BLM Rioters Get $6M Because Cops Didn’t Wear Face Masks

Daniel Greenfield March 06, 202  @ Sultan Knish Blog

The Black Lives Matter race riots in New York City were among the worst in the country. Racist mobs injured hundreds of police officers, started fires, looted stores and vandalized parks and statues. At least 450 businesses, many of them small and family owned, were damaged or looted by the rioters who claimed to be angry over the drug overdose death of George Floyd: a vicious career criminal who had previously robbed a woman by putting a gun to her stomach. 

 While Black Lives Matter was swimming in hundreds of millions of dollars, funneled to it by radical nonprofits, major corporations and Hollywood celebrities, family businesses in New York City looted by those rioters were offered a maximum of $10,000 to rebuild their shattered lives.

One small business owner in the Bronx complained that it would hardly even begin to cover the $200,000 in damages to her store after rioters “smashed glass display cases and medical equipment”. But participants in an extremist group’s Bronx protest are getting a much better deal. New York City will be paying $21,500 to each of the “protesters” in the Bronx for a total of as much as $6 million. And none of that money will be going to the looted businesses.

This has been described as the largest payout for mass arrests in American history.

The BLM riot era class action lawsuit claimed, among other things that the, “police officers responding to protests frequently failed to wear masks or to assist detained protesters in covering their noses and mouths, and on occasion even forcibly removed protesters’ masks, exposing protesters to a heightened risk of contracting COVID-19.”

Family businesses lost everything and cops and civilians were badly wounded during the BLM riots, but the police officers didn’t always wear masks when trying to control those riots.

Mott Haven, the Bronx neighborhood where the protest took place, was described as “mostly black and brown” and the police intervention as “racist terror.” Mott Haven is actually mostly Hispanic and while the lead plaintiff in the case is black, most of the protesters on video appear to be white hipsters wearing glasses. After the protest was controlled by the police, local business owners sent a message thanking the NYPD for protecting their livelihoods.

The media and leftist lawfare activists claimed that the Bronx protest was “peaceful and non-violent”. In reality, it was organized by a group known as FTP which stands for ‘F__ the Police” and was promoted with a flier featuring a burning police car.

Afterward a press release was put out describing how “the FTP formation launched #FTP4, the fourth in a series of militant actions exposing the every day brutality of the U.S. police state” and boasted that they “had to risk direct confrontation with the most powerful police state in the world to earn recognition of the human rights violations done by the U.S.”

This was as good as an admission that they had set out to provoke a confrontation with the police so as to be able to claim that they were the victims of police brutality.

Furthermore the press release stated that “we denounce any attempt to divide us from protestors who are non-peaceful or who liberate the ill gotten gains and excesses of capitalism.”

This was an endorsement and a defense of BLM rioting and looting.

A previous FTP manual contained not only an image of a burning police car, something BLM rioters repeatedly did, but included a section on “How to Shut Down a City” with a list of items like “Bolt Cutters”, “Bricks”, “Fire”, “Glass Bottles” and “Nails”. It urged “Sabotage Everywhere”.

But the police didn’t wear masks so these very fine people, who may have possibly been exposed to COVID while they were fighting police, get millions while the people whose lives have been ruined get a few thousand or nothing. That’s what a leftist justice system looks like.

None of the media coverage mentions anything about FTP, what it stands for or its manual and its defense of violence and looting. As was its habit during the BLM riots, it describes them in generic terms as “protesters” and the events as “racial justice protests”. These lies by omission have continued for years after the riots devastated communities and claimed so many lives.

FTP’s actions were linked to Decolonize This Place, a movement co-founded by Muslim NYU Professor Amin Husain. A previous FTP event, FTP III, had tried to shut down subways, engaged in vandalism, staged confrontations and used a manual promoting sabotage. The NYPD’s overwhelming response to FTP4 becomes much more understandable within that context. It’s a context that the media carefully fails to provide in its news coverage.

Amin Husain has declared, “I’m fighting for Palestine by fighting here.” He spread images promoting Hamas and the PFLP terrorist group and boasted of having fought in Israel, “I was throwing rocks, Molotov cocktails, the like.” Decolonize This Place had tweeted, “Find targets nearby, Find where these zionist fools live, and where there offices are, and act!”

“Nothing says “peaceful and nonviolent” like calling for an antisemitic purge of Jews.

But not all of the NYPD officers wore face masks while grappling with members of what looks a lot like a terrorist group with foreign enemy links. And so food will be taken out of the mouths of hungry children and millions will be reappropriated to the leftists who waged war on New York.

And the looted businesses will be on the hook to provide that money to their destroyers.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.