RUTHFULLY YOURS

In an interview with The College Fix, a Berkeley College Republican said that he and his compatriots feared for their lives during the violent riot last week and some of them continue to face threats from the “anti-fascist” (Antifa) terrorists on campus.

Naweed Tahmas, who helped organize the Milo Yiannopoulos speaking event, said he was “pushed and shoved” by agitators as he headed to help prep for the speech. As the demonstration devolved into a riot, he and his peers sheltered in place as left-wing goons threw firebombs at the building.

And now Tahmas said he’s been told to watch his back because he may get jumped, and an Antifa affiliate has also threatened to publish the names and contact information of those sympathetic to Milo’s visit, called “doxing.”

Undaunted by the harassment and threats, he told The College Fix he is proud to stand for free speech.

Tahmas told The Fix that the crowd was violent and menacing from the start.

By the time he got to the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union to begin prepping for the event at 5:30 p.m., a throng of students and other demonstrators flanked the building. As he walked through the crowd, protesters surrounded him and closed in on him, pushing and shoving him from all sides.

“We know who you are, you can’t hide from us,” Tahmas recalls them saying as he pushed through the crowd.

“It was so violent at that point,” he said. “They were surrounding me. They were assaulting me.”

Rattled but essentially unharmed, he made it into the building. There he met up with Yiannopolous and other Berkeley Republicans. But it was not long before someone pulled the fire alarm. Then protesters began shooting M-80 firecrackers at the building, with several narrowly missing the group and the police officers attempting to guard them.

Tahmas said one of Milo’s security guards, a former Navy Seal, even commented: “I haven’t seen protests like this since Afghanistan.”

As the protesters began to light fires around the building, Tahmas recalls thinking that “they [were trying] to burn the building with us in it.”

“I don’t think they would have had any regrets burning us alive,” Tahmas told The Fix. “We were basically like cattle. The protesters shouted, ‘We’re going to burn and shut your shit down.’”

When the event was canceled, they tried exiting from the back of the building, but still had to pass through a gauntlet of rioters yelling, “F-ck the Berkeley College Republicans!” Milo, in the meantime, made his way out separately to an underground parking garage.

Tahmas told The Fix that he ended up sleeping at a friend’s house that night for his own safety because someone had posted his personal information on Facebook and Twitter. He said he continues to face threats for his role in organizing the event. “One individual mentioned they were ‘going to catch me in the shadows’ when I was on campus,” he said.

Tahmas disagreed with the notion propagated by some on the left that the troublemakers only came from outside groups.

“It was a combination of both [students and protesters],” he said. “To suggest students played no role in the protests in preposterous. There is footage of even the so-called ‘non-violent’ protesters cheering the violent actions of the other protesters. There were meetings on campus organizing the protests that alluded to the planned use of violent tactics.”

Even worse, at least one Berkeley staffer is apparently under an FBI investigation for his role in the riot, which includes allegedly assaulting a Trump supporter. UC Berkeley acknowledged on Facebook over the weekend that the university is “working with the FBI to pursue all leads” in the case.