If the world is to take seriously their concerns about globalization and the role of agencies such as the World Bank and WTO, it's time that protesters with a genuine interest in reform turn on the anarchists and agitators who use them as a front to pursue mindless violence.
Sadly, and predictably, the protest against about 25 trade ministers meeting in Montreal this week to iron out problems heading into the next round of World Trade Organization negotiations in Mexico turned violent on Monday.
As they had done before in Genoa, Gothenberg, Quebec City, Prague, Washington and Seattle, protesters who purport to defend social justice stood by or even cheered as morons in bandanas, gas masks or other facial coverings emerged from their midst to vandalize public property, store windows and luxury automobiles.
No matter how plaintively many of the 200 persons arrested plead their innocence, saying they were doing nothing more than exercising their right to free speech, their failure to do anything to stop the vandals or identify the culprits to police belies their claim.
As long as protest organizers insist that The Gap and Burger King, and even a Canadian Armed Forces recruitment centre, are "legitimate targets" and do nothing to discourage violence, their credibility remains non-existent.
"What we have called for is mass mobilization, a march," according to Tamara Herman, who speaks for Popular Mobilization Against the WTO.
"At the same time, we respect everybody in this march and we respect the fact everyone will make their own decisions and do whatever they have planned," she said, demonstrating why protesters don't deserve or get much public respect.
"To us, a couple of broken windows poses no disrespect to human dignity the way the Canadian Armed Forces and companies that use sweatshops do."
Apparently, Herman and others among her misguided ilk consider themselves greater servants of democracy and protectors of Third World citizens than the elected politicians who are trying to negotiate in a civil manner a global trade treaty that provides more equitable market access for the world's poorest countries.
The proliferation of bilateral trade agreements, such as NAFTA, among some of the world's strongest economies have set up preferred trading relationships that undermine WTO objectives. While there's no doubt that developing countries which in good faith opened up their markets to global competition in the last round of WTO talks were badly let down by rich nations' protectionism and greed, it makes the current Doha round of talks all the more important.
If the protesters who apparently want to scrap the WTO have their way, it will only exacerbate the kind of protectionism and isolation that already has caused so much harm to the world's poorest citizens.
Just what these social justice do-gooders hope to accomplish by scuttling the Montreal talks, aimed primarily at getting Americans and Europeans to ratchet down their devastatingly high agriculture subsidies, isn't at all clear.
If the protesters' goal is to help the world's poorest people, surely it's best done by supporting trade rule reforms that ensure Third World farmers aren't forced out by highly subsidized cheap imports from the EU or the U.S., not by heaving garbage cans through the window of a restaurant franchise owned by a Montrealer or beating a citizen who takes exception to a bandana-clad moron wrecking his Porche.
Democratically elected politicians shouldn't have to conduct video-conferences, spend hundreds of millions on security to gather in a desert kingdom, the Alberta wilderness or heavily fortified urban centres, or contemplate gathering in a ship mid-ocean to discuss issues of importance to all global citizens.
In creating this abysmal state of affairs repeatedly by abusing their right to legitimate free expression, the protesters show themselves to be thrill seekers to whom democracy has become a convenient excuse to support or conduct violence and vandalism.
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