May day in Kreuzberg has become a day for rowdy punks and skinheads to turn the area upside down, and do as much damage as possible in a day. Why? Because they can. Because there's a day set aside for them to throw molotov cocktails at police, break windows and overturn cars under the pretense of political activism.

I was standing not far from that exact corner on 1 May 2009. That night, a huge group of punks had gathered under Kottbusser Tor. Every five to ten minutes, I would see a group of police in full riot gear march through to try to calm the rioters down - every time they would have to dodge molotov cocktails and pavers aimed at their heads. It's an incredibly dangerous situation to find yourself in and if it were any of you, you'd be in full self-defense mode and more than a little scared. I'm not saying that makes it ok to kick a woman who has fallen to the floor, but that sort of situation doesn't leave much room for anything but instinct and I find it difficult to hold someone who finds themselves in that situation fully accountable for their actions.

There are some pretty strong parallels between the sort of thing that happens every year on May day and the riots we saw about a month ago in London. If this footage were from England in August this year, I wonder if you would all be so quick to mount your high horses.

Here's some more background on what went down on 1st of May in 2010. http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,5529267,00.html

That's why gifs like this make me uneasy - not because of the violence they depict but because they're snapshots completely removed from context, so there's no way of knowing whether the violence was provoked or entirely unjustified.

Edit: Also, your comment is so ridiculously racist, I don't even know where to start.