WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 01st September, 2020) The American public must join together in rejecting all forms of senseless violence from unwarranted police shootings and right wing militias to rioting and looting in US cities, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden said in a speech in Pittsburgh on Monday.
"We have to stand against the violence of unwarranted police shooting... of right wing militias [and] against the senseless violence of looting and burning and the destruction of property," Biden said.
Such violence from extremes and fringes of society was counterproductive and none of it could have any constructive or unifying outcome for Americans, Biden said.
"Violence is not protesting, looting is not protesting, it is lawlessness pure and simple. Violence will not bring change. It will only bring destruction, he added. Fires were burning across America "and we have a president who fans the flames," he said.
Biden said President Donald Trump was further dividing the nation rather than unifying it and his words and messages were sowing chaos rather than law and order.
Biden spoke on the issue after Trump and numerous Republicans repeatedly criticized him and the Democrats for not denouncing the three-month-long campaign of violence by the Antifa and Black Lives Matter movements in Democrat run states and cities. Republicans have said Democrats in those jurisdictions are trying to score political points in an election year by allowing the violent protests and riots and by refusing Federal assistance that Trump has offered to quell the unrest.
Protests against police brutality and racism started in numerous cities in the United States after the death of African American George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis on May 25. However, many of the protests turned into riots complete with violence against police and civilians and acts of arson, looting and vandalism, especially after subsequent deaths of African Americans in encounters with police.
