Earlier this week, Black Lives Matter Toronto ended more than two weeks of continuous public protest in front of the city’s police headquarters. In that short time, the group negotiated a unanimous city council vote to review police accountability, especially as it relates to black residents. Premier Kathleen Wynne met briefly with BLMTO organizers in front of a throng of media, and promised to meet them again soon about their concerns. Young people, specifically black queer and trans women, transformed the black community’s pain over police violence into civic action and inspiration.

This ability to respond to state-sanctioned aggression with peaceful resistance is beautiful and rare. Yet a BLMTO organizer is being labelled a racist, violent person because she publicly prayed for the strength not to harm those who harm her. Yusra Khogali’s tweet asking, “Allah, give me the strength not to cuss/kill these men and white folks out here,” is the opposite of a call to violence — it is an honest appeal to restraint and wisdom in the face of violence, racism, and misogyny.

Since one of my Newstalk1010 Radio colleagues publicized Khogali’s tweet, which she wrote in February, the media has demanded she explain herself. Was this some kind of threat? Was such a comment befitting of the representative of a public movement? Khogali has turned down all media requests, but her subsequent tweets suggest she will not apologize for the controversial remark.

Nor should she. Khogali and BLMTO have achieved such impressive political success and relevance that their previously ignored public comments are now deemed relevant. While folks are now clearly interested in Khogali’s thoughts, they shouldn’t be surprised by them. The most common response to violence and injustice is anger, and black women who express that anger should be heard instead of being scrutinized as perpetrators themselves.

Those who deny that Khogali is truly fighting against oppression will obviously fail to understand her intense feelings. But many of us know that she and hundreds of supporters slept on the cold pavement outside police headquarters because they oppose the systemic racism and hyper-masculinity that drives modern policing.

Violence makes their blood simmer, but they do not respond in kind. They turn their frustration into words, songs, tweets, prayers, chants, and political demands. They camp on public property in freezing rain storms, and refuse to leave until someone comes to address them. Somehow, people mistake these righteously angry responses to violence for violence itself.

Khogali rightly pointed out that it took Wynne and her local counterpart John Tory days or weeks to respond to BLMTO’s demands, including a request to review the Special Investigations Unit that oversees police, but only hours to respond to a tweet she made two months ago. The local media contributed to this misplaced focus through its eagerness to scrutinize Khogali’s tweet, an eagerness that in many cases has not been found in the coverage of BLMTO’s historic and successful protest.

If only the media had been as eager to get answers to the actual police violence that Khogali and protesters faced on March 21, when Toronto Police Service officers pushed and kicked the mostly black women who were demonstrating outside 40 College Street in order to dismantle their tents and extinguish a contained fire they were using to keep warm. Too bad it’s so easy to justify the violence of the powerful, while questioning the tweets of someone who endures aggression, and who prays not to return it in kind. Police chief Mark Saunders has still said nothing about the protest, or his officers’ violent disruption of it, and few in the media seem to be demanding a response.

Khogali joined me recently on the radio to explain what the movement she’s been a part of means to her. “We’ve taken a space of violence, and created love,” said Khogali, her voice raspy from days of singing and chanting. “From this point forward, that’s how we’re going to move, with love as the foundation of everything we do.”

Those who question whether this statement contradicts Khogali’s tweet should look to the local movement she and others have worked to build. Black Lives Matter is very clearly all about love, even though it is borne out of anger and despair. But asking organizers to challenge systemic oppression in a way that does not offend or frighten an indifferent public is itself a form of violence.

Desmond Cole is a Toronto-based journalist. His column appears every Thursday.