In any movement started by the radical left, a key component to fanning the flames and keeping the masses fired up is to turn someone involved in it into a symbol, someone who will serve as an example of why they must keep up the fight and see the “mission” through.
We saw it, for instance, with the Occupy Wall Street protests where people in wheelchairs were purposely put in the front rows of protest lines.
The latest incarnation of OWS, the anti-Israel demonstrations, is very similar in nature, as Professor Jacobson pointed out in a recent Fox News interview.
And during one such demonstration that took place this week in Georgia, the anti-Israel left found their next symbol, an economics professor from Emory University whose Thursday arrest was caught on tape by CNN, something that instantly turned her into a progressive icon among anti-Israel activists and their coddlers in higher education.
In a shortened video clip shared to the Twitter machine and which has been viewed nearly eight million times as of this writing, we see Professor Caroline Fohlin telling a police officer to “stop it” in the middle of a campus protest as the officer tells her to “get down” as he is about to arrest her. She continues to refuse to get on the ground, so he maneuvers her there himself, and soon after is assisted by another officer while Fohlin claims her head hit the concrete.
During her arrest, Fohlin is heard yelling “I’m a professor!”
Watch:
Fohlin was immediately painted as a selfless heroine who was just doing what any professor would do to “protect their students,” and others in higher ed rushed to her defense:
“Peace activists” also weighed in:
Comments to tweets and RTs on her Twitter timeline contained comments from people who were expressing support and solidarity with her.
The problem here is that in the longer CNN video clip, Fohlin is seen interfering in the arrest of someone who is presumably a student. Watch as she screams for a few moments at officers before walking over to one and leaning right behind him just inches away from his gun, seeming to reach out with her left hand:
Here’s a screengrab of the moment:
In another clip, Fohlin is shown admitting she “impulsively hit him on the head very lightly to get his attention”:
“I impulsively hit him on the head very lightly to get his attention. And they grabbed me, threw me to the ground and arrested me.”
That is a no-no, and you can best believe in the vast majority of instances if you do something like that you will be descended upon by police in record time, as happened in the clip. She’s fortunate she wasn’t tackled immediately.
Incredibly, once the full CNN clip (which did not contain the admission) started making the rounds, she was still portrayed as a victim who did nothing to deserve the response she got, with her defenders stating that she was simply “expressing concern” when confronted by the officer:
Needless to say, hitting an officer “on the head very lightly to get his attention” is not merely “expressing concern” over the situation. It’s not clear whether any of those rushing to the defense of the professor have seen her admission, but rest assured it is unlikely any tweets will be deleted because narratives and whatnot.
It’s hard to pinpoint what’s more maddening here: Fohlin yelling “I’m a professor!” as if that’s supposed to let someone off the hook for behaving badly, or the number of people swarming in to defend her by gaslighting their followers on what led to the arrest.
The consensus on Twitter from conservatives was that the “I’m a professor” moment was the worst – and most amusing:
That said, $10 says she becomes an MSNBC contributor. Maybe even gets a speaking invitation to the DNC.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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