People it's not just O'Reilly that has been on a jihad against progressive blogging as has been recently documented by producer Robert Greenwald (Outfoxed).
Routinely "Newscasters" and pundits on Fox accuse the left wing blogosphere of the most virilent forms of "Hate Speech", often making alleged incidents up completely out of whole cloth. They've been compared to Nazi's and the Klan. But there is one place where these many claims of "Hate" are documented and can be verified - The Southern Poverty Law Center.
Not long ago I wrote about how the right wing was having a "Nutty" over the influence of the left wing on the web, particularly Media Matters after they torpedoed the career of Don Imus.
On the April 16 edition of his television show, Bill O'Reilly invited Fox News contributor Tammy Bruce to comment on the firing of Don Imus, which, according to O'Reilly, "has metastasized into an ideological witch-hunt by evil forces." Bruce asserted that "small groups of people" are engaged in an "effort" to "silence[]" and "destroy[]" "people who are not intimidated" and that these groups "have a list of individuals that are to be targeted.
Since then Fox News has effectively declared bloggers as The Pox Americana
Last night on Special Edition, the "Fox News All-Stars," used this week’s Take Back America conference as an oppurtunity to bash progressive bloggers.
Describing bloggers as "a pox," Roll Call editor Mort Kondracke compared them to right-wing talk radio, charging that they are preventing "American problems" from being solved:
This has been followed by O'Reilly direct attacks on Dailykos and Jetblue.
They're a Hate Site. Deeply on the left. As bad as David Duke
O'Reilly comments led to a bit of dumpster diving by those on the left, and they managed to find more than a frothy nuggets of hate and venom direct at Presidental Candidate Hillary Clinton. Enough to gain the attention of the Secret Service.
"If Hillary wins, I will be respectful of our leader. If you could read my thoughts, I would be on the SS [Secret Service] watch list."
...
If Hillary wins... my guns are loaded.
Last night O'Reilly continued his attacks and completely blew off the signifigance of the Secret Service investigating violent comments made on his own site with Dennis Miller.
On the July 25 edition of the program, O'Reilly noted that someone had notified the Secret Service about content on his website, saying to Miller: "I mean, they lie all the time. They -- I don't know whether you know this or not, but they contacted the Secret Service saying that there was somebody on BillOReilly.com threatening Senator Clinton. I mean, this is how insane these people are."
In the midst of all this, I think it might be instructive to take a look at what a REAL Hate Site looks and sounds like.
What is Southern Poverty Law?
The Southern Poverty Law Center was founded in 1971 as a small civil rights law firm. Today, SPLC is internationally known for its tolerance education programs, its legal victories against white supremacists and its tracking of hate groups.
Located in Montgomery, Alabama – the birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement – the Southern Poverty Law Center was founded by Morris Dees and Joe Levin, two local lawyers who shared a commitment to racial equality. Its first president was civil rights activist Julian Bond.
Throughout its history, SPLC has worked to make the nation's Constitutional ideals a reality. The SPLC legal department fights all forms of discrimination and works to protect society's most vulnerable members, handling innovative cases that few lawyers are willing to take. Over three decades, it has achieved significant legal victories, including landmark Supreme Court decisions and crushing jury verdicts against hate groups.
In 1981, the Southern Poverty Law Center began investigating hate activity in response to a resurgence of groups like the Ku Klux Klan. Today the SPLC Intelligence Project monitors hate groups and tracks extremist activity throughout the U.S. It provides comprehensive updates to law enforcement, the media and the public through its quarterly magazine, Intelligence Report. Staff members regularly conduct training sessions for police, schools, and civil rights and community groups, and they often serve as experts at hearings and conferences.
By tracking, documenting and using legal means to fight hate groups the Southern Poverty Law Center has scored many victories against the perveyors of hate and intolerance. Working since the Civil Rights movement SPLC has had many victories. They've fought the Klan and Won, over and over again.
In 1979, over 100 members of the Invisible Empire Klan, armed with bats, ax handles and guns, clashed with a group of peaceful civil rights marchers in Decatur, Alabama.
Though the FBI investigated and could not find enough evidence of a conspiracy to charge the Klansmen, SPLC filed a civil suit against the Invisible Empire and numerous Klansmen, Brown v. Invisible Empire of the KKK. SPLC investigators uncovered evidence that convinced the FBI to reopen the case, and nine Klansmen were eventually convicted of criminal charges.
...
SPLC lawsuits in 1982 and 1984 ended Klan paramilitary activity in Texas and Alabama. Klan groups in these states were training paramilitary forces in the use of grenades, explosives, weapons, techniques of ambush and hand-to-hand combat, all in preparation for what they believed was an impending "race war."
...
In 1988, Tom and John Metzger sent their best White Aryan Resistance (WAR) recruiter to organize a Portland Skinhead gang. After being trained in WAR's methods, the gang killed an Ethiopian student. Tom Metzger praised the Skinheads for doing their "civic duty."
SPLC attorneys filed a civil suit, Berhanu v. Metzger, asserting the Metzgers and WAR were as responsible for the killing as the Portland Skinheads. In October 1990, a jury agreed and awarded $12.5 million in damages to the family of the victim, Mulugeta Seraw.
In 1994, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review Metzger's appeal, allowing SPLC attorneys to begin distributing funds from the sale of WAR's assets. The principal beneficiary is Seraw's son, Henok, who receives monthly payments from WAR's bank account.
Their efforts in the Metzger case effectively brought WAR to bankruptcy and shut them down.
In the online world the SPLC has tracked and documented the use of the internet to recruit and indoctrinate the youth into the culture of hate, a technique which David Duke and sites such as Stormfront have refined into a near-art.
On most days, the man once labeled a "near genius" in a Time magazine article spends the bulk of his time in an office of the Mandeville, La., home of infamous white supremacist David Duke.
There, Jamie Kelso whips across Duke's hardwood floors on a wheeled office chair as he attends to his work: monitoring the burgeoning community of the racist Stormfront Web site on one of six different computers.
To the thousands of white supremacists who regularly visit Stormfront and its forum, Kelso is best known by his e-moniker, "Charles A Lindbergh." He signs off all his posts with a quote from Lindbergh, a well-known racist and anti-Semite: "We can have peace and security only as long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood."
Interestingly, the techniques employed by Stormfront are remarkably similar to those employed by Fox News. It all began with one Duke Acolyte by the name of Don Black, an ex-con who spent three years in prison for attempting to implement a coup on the Carribean Island of Dominica which - they hoped - would have ousted it's black-run goverment and turned it into a "White State."
Black saw clearly that with this new technology, white supremacists might finally bypass the mainstream media and political apparatus, getting their message out to people who otherwise would never hear it — people who now could listen in the privacy of their own homes without fear of embarrassment or reproach. "The potential of the Net for organizations and movements such as ours is enormous," Black told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1996. "We're reaching tens of thousands of people who never before had access to our point of view."
Being the first of its kind helped Stormfront win enormous publicity. Black and his site were written up in newspapers around the country and the world, and he frequently appeared on major network news shows like abc's "Nightline," where, clad in suit and tie, he talked politely about allowing people access to information not filtered by the "media monopoly." Though he undoubtedly turned off many viewers, each major TV appearance led to a spike in visitors to Stormfront.
And just what do Stormfront Visitors have to say on their message board about say - blacks?
AryanWill: The blacks that I see around my area and school are a total disgrace. Seeing them go out with amazing white girls... . It's true, I've heard them bragging.
FuriousD: I don't have any black friends, but I think that some are good but a lot are bad. I hate niggers (Snoops Dogg, 50 Cent), but black people (Gary Coleman and such) don't bother me.
eRiC1488: I hate all Blacks.
GuyverSS: I hate them all. I seriously would like to hang a couple of them. I'm not a violent person at all and the sight of gore makes me sick, but I could really like seeing them suffer. ... They will make jokes about me as I pass just because I am a kind and well-dressed person.
Heritage_Not_Hate: I don't hate them, I just don't want them around!
Annihilate: I would definitely have to say that blacks do not work hard and want everything given to them. ... As for Hispanics, I hate them more than anything. ... They try to take white women and our jobs, too.
My some of that rhetoric sounds a bit familiar, kinda like Bill O'reilly.
On their site SPLC includes a Hate Map, which lists and tracks various Hate-based groups nation wide. Far from simply focusing on White-Supremacist, Neo-Nazi, Christian Identity, Racist Skinhead and Neo-Confederate groups the SPLC also includes listings for the Black National of Islam, Jewish Defense League, Arab Anti-defamation, the Catholic Family News, the American Border Patrol and dozens upon dozens of others.
They are clearly an equal-oppurtunity anti-Hate organization, one that is far from stingy when it comes to pointing a finger at intolerance. It doesn't matter to them if the Hate comes from the left or the right - either way, they will fight it. As of today, they currently count 844 active hate groups in the United States.
If you look on their Hate Map, and focus in on California (where they count 63 Hate Groups), and then focus in further on the San Francisco Area the one thing you won't see listed - IS DAILYKOS
However on their front page you might find someone highly familiar - Billy O'Reilly and his report on Pink Pistol Packing Lesbian Gangs!
A "national underground network" of pink pistol-packing lesbians is terrorizing America. "All across the country," they are raping young girls, attacking heterosexual males at random, and forcibly indoctrinating children as young as 10 into the homosexual lifestyle, according to a shocking June 21 segment on the popular Fox News Channel program, "The O'Reilly Factor."
Titled "Violent Lesbian Gangs a Growing Problem," the segment began with host Bill O'Reilly briefly referencing for his roughly 3 million viewers the case of Wayne Buckle, a DVD bootlegger who was attacked by seven lesbians in New York City last August. Deploying swift, broad strokes, O'Reilly painted a graphic picture of lesbian gangs running amok. "In Tennessee, authorities say a lesbian gang called GTO, Gays Taking Over, are involved in raping young girls," he reported. "And in Philadelphia, a lesbian gang called DTO, Dykes Taking Over, are allegedly terrorizing people as well."
The SPLC then proceeded to take O'Reilly report apart peice by peice pointing out that it's facts and sourcing were either weak or entirely fabricated, in almost the exact same way that the "vile hate site" Media Matters or Daily Kos might do.
The only specific instance of actual violent lesbian gang activity that Wheeler cited on "The O'Reilly Factor" was a May 19 attack on a 15-year-old boy who was stabbed near a transit station in Prince George's County, Md. "And the police found out that it was a group of six women who identified themselves as being members of a lesbian gang that actually attacked this young man," Wheeler told O'Reilly.
According to a June 15 article in The Washington Post, however, two of the three individuals arrested in that assault were teenage males, though the article did note that, "Metro officials said the fight was between two gay and lesbian gangs that operate in Maryland."
To be fair the SPLC doesn't yet have listing on the Hate Map for Fox News Channel in New York City, as they tend to focus on actual physical violence that has occured in direct relation to hate-filled rhetoric - but I suspect it's only a matter of time before that changes because the one form of Hate they have yet to quantify, but has clearly become an increasing danger in this nation is the open and viciously naked Hatred of Liberals.
Vyan
No comments:
Post a Comment