A mob of Muslim activists sacked and set fire to a Christian church in Niger this weekend to protest the arrest of an influential imam.
On Saturday night, scores of demonstrators in Maradi, Niger’s third largest city, torched the church of the Assembly of God in the Zaria neighborhood along with the car of the parish pastor. In another neighborhood, the Life to the Full Christian church was sacked.
Witnesses toldAgence France Presse (AFP) that on late Saturday evening, groups of young Muslims laid barricades across the road and burned old tires in protest of the arrest of Cheick Rayadoune, the influential imam of the mosque of Zaria.
Police had arrested the imam earlier in the day after he had preached at Friday services against a new government bill on the organization of the exercise of worship, calling the proposed legislation “anti-Islam.”
After several hours of detention, the imam was released.
A senior official of the Niger’s Ministry of the Interior told AFP that there is “nothing anti-Islamic” in the proposed legislation, which is the fruit rather of extensive consultation and is intended to counter measures advocated by “obscurantist terrorist organizations” in the country.
In 2017, Niger’s Ministry of the Interior convoked Nigerien Muslim scholars to work together on drafting the bill.
In late April, the Council of Ministers adopted the legislation, which was drafted to “prevent the risks of abuses found in other countries” and to provide means for the state to “regulate practices that are common in the religious sphere,” according to an official statement.
The council’s communiqué emphasized a “total absence of rigorously defined norms” concerning “the exercise of worship” in the nation, against a backdrop of increasing “fundamentalist and extremist religious tendencies” in various regions of the country.
The bill still needs to be adopted by Parliament to become law.
Imam Cheick Rayadoune has said that he was misinformed about the content of the bill, having been falsely led to believe that it would impose same-sex marriage. He said he will correct the error in his sermon this Friday. Meanwhile, police have detained 178 Muslim demonstrators over Saturday’s violence.
Niger is a country that is overwhelmingly Muslim, with only 1-2 percent of Christians of a population of more than 20 million.
The country is not unaccustomed to religiously motivated violence.
After the publication of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed by the French newspaper Charlie Hebdo in 2015, anti-Christian mobs killed ten people in Niamey and destroyed most of the churches in the capital, as well as in Zinder, the second largest city in the country.
A Muslim couple has been sentenced to seven years in federal prison each for enslaving a West African girl for more than 16 years until she escaped with the help of neighbors, the U.S. Department of Justice.
Mohamed Touré and Denise Cros-Touré, who are citizens of the Islamic dominated African country of Guinea, and lawful permanent residents of the U.S., were also ordered to pay their victim $288,620.24 in restitution in the forced labor conviction, according to Yahoo news.
Prosecutors say the couple — members of “wealthy and powerful Guinean families” — arranged for the victim to travel to Texas from rural Guinea in early 2000.
Starting as a young girl, the couple forced the victim named Djena Diallo “to cook, clean, and take care of their biological children, some of whom were close in age to the victim, without pay for the next 16 years,” the release says.
The administrative state, the federal leviathan, the Swamp: The monstrous, centralized, bureaucratic, entrenched decision-making apparatus within the federal government that seems to answer only to itself.
On Sunday night’s episode of Life, Liberty & Levin, LevinTV host Mark Levin and Claremont Institute senior fellow and University of Nevada, Reno, Professor John Marini talked about how that Swamp got to be so deep and how things are actually worse now than most people realize.
“The administrative state is such a pervasive phenomenon that most people think of it simply as the bureaucracy,” Marini explained. “But it’s really much more pervasive than that, because it not only is established in the institutions that are created by government, but it also has a kind of authority … that allows politicians to defer to that authority and relieves them, really, of making the kind of political decisions that they need to make about things like making laws.”
The problem with this scenario is not just that the administrative state mechanism is teeming with progressive ideology, regardless of who controls Congress or the White House, but that its very existence runs contrary to the Constitution.
“There’s absolutely no authority for the administrative realm in the Constitution,” Marini explained. “Every authority that is in the Constitution is a political authority, so it derives either from the legislative, executive, or judicial powers.”
“Now, every government has to have an administration, obviously, but the administration that we have now — and the reason why it’s sometimes called rational administration — is not merely carrying out the political will; it’s establishing its own authority to carry out, to deal with, problems that those who have political authority are no longer dealing with,” Marini explained. “They’ve, in a certain way, turned those decisions over to those who have specialized knowledge.”
One of the biggest shifts towards this model occurred during the “Great Society” program push of the Lyndon Johnson era, when Marini said Congress went from being a lawmaking body to a “administrative oversight body.”
“There’s no question that this is all part of the progressive legacy” and the progressive experiment to “replace civil society” with technocratic decision-making from a modern administrative government, Marini explained. “In a certain way … that extends all the way down almost to the family — that every other kind of social organization that once dealt with the problems that are now handled by bureaucracies, all of those things have been turned over, you might say, to professionals.”
Levin and Marini talked about the fact that the descriptions “expert” and “professionals” are really only “credentials that give them the authority for that. That is not the same as knowledge.”
Marini also added that this kind of thinking was a far cry from the kind of governance initially intended for the United States. Among the American Founders, he explained, “there would have been no substitute for making these moral decisions based on human reason. There’s no way that you can delegate that to some other body.”
Supporters of President Donald Trump started lining up for his reelection campaign kickoff rally in Orlando, Florida around 2:30 a.m. Monday–just under forty-two hours before the scheduled 8 p.m. Tuesday start. Trump said Monday morning over 100,000 ticket requests have been made for the rally that is being held at the Amway Center which has a reported capacity of 17,000 to 20,000 depending on the seating configuration.
The rally will feature President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump, along with Vice President Mike Pence and Second Lady Karen Pence. The campaign announced on Friday it will be holding an all-day “45 Fest” tailgate party outside the Amway Center with giant screen TVs to accommodate an expected massive celebratory overflow crowd.
Big Rally tomorrow night in Orlando, Florida, looks to be setting records. We are building large movie screens outside to take care of everybody. Over 100,000 requests. Our Country is doing great, far beyond what the haters & losers thought possible – and it will only get better!
WKMG-TV reported the first Trump supporter arrived around 2:30 a.m. Monday:
…Eight Trump supporters started camping out Monday morning, with the first one showing up at 2:30 a.m. The rally is scheduled to begin at 8 p.m. Tuesday.
Gary Beck, a Trump supporter from Panama City, was the first in line.
“There’s going to be a bunch of people, and it’s going to be pretty intense,” Beck said. “The electricity is going to be high. It’s time for America to get back on its feet and be made better than it’s ever been before.”
Street closures for Tuesday around the Amway Center have been announced:
The City of Orlando says the streets surrounding the Amway Center will begin closing at 9 a.m. Tuesday. Additional closures are expected to be put in place by the U.S. Secret Service. https://t.co/Mj7WQ2VoWIpic.twitter.com/oeaD2ZkDdM
A voter registration drive will be held by a pro-Trump group outside the Amway Center Tuesday. Florida’s elections are decided by razor-thin margins, so groups such as this one see it as imperative for Trump’s reelection bid that every eligible supporter is registered to vote.
Roger Stone is requesting proof that Russians hacked the DNC server, as was reported in the Mueller report. Stone claims if the Russians didn’t hack the DNC, his case should be dismissed.
As we’ve pointed out…. the entire fake Russia collusion narrative was based on the fairy tale that Russia hacked the DNC and then provided emails they stole to WikiLeaks. Roger Stone is out to prove that this narrative is a total fabrication.
We reported on May 11, 2019, that Roger Stone and his legal team requested the report from Crowdstrike, the firm connected with the Deep State who reportedly did inspect the DNC server after emails were released by WikiLeaks. This report was used by the FBI and the Mueller gang as support that the DNC was hacked by Russia.
Stone’s position is that if the Mueller team and the FBI did not inspect the DNC server, then how can they know that the server was hacked. This logical argument makes sense –
The chain of custody of evidence is kind of a big deal. If the FBI didn’t have custody of the server, and if they never examined it, they cannot verify what happened to the data on it. https://t.co/0PmN50YAmy
The Mueller team fought back against the Stone team and argued that it is not necessary to see the documents that support that Russia hacked the DNC –
If it is "so obvious" the Russian government orchestrated the email disclosures of the 2016 campaign, why are the #Mueller leftovers in the #RogerStone case asking the court to relieve them of that very obligation, saying they should "not be required to prove" that very fact? pic.twitter.com/WdfSzSsvF2
The entire Russia collusion delusion is a sham. To date there has been no information reported that absolutely confirms that the DNC was hacked by the Russians. No reports to date show that the DNC server was inspected by the Mueller team and the FBI. Since this is the case, there is no way the Mueller team can claim the server was hacked.
Since there is no proof that the emails were hacked, the reports that Russians were involved in the collusion delusion evaporate. Others agree with this assertion.
After speaking w/ my @FBI sources & a @nytimes reporter with direct knowledge of the handling of the @DNC server it’s true – there was no direct examination or physically custody of the DNC server – an "image" (i.e. copy) of the server was examined only: https://t.co/yDJKCYmUQC
We reported two weeks ago that NSA Whistle blower Bill Binney looked at the DNC data leaked by WikiLeaks and determined that it was definitively not hacked, it was copied to a disk or flash drive.
NSA Whistleblower and longtime intelligence analyst Bill Binney on continuation of #RussiaGate fever: "The problem with the Mueller Report & the Rosenstein indictment is it’s based on lies."
… that three of the Russian GRU officers on the DOJ wanted list were allegedly working concurrently on multiple non-related projects like interfering with the 2016 United States elections (both HRC and DNC) while at the same time they were also allegedly hacking anti-doping agencies (Images 2-3).
Above are pictures of the individuals the FBI says were working on both the DNC/HRC email hacking and the Olympic doping projects.
The same guys were working on both projects which is all but impossible. (Do we really know if they’re even Russians?)
The fact that the three had multiple concurrent high impact and high visibility project assignments is odd because this is not how typical offensive cyber intelligence teams operate. These units tend to be compartmentalized, they are assigned to a specific mission, and the taskforce stays together for the entire duration of the project.
Also, WikiLeaks has stated numerous times that Russia did not provide them with the emails they leaked in 2016 and Julian Assange has stated that WikiLeaks had nothing to do with Russia.
But of course the Mueller gang never interviewed WikiLeaks in an effort to determine how they received the Clinton emails. Of course the Mueller team could not risk WikiLeaks saying the emails were not received from Russia which would destroy their Russia hacked the DNC fairy tale.
Roger Stone continues to fight back! On Friday Stone filed two documents with the court! The first document was a 15 page reply from Stone to the government’s opposition to a motion to suppress.
In this first document Stone filed his reply to the government’s opposition to his “motion to suppress all evidence as fruit of illegal search warrants and evidentiary hearing.”
Stone states –
The specific challenge to the truthfulness of all the warrants is the unproven claim that the Russian state transferred the DNC and DCCC, and other campaign officials’ data to WikiLeaks. Or, said a different way, WikiLeaks received the data from the Russian state. The government should not have represented this as a fact to the various district judges and magistrates in order to obtain the search warrants.
Stone continues –
The government has never had to prove its case. The series of misrepresentations is foundational.
The government does not dispute in its opposition: “The Office cannot rule out that stolen documents were transferred to WikiLeaks through intermediaries who visited during the summer of 2016.” Robert S. Mueller, Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election, 47 (2019) (emphasis added) (hereinafter “Mueller Report”). Declarations from William Binney and Peter Clay, experts in this field concur that WikiLeaks did not receive the stolen data from Russia. (Doc. 100-1; Doc. 100-3). This evidence was discoverable to the government simply by analyzing the documents from the WikiLeaks database. It required no warrant of any entity or person at all.
This is devastating to the Deep State and the Mueller gang. Even though the government claims the Russians sent emails to WikiLeaks the government agrees it cannot prove it and yet the government used this as the basis for obtaining all warrants related to the Mueller investigation and all actions related to the fake Russia collusion farce!
Stone continues –
Because the Russian state did not transfer the data to WikiLeaks, all other allegations, including communications with Assange or WikiLeaks are irrelevant and immaterial to investigation about Russian interference with 2016 election.
Stone lays out more arguments in the remaining 12 pages of his reply attached above.
But Roger Stone was not done. He next filed another reply with the court, this 5 page document relates to the court’s opposition to a motion to compel.
In this document Stone is compels the government to obtain and provide to Stone the unredacted portions of the Crowdstrike report that the FBI and the Mueller gang used to create the Russia investigation and the Mueller investigation.
Defendant, Roger J. Stone respectfully moves to compel discovery of the unredacted copies of the CrowdStrike Reports. In light of the government’s representation that it does not have the unredacted reports
Stone’s documents are devastating to the Russia stole DNC emails and provided them to WikiLeaks farce! He is facing an uphill battle with the crooked Obama appointed judge overseeing his case (Amy Berman Jackson) but the facts are in his favor.
Let’s hope Roger Stone is able to present all the information available to destroy the ‘Russia Collusion’ sham once and for all.
Harvard has rescinded their acceptance of conservative activist Kyle Kashuv, a survivor of the 2019 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, to its 2023 undergraduate class.
In a Twitter thread Monday morning, Kashuv explained to his 300,000 followers that he believed his potential classmates had pressured the university to cancel his admittance after news reports emerged of derogatory remarks Kashuv wrote in text messages and a study document when he was 16.
When those reports first broke Kashuv issued a statement saying he was "embarrassed," but contended he had matured in the years since the remarks had been made. Kashuv added that surviving the shooting at his high school, which killed 17 of his classmates and teachers, had transformed him.
"After the story broke, former peers & political opponents began contacting Harvard urging them to rescind me," Kashuv wrote. Kashuv shortly thereafter received a letter from the university alerting him that they had the right to cancel his previous admittance and asked for a full explanation of his remarks within 72 hours.
Kashuv responded to the head of admissions with a two-page letter further explaining the situation, how he has matured since he made the derogatory statements, and why he believed he would still make a valuable addition to the Harvard community.
5/ I responded to the letter with a full explanation, apology, and requested documents. pic.twitter.com/yWd6FeKWOJ
The conservative activist also reached out to the university’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion to begin a conversation about how he could expand his outreach to minority communities.
Despite this correspondence, Harvard sent Kashuv a letter on June 3 informing him the university had decided to withdraw his acceptance after an admissions committee vote. Kashuv linked to requests to meet with admissions officials for a further explanation of why the decision had been made and whether or not there was anything he could do or exhibit to change the decision. But the university declined all requests.
"Throughout its history, Harvard’s faculty has included slave owners, segregationists, bigots and antisemites," Kashuv tweeted, rounding out his thread on the decision. "If Harvard is suggesting that growth isn’t possible and that our past defines our future, then Harvard is an inherently racist institution. But I don’t believe that."
The conservative activist, who has used his national platform to defend the Second Amendment and advocate for stronger school safety measures, said he is exploring all options about his next steps.
"In the end, this isn’t about me, it’s about whether we live in a society in which forgiveness is possible or mistakes brand you as irredeemable, as Harvard has decided for me."
MONTERREY, Nuevo Leon – Mexican federal authorities raided a large warehouse outfitted by cartel members to allegedly manufacture industrial quantities of fentanyl in closer proximity to Texas.
The raid was announced on Sunday afternoon by Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office (FGR). The operation was coordinated with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Following an investigation, federal authorities obtained a search warrant from a judge in Nuevo Leon and raided a warehouse in the Ciudad Mitras Industrial Park and a home in the Pedregal La Silla neighborhood.
During the warehouse raid, authorities found a full-scale production laboratory and series of notebooks with formulas allegedly describing the manufacture of fentanyl. Police arrested a chemist identified as Guadalupe “A” on drug production charges.
The fentanyl laboratory is the first of its kind in Nuevo Leon. Authorities have not revealed which criminal organization they believe is linked to the plant.
Editor’s Note: Breitbart News traveled to the Mexican States of Tamaulipas, Coahuila, and Nuevo León to recruit citizen journalists willing to risk their lives and expose the cartels silencing their communities. The writers would face certain death at the hands of the various cartels that operate in those areas including the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas if a pseudonym were not used. Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles are published in both English and in their original Spanish. This article was written by Tony Aranda from Nuevo Leon.
A pro-Trump political group is eyeing a big investment in four 2020 battleground states.
The Committee to Defend the President told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview it would invest $1 million each in Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan, and North Carolina ahead of the 2020 presidential election. Its efforts will be primarily focused on mobilizing and registering one million new voters from those jurisdictions.
Ted Harvey, the group’s chairman, told Breitbart News it was “crucial” for President Donald Trump to be reelected so he could continue to move the country forward for all Americans.
“You look at what the president has done without even having Congress on his side,” Harvey said. “He has has some significant successes, if he didn’t have the Mueller investigation over his head as a distraction I think he would have far greater successes.”
Now that Mueller investigation was over, Harvey expressed the political battle was just starting.
“Some of these states no one thought we were going to win in 2016, but we did,” Harvey said. “If we can continue to hold them it sends a strong message to the rest of the country.”
He said that Trump is reelected and Republicans take control of Congress it would make it more difficult for Democrats to continue obstructing the president’s agenda and push for impeachment. Such a result, however, won’t come easy.
“It’s going to take a concerted effort to mobilize Trump supporters and that’s what we’re trying to do,” he added.
The Committee to Defend the President, formerly known as Stop Hillary PAC, spent more than $6 million during the 2016 presidential election, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Most of the money went to targeted advertising to highlight former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s handling of the Benghazi attacks.
Now the group has turned its attention to defending Trump from what it sees as an organized attempt by the left to derail his presidency.
“When we saw Democrats throwing a national temper tantrum after the election—literally the very next day having organized uprisings all across the country to discredit the election and the incoming administration—we’ve decided to dedicate ourselves 100 percent to defending the president and his agenda from the left-wing media and Democrats.”
The group’s efforts have been multifaceted since Trump took office. It’s touted the president’s achievements during his first 100 days in office, run ads pressuring senators to back judicial nominations, and vigorously countered Democrat’s calls for impeachment.
In 2018, the committee heavily intervened in congressional races to ensure the president’s allies were elected. One of the most successful efforts took place in Tennessee, where the committee invested $1 million to see Marsha Blackburn elected to the U.S. Senate.
Instead of just blanketing the state with advertising like some other groups, the committee invested time and resources in expanding Tennessee’s midterm electorate.
“We spent over a million dollars going after identified Trump supporters who voted for the president in 2016, but typically do not vote in off-year elections,” Harvey said. “Through our sophisticated social media an tracking system, we were able to identify 350,000 such voters.”
Once they were identified, the committee worked ensure these voters showed up on election day. Starting in February 2018, the group spent more $680,000 on television and social media ads targeted specifically targeting such voters. Knowing that ads weren’t enough, the committee spent more than $160,000 on grassroots outreach—knocking on more than 70,000 doors across the state. Money was also spent on get the out vote and direct mail, among other initiatives.
It is impossible to tell the extent of the committee’s impact in Tennessee, but the results seem to indicate some measure of success. Turnout was significantly higher than during the state’s last Senate race in 2014. Blackburn defeated Phil Bredesen, a popular former Democrat governor, by more than 242,000 votes. Although the victory was not totally surprising given Tennessee’s shift toward Republicans, Blackburn won even after being outspent by nearly three million dollars.
Harvey said his group will build off the tactics formed in Tennessee when registering and mobilizing voters in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Florid ahead of the presidential election. This time, though, the individuals being targeted will be different.
“We’re going after people that have been disenfranchised in the political process for one reason or another,” Harvey said. “Whether they are veterans that have come back from their service and have yet to register to vote or just don’t think they’re vote matters anymore.”
The committee plans to “identify a million people” that “believe in securing our border, believe in the Second Amendment, are pro-life, and pro-military.” Harvey said these will not necessarily be individuals conventionally drawn to politics, but rather those who feel left behind by the status quo.
“I think there is a huge groundswell of people that have been disenfranchised by the political process of the last few decades,” he said. “They don’t think their vote counts because most Republican and Democrat presidents have ignored them and their problems.”
Despite the years of neglect, Harvey expressed Trump’s standing as an outsider and his willingness to push partisan orthodoxy has created an opening among such voters.
“I think because Trump has been pursuing policies that are actually benefiting them and their families, we can get these people registered and involved” he said.
The committee believes states in the rust belt, like Michigan and Pennsylvania, are especially fertile territory.
“Pennsylvania was essentially the forgotten America that Trump campaigned about in 2016,” Harvey said. “The state was significantly impacted by trade agreements, whether it was NAFTA or the trade arrangements with China, Pennsylvania was losing manufacturing jobs and other industries heavily.”
“If you look what has occurred since Trump took office and started implementing his policies,” Harvey said, citing the president tax cuts and tariffs on steel. “Pennsylvania has had more than 5,000 new manufacturing jobs come back, they have had 120,000 overall jobs come back.”
“So we should be able to tell that story in Pennsylvania and other states across the country,” Harvey said. “There is a powerful message here to reach Americans that feel disenfranchised.”
The committee’s focus is also strategic. Trump only carried the two states marginally—Pennsylvania by less than 45,000 votes and Michigan by less than 11,000 votes—in 2016. Victories there, along with North Carolina, Florida and Wisconsin, made Trump’s electoral college victory possible, despite a three million popular vote deficit.
Harvey expressed the political realities presented by 2020 and helping Americans who feel left behind are connected.
“If we don’t hold the White House and take back the U.S. House of Representatives, we’re never going to be able to secure the border or stop the stream of drug and human traffickers coming across,” he said. “If Trump is not president and Republicans don’t control congress, than many of the issues important to those that feel disenfranchised can’t be addressed.”
Harvey citied the Trump’s stance on trade with China as proof.
“This president is the only one in the last 30-t0-40 years to take China seriously, not only as threat to our economy, but also as a threat to stability around the world,” he said. “This president is finally pointing out the ways China is breaking the rules, he’s holding them to task by changing these trade agreement to ensure they’re enforceable and fair.”
“That’s good for America,” Harvey added. “That’s good for American workers and it will be good for consumers as well.”
During an appearance on “Sunday Morning Futures” on Fox News Channel, senior White House trade adviser Peter Navarro praised the tariffs used by President Donald Trump.
According to Navarro, the tariffs achieved more in two days on immigration than Congress was able to accomplish in 20 years.
“Polls show that about 80 percent of Americans believe there’s a crisis at the border. If you ask Americans in a poll, what do you think about 100,000 illegal aliens moving every day on a conveyor belt from Guatemala up to San Diego and El Paso, I’d say about 90% of them would object to that. And the tariffs that President Trump used, he got in two days more than Congress did in 20 years on this. We have got troops down at the southern border that Mexico has deployed. We have got Mexico committing to take the phony asylum seekers onto Mexican soil, which will deter further immigration from the Northern Triangle down at the southern border with Mexico. And we have a very strong commitment to break up that conveyor belt, which is this Rube Goldberg machine of narco-traffickers and human traffickers making billions of dollars off these poor immigrants coming up, and off the American people who have to take their drugs, and the illegal immigrants, which hurt us in terms of jobs.
The government of Hong Kong issued a statement Sunday apologizing to its people for triggering widespread protests with a proposed extradition bill many fear could result in the mass incarceration of pro-democracy Hong Kongers to communist China. The apology appeared to do little to quell calls for chief executive Carrie Lam to resign.
“The chief executive admits that large-scale confrontation and conflict took place in Hong Kong society due to the inadequacy of the government’s work, causing many residents to be disappointed and saddened,” the government said in a statement, according to the Hong Kong Free Press (HKFP), adding:
Having regard to the strong and different views in society, the government has suspended the legislative amendment exercise at the full Legislative Council with a view to restoring calmness in society as soon as possible and avoiding any injuries to any person. The government reiterated that there is no timetable for restarting the process.
“The chief executive apologises to the public, and promises that [she] will accept criticism in the most sincere and humble way,” the government statement added. Lam herself made remarks on Saturday, urging Hong Kong to “give [her] another chance,” but she did not offer an apology as contrite as the one the government issued in the statement on her behalf.
The response to Lam’s call for the people to give her another chance Saturday was a protest the next day that attracted nearly two million people, almost double the number that came out to protest against her last week. The Civil Human Rights Front (CHRF), the group organizing the protests, put out the estimate on Monday, which the HKFP noted would amount to nearly 30 percent of the entire population of Hong Kong. The group explicitly rejected Lam’s apology in their statement.
“Facing such public rage, Carrie Lam simply makes apology through a press release, for ‘the inadequate work of the government’ but not for pushing to pass the bill or police’s crackdown on protesters,” the statement read. “She even stressed that she would continue to serve the citizens. This is a total insult to and fooling the people who took to the street! Hong Konger will not accept this!”
Protesters also rejected the move to merely table the bill, rather than eradicate it from the legislature permanently; demanded that the government apologize for repeatedly referring to the peaceful protests as “riots;” and demanded an apology for using rubber bullets, tear gas, and batons to attack protesters, then accusing the protesters of being violent.
While apologizing for the extradition bill, the government did not apologize for calling the protests “riots”; instead, an adviser to Lam denied that they had.
“I don’t want people to think that the chief executive and the government are saying the students are rioters … The government did not categorise the events on a particular date as a riot,” Lam Ching-choi, a member of the Executive Council, said following the apology statement.
Lam, personally, lost significant goodwill with her attitude against the protesters.
“(An) apology is not enough,” a teenaged protester identified as Victor Li told Reuters. On the other end of the age spectrum, an 80-year-old protester told the Morning Post, “Carrie Lam should really reflect on herself and apologise. She should also think about whether she has the capacity to be the city’s leader.”
Lee Wai-po said he had never been to a protest until last week.
As the South China Morning Post‘s Luisa Tam noted on Monday, Lam compared protesters to ungrateful and undisciplined children and described herself as the mother of Hong Kong.
“In a recent television interview, Lam said that if she gives in to every demand from her son, he would be spoiled, end up regretting getting everything he wanted, and he would blame her for not teaching him how to distinguish right from the wrong,” Tam relayed, an analogy that she noted outraged many protesters given its patronizing language and one that many mothers of protesters rejected. One group of mothers wrote in a petition to oppose the extradition bill, “We would definitely not use tear gas, potentially lethal rubber bullets and beanbag rounds on our children, and we would not remain unmoved on seeing young people covered with blood after being bashed by police batons.”
Lam appears to also have lost some support within her political faction. Speaking anonymously, a “pro-establishment lawmaker” told the South China Morning Post that he considered Lam’s response to the protests “not ideal” and that she “sounded too tough,” inspiring more protests rather than calming the political climate. “While she could not accept people’s calls for her to resign, she also suggested that the people were wrong,” the lawmaker said. “I don’t know what was she trying to tell Hong Kong people in her press conference.”
Another anonymous lawmaker said that even supporters of the extradition bill have soured on Lam because of her “attitude” and “that she feels she’s always right.”
Joining the chorus of disapproval Monday was former Secretary for transport and Housing Anthony Cheung Bing-leung, who urged Lam in an interview to fully withdraw the extradition bill instead of merely tabling it.
“The crisis underscores the complete failure of our political system. The central government can no longer expect the problems in Hong Kong to be resolved by focusing on economic and livelihood issues, while avoiding political reform,” Cheung said, suggesting Lam owed the public an apology in person.
Hong Kongers have for years expressed fears that the Chinese communist government would violate their “one country, two systems” agreement that grants China sovereignty over Hong Kong but not political control to erode its capitalist freedoms. Thousands of Hong Kongers marched on New Year’s Day against growing Chinese influence in the city, as China revealed a plan to connect Hong Kong and Macau into one large “Bay Area” and more than 100,000 organized to honor those killed in the Tiananmen Square massacre early this month.
The extradition bill has alarmed many, as it would allow Hong Kong to extradite its citizens to China for violating Chinese law. The Communist Party routinely disregards many basic international human rights conventions and considers exercises of free speech and religion crimes. Protesters in Hong Kong expressed concerns that the government could extradite them for publicly criticizing communism or worshipping in private.
