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In recent days, one person was killed in Seattle and two people were injured in Bloomington, Ind. Dozens of similar incidents have occurred across the United States. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/us/bloomington-car-attack-protesters.html By Neil MacFarquhar <https://www.nytimes.com/by/neil-macfarquhar> July 7, 2020 The driver of a red Toyota first stopped, then unexpectedly accelerated into a crowd of dispersing demonstrators in Bloomington, Ind., on Monday night, injuring two of them in the latest of a disturbing rash of vehicular attacks targeting protesters. The demonstration, inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, had sent several hundred people marching through the college town, demanding the arrest of a small group of men who had threatened a Black civil rights activist. Dramatic video footage of the attack showed a woman clinging to the car’s hood and a man clutching the driver’s door handle as the vehicle zoomed forward. The police were still searching for the hit-and-run driver on Tuesday. “It was terrifying,” said Rachel Glago, 28, whose friend, she said, had jumped onto the hood to avoid being run over. “I wanted to stop the car, I wanted to help her, I was screaming, I could hear other people screaming.” Dozens of similar incidents have occurred across the United States in recent weeks, although it is difficult to assess which attacks are premeditated and which are prompted by rage when drivers find their route blocked by crowds. The tactic has previously been mostly used by extremist jihadist groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda, as well as Palestinian militants. “It is not just an extremist thing here, but there are social media circles online where people are sharing these and joking about them because they disagree with the protests and their methods,” said Ari E. Weil, the deputy research director at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats of the University of Chicago. “Sharing memes and joking about running over people can lead to real danger.” There have been at least 66 car attacks nationwide since George Floyd was killed by the Minneapolis police on May 25, Mr. Weil said. Seven of them have been by law enforcement officers, he said. That included two in New York which Dermot Shea, the police commissioner, defended as an appropriate use of force because he said the police vehicles were under attack. Prosecutors have brought charges in about 24 of the cases so far, Mr. Weil said, including hate crimes, and have dismissed four as accidental. Perhaps the most high-profile example of a car attack in the United States is from the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, when James Alex Fields Jr. killed Heather Heyer, a counterprotester. Mr. Fields was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. Evidence at the trial included the fact that he had shared images online of cars ramming into people before participating in the far-right rally. Some of the crashes at recent protests have also been fatal. Summer Taylor, 24, who worked at a veterinary clinic, died on Saturday after a man drove a car through a march <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/05/us/summer-taylor-seattle.html> on a Seattle highway. Another protester died after being hit in Bakersfield, Calif., in June. The driver in Seattle, Dawit Kelete, has not been charged but is being held on $1.2 million bail, and the State Patrol announced it would ban demonstrations from Interstate 5. Supporters of far-right organizations — as well as the occasional government official or law enforcement officer — have been circulating memes and slogans online encouraging such attacks. In Richmond, Va., a driver sought to intimidate protesters with his truck and hit one demonstrator’s bicycle in early June, prosecutors said. The driver, who was charged with assault, told the police he was a high-ranking Ku Klux Klan official, court documents said. In Seattle, the King County Sheriff’s Office announced that one officer had been placed on administrative leave after posting a picture of a vehicle hitting someone under the commonly shared phrase “All Lives Splatter” and another line about moving off the road. The officer, Mike Brown, is Gov. Jay Inslee’s cousin, and the governor said in an interview that he was deeply disappointed by his cousin’s post. “It’s never acceptable, but particularly now when we’re trying to heal the divisions in our community between police and citizens,” he said. Vehicular attacks have proliferated in recent weeks. Experts believe it is because of the combination of widespread protests across the country and the circulation of dangerous memes among extremist groups about running over pedestrians. “There has been an increasing amount of propaganda online calling for vehicular attacks on protesters, targeting the Black Lives Matter movement in particular,” said Josh Lipowsky, a senior researcher at the Counter Extremism Project. “It is being used as a form of intimidation against them to get them to halt their protests.” Attacks with vehicles are easy to conduct, he said, because they do not require a lot of planning or financial resources. In Bloomington, the two protesters were flung off the car as it made a sharp turn at an intersection, Capt. Ryan Pedigo of the Bloomington Police Department said. But those involved said they would not be intimidated. Ms. Glago, who said her friend sustained a concussion, said she was heading out to another protest in Bloomington on Tuesday, determined not to let drivers get away with what she said was “domestic terrorism.” “I think it is more important to be an anti-racist and to support those with less privilege from you than to just sit at home,” she said. _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
