And anyone who noticed the attackers’ race was a racist, people at the paper said later. I know a newspaper editor in Chicago who would love to hire these kids.
In St. Paul in February 2011, fifty black people descended on a convenience store in “a so-called mob theft or mob robbery. They stormed in together, their numbers overwhelming and just started stealing” and the video pictures tell the story.3
So much for the “long hot summer” theory.
People in St. Paul consider their city to be safer than Minneapolis. Don’t know why.
SCAN ME!
VIDEO: Mayhem in the Mall of America
When Lil Wayne and Drake are rumored to be partying at the largest mall in America, you know that can only mean one thing: riots.
A few days before Christmas in 2011, two hundred black people were fighting, smashing, grabbing, beating, stealing, and having a good time doing it—if the audio on the dozens of videos are any indication.
It took more than an hour to quell the disturbance, which began about 4:20 p.m. as a single fight involving a large group in a food court and quickly spread through the nation’s largest mall, said mall spokeswoman Bridget Jewell. Bloomington police and mall security arrested at least 10 juveniles and young adults on suspicion of disorderly conduct, police said Monday.4
Ten people were arrested. All were black.
Guess it’s time to break out my “it’s a long cold winter” theory to explain the violence.
MINNEAPOLIS BREAKS OUT
The year 2012 started out with a bang in Minneapolis. Not satisfied with being known as the “most dangerous city in the Midwest,” they took it up a notch. In the first part of 2012 alone there were between ten and twenty incidents. And, of course, Minneapolis police made sure to point out that race had nothing to do with the epidemic of violent crime in their downtown.
Crime reporter Matt McKinney called the flash mob violence and mayhem “random” and saw “no other real pattern emerges.” In his mind the “motivation for the attack remains unclear.”5
Police and reporters may have a hard time figuring it out. But more and more people in Minneapolis are realizing their city is caught up in a wave of racial violence, featuring groups of black people—big and small, men and women, young and not so young—marauding through the downtown, beating, hurting, destroying, and stealing. Sometimes they do it right in front of the police.
There are a lot of witnesses to these events. There are at least fifteen videos posted on YouTube from 2011 alone.
In Minneapolis, the Star Tribune headline “Flash mob actions worry Minnesota police” tells part of the story. McKinney fills in some of the details about one of the incidents from March 2012:
We were just biking, the three of us, having some laughs and enjoying the night,” said the cyclist, who didn’t want his name used out of fear for his safety. It was 7:45 p.m. and the street was crowded with people enjoying the unusually warm evening, he said.
“Suddenly ‘some kid’ ran up to the man’s friend and punched him in the face, breaking his jaw. Another eight to 10 youths surrounded the cyclists, yelling and trying to provoke a fight.
Two police officers had been watching seven youths at a bus stop when they saw them “suddenly surged” toward the cyclists.
As the officers gave chase, the group fled with one victim’s bike. They ran through the seating area at Oceanaire’s patio, picking objects off the tables to throw at one of the bicyclists running after them.6
Eventually four people were arrested, all black.
The bikers got hurt pretty badly, but they got off easy compared to the St. Patrick’s Day mauling twenty black people inflicted on a Minneapolis graphic artist named Pieter. He suffered serious brain injuries and now has no short-term memory. A local bank has turned videos of the crime over to the police. He is afraid to use his last name.
An hour before Pieter was beat and kicked into intensive care, twenty black people assaulted an out-of-town couple at the exact same intersection. The Star Tribune may be squeamish about reporting the race of the criminals, but City Pages is not:
Melissa screamed as three separate youths came at Kirk, throwing punches. Kirk says he was able to dodge the blows. He remembers one of the assailants smiling while he threw punches, “like it was fun.” As people on the street started to take notice of the attack, the mob dispersed, leaving Kirk one-on-one with a man he says was over 6 feet tall.
“I dodged several of his punches before he ran off,” Kirk said, adding that he himself didn’t punch anyone. “I believe that if it wasn’t for my wife’s screaming I would have been seriously injured.” Thankfully, he ended up with nothing more than a swollen neck. Melissa, a 33-year-old school teacher, was pushed, and one of the assailants burned her hand with a cigarette, she says.
After the mob dispersed, Kirk and Melissa made their way back to the Marquette. There, they talked to a police officer about the incident.
Wrote Melissa in an email: The “cop wasn’t that interested in taking a report, since we didn’t have descriptions—just African-American. … [I] wonder how many people have been attacked, since our story isn’t even part of the stats.”7
There’s more:
May 2012—“Mob robbers hit convenience stores in St. Paul”8
June 2012—“4 shot after argument leads to gunfire in Mpls.”9
April 2012—“Victim describes ‘flash mob’ attack in downtown Mpls.” The eighth one from February to May, 2012.10
After dozens and dozens of attacks, shootings, beatings, thefts, acts of vandalism, and mayhem—many not reported by police or the media—the business owners want the “chaos in downtown Minneapolis to end.” They think part of the problem is that at 2:30 a.m. all the clubs must be empty. “It’s like the beginning of a race: Lift up the doors and all of the horses run,” Celeste Shahidi, the owner of two buildings on First Avenue, described the scene. She thinks bar closing hours should be staggered to prevent the rush.”11
Police say club owners are at fault.
Whatever.
City officials do not want any part of this “return of racial violence” business.
“We don’t keep track of arrestees by race,” says police spokesman William Palmer. “And frankly, no, it doesn’t matter. We arrest and prepare criminal cases for consideration of prosecution for those people who choose to break the law. Race has nothing to do with it.”
That’s interesting because the city does seem to care about race when it comes to its hiring practices. They keep track of the race of officers in its affirmative action_reporting and recruiting. According to the city Web site, “The City of Minneapolis is aware of its commitment as an equal opportunity employer and the efforts necessary to meet the responsibilities outlined in the Affirmative Action Plan. The City’s Department of Human Resources serves as a liaison through its ‘Connecting with the Communities We Serve’ program and maintains contact with the following community-sponsored action groups,” including the Black Story Tellers Alliance, African Community Services, Minneapolis Urban League, Minnesota Multicultural Development Center, and other race-based groups.12
The city also has a policy to “intensively recruit protected class persons,” including black people. And if they are having trouble qualifying for a job, the city will provide tutoring and change certification procedures to help select more “protected class persons.”13
So race apparently matters to someone in the city of Minnesota. At least some times. And of course, this affirmative action is standard procedure at every police department in the country.
Blogger Neal Krasnoff says the violence is more widespread than the police or media are talking about:
One of my friends was robbed at Nicollet and 7th. They harassed her, then one mutt knocked her down, pounded her head against the sidewalk, then took off with her cell phone. The perps are — yes, you and I guessed correctly — Male/Black/18-35. She’s the 5th person in her circle of friends to be attacked.<
br />
The Star Tribune is loathe to discuss race, but many of the black people involved in the mayhem are not. They freely post their exploits on YouTube or brag about their crimes.
SCAN ME!
VIDEO: Minneapolis on Video
Videos of groups of violent black people in Minneapolis are numerous, and some are even set to music.
McKinney and the police are not willing to talk about violence and how race is a part of it. But the readers of the paper, bloggers, and talk radio are.
SCAN ME!
VIDEO: Minnesota Gangs
“Let’s stop being so p.c. about all this,” said one reader of the Star Tribune. “it’s a racial thing, isn’t it? Isn’t it black youth who are the ones committing the vast majority of these downtown crimes, and aren’t they the ones harassing people downtown? Will this comment be censored? Isn’t what I’m saying factual, though, censored or not?14
There is no doubt the crimes are happening. And neither is there any doubt that a large number of people in and out of the media are ignoring racial violence in Minneapolis. The next chapter shows how at least one reporter in Minneapolis got religion.
SCAN ME!
VIDEO: Twin City Hip Hop Awards
SCAN ME!
VIDEO: Fights in Downtown Minneapolis
SCAN ME!
VIDEO: Gang Violence Up 200 percent
14
CONFESSIONS FROM A NEWS DESK, PART 2
The education of a liberal or Minneapolis is a hot, racial mess.
When Mike Williams, the afternoon-drive host at the CBS radio affiliate in Minneapolis, read my WND.com story about an epidemic of racial violence in Minneapolis, he was curious—but unconvinced. At first.
Williams went through the story with your humble correspondent, which is available by podcast online.
SCAN ME!
AUDIO: The Mike Williams Show
“You do not live in Minnesota, correct?” he asked to start off the interview. I had to confess I did not, but I reminded him that I had written a book about the return of racial violence and how the media ignored it and wrote a piece about it for WND. I proceeded to give him some times, dates, and places of fifteen to twenty examples of horrific racial violence in Minneapolis—where large groups of black people roamed the streets of downtown, beating, stealing, vandalizing, and hurting people.
That was in June 2012.
I told him how the press in Minneapolis ignored the fact that all the members of all of the violent mobs were black.
“You’re saying the mainstream media is ignoring them. Then how would you have known about them if the main stream media did not report them,” he asked.
He thought he had me.
They did not report the repeated episodes, the fact that all the mobs were black, and that it was happening all over the country, I told him. It’s called connecting the dots. I did my research.
It’s not that hard but you have to be willing to look.
The criminals may have been black, Williams conceded, but he did not “buy” the fact that they had racial motives for the attacks, which was okay because that was not what I was selling. “The perpetrators of these crimes are black, I did not attempt to read their minds to figure out why they did it,” I said.
It went on like that for a while, with Williams remaining polite but doing the usual media dance: denying the issue existed white simultaneously explaining why it existed. Or why it was so difficult for him to acknowledge it. He concluded that black mob violence was just some kind of statistical fluke, a mystery of nature, and that was that. And then my part of the show was over.1
After the break, callers jammed the lines with their own experiences with racial violence in downtown Minneapolis. The first caller was from a woman whose son was beaten by a black mob. After hearing the host and I talk about serious injuries and police indifference, the woman was convinced we had been talking about her son’s experience.
We had not. Her son was a different case. An even more serious case.
“My son was assaulted in Minneapolis back in July 2010, and it was an unprovoked attack,” said Haley. “A group of males approached him. One broke out of the group and punched him in the jaw and double-fracture his jaw…. We filed a police report. It was very traumatic because I could not get the police department to help me with anything.”2
After six hours of surgery for a compound fracture of the jaw, Haley set out to find the criminals. And “nobody did anything about it,” she said. They would not look at security camera videotape. They would not help her look at it. “They didn’t care. I get flamed up thinking about it. They basically told me they had bigger fish to fry.”
The Williams’ facade was cracking. “It still seems to me that it is not race based, but it just happens to be racial,” Williams said. Whatever that means.3
His producer tried to buck him up: Race had nothing to do with anything.
That was too much for even Williams.
“When you are downtown and see a group of kids descending on you and you are white, do you feel a little more vulnerable because of the color of your skin?” asked Williams.
No, said the producer. That was a bit much even for Williams. “Well I do … And that is a terrible thing for me to say.”
If Williams’ door was cracking open, the next callers would give it another nudge.
First up, a black mob beat up a young soldier just back from Afghanistan. “It does seem to be an epidemic,” said the caller.
Then a black man from Minnesota talked about how your humble correspondent was correct in his reporting, and how “these kids are embarrassing me and they are embarrassing our race. And it just makes me sick.”
Creak, the door opens wider “I feel a little odd right now,” confessed Williams, “about some of the things I’ve said. But that is just because I’ve observed this scene and that is just because what it either looks like, or to a white guy, feels like.”
The caller told the story about a group of black people just a few weeks earlier who tried to stop a white kid on a bike. He did not stop and “they shot, and they killed him.”
Williams, undaunted, pressed on. “It just depends on the scene. If that were the case and the kid on the bicycle were black, I am still willing to think they would have shot and killed him.”
Uh, okay, I guess.
Then came a regular listener to the John Williams show who had won a few tickets from the station to a Timberwolves game in downtown Minneapolis. The caller gave the tickets to his son. After the game, the caller’s son and his friend were set upon by a black mob who taunted them, beat them, and hurled racial epithets at them—as well as rocks. The caller told us, “As they were leaving, they held up a gun and said ‘white boy you are lucky.’”
Williams’ explanations became less and less convincing, even to himself. He started disagreeing with things I never said or wrote. Finally the segment ended and Williams summed it up: “This is a gut check for you.”
Of course over the next few weeks there were several more shootings, lots of fights, and lots of mayhem, all in downtown Minneapolis.
I hereby swear I had nothing to do with them.
15
NEW YORK
Has a Whole Lotta Soul and Racial Violence
If Chaim Amalek, an alias for New York video blogger Luke Ford, had his way, no one would know that mobs of black people are attacking and beating and robbing Jews in the New York area. Or that they shout anti-Semitic epithets. Or that they target Jews because “they don’t fight back.” Or that it has been going on for a while—and that even Al Sharpton got in on it.
“Such information can only serve to heighten racial tensions between these two groups,” said Amalek. “Let us all look beyond the issue of race (in any event a mere social construct) and instead celebrate our diversity”1
The New York Post saw a pattern that most other media outlets never see—or want to see. To some, it was jarring. A June headline about a series of
anti-Semitic attacks read “Anti-Jewish crime wave.” Post reporters wrote that “in the most disturbing incident, a mob of six black teenagers shouting, ‘Dirty Jew!’ and ‘Dirty kike!’ repeatedly bashed Marc Heinberg, 61, as he walked home from temple in Sheepshead Bay.”2
This was just one of several vicious black mob attacks perpetrated against Jewish people in Brooklyn during 2011 and 2012. Orthodox Jews may bear a disproportionate amount of the violence in that part of New York. But the mob violence in the area is not limited to Jews.
In February 2011, four black people beat and robbed an Orthodox Jew in the New York suburb of Monsey. They were charged with hate crimes after it was determined they targeted the victim based on his religion. News accounts did not mention the race of the attackers, but the video tells the whole story.3
SCAN ME!
VIDEO: Monsey Beating
In a three-week period after Thanksgiving 2010, the same group of black people were charged in three separate episodes of targeting, beating, and robbing members of the Orthodox community. One of the victims, Joel Weinberger, spent four days in the hospital with broken bones and required surgery on his broken jaw and eye socket.4
Ford and others, such as MSNBC news anchor Melissa Harris-Perry, who say the media should not report news if it makes black people look bad, don’t have to worry too much. Most racial crimes and violence from groups of black people in the New York area are usually not reported—not by the media anyway.
But witnesses and others who know often find a way to drop a dime. Or a video. Or an Internet post.
Just a few days before the Weinberger beating, a group of students from a predominately black school in a predominantly black New York neighborhood were “evicted” from the 9/11 Memorial site in Manhattan_“after they callously hurled trash into its fountains. The vile vandals from Junior High School 292 in East New York treated the solemn memorial — its reflecting pools honoring the nearly 3,000 people killed in the terror attacks — like a garbage dump.”5
White Girl Bleed A Lot Page 13