OPINION: THE PRESIDENT’S LIES ABOUT A PRO-PALESTINE DEMONSTRATION THREW OUR REPORTERS UNDER THE BUS. WHAT NOW?

Our reporter Kate Burns called me Sunday afternoon, still in shock. She recounted the mob attacking her and eight other reporters in front of Adas Torah, a synagogue in the Pico-Robertson neighborhood in Los Angeles. Someone assaulted Burns in front of police and stole her phone while it was still recording. They threatened to come to her home, to rape and behead her, called her a whore, called other reporters faggots, and beat them. Our long-time reporter Sean Beckner-Carmitchel, was punched in the head during a gang assault.

As she recounted all this, Burns told me over and over that while all of the violence went on, the police watched and did nothing.

By Monday morning, the President of the United States, the Governor of California, and the Mayor of Los Angeles had all lied to the world about what happened. They ignored the fact that the pro-Israel mob committed most of the violence. Instead, the elected leaders portrayed the incident as an antisemitic attack on a synagogue.

It’s true that the protest took place at a synagogue, but pro-Palestine protesters weren’t targeting a worship service—it was Sunday, after all. They were demonstrating against a real estate show run by a company that sells land and homes in illegally occupied settlements in the West Bank.

“Come and meet representatives of housing projects in all the best Anglo neighborhoods in Israel,” the flyer for the event in the Jewish Journal reads. For context, “Anglo” here means English-speaking as opposed to Hebrew-speaking neighborhoods—not necessarily “whites only.”

“For the past several years, I’ve spent hours daily watching videos and reading reports from protests across the U.S., and two of the most violent events I’ve seen since 2020 have been mass attacks on pro-Palestinian protesters in LA: UCLA on 4/30, now [Pico-Robertson] yesterday,” Jay Ufelder of the Nonviolent Action Lab at Harvard’s Ash Center said on Twitter.

Legacy media have by and large failed to report on this story accurately. The majority of the actual work understanding these conflicts is done by activists, researchers and independent reporters who invest countless hours, often risking their safety to get the information they do. Legacy media are generally unwilling to make that commitment or pay anyone who is. So instead we get “both sides”—a superficial patchwork of opinions, sensational images and government officials’ statements with no further inquiry. This is a formula that always lets perpetrators of violence off the hook because it refuses to engage the balance of power.

On Monday, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass gave a closed-door press conference at the Museum of Tolerance. Standing behind Bass during the conference was former InfoWars employee Alex King, who’s gone on neo-Nazi podcasts to talk to the likes of Nick Fuentes, Gavin McInnes and Elijah Schafer.

Bass outlined how she’s responding to the violence: putting more cops on the street, increasing grants for security for nonprofits and pursuing a ban on wearing masks at protests. Fascist groups like the Proud Boys have spent years calling for bans like this. COVID-19 denial conspiracy theorists protesting mask requirements previously assaulted our reporter Kate Burns while she was getting cancer treatment, punching her and spraying bear mace into her surgery wound. On Sunday, the pro-Israel bigots who called her a cunt and a whore tore the mask she wears to protect her health from her face while they assaulted her.

No one at Bass’s conference mentioned the assaults on the press or the fact that the majority of the violence was perpetrated by the pro-Israel mob. The mob went after journalists specifically, attacking them, threatening them to delete videos of their attacks, stealing their phones. 

Andy Ngo, the fascist disinformation peddler, specifically targeted Burns, along with Carmitchel, on his Twitter account, while she reported. Rony Yehuda, previously involved with the UCLA attackers, targeted independent journalists online before the event, including one of our writers, and labeled them as “Antifa members.” The L.A. DA’s office has so far prosecuted just one of the UCLA attackers. 

At LCRW, nearly every story we run is an indictment of government’s failure to deal with organized bigoted violence. At times, our stories are about government complicity with it. This violence comes at a cost rarely paid by its enablers. Instead, the rest of us pay. My reporters are less safe every year. The brutality we’ve seen by police and the far-right is growing more intense and politicians are less and less willing to acknowledge it for what it is.

There are many things I have left unsaid about what happened on Sunday. We plan to write about it in more depth in the coming days. If you have any information on the people who attacked our reporters and colleagues, please reach out. Our reporters will need time and support to recover from their injuries and continue the work. Kate Burns is currently running a fundraiser to both take care of some expenses and plan for upcoming travel to report for us. If you’d like to contribute, please follow this link.

Abner Hauge

Editor in Chief