Omtatah's omissions

During the PEV, Omtatah argued that violence was justified: indeed, he invoked Jesus in his piece in the Nation, if memory doesn't fail. (I can no longer find the piece online, but I distinctly remember it: it is difficult to forget a defence of ODM's violence -- which at the time included mass murder and ethnic cleansing -- that calls in divine assistance.)

Imagine my surprise, then, at discovering his defence of the view that violently resisting the police is waging war on the state, which, we must assume, is always wrong. This is both silly and false. There's absolutely no reason to think that resisting the police -- even violently resisting the police -- is waging war on the state: if you violently resist the police who are trying to steal (or, these days, kidnap) you, your clear intention then is simply to prevent an injustice, rather than to take the fight to the state itself.

I'm guessing the comeback here would be that one can wage war against the state without intending to wage war against it -- all that's necessary for an attack to count as an act of war against the state is the attacker's intention to violently attack an agent of the state. But that's unpromising because it doesn't distinguish terrorists from angry drivers: the terrorist's intention in attacking a policeman is to overthrow the state, but the driver who attacks the traffic policeman lacks that intention. The acts are the same in the relevant bit -- they both intend to attack some policeman -- which would make them both acts against the state. It's obvious, though, that only the terrorist fits that description.

Moreover, even if one accepts his claim that violently resisting the police is waging war on the state, it simply doesn't follow that that is always unjustified -- there are clearly imaginable circumstances when it would be legitimate to use force against the state or its agents.

It's clear that some Muslims behaved badly during the protest, and those who did ought to face the legal consequences. It's also clear that violence is almost always unjustified, and that it wasn't justified in this case. But, just as was the case during PEV, that doesn't deprive them of the right to protest an injustice or to have their grievances heard.