Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) is assaulted by a protester during her first town hall meeting in her district of Minneapolis amid ongoing tension and protest of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations. The protester jumps out of his seat and charges the representative before reportedly throwing a substance on her. This came following her call on Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to resign.
It’s going to keep escalating. Wonder when this will mirror the Caning of Charles Sumner.
Yeah… but on the other hand I can see this becoming a common tactic to prevent people from speaking: spray them with water so they have to leave the event to get checked out, while the perpetrator faces relatively light charges because it wasn’t actually dangerous.
Wouldn’t work. Bring a fake bomb strapped to your chest to a town hall and you don’t get a lighter sentence just because it wasn’t a real bomb. Pretend terrorism is treated the same as real terrorism.
Because that’s an explicit threat. Spraying water is—at least on the face of it—a step below throwing rotten fruit or creme pies or fake blood: you can always claim it was meant to be symbolic.
Edit for clarification: The point is, you can deliberately make it as non-threatening as possible, and it may be obvious to everyone that it’s not a threat—but if there’s a protocol to always check anyway, you’re shutting the speaker down by exploiting the protocol rather than the threat.
Ah, I see. I didn’t realize the water was squirted out of a plastic flower on the attacker’s lapel.
But joking aside, no court would ever interpret the act “on the face of it.” Rotten fruit, pie in the face, fake blood, you’re right, those have lots of historical precedent as symbolic acts of protest. “Mystery fluid flung at someone’s face” has historical precedent too, but not so symbolic.
I understand what you’re trying to say, but you’re not thinking like a judge. If you were a judge, would you really want an article in a law book to describe you as the one who thought it was a good idea to greenlight the throwing of mysterious fluids at politicians’ faces as an act of protest?
I’d shut up and take the L on this one. You’re failing to understand and it’s not getting better you.
Let’s not jump to conclusions. That doesn’t appear to be what happened here.
I’m not talking about this event in particular, I’m talking about the assumptions you have to make when responding to events like this. Because your response will influence what others do in the future.