I watched the whole stupid video waiting for the assault to happen. There was no assault, just five full minutes of an idiot whining about wanting all the protesters to go somewhere else so that he and his son — who looked as if he’d really rather not be there — could exercise their God-given right to play with a football at the exact place and time of their choosing.
The guy charged with assault was in fact the person that was assaulted and the person who de-escalated the situation and prevented “the victim” from being attacked by a random jack-ass with white knight syndrome.
The “father” here is behaving like a right jackass. And UofT’s incident report is a load of bullshit. The paper says that Aly is scheduled to appear in court July 9 at 2 p.m., and I hope that’s when the charges will be dropped, if not earlier, because this whole thing is a waste of time.
That said, I really, really don’t understand why they didn’t let them play ball in the first place. A protest site should not be any kind of fortress excluding ordinary people who want to do ordinary things, like playing football. Those two were not there to break the encampment apart, they didn’t have the capacity. And in any case, a TAZ is meant to be a place of freedom and freedom includes playing. One of the people in the video says “there is a genocide in the ME and you have time for football”, what an outragously stupidly puritanistic thing to say! The genocide is not happening on the UofT lawn, the protest is happening there. Let them in, worst case, what? They might read one of your signs??? Or they might go back and tell their friends that hey, the encampment people are actually pretty nice and maybe they have a point?
