It’s been a wild week across the nation between the NYPD clearing the violent anti-Israel occupiers from Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall and the LAPD and CHP taking care of business at the militarized UCLA anti-Israel compound encampment.
As the warzone-like video clips and images flashed across the screen Thursday morning, the crew on MSNBC‘s “Morning Joe” program were seemingly in agreement that campus agitators were making Democrats look bad ahead of the November elections.
Rev. Al Sharpton was particularly unamused at what he was seeing and noted that he agreed with co-host Joe Scarborough’s assessment of the optics. Sharpton went even further, though, equating the anti-Israel agitators to the January 6th defendants:
MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” showed footage of police moving in on UCLA’s anti-Israel encampment, as host Joe Scarborough demanded Democrats speak out against these demonstrations.“The politics of that, what is being robbed by them not doing that, Joe, where you and I agree. How do the Democrats, how do all of us on that side say Jan. 6th was wrong if you can have the same pictures going on on college campuses, you lose the moral high ground,” Sharpton said.“Good Lord, don’t make a parallel to Jan. 6th,” co-host Mika Brzezinski said in response. “For some reason that’s not allowed.”
Watch:
Brzezinski, as it turns out, made a similar statement a couple of days prior, which presumably did not please their small audience:
But it was Sharpton’s observation in particular that had the Very Online Left fuming:
The day after Sharpton made the comparison, he walked it back:
“…The right will wrongly try to act like see they’re violent and they talk about January 6th. First of all, January 6th and the violence here is not the same thingThey try… some right wing to say I’m comparing it, not comparing it, what I’m saying is they will compare it”
First things first, Al Sharpton of all people pretending he’s some arbiter of what’s right and wrong as it relates to riots is hilarious considering his sordid history, but I digress.
Sharpton’s comparison of the anti-Israel campus mobs to the January 6th defendants was interesting when one takes into account that, unlike the J6 defendants who have had the book thrown at them in addition to many being held without bond for long periods, the pro-Hamas demonstrators likely will not spend much if any time in jail.
In fact, the UCLA protesters who were arrested reportedly never even saw the inside of a jail cell and were given free breakfasts before they were released in what amounted to little more than a field trip:
And, not surprisingly, there was already talk about the protesters who were released coming back to rebuild the encampment:
And in the aftermath of the Columbia University encampment and occupation debacles, the “punishment” for some students by their professors was to announce that they don’t have to take final exams, that they’ll be getting As for their courses – a policy that campus administrators greenlighted Wednesday.
Wash, rinse, repeat. Far-left activists keep doing what they do because there are rarely if ever any consequences.
And that brings me to my next point, Sharpton’s claim about Democrats “losing the moral high ground.” When exactly did they ever have the moral high ground? Was it before or after the Antifa/Black Lives Matter-led riots in 2020? Before or after the crime-riddled Occupy Wall Street encampments from 2011? Before or after the stalking of conservative Supreme Court Justices in the spring and summer of 2022?
As unfortunate as it was, the Capitol riot was a one-time thing. But we could go back 20, 30, 40, 50 years or more to see how the activist left led by professional agitators have used violent protest as a tool to manipulate public sentiment in order to get what they want.
Will they be successful this time around? It’s unlikely, considering an overwhelming majority of those recently polled indicated they supported Israel over Hamas in the war. Relatedly, only three percent said the Israel-Hamas war was the most important issue to them personally, which is further evidence that the anti-Israel left’s attempts at raising awareness of their “cause” and turning public sentiment against Israel aren’t working.
With any luck, the pro-Hamas movement here in the U.S. will be a miserable failure on par with the Defund the Police movement’s epic crashing and burning. But even if it does, it won’t be long before the next violent left-wing call to action begins, because as history has shown us, it’s just who – and what – they are.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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