Dec 28 '05 - 505 W - Vote Good + 10 :: Bad - 8 Bicyclists with Bombs :: Riding with Osama
Published December 27th 2005, by New York PressBy Bret Liebendorfer
There’s nothing like some good old Times-hating from our friends at the Post. According to Tuesday’s “Times Watch,” which takes up the paper’s full editorial slot, the Times is at the forefront of the burgeoning anti-anti-terror movement. Were our friends at the paper of A. Hamilton and A. Peyser exercised over Times reports on warrantless spying and extraordinary rendition? Of course.
But such sins together occupied less of this fire-breathing dispatch than the Times’ stance in favor of the war on the war against bicycles. Specifically, Times reporting on undercover NYPD infiltration of the Critical Mass biking movement.
This seemed a strange report to object to, until we saw that the use of such cops is “to protect the people of New York.” It starts with bicycling, and ends in anarchy and terror, we suppose.
What was really shocking here was not so much the tardiness of the Times’ story “breaking” the news, though, but the story’s irrelevance. After a year of ham-handed police actions to shut down Critical Mass, the last few months have been uneventful, netting zero arrests.
But even during the anti-Critical Mass heyday, would it really have been a surprise that the same Manhattan police who block entire streets (causing more traffic delays than the Brooklyn police, who usher the procession along efficiently), throw cyclists off their bikes and arrest dozens for “parading without a permit” would deploy undercover agents to find out the bikers’ true role as witting dupes for Hazbollah? Or some such.
Real news concerning Critical Mass occurred a few months ago when the NYPD went on bicycle lock-clipping sprees in areas where activists gather, most notably the Bedford Ave. L stop, echoing an RNC-era move when police gleefully clipped locks at Union Square, where (coincidentally, of course) many of the activists were stationed.
The only reported act of violence during these bike rides—again, that’s bike rides, not terror conferences—came when rapper Foxy Brown (or someone driving her SUV) struck two cyclists with her gas-guzzling terrormobile. This after having allegedly shouted vaguely racist and homophobic slurs at cyclists when her trip to Louis Vuitton was delayed when she fell behind the bicycling procession.
Despite the lack of violence, the Post fears that the Times is compromising the NYPD’s ability to monitor “back-pack toting terrorists.” Our suggestion? Send Andrea Peyser into the dark heart of the Islamist–bicyclist alliance. It’s time she reclaimed her lost columnist of the year crown.
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