My Take | A few hooligans are blackening the name of an admirable mass movement

When hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong people hit the streets in protests against the government’s extradition bill, they did so peacefully and with dignity. The entire world was in awe.

But a subset of those protesters has turned violent on multiple occasions, the latest being their brief occupation and vandalising of the legislature. Their violence has threatened to overwhelm the movement’s messages to the world and erode support among locals.

Yet prominent media pundits and opposition politicians continue to make excuses for their most blatant criminal behaviour, preferring to lay all responsibilities on the government and the police. When police intervene, it’s brutality. When they don’t, they are setting up a trap for protesters to break the law.

Fernando Cheung Chiu-hung, of the Labour Party, actually said on television that the police could have protected the legislature but decided to disperse to let the protesters in and vandalise the place so as to discredit them.

Then you have Lewis Lau Yiu-man, an occasional commentator with the yellow-ribbon outlet Stand News. Writing in The New York Times before the July 1 protests, he said the movement was both peaceful and “forceful”.

“The use of force, in particular, is a divisive issue,” he wrote. “Some insist on the necessity of keeping the protests peaceful, so that they will seem morally legitimate and may gain sympathy from the broader public. Others … believe that some measure of force has become necessary; otherwise, the government will simply ignore them.

“The ‘do not split’ idea acts as a bridge between these two factions by promoting mutual respect for diverging views within the protest movement.”