Anger over health-care reform a.k.a [ Fear of The Black Man in Office ] spurs rise inthreatsagainst Congress members: Anger over the health-care overhaul has led to a nearly threefold increase in recent months in the number of serious threats against members of Congress, federal law enforcement officials said. The lawmakers reported 42 threats in the first three months of this year, compared with 15 in last three months of 2009, said Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Terrance W. Gainer, who had information about threats involving both chambers. “The incidents ranged from very vulgar to serious threats, including death threats,” Gainer said. “The ability to carry them out is another question and part of an investigation to determine what, if any, appropriate steps to take.” [ READ MORE ]
Racist radio host, Rush Limbaugh claims the government is “raping” the country by “criminalizing Fox News.” [ SEE VIDEO BELOW ]
Also, Eleanor Giusti, the mother of Gregory Giusti — who was arrested after allegedly threatening the life of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for her support of health care reform — has stated that Fox News was a factor in her son’s alleged actions. As Media Matters for America has documented, Fox News hosts and guests have a history of issuing inflammatory remarks about Pelosi, most notably Glenn Beck’s discussion of “put[ting] poison” in her wine. [ READ MORE ]
Limbaugh can spin it as much as he wants. There is factual evidence which overwhelmingly designates Fox as a domestic terrorist media outlet — for Republicans, neo-Nazis, skin-heads, anti-abortion terrorists — all forms of violent, racist extremists.
Despite nation’s strides, hate groups grow in number. Fueled by non-white immigration, the economy and the rise to power of a black president, the number of hate groups rose to a record 926 in 2008. How can hate enjoy such phenomenal growth in a nation where a Jew serves as senator from Connecticut, a Muslim serves as representative from Minnesota, a Hispanic is governor of New Mexico and a black man is president?
By Leonard Pitts Jr.
There are now 926 hate groups in this country.
Take a second, and consider that number. It represents an increase of more than 50 percent since 2000. And by “hate groups,” I don’t mean guys in their bathrobes who go online and pretend their followers are legion. No, I mean actual Klan cells, Neo-Nazi sects, gay-bashing “churches,” cliques of black separatists, white nationalists, nativists, racist skinheads and other merchants of venom who meet, plot and recruit in all 48 contiguous states. (Alaska and Hawaii have no known hate groups.) Nine hundred twenty-six of them. The number is a record.
The National Socialist Movement, a neo-Nazi sect marches last fall in Jefferson City, Mo.
We learn all this from the Southern Poverty Law Center (www.splcenter.org) in Montgomery, Ala., which has, since its founding in 1971, become a leading authority on the business of hate. According to the latest issue of Intelligence Report, the center’s quarterly magazine, that business is booming.
And maybe you wonder how this can be. How can hate enjoy such phenomenal growth in a nation where a Jew serves as senator from Connecticut, a Muslim serves as representative from Minnesota, a Hispanic is governor of New Mexico and a black man is president? The answer is that we are a nation where a Jew serves as senator from Connecticut, a Muslim serves as representative from Minnesota, a Hispanic is governor of New Mexico and a black man is president. Because if those things strike you as signs of progress, well, they are signs of apocalypse to those who believe only white, male Christians are fit to lead.
But that’s not the only reason for the increase. The center also cites the debate over illegal immigration that has dominated much of this decade. Though former President George W. Bush offered thoughtful, moderate leadership on the issue, he was drowned out by demagogic extremists competing to see which could most effectively scapegoat undocumented workers. They, too, bear responsibility here.
Finally, there is the economy. When things get tough, people become more receptive to the idea that their miseries are all the fault of some alien other. So the stock market, too, is implicated. Hate rises when the Dow falls.
I imagine the center’s findings land like cold water in the faces of those who took Barack Obama’s ascension to the presidency as proof that the nation was finally cured of the sickness of hate. The truth, I’m afraid, is more nuanced than that.
FOX News – Merchants of Venom
Maybe it helps to think in terms of alcoholism, a disease that can, with treatment, be contained, controlled, put into remission ? but never cured. Even when you have years of sobriety under your belt, the germ of it lurks in your bloodstream. Which is why alcoholics do not call themselves cured. Rather, they say they are recovering.
Hate is something like that, a fact some of us have never quite understood. Such folks are convinced that there is a goal line out there somewhere, which, once crossed, will allow the nation to declare itself cured. And once cured, we’ll never have to grapple with hatred again.
But it doesn’t work that way.
In a nation so deeply riven by culture, race and religion, there is always a temptation to hate somebody, to blame some group of others for the job you lost, the crime committed against you, the fear and uncertainty you feel. There is a simplicity and a seductiveness to it that are all too easily mistaken for righteousness.
So there is no “cure” for a nation’s hate. There is only an ongoing process of getting better, not unlike the alcoholic who must daily earn his sobriety anew. This explosion of hate is a reminder of what happens when we forget that, when we are undeservedly sanguine about how enlightened we’ve become.
It is said that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. Well, that’s the going rate for tolerance, too.
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[Enlarge] About The Author: Leonard Pitts, Jr. is a nationally-syndicated columnist and winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary.
He was originally hired by the Miami Herald to critique music, but within a few years he received his own column in which he dealt extensively with race, politics, and culture. He lives in Bowie, Maryland.
He has won awards for his writing from the Society of Professional Journalists and the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and was first nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1993, eventually claiming the honor in 2004. He is also the author of the bestselling book Becoming Dad: Black Men and the Journey to Fatherhood.
Pitts gained national recognition for his widely-circulated column of September 12, 2001, “We’ll Go Forward From This Moment,” in which he described the toughness of the American spirit even in the face of such a horrible attack.
In June 2007, Pitts was the subject of a campaign of death threats and harassment by neo-Nazis angry at a column he wrote about two whites raped and murdered in Knoxville, Tennessee. In his column addressing the murders, Pitts stated “for the crackpots, incendiaries and flat-out racists who have chosen this tragedy upon which to take an obscene and ludicrous stand. I have four words for them and any other white Americans who feel themselves similarly victimized. Cry me a river.”
The sudden eruption of gunfire horrified Herrington’s companions–his cousin Marcel Alexander, then 17, and friend Chris Collins, then 18, who are also black. “I looked at Donnell and he had this big old hole in his neck,” Alexander recalls. “I tried to help him up, and they started shooting again.” Behind him, he says, the gunmen yelled, “Get him! Get that nigger!“
——————————————————————– thinkprogress.org — Report: White vigilante groups blockaded small towns in post-Katrina New Orleans and murdered blacks.
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Earlier this week, A.C. Thompson of The Nation revealed that after Hurricane Katrina, white vigilante groups patrolled New Orleans, blockaded streets, and shot at least eleven black men. It “was like pheasant season in South Dakota. If it moved, you shot it,” said one vigilante. Color of Change is organizing a campaign to tell Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) and state officials to investigate the shootings, as “Louisiana’s broken law enforcement agencies have refused to investigate these crimes.” Watch Thompson’s video on his report:
Color of Change is also sending messages to Attorney General Michael Mukasey and Attorney General nominee Eric Holder.
Times Online: Heath and Deborah Campbell were furious when their local baker in New Jersey refused to decorate a birthday cake with the name of their baby boy.
But ShopRite, in Holland Township, ignored the parents’ pleas after concluding that ‘Happy Birthday Adolf Hitler‘ was an inappropriate use of icing sugar.
Adolf Hitler Campbell turned 3 this week and celebrated at a party with his younger sisters Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie (sic — apparently in tribute toHeinrich Himmler) and JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell.
His parents insisted that some of the toddler’s best friends were black. Mr Campbell, 35, said that about 12 people attended the birthday party on Sunday, including several children who were of mixed race.
‘If we’re so racist, then why would I have them come into my home?’ he asked.
A spokeswoman for ShopRite said that this was not the bakery department’s first run in with the Campbells — a similar request was denied two years ago when the shop also refused to daub swastikas on baked goods for the family.
‘We reserve the right not to print anything on the cake that we deem to be inappropriate,’ Karen Meleta said. ‘We considered this inappropriate.’
Mrs Campbell, 25, said she phoned in her order last week to the ShopRite, but when she told the bakery department she wanted her son’s name spelled out, she was told to talk to a supervisor, who denied the request.
The angry father, who was wearing a pair of black boots that he claimed were Second World War German artefacts, said: ‘They need to accept a name. A name’s a name. The kid isn’t going to grow up and do what (Hitler) did.’
He said he named his son after the leader of the Third Reich because he liked the name and because ‘no one else in the world would have that name.‘
“Other kids get their cake,” he complained. “I get a hard time. It’s not fair to my children. How can a name be offensive?”
——————————————————– My comment: Skin-Head Ass-Holes!
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Last month it happened in Long Island, this month it is Brooklyn, New York. In August, a bunch of barbaric white youths lynched Luis Ramirez, a Latino Immigrant in Pennsylvania. Latino immigrants are prime targets for White Racists emboldened by the now three year old Republican campaign of HATE and XENOPHOBIA
A few hundred people on Sunday marched in Brooklyn to protest last week’s fatal beating of a 31-year-old Ecuadorean man — an incident authorities say may have been a hate crime.
The demonstrators — holding signs reading “No more hate crimes” — walked a half-mile in the neighborhood where police say Jose Sucuzhanay was hit in the head with a bottle and beaten with an aluminum baseball bat on December 7.
Sucuzhanay died of his injuries Friday at Elmhurst Hospital, hours before his mother arrived in New York from Ecuador, his family said. Read full article »
Brooklyn Hate-Crime March | White Racists Targeting Latinos
