding out inside liberal activist groups with reformist agendas, and start being more vocal in their demands for revolution and total social change.”

A bonfire set by demonstrators protesting a scheduled speaking appearance by Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos burns on Sproul Plaza on the University of California at Berkeley campus on Wednesday in Berkeley, Calif. The event was canceled out of safety concerns after protesters hurled smoke bombs, broke windows and started a bonfire. (Ben Margot/AP)

For years now, masked activists in black have been a fixture at demonstrations nationwide — from Black Lives Matter rallies to political conventions to Occupy Wall Street. On Wednesday, they destroyed ATMs, broke windows in the student union and set a fire in the campus plaza at Berkeley, prompting a campus lockdown.

From the black bloc-ers perspective, property destruction is all about attacking the symbols of capitalism and corporate greed. Some don’t even view it as violent.

“We contend that property destruction is not a violent activity unless it destroys lives or causes pain in the process,” read a “black bloc communique” from the Seattle protests in 1999. “When we smash a window, we aim to destroy the thin veneer of legitimacy that surrounds private property rights.”

But for demonstrators seeking to protest peacefully, “black bloc” activity is at best a distraction. The writer and activist Devon Douglas-Bowers has argued that “black bloc” protesters “fetishize” property destruction at the expense of nonviolent action, and the popular left-wing journalist Chris Hedges once called them the “cancer of the Occupy movement.” Beyond that, go to any large rally, and the calls for peace almost always drown out the calls for destruction, even if they don’t stop it.

A protester walks by a limo that was set on fire in downtown Washington following the inauguration of President Trump on Jan. 20. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Law enforcement officials acknowledge the difference, too.

“What they’re doing is they’re taking advantage of the legitimate protesters to destroy things and emphasize their anarchist roots,” David Gomez, a former senior FBI counterterrorism official in Seattle, told The Washington Post after the anti-Trump protests in November.

Young, the author of the “black bloc” history, questioned the future of the tactic in his 2001 essay for A-Infos.

“It is important that we neither cling to it nostalgically as an outdated ritual or tradition, nor reject it wholesale because it sometimes seems inappropriate,” he wrote. “Rather we should continue working pragmatically to fulfill our individual needs and desires through various tactics and objectives, as they are appropriate at the specific moment.”

The appropriate moment for “black bloc” seems, for some, to be indefinite.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.db70d8addcda

Wow, I wish the Washington Post would cover Trump in the same "nostalgic" way they chose to cover "Black Bloc" anarchists. The only thing missing was who they are. Are they foreign? Are they Americans? Did they fly in? Drive in? Or do these people live in Berkeley? You would have thought the police could have caught at least a couple of them for interviews and information. Apparently, no one ever has. And that's strange don't you think? That police all over the world never catch them a "Black Bloc" member to question them, so for 57 years of causing chaos, violence, fires and property damage all over the world, no one knows who they are?

Originally Posted by Judy

Wow, I wish the Washington Post would cover Trump in the same "nostalgic" way they chose to cover "Black Bloc" anarchists. The only thing missing was who they are. Are they foreign? Are they Americans? Did they fly in? Drive in? Or do these people live in Berkeley? You would have thought the police could have caught at least a couple of them for interviews and information. Apparently, no one ever has. And that's strange don't you think? That police all over the world never catch them a "Black Bloc" member to question them, so for 57 years of causing chaos, violence, fires and property damage all over the world, no one knows who they are?

I'm just thinking out loud, but I'm wondering if they're a predominately Asian group, hence the Ninja dress? California has a large population of Asian-Americans and Asian immigrants. Note the picture on the post that started this thread, looks like the guy carrying the stick could be Asian. I also recall seeing a petite girl dressed in the Ninja garb busting windows in a news clip on Fox News. She too could have been Asian. I'm probably wrong ..... just an observation.

Protesters watch a fire on Sproul Plaza during a rally against the scheduled appearance by Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos at UC Berkeley. (Ben Margot / Associated Press)

February 5, 2017
Veronica Rocha and Peter H. King

They dressed “like ninjas” and marched onto UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza like a paramilitary force armed with bats, steel rods, fireworks and Molotov cocktails, officials say.

The scheduled appearance Wednesday of conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos was still two hours away, but it was precisely the time that most local television stations were beginning their live 6 p.m. broadcasts.

Within minutes, the group of 100 to 150 agitators had smashed half a dozen windows with barricades, launched fireworks at police and toppled a diesel-powered klieg light, which caused it to burst into flames.

“They didn’t come to lock arms and sing ‘Kumbaya,’” said Dan Mogulof, assistant vice chancellor and spokesman for the UC Berkeley. “They came to [mess stuff] up,” he said, using stronger language.

While so-called black bloc agitators have become a fixture of Bay Area demonstrations in the last decade, their appearance at Berkeley on Wednesday and otherwise peaceful demonstrations threatens to inflame tensions in an already polarized nation.

After learning that Yiannopoulos talk was canceled, President Trump tweeted: “If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view — NO FEDERAL FUNDS?”

The self-described anarchists or antifascists have left school and law enforcement agencies struggling to cope with their tactics.

Moving officers into Wednesday night’s melee, would have created "a lethal, horror situation," said campus Police Chief Margo Bennett.

"We have to do exactly what we did last night: to show tremendous restraint," she said.

UC Berkeley officials are now talking with federal and local law enforcement agencies about how to address black bloc tactics, which first appeared in Europe in the 1980s but have grown increasingly common in the United States in recent years.

To be sure, the University of California system has seen far larger disruptions by ordinary students. Window breaking and barricade tossing were common during Regents meetings when tuition was being raised significantly in the last decade, and protesters at UCLA trapped the Regents and other UC officials in a meeting building and garage.

But even though there was only one arrest Wednesday night, Berkeley officials insist the incident was something altogether new.

“We have never seen this on the Berkeley campus,” Mogulof said. “This was an unprecedented invasion.”

Mogulof said Berkeley administrators are dedicated to protecting the 1st Amendment and free speech, but certain events might need to have a closer look, especially if there is potential for major disruption and destruction on campus. School officials, he said, are reviewing their policing tactics as well as their policies and protocols for future events featuring controversial speakers.

He said “it’s not about limiting free speech,” but about protecting the students and campus.

The agitators, who keep their faces covered with bandannas, attach themselves to peaceful protests and then break out and start shattering windows and attacking cars, authorities say.

Police are investigating the group’s tactics, and additional arrests could come in the future, officials said.

Members of the group seem to be most active in Oakland, which has long been a hotbed of the protest movement. In downtown Oakland, shopkeepers have taken to boarding up their windows before protests they believe will attract the anarchist element.

At UC Berkeley, Police Chief Bennett said she doubts it would come to that on campus, but did allow there might need to be some rethinking about allowing controversial appearances to take place at night.

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/l...203-story.html