For your collection
Posted on 11/13/2015 6:23:15 PM PST by markomalley
In a still developing situation, the city of Paris, France, is under attack by terrorists armed with guns and explosives. Many dozens of people have been killed. A still undetermined number of people have been wounded. The terrorists took dozens of hostages in a concert hall. French police and military forces have been deployed. There is mayhem and blood in the streets of Paris.
President Obama has correctly described this day’s horrific events as “an attack on all of humanity and the universal values we share.”
Terrorism is politically motivated violence against a vulnerable population that is designed to intimidate, sow fear, create panic and alter public policy.
Terrorism is serious business that kills people, breaks bodies and alters lives.
It is not a game.
In the United States, the right-wing media and movement conservatives have for decades consistently used eliminationist and other violent rhetoric to describe liberals, progressives and other people with whom they disagree. As was seen in the recent attacks on a Charleston-area black church, and other violence by right-wing anti-government militias, such rhetoric does not float in the ether of the public discourse, harmless and unacknowledged. No, it does in fact lead to action.
In recent months, the right-wing media has used language such as “terrorism” and “violent,” or that the latter is “targeting police for murder” to describe the Black Lives Matter movement. Such bombastic and ugly screeds–which are wholly unfounded, with no basis in empirical reality–have also been used by right-wing opinion leaders to describe the African-American students who are fighting against racism at Yale and the University of Missouri.
There are many examples of this type of incendiary rhetoric from conservatives and their sympathizers.
A few examples.
Bill O’Reilly has declared “war” on Black Lives Matter and in doing so described them as a type of contemporary Ku Klux Klan (KKK). At its height of popularity in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the KKK was America’s largest terrorist organization. It was responsible for the murders of thousands of African-Americans. In contrast to the KKK, Black Lives Matter is a group dedicated to protecting the human rights of all people against state-sponsored violence and police thuggery and murder.
Ben Carson, in his designated role as a black conservative whose primary purpose is to disparage black Americans and to excuse-make for white racism, recently told Fox News’ Megyn Kelly that the black and brown students who are advocating for their full rights and respect at Yale University are ushering in “anarchy” and “this is just raw emotion and people just being manipulated, I think in many of these cases, by outside forces who wish to create disturbances.”
Likewise, Fox News has repeatedly described the student protesters at Yale and Missouri using the same language. O’Reilly has even gone so far as to suggest that Black Lives Matter and the students who are protesting racist treatment are part of a cabal that is engaging in “fascist” behavior and “running wild” against white people. Trumping his allusions to “fascism,” on his October 22, 2015 episode of his TV show, Bill O’Reilly even made the absurd claim that Black Lives Matter is akin to the “Nazis.”
These are implicit threats and overtures to violence as racial authoritarian fascists are a clear and present danger to democracy and freedom. Thus, they must be eliminated by any means necessary.
Other critics of the student activists at Yale University and Missouri such as The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf have even made the absurd claim that so-called “safe spaces” are being “weaponized” by student activists in order to deny free speech.
Terrorism has been practiced in the United States. It was used by a Herrenvolk white settler society built upon the genocide of First Nations peoples and the enslavement of African-Americans to control, intimidate, and murder non-whites. The decades of Jim and Jane Crow white supremacy were also a form of State-sponsored terrorism as well. Political violence continues in the present where in too many of America’s communities, police and other security forces kill with impunity, force the black and brown poor into a state of “custodial citizenship”, and act in a thuggish and illegal way towards the country’s most vulnerable citizens.
Black Lives Matter stands against such violence. The student protesters at Yale and Missouri who are fighting for fairness and justice stand against violence. Liberals and progressives as a matter of principle, a belief in the Common Good, and a humane society stand against violence.
Despite what the right-wing media, Bill O’Reilly, and the opinion leaders in the White Right routinely bloviate, those groups and individuals are not terrorists.
Real terrorists have killed people in the streets of Paris. The right-wing media needs to take note of that fact and moderate their rhetoric and abusive language accordingly.
Given the American right-wing’s casual habit of using violent language to describe their foes, and to gin up fear and anxiety among the movement conservative base, the Fox News’ right-wing echo chamber and its elites should be ashamed given the death and destruction that terrorism actually reaps in practice.
[Updated] Video reported by France 24
I wish you hadn’t posted that article, or at least I had not seen it yet. After reading only a few sentences, I lost my appetite for a late supper I am preparing. In fact, the stupidity expressed in that article raised my blood pressure by likely 10 points.
How do people who are so willfully blind survive? The depth of stupidity/willful blindness displayed in that article is breathtaking!
Black Lives Matter stands against such violence. The student protesters at Yale and Missouri who are fighting for fairness and justice stand against violence. Liberals and progressives as a matter of principle, a belief in the Common Good, and a humane society stand against violence.
You mean the girl who was screaming the F word at everyone and the activists who were threatening violence if they didn’t get their way?
For your collection
Oh Lord! Like we need more from the young, stupid and persistently aggrieved.
“Coordinated?”
Ingrained. They’ve been doing it for so long it’s reflexive.
I have the Solution, but no one wants to hear it.
LOL liberals really do have the minds of mushrooms don’t they..and my apologies to mushrooms everywhere..They are truly sick, twisted, deranged pieces of filth aren’t they. Id love to see how these Salon idiots would have reacted if they had been in that Concert Hall, too bad they couldn’t have been used as human shields
Call it hate. Call it simple self- defense. Send all the Moslems back to their own countries ( nations they invaded and took over just like they’re doing now to us). Call it any d thing but send them home. They already have seized control of 56 countries - they don’t need to come here !!!
I guess something like smashing all of the windows in Muslim owned businesses and homes would be frowned upon, or racist, or something. Oh, well, that’s pretty much where things are headed. The “respectable” parts of the political elite have failed. The not so respectable parts will be taking matters into their own hands more and more. It’s going to get ugly. It didn’t have to be this way, but nobody tapped the brakes when there was still time.
This article, the timing, they venom, the projection, etc. provide us with excellent example as to why such prattlings of Leftist’s, Liberal’s, should never be seriously considered, other than the simple fact they exist with such convoluted perspective should cause us all concern.
These sorts are teaching our children, and we aren’t stopping them.
I’m sick of the left.
What is wrong with the left after a School Shooting the left goes after Guns but now won’t go after Terrorist
Liberals... champion promoters and vocalizers of hate speech denouncing “hate speech”. Is there any limit to their hypocrisy?
The left are morons. There are no universal values. There is Western Christian civilization, and opposed to it Islam, with their own set of opposing values.
The event will accelerate the end of multicultural leftism in Europe, and may deliver the Prime Ministers post to Le Pen, who was already leading in the polls.
Likewise it helps Trump, and makes a fool of Bernie, Jeb and that bleeding heart moron Kasich.
PFL
And now you know why Moses and Joshua killed every single one of them. They are the spawn of Ishmal
"Correctly described"??
I would have categorized it as a moronic, and useless, spewing of catch phrases.
No, this was not an attack on all humanity - this was an attack on non-Islamics by Islamics.
No, we do not share "universal" values with Islamics that are sworn to kill, or enslave, those that do not join their cult.
And now I remember where I heard this "attack on all humanity" pablum. This is from the Koran! Their catch phrase that they like to quote to show what wonderful folks they are -- ignoring the fact that if you actually check the context of this particular Surah, you find that "universal" applies only to Muslims. I believe the same Surah goes on to condemn Jews and Christians.
We have a Manchurian candidate in the White House.
We really do need to bring back insane asylums..these slime really need to be in straight jackets.
Maybe if the Islamists stopped KILLING PEOPLE, we wouldn’t be using OFFENSIVE YET TRUTHFUL WORDS!!!!
All the school shootings have been Leftist whackos. The Left is comprised of cowards. The cowards will go after the guns, but not their own who wield the guns unless they can do so under the cloak of silence of a complicit media.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.