Two white reporters assaulted by black mob in Norfolk, Virginia

First, here is the May 1 column, by Michelle Washington, an editorial writer and columnist at The Virginian-Pilot, which was linked at the Drudge Report today (my comments and those of readers follow):

Wave after wave of young men surged forward to take turns punching and kicking their victim.

The victim’s friend, a young woman, tried to pull him back into his car. Attackers came after her, pulling her hair, punching her head and causing a bloody scratch to the surface of her eye. She called 911. A recording told her all lines were busy. She called again. Busy. On her third try, she got through and, hysterical, could scream only their location.

Church and Brambleton. Church and Brambleton. Church and Brambleton.

It happened four blocks from where they work, here at The Virginian-Pilot.

Two weeks have passed since reporters Dave Forster and Marjon Rostami—friends to me and many others at the newspaper—were attacked on a Saturday night as they drove home from a show at the Attucks Theatre. They had stopped at a red light, in a crowd of at least 100 young people walking on the sidewalk. Rostami locked her car door. Someone threw a rock at her window. Forster got out to confront the rock-thrower, and that’s when the beating began.

Neither suffered grave injuries, but both were out of work for a week. Forster’s torso ached from blows to his ribs, and he retained a thumb-sized bump on his head. Rostami fears to be alone in her home. Forster wishes he’d stayed in the car.

Many stories that begin this way end much worse. Another colleague recently wrote about the final defendant to be sentenced in the beating death of 19-year-old James Robertson in East Ocean View five years ago. In that case, a swarm of gang members attacked Robertson and two friends. Robertson’s friends got away and called for help; police arrived to find Robertson’s stripped, swollen corpse.

Forster and Rostami’s story has not, until today, appeared in this paper. The responding officer coded the incident as a simple assault, despite their assertions that at least 30 people had participated in the attack. A reporter making routine checks of police reports would see “simple assault” and, if the names were unfamiliar, would be unlikely to write about it. In this case, editors hesitated to assign a story about their own employees. Would it seem like the paper treated its employees differently from other crime victims?

More questions loomed.

Forster and Rostami wondered if the officer who answered their call treated all crime victims the same way. When Rostami, who admits she was hysterical, tried to describe what had happened, she says the officer told her to shut up and get in the car. Both said the officer did not record any names of witnesses who stopped to help. Rostami said the officer told them the attackers were “probably juveniles anyway. What are we going to do? Find their parents and tell them?”

The officer pointed to public housing in the area and said large groups of teenagers look for trouble on the weekends. “It’s what they do,” he told Forster.

Could that be true? Could violent mobs of teens be so commonplace in Norfolk that police and victims have no recourse?

Police spokesman Chris Amos said officers often respond to reports of crowds fighting; sirens are usually enough to disperse the group. On that night, he said, a report of gunfire in a nearby neighborhood prompted the officer to decide getting Forster and Rostami off the street quickly made more sense than remaining at the intersection. The officer gave them his card and told them to call later to file a report.

The next day, Forster searched Twitter for mention of the attack.

One post chilled him.

“I feel for the white man who got beat up at the light,” wrote one person.

“I don’t,” wrote another, indicating laughter. “(do it for trayvon martin)”

Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teen, died after being shot by a community watch captain with white and Hispanic parents, George Zimmerman, in Florida.

Forster and Rostami, both white, suffered a beating at the hands of a crowd of black teenagers.

Was either case racially motivated? Were Forster and Rostami beaten in some kind of warped, vigilante retribution for a killing 750 miles away, a person none of them knew? Was it just bombast? Is a beating funny, ever?

Here’s why their story is in the paper today. We cannot allow such callousness to continue unremarked, from the irrational, senseless teenagers who attacked two people just trying to go home, from the police officer whose conduct may have been typical but certainly seems cold, from the tweeting nitwits who think beating a man in Norfolk will change the death of Trayvon Martin.

How can we change it if we don’t know about it? How can we make it better if we look away?

Are we really no better than this?

Michelle Washington is a columnist for The Virginian-Pilot. Email: michelle.washington@pilotonline.com

This is a remarkable document. Two white liberal reporters are wilded by a huge black mob. Their paper doesn’t report it until two weeks later, and then only in a column, not a news article. Their colleague (and presumed superior) reluctantly comes out with the fact that it was blacks who did it, and indicates that this bothers her. She suggests, however weakly, that there is something wrong with the blacks who did this (“We cannot allow such callousness to continue unremarked”), and that the event is not just an isolated incident but part of a larger phenomenon that must be identified (“How can we change it if we don’t know about it?”). This is the first time I remember seeing a liberal or mainstream publication say this. Yes, some liberal media have from time to time described incidents of black-on-white violence as such, but none that I have seen have ever suggested that the media’s cover-up is itself a problem and must end.

But then there is the ambiguous final sentence: “Are we really no better than this?” Is Washington saying that the media are covering up black-on-white violence, and that they should stop doing that? Or is she suggesting that “we,” meaning all of us, are somehow responsible for such violence, that the black violence reflects equally on all of us, meaning that it’s still whites’ fault?

Of course, in one sense the continuing and escalating black racial violence against whites is whites’ fault, and particularly the fault of the mainstream media, since they have systematically ignored it and covered it up and downplayed its importance and so encouraged blacks to do more of it.

Notwithstanding the article’s inadequacies, it could be seen as a liberal’s paradigmatic first baby step toward racial reality.

Also, this may be the only way that the truth starts to come out: when black mobs attack WHITE JOURNALISTS. The same has happened before, in I forget which city, but the coverage remained local, of course. This story will also remain local, not covered in any mainstream national media. But at some point a black mob is going to attack a national media figure. And then, and then…

Whoops, there I go again, about to suggest that a major change in liberalism could happen. Remember Lara Logan? After months of silence following her ordeal at the hands of an Egyptian mob she finally gave a detailed account of her experience. But she covered up the Islamic aspect of it. Her story made no impact on the national conversation regarding Muslims. So I take back what I was about to say. Even if a prominent media figure were wilded by blacks, there is no reason to believe that it would lead to a fundamental change in the media’s concealment of and non-response to America’s black-on-white intifada.

On another point, let’s look again at how the incident started:

Two weeks have passed since reporters Dave Forster and Marjon Rostami—friends to me and many others at the newspaper—were attacked on a Saturday night as they drove home from a show at the Attucks Theatre. They had stopped at a red light, in a crowd of at least 100 young people walking on the sidewalk. Rostami locked her car door. Someone threw a rock at her window. Forster got out to confront the rock-thrower, and that’s when the beating began….

[Marjon Rostami] tried to pull [Forster] back into his car. Attackers came after her, pulling her hair, punching her head and causing a bloody scratch to the surface of her eye.

Forster’s behavior suggests an item that might be added to John Derbyshire’s famous list of things to do if you wish to avoid being hurt by blacks:

10(j) If you have stopped your car at an intersection and your car is surrounded by a mob of threatening blacks and one of them throws a rock at your car window, do not get out of your car to confront the rock thrower. Stay in your car and drive away as quickly as you can.

Forster, who got out of the car to “confront the rock thrower,” which led immediately to his beating, and then to the beating of his female colleague and friend, evidently did not understand that blacks throwing rocks at his car were dangerous and were not going to be appeased by a rational conversation consisting of Forster saying to them, “Why did you do that? What have we done to harm you”? Which I’m sure is exactly what Forster said or was about to say before he was beaten.

Such are the helpless, clueless, contemptible saps whites have become under the influence of liberalism. What will shock them out of it? Only continued, repeated, ever-worsening black violence directed at themselves.

Normal people, i.e., non-liberals, can read about a phenomenon such as black-on-white violence and understand it. I personally have never been physically attacked by blacks. No one close to me has been physically attacked by blacks.* I understood the reality and the nature of the phenomenon simply from reading news stories about it. But liberals cannot grasp a fact that goes against liberalism by simply reading about it. They can only grasp it, and only partially and weakly at that, if it directly affects them or their relatives, friends, or colleagues. To paraphrase Nietzsche, only real suffering can bring the white race out of its present death state. I don’t call it a sleep state, I call it a death state.

_____

*Correction: in the early 1960s, my ten-year-older sister was grabbed from behind by a well-dressed black man as she entered her New York City apartment building; she screamed at the top of her lungs and kept screaming and the man ran away. She was not hurt.

- end of initial entry -

Wayne Lutton, who sent the article, writes:

I am on the mailing list of the Historic Ships in Baltimore organization (they are preserving the USS Constellation and a couple of WW II ships) and receive invites to attend July 4th and New Years’ Eve events in the Inner Harbor. Dangerous place at the best of times. But re this report, imagine Katie Couric taking some TV show down there to see the fireworks and being attacked by blacks. She might have a private moment of awareness. But would she share this with her audience? Not likely. Her public posture would be that this reinforced how “we have failed them and need to do more,” they mistook her for a white interloper, etc.

LA replies:

Agreed.

James P., who also sent the article, writes:

A mob of blacks beat two white victims in Norfolk. The paper waited two weeks to report it, and really only did so because the victims were employees of the paper. The police “coded the incident as a simple assault, despite their assertions that at least 30 people had participated in the attack.” The police know who did it (black youths from nearby public housing) but don’t really care and don’t even bother to interview witnesses.

Notice the reporter’s despicable device of asking rhetorical questions rather than making positive statements of fact:

“Could violent mobs of teens be so commonplace in Norfolk that police and victims have no recourse?”

She asks this rather than stating forthrightly the truth, i.e., “Violent mobs of black teens are so commonplace in Norfolk that police and victims have no recourse.”

She continues:

“Was either case racially motivated? Were Forster and Rostami beaten in some kind of warped, vigilante retribution for a killing 750 miles away, a person none of them knew? Was it just bombast? Is a beating funny, ever?”

She asks this rather than stating forthrightly the truth: “Black teens beat these people for being white, and thought it was funny to do so.”

“Here’s why their story is in the paper today. We cannot allow such callousness to continue unremarked, from the irrational, senseless teenagers who attacked two people just trying to go home, from the police officer whose conduct may have been typical but certainly seems cold, from the tweeting nitwits who think beating a man in Norfolk will change the death of Trayvon Martin.”

But the beating was not “irrational.” There was a definite rationale—black hatred of whites. The police behavior may seem “callous,” but it is also rational. Since liberalism has prevented the police from preventing these crimes or punishing the guilty, why should they be anything but indifferent?

“How can we change it if we don’t know about it? How can we make it better if we look away? Are we really no better than this?”

Apparently what bothers the author is the “callousness” of the thugs and the police, not their behavior. The “it” that we need to change and make better, according to her, is the “callousness” of the criminals and the police. However, to change the actual behavior of the thugs, to permit the police to deter and prevent crime, and—last but not least—to require the media to report black crime honestly rather than “looking away,” would require a fundamental reevaluation of liberal ideology. This is unlikely to happen.

A reader writes:

Note three things: (1) no reporting of incident for two weeks despite it being known; (2) police description as simple assault; and (3) author’s inability to state unequivocally that this was a racially motivated assault.

LA writes:

By the way, notwithstanding her surname, Michelle Washington, as we can see from her photograph accompanying her column, is white—the first time I remember seeing a white person named Washington. Maybe she’s married to a black man.

Paul K. writes:

Just a few days ago you had a similar story about an assault on a motorist at McDonalds It contained the line, “Jeffrey Easton, 48, told officers he got out of the car and asked them to move, leading to an argument. Several juveniles reportedly started throwing rocks at him.”

White people—do not get out of the car! In countries like South Africa drivers do not even stop at stop signs because they know their car will be swarmed by mobs of black youths. We are headed in the same direction, so start acting accordingly.

Another indication of the clueless liberalism of these reporters is that they were attacked only four blocks from their office, so they must have had some idea of the neighborhood they were in. And please, the Attucks Theater? I see from its website that it is named for Crispus Attucks, one of the heroes of Black History Month. Would that not have raised a red flag? Perhaps these reporters follow the Andrew McCarthy rule and choose to regard each member of a black mob as an individual who must be judged on his own merits.

May 3

Mark Jaws writes:

I am going to give some of the white progressives who run the American media a little bit more credit than you are. They are not defenseless, clueless, and contemptible saps mindlessly adrift in some death-like stupor, but rather despicably clever manipulators of information who know that to report on the anti-white intifada is to hurt their Democratic Party. While the younger members of the white liberal establishment may actually believe they can reason with a black mob, as Forster evidently did, the executive media types are not buying their own lies. I think they see the world as it is and they do everything they can in their personal lives to avoid the Frankenstein Black Urban Monster they have helped to create. They are also old enough to remember the time of “white backlash” against civil rights and the urban riots of the 1960s and are painfully aware there is still a considerable component of the vital white independent vote which will abandon the Democrats when crime—particularly black crime—is one of the main issues of the day.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 01, 2012 10:00 PM | Send