Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:These are not scared or confused faces. And if you buy that statement, go ahead and send your money to the Nigerian prince already.
There was a LOT going on at this point. Watch the entire one hour video.
Then remember:
These boys had just been on an all day protest/march for something they believed in.
They were told to gather at the steps to go back to their hotel or wherever, for the night. They were assembling where they were supposed to.
They were being yelled at by some crazy dudes.
They were getting hot from being yelled at.
They started doing some school cheerleading type cheers. Some kids say it was to drown out the taunts from the Black Hebrew guys. Maybe it was just to focus inward on their group, show some group unity. Maybe it was to be aggressive back.
Yeah, maybe some of them yelled back at the Black Hebrews in response to being taunted.
AT THIS POINT Mr Phillips walks in, playing what he calls a "peace song" but what sounds to me like a lot of drumming.
The boys are all gathered in a group near the steps. Mr Phillips walks RIGHT INTO them. He doesn't walk around them to get to the top of the steps to meet his friends. He stops. He looks into the group.
Some of the boys start chanting and singing and hopping in beat to the drums. They are smiling. It is not at all clear to me that they are mocking him. They might be incorporating their school cheers into his song. They are heated up, revved up from events.
I don't know how you would expect the type of music Mr. Phillips is playing, to calm these kids down at all. It was drumming.
The boys did NOT approach Mr Phillips as he was peacefully playing music, and disrupt him. Mr. Phillips walked right up to and into their group, and then is complaining to the media that he felt surrounded, had no escape, and could not get through the group.
To require the teen boys at that point to back down, to walk away, to stop singing and chanting along with the music, is not to understand human nature. My own teen boy would probably have been singing and jumping up and down to the music at that point.
It is very hard to know how cell phone video would interpret your actions in such a situation.
Watch the complete video.