Last Updated on August 14, 2019
A medical worker in Hong Kong is going viral after holding up a sign with popular internet meme Pepe the Frog in solidarity with a young woman shot in the eye by police.
The story of a young woman who was shot in the eye by police during anti-government protests in Hong Kong has become an online symbol of the resistance for protesters across the city. Images were posted to Twitter showing a young medical worker wearing a faux eye patch and holding up a sign with Pepe the Frog that read “Police shot my eye, give me back my eye!”
https://twitter.com/bleachsk2/status/1161292156448968705
The images were also posted to Reddit and Facebook and garnered significant attention from opponents of police brutality tactics used by police during the protests, which center around a proposed extradition law that would allow the Chinese government to extradite any Hong Kong resident who has been found guilty of violating Communist Party Laws. Many wondered why it was acceptable for police to fire on unarmed protestors with such potentially weapons as bean bag shotguns.
As Breitbart reports,
Citing a source at the hospital tending to the protester, who remains unidentified, the South China Morning Post reported on Monday that the impact had “ruptured” the woman’s eyeball, but it was not yet a certainty that she would lose it. The unnamed source, a doctor, said the woman had endured six hours of surgery on her face to repair damage to her nose in addition to emergency measures to save her eye.
Police protocol bans firing bean bag rounds at protester’s faces, allowing their use only on bodies in cases of emergency.
Hong Kong policy denied that officers fired the shot that injured the woman, whose status as a protester has not been confirmed.
“There is no evidence showing that the cause of this incident was related to the police, Tang Ping-keung, deputy commissioner of Hong Kong police, said at a Monday conference,” the Communist Party propaganda outlet Global Timesclaimed on Monday. An unidentified source the Global Times claimed to be a police officer added it was “technically impossible” for police to shoot the woman to cause such an injury, though he did not explain why.
At press time, there is no additional information available about the medical worker with the Pepe sign seen in the Twitter photos. It’s worth noting that Pepe the Frog has been designated a white supremacist hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League and other far-left organizations, which raises questions as to why such a supposedly controversial and bigoted meme would be used by Hong Kong residents to protest police brutality.