Jack Bauer said:
Jinx 2 said:
Waco1947 said:
I feel sorry for the kid. Geez I don't know what I would have done.
Sandmann's statement was either written by his parents or by a lawyer they hired to represent him--probably the latter, since his mom has apparently refered to the Hebrew Israelites as "black Muslims."
The incident started with yelling between two groups--the kids and the Hebrew Isralites. The HIs sound dangerous in the longer video I saw. Where were the chaparones who should have steered the kids somewhere safer?
Mr. Phillips thought he could diffuse the tension by singing his peace song and getting inbetween the 2 groups. One of the kids--Nick--wouldn't back off.
What baffles me about this whole thing is how fast the right-wing media managed to turn this story into another example of white people being mistreated by the MSM. Mr. Phillips is a villain for singing and chanting to try to prevent violence and shouting? He didn't call names or shout at anyone. All he tried to do was diffuse the situation.
Wrong.
The kids were mistreated by MSM by declaring they "surrounded" Mr. Phllips and chanted build that wall and other racist slurs (They didn't). NOBODY says Mr. Phillps is a villain, stop making stuff up.
They were literally sitting there minding their own business and singing school songs. Some old man walks right up to them banging a drum in their face. At first they thought he was joining them in their songs, then they didn't know what he was doing. How would a bunch of teenagers from KY know the intent of an elderly Native American?
One kid stands there with a smirk for a few mins, he doesn't talk to or touch Mr. Philips and then he continues on.
Just goes to show that people are going to disagree with what happened even when there's video evidence:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/viral-video-catholic-school-teens-taunting-native-americans/story?id=60498772One student who was part of the group Kentucky youth group claimed he and his classmates were initially targeted by a middle-aged African-American man with a megaphone who yelled racial slurs at them as they were doing school cheers while taking a head count and preparing to get on buses to go home.
"We then went back to our school chants ("CCH") and clapped," the student said in a statement to ABC News, asking to remain anonymous. "At that point, an Indigenous American man with a few other men approached the center of the boys and in particular one boy (who goes to my school but I do not know him). He was beating his drum and chanting something that I couldn't understand. The boy from my school didn't say anything or move -- he just stood there.
"As time went on the man with the drum got closer to his face. The guy with the drum yelled something at us that I could not understand. After a couple of minutes of the man standing there beating the drum in the boy's face, he walked away. The African American man with the megaphone came back and started yelling obscenities at us. Some upperclassmen from our school told us to load onto the bus which is what we did. That was the end. That is everything that I saw."
But Kaya Taitano, a college student who posted one of the videos of the confrontation, said no one from the Native American group instigated the episode."No one from the indigenous peoples' march called anyone names," Taitano told ABC News. "It was a peaceful movement. Prior to this madness, they all joined hands and danced in a circle."https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/picture-of-the-conflict-on-the-mall-comes-into-clearer-focus/2019/01/20/c078f092-1ceb-11e9-9145-3f74070bbdb9_story.html?utm_term=.3498d06ee2e1The three groups that met Friday in the cold shadow of the Lincoln Memorial could hardly have been more different. They were indigenous rights activists from Michigan, Catholic schoolboys from Kentucky some wearing Make America Great Again hats and Hebrew Israelites from the nation's capital.
They were Native American, Caucasian and African American; old, young and middle-aged.
And there, beneath the fallen president's promise to work "with malice toward none, with charity for all," they came together in an incident that would echo nationwide for its ugliness.
The Israelites and students exchanged taunts, videos show. The Native Americans and Hebrew Israelites say some students shouted, "Build the wall!" But the chant is not heard on the widely circulated videos, and the
Cincinnati Enquirer quotes Nick Sandmann, the student at the center of the confrontation, saying he did not hear anyone utter the phrase.
When a Native American elder intervened, singing and playing a prayer song, scores of students around him seem to mimic and mock him, a
video posted Monday shows. At one point, he found himself face to face with Sandman, whose frozen smile struck some as nervousness and others as arrogance.
Neither budged.
Video footage of the tense confrontation quickly went viral, stirring outrage across the political spectrum. The Kentucky teens' church apologized on Saturday, condemning the students' actions. By Sunday, however, conservative commenters on social media were saying it was the students who had been wronged, and the organizers of the March for Life, the event that drew the teens to Washington,
rescinded their initial criticismof the youths.
Sandmann, an 11th-grader, said in a statement provided to the Enquirer that he and his classmates had been called "racists," "bigots" and worse. He said he was "remaining motionless and calm" in hopes that things would not "get out of hand."
The Native American elder said he was caught in the middle.
"When I took that drum and hit that first beat . . . it was a supplication to God," said Nathan Phillips, a member of the Omaha tribe and a Marine veteran. "Look at us, God, look at what is going on here; my America is being torn apart by racism, hatred, bigotry."
The incident, and the finger-pointing that followed, seemed to capture the worst of America at a moment of extreme political polarization, as discourse once again gave way to division, and people drew conclusions on social media before all the facts were known.The students, from Covington Catholic High School in Park Hills, Ky. were one of scores of school groups bused to the annual March for Life.The Native American activists were there for the Indigenous Peoples March.So were the Hebrew Israelites, who believe African Americans are God's chosen people and the real descendants of the Hebrews of the Bible."We were there to teach, to teach the truth of the Bible, to show them our real history," said Shar Yaqataz Banyamyan, one of five Hebrew Israelites on the Mall that day.The group has militant members and "a long, strange list of enemies" that includes whites, Jews, Asians, members of the LGBTQ community, abortion rights advocates and continental Africans, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.Banyamyan said he and those with him Friday believe in using blunt language, but not violence. A video he posted to social media shows them insulting other marchers."Where's your husband?" one Hebrew Israelite asked a woman who had stopped to argue with the group. "Bring your husband. Let me speak to him."
At one point, the Hebrew Israelites began arguing with Native American activists, telling them the word "Indian" means "savage," according to the video.
While the groups argued, some students laughed and mocked them, according to Banyamyan and another Hebrew Israelite, Ephraim Israel, who came from New York for the event. As tension grew, the Hebrew Israelites started insulting the students."Tell them to come over in the lion's den instead of mocking from over there," Banyamyan can be heard saying in the video. "Y'all dirty ass little crackers, your day is coming.""They were sitting there, mocking me as I was trying to teach my brothers, so yes the attention turned to them," Israel told The Washington Post. "I explained to them, you want to build the wall for Mexicans and other indigenous people, but you've never seen a black or a Mexican shoot up a school."...
Sandmann said in his statement that he "did not witness or hear any students chant 'build that wall' or anything hateful or racist at any time. Assertions to the contrary are simply false."
He said he and his classmates were shouting cheers they knew from school, with permission from their chaperones, "to drown out the hateful comments that were being shouted at us by the protesters."
By 5 p.m., the light was fading on the Mall and both marches had mostly petered out. A group of around 100 Covington students had gathered on the stairs of the Lincoln Memorial, where they had been told to meet before catching their buses home.
The Hebrew Israelites were also still there, and still insulting the students."You all are a bunch of Donald Trump incest babies," Israel said to them, according to the video, before asking if there were any black students among them.When a black Covington student came forward, Israel called him "Kanye West" and the n-word, the footage shows. He tells the teen his friends will one day harvest his organs, an apparent reference to the racially fraught movie "Get Out."At that point, the students began chanting, jumping and shouting. The songs culminated in one student stripping off his shirt and shouting as others cheered