Monday, August 26, 2013

Laura Ingraham's Veiled Encouragement of the Murder of John Lewis

I have been doing some research into the role that hate talk radio played in the Rwandan genocide attempt, in particular reading transcripts of the hate campaign that turned into open call to commit genocide on   Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines, a politically connected station that was up to the top of its transmitter in blood by the end of it the genocide.  It is an unfortunate fact that even as the genocide was going on, American officials were refusing to jam transmissions or bomb the transmitter.  "Free speech" and "Freedom of the Press" were seen as more important than preventing a call to mass murder on an epic scale..

In particular I've been reading French language transcripts of broadcasts by one Kantano Habimana, who, I'm not going to mince words, isn't much different from what you'll hear on American hate talk radio.   Perhaps I'll translate some of those, though I'm no translator and it will take a while.  Until then, you can listen to things like Laura Ingraham to get the gist of it.

Conservative radio host and Fox News contributor Laura Ingraham attacked the speakers at the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech, at one point using the sound of a gunshot to cut off a sound bite of civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) -- a man whose skull was infamously fractured by a state trooper on "Bloody Sunday" in Selma, AL, in 1965. Ingraham used the speech's anniversary to race-bait about black-on-white crime statistics and hosted Pat Buchanan to bemoan the idea that minorities face any higher level of adversity in America 50 years later.

They're not even bothering to cover up their calls for murdering liberals and civil rights workers.  This is something of a natural escalation for Ingraham  from her days as one of the resident racists in Jeffrey Hart's little cell of racists at Dartmouth.  Earning a lawsuit from one of the black professors there. Unfortunately, he dropped it.   Perhaps it's time to make such incidents the business of the Secret Service, as it well could be if it were the president whose assassination was being encouraged on the radio with a wink and a nod.

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