Hateful words a war crime

iVillage Member
Registered: 07-25-2003
Hateful words a war crime
33
Thu, 12-04-2003 - 10:34am
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20031203-113817-3449r.htm

With a trio of guilty verdicts yesterday, the U.N. tribunal for Rwanda has established that men armed only with words can commit genocide.


NPR had a good story on it yesterday, too.

rtsp://real.npr.na-central.speedera.net/real.npr.na-central/atc/20031203_atc_08.rm

Renee

iVillage Member
Registered: 07-25-2003
Fri, 12-05-2003 - 3:06pm
Look, I'm not defending Ann Coulter; I don't even read her for heavens sake, but there really is no parallel with what Americans would call hate speech and what went on in Rawanda.

The most influential media outlet in the country was an active and unrepentant part of one of the worst cases of genocide in Africa.



I'll post those quotes you asked about when I find them.

Renee

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-31-2003
Fri, 12-05-2003 - 5:39pm
Look, all I'm saying is that it doesn't just happen one day, you wake up and the news is urging you to go kill your neighbors, and you think "why not?" It's gradual. It's masked as patriotism, or nationalism, or tribalism. It's disguised as the "moral" thing to do. Of course Ann Coulter isn't responsible for a massacre, or an assasination, or a lynching. But she's sure doing everything she can to push discourse to a really ugly, violent place.








iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Sat, 12-06-2003 - 7:20am
Words worth investigating, I guess.
Secret Service checks Eminem's 'dead president' lyric.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/SHOWBIZ/Music/12/05/eminem.lyrics/index.html


The Secret Service is trying to determine if any action needs to be taken regarding a lyric from rapper Eminem that may be a threat to President Bush.


The lyric comes from a bootleg Eminem recording -- one of several from the rapper making rounds on the Internet over the past week.


In the song called "We Are American," Eminem sings: "(Expletive) money, I don't rap for dead presidents. I'd rather see the president dead."


Dennis Dennehy, a spokesman for the Grammy- and Academy Award-winning rapper, told CNN the song was not ready for release.


"This was an unfinished song, either lost or stolen," Dennehy said. "There was no determination where, when, how or if it was going to be used."


A Secret Service probe is routine when something that could be construed as a threat to the president is brought to agents' attention.


"Dead presidents" is slang for cash because of the depiction of several presidents on currency.


The reference to seeing the president dead does not specify the president of the United States.


"We are aware of the lyric and are in the process of determining what action, if any, will be taken," said Secret Service spokesman John Gill.


The music has been circulating on fan sites, on peer-to-peer networks and in hip-hop chat rooms.


There is no indication that the rapper was complicit in the release of the bootleg song.


"It would be saying too much to make too big a deal out of this," one Secret Service official said.

cl-Libraone

 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 07-25-2003
Mon, 12-08-2003 - 1:27am
These aren't the exact ones I was thinking of, but they'll do:

*In May 1994, Newsweek Washington Bureau Chief Evan Thomas (whose father ran for president on the Socialist ticket four times) disparaged Paula Jones and her argument that President Clinton had exposed himself and asked for sexual gratification.

Thomas said on TV: ''Yes, the case is being fomented by right-wing nuts, and yes, she is not a very credible witness, and it's really not a law case at all. … Some sleazy woman with big hair coming out of the trailer parks.''

*Alec Baldwin "If we were in other countries, we would all right now, all of us together would go down to Washington and we would stone Henry Hyde and Bob Barr to death and we'd go to the homes and we'd kill their wives and children!"

* In November 1994, USA Today columnist Julianne Malveaux was discussing Justice Thomas on a PBS television show. She said: ''I hope his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he dies early like many black men do, of heart disease.

*In May 2000, on the PBS show ''To the Contrary,'' Linda Chavez, a conservative activist, argued that a gun might help a woman like herself stop a rapist. Bonnie Erbe, the host, dismissed her with this: ''If you look at the statistics, I would bet that you have a greater chance of being struck by lightning, Linda, than living where you live, and at your age, being raped. Sorry.''

*Maureen Dowd, columnist for the New York Times, was discussing how Justice Thomas dissented from this spring's U.S. Supreme Court decision on racial preferences at the University of Michigan. On June 26 she wrote: ''The dissent is a clinical study of a man who has been driven barking mad by the beneficial treatment he has received.'' ...She is comparing a dignified, principled and accomplished black man to a DOG.

*Speaking of the GOP’s Contract With America, Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., said, "When I compare this to what happened in Germany, I hope you see the similarities to what is happening to us." Rep. Major Owens, D-N.Y., chimed in with, "These are people who are practicing genocide with a smile; they’re worse than Hitler."

*Former Rep. Patricia Shroeder, D-Colo., charged that surgeon general nominee Henry Foster was "goose-stepping over women’s rights" and told League of Women Voters that Rush Limbaugh’s listeners "are the ones who are goose stepping."

*''BOBBY EHRLICH is a Nazi.... He should be running in Germany in 1942, not Maryland in 2002. We'll define him as the Nazi he is. Once we do that, I think people will vote for Kathleen Kennedy Townsend.''

Thus spake Democratic political consultant Julius Henson about congressman Robert Ehrlich, the Republican candidate in Maryland's gubernatorial election this year. Henson had just signed on to work for Townsend, Ehrlich's Democratic opponent, and made his repugnant remarks in an interview with The Washington Post.

*While delivering the invocation at the Connecticut Democratic convention last summer, longtime party activist Ned Coll labeled Republican Governor John Rowland a ''snake'' and a ''glorified thug'' and called for ''death to the Prince of Darkness.''

*Harry Belafonte, who described Secretary of State Colin Powell as a bootlicking plantation ''slave'' who curries favor in order ''to come into the house of the master.''

*And no prominent liberal blasted Gerardo Villacres, the head of the Hispanic American Chamber of Commerce, when he likened California businessman Ron Unz to a Nazi for financing ballot campaigns to end bilingual education.

*"(I)f there is retributive justice (Sen. Jesse Helms) will get AIDS from a transfusion, or one of his grandchildren will get it." - Nina Totenberg, NPR

*That herd of managers from the House, I mean, frankly, all they were missing was white sheets." - Eleanor Clift, on her principal object of adoration Bill Clinton's impeachment

*"Whenever I hear Trent Lott speak, I immediately think of nooses decorating trees. Big trees, with black bodies swinging from the business ends of nooses." - LA Times contributor Karen Grigsby Bates

*"(Ashcroft comes) from the Taliban wing of American politics." - NAACP head Julian Bond

*"(Thomas is) an Antichrist," "a Hitler" - or "if not Hitler, he is a Goebbels" - and an "assh*le," and that allowing him to speak would be "like having a serial murderer debate the value of life." - various members of the Hawaii ACLU, objecting to the idea of inviting Clarence Thomas to a debate

*"In South Africa, we call it apartheid. In Nazi Germany, we'd call it fascism. Here in the United States, we call it conservatism." - Jesse Jackson

*"(Republicans) have no love and no joy. They'd rather take pictures with black children than feed them." - former Albert "Arnold the Pig" AlGore campaign manager Donna Brazile

*Sandra Bernhard, the actress and alleged comedienne, was asked during an online Washington Post chat for her thoughts on terrorism.

"The real terrorist threats," she replied, "are George W. Bush ... and his band of brown-shirted thugs." (The Nazi stormtroopers were known as brown-shirts.)

*Miami minister and radio host Victor Curry castigated the Bush administration over the air -- for its "neo-Nazi, right-wing, mission against the American people.""

*Sean Penn likened Bill O'Reilly, the popular Fox News Channel personality to Osama bin Laden, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and -- of course -- Adolph Hitler.

*The Democrats inserted an ancient TV clip of Taylor -- who once owned a string of hair salons -- and turned it into an ad that played up every stereotype of the homosexual male hairdresser.

As one Montana daily reported, the ad showed Taylor applying lotion to the face of a male customer. He is seen "wearing a tight-fitting, three-piece, suit, with a big-collared, open shirt ... Taylor's top two or three shirt buttons are unbuttoned, exposing some bare chest, and a number of gold chains".

*Bill Maher made an outrageous joke about hoping for the death of Florida's Republican Secretary of State Katherine Harris..."Now earlier today, a rental truck carried a half a million ballots from Palm Beach to the Florida Supreme Court there in Tallahassee. CNN had live helicopter coverage from the truck making its way up the Florida highway, and for a few brief moments, America held the hope that O.J. Simpson had murdered Katherine Harris."

* Spike Lee was interviewed after making the movie “Summer of Sam” and in the interview he said:"...Shoot , with a .44 caliber Bulldog..."

*In Salem, Mass., the superintendent of schools declared that Barbara Anderson—the state’s leading taxpayer activist—"should be tried for murder" for her opposition to raising property levies.

*In Berkeley, Calif., advocates for the homeless denounced bookseller Andy Ross—who campaigned to keep vagrants from sitting and lying in the streets—as a "fascist," and defended the swastikas that were painted in front of his store.

*In Washington, Republican foes of a campaign finance bill were likened to "terrorists" by Gwen Ifill, a reporter for NBC.

*Tom Shales, the Washington Post’s gifted TV critic, could suggest of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr: "Beneath the dullness lies pure evil." This is why liberal talk show host Phil Donahue could go postal during a conversation about politics "and begin shouting," as the New York Post reported this month, "how much he hated Republicans."

*Charles Rangel, the congressman from Harlem, smeared Republicans..."Don’t you believe that they don’t want to dismantle the Social Security system. They are afraid to come out from under their hoods and attack us directly."

*The novelist E. L. Doctorow compared Bill Clinton’s critics to the murderers in Jasper, Texas: "The President of the United States being dragged through the town by a pickup."

*A pre-election radio spot aired in St. Louis:

"When you don’t vote, you let another church explode. When you don’t vote, you allow another cross to burn. When you don’t vote, you let another assault wound a brother or sister. . . . Paid for by the Missouri Democratic Party."

*"Conservative legal interest groups," says Atlanta Mayor Bill Campbell, "such as the Center for Individual Rights and the Southeastern Legal Foundation"—both of which oppose racial preferences and quotas—"are … a homogenized version of the Klan. They may have traded in their sheets for suits … but it's the same old racism."

*Cartoonist Paul Conrad, also of the L.A. Times, drew a sketch of Buford Furrow—the bigot who opened fire in a Jewish community center in August, then murdered a Filipino mailman—and labeled it: "A faith-based compassionate conservative."

*Gay activist Dan Savage boasted on Salon.com of his efforts to infect Gary Bauer with flu. When readers appalled by this germ warfare complained, Salon's editor groused that "America has become really humourless about these things."

*In his New York Press column, Alexander Cockburn suggested "dropping a tactical nuclear weapon on the Cuban section of Miami." Alas, he lamented, that "would require the sort of political courage sadly lacking in Washington these days."

*A sickening TV spot sponsored by the NAACP showed a pickup truck dragging a chain and accused Bush of having "killed" James Byrd "all over again" when he opposed a change in the Texas hate crimes law.

*But for pure vitriol, nothing matched the eruption by former Clinton aide Paul Begala, who wrote on MSNBC.com about the map with color-coded election returns that showed a sea of red for Bush with small blotches of blue for Gore:

"But if you look closely at that map you see a more complex picture. You see the state where James Byrd was lynched-dragged behind a pickup truch until his body came apart -- it's red. You see the state where Matthew Shepard was crucified ... for the crime of being gay -- it's red. You see the state where right-wing extremists blew up a federal office building and murdered scores of federal employees: red. The state where an Army private thought to be gay was bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat, and the state where neo-Nazi skinheads murdered two African Americans because of their skin color, and the state where Bob Jones University spews its anti-Catholic bigotry: they're all red, too."


http://www.asthma-drsprecace.com/jacoby1.html

http://coldfury.com/archives/000686.php

http://www.therighttrack.org/tom's%20rant.htm#coulter

http://216.247.220.66/jacoby/1999/jj01-01-99.htm

http://drs.yahoo.com/S=2766679/K=democrat+hate+speech/v=2/SID=e/l=WS1/R=8/H=0/*-http://www.chronwatch.com/featured/contentDisplay.asp?aid=4094

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/6/25/154431.shtml

http://coldfury.com/archives/000686.php

http://www.daveschultz.com/maniacal/liberaldoublestandard.htmhttp://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m1571/4_15/53729180/p2/article.jhtml?term=

Renee

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-31-2003
Mon, 12-08-2003 - 2:24pm
No wonder you think I'm off the deep end - you still don't get what I'm talking about. Only 2 of these 37 quotes come any where close to the kind of promotion of violence as a political tool that I posted about, which leads me to believe that you just don't get what it is about the Coulter quotes that are radically different from just general rotten things to say. Calling someone trailer trash isn't really what I meant. People from both sides of the political spectrum say mean things. That's probably never going to change, and it's not my complaint.

By my count, 8 quotes call conservatives "nazis" or "Hitler", 4 liken conservatives to KKK members, 4 call them terrorists, 2 compare them to gay bashing lynch mobs, 7 are just mean things to say, and 8 are perfectly acceptable, though hard hitting, political speech.

Here are the 2 that I would agree are terrible things to say which are akin to the Coulter quotes as they promote and condone political violence:

1. Alec Baldwin "if we were in other countries, we would all right now, all of us together would go down to Washington and we would stone Henry Hyde and Bob Barr to death, and we'd go to the homes and we'd kill their wives and children."

This is very clearly, way over the line and a reprehensible thing to suggest. I'd say it's almost as bad as the Coulter quotes I posted. I say "almost" only because at least he qualifies it with "if we were in other countries" while Coulter, having the enormous balls which you prize so dearly, dispenses with any ifs, maybes or but fors and just flat out advocates violence. Still, Alec should be ashamed.

2. Alexander Cockburn "In his New York Press column, Alexander Cockburn suggested 'dropping a tactical nuclear weapon on the Cuban section of Miami.' Alas, he lamented, that "would require the sort of political courage sadly lacking in Washington these days." I couldn't find any more of this article to read in context, but taken at face value, it's pretty bad.

These next two are pretty bad, but stop just short of being appalling:

3. "If there is retributive justice (Sen. Jesse Helms) will get AIDS from a transfusion, or one of his grandchildren will get it." Nina Totenberg, NPR

The fact that she drags grandchildren into it is what makes this so shocking, but she's not suggesting it, or urging people to give them AIDS. She's sort of saying "if there's any justice in the world...then..." or "how would they feel if...." It's a rotten thing to say, but there's really no call to action involved. It's also a use of your favorite literary device, irony, since you should see the things Jesse Helms says about people with AIDS. (Just so you don't have to look it up, if Jesse Helms got AIDS it would be situational irony, or a discrepency between the expected outcome and the actual outcome.)

4. On the surface the Spike Lee quote seems to be exactly the kind of thing I'm accusing Ann Coulter of. But if you delve a bit deeper, you'll see it's an ironic statement. Spike was talking about ending gun violence. How should we end gun violence? By shooting Charlton Heston. It's a violent thing to say but the issue is violence. And just so you don't think I'm just letting liberals off the hook, it's akin to a right to lifer saying that "the way to end abortion is to abort Justice Sandra Day O' Connor." See how that works? Here's one that would NOT be ironic: "The way to end pork barrell spending is to shoot (your congressman here) ."

Maybe later when I have time I'll break down the rest for you.



iVillage Member
Registered: 07-25-2003
Mon, 12-08-2003 - 4:05pm
I have to disagree with you. Calling people nazis and KKK are two of the worst things you can call anyone in this country. Every time a Republican is called one of these names, s/he is dehumanized into a cruel racist murdering animal with no redeaming qualities. If you want to play the game that one thing leads to another leads to genocide, this is exactly how you go about doing it so that people don't not only feel bad about killing Republicans, say, but actually thing their providing a service for ridding the world of such a blemish.

As I said, these arn't the quotes that I was thinking of orignially, I haven't been able to locate them, yet, but if you want to prolong this, I search again when I have time.

Renee

iVillage Member
Registered: 05-06-2003
Mon, 12-08-2003 - 4:12pm
hmmm. thanks for letting me know what my own intentions are.

let me rephrase:

at what point do we stop dismissing coulter's (and others) words as merely 'hate speech' and start to consider them along the same lines as the journalists in this article?

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-31-2003
Tue, 12-09-2003 - 12:14am
"<>

No, I would draw the line at people saying "Hey, let's kill Republicans, we would be doing a service to rid the world of such a blemish" but I've got pretty thick skin. Unfortunately for the viewers of televised political ads, name calling is allowed in a democracy.

It is however a pet peeve of mine that people insist on calling eachother Nazis. It happens so often that it's become almost completely meaningless. I swear I once saw a PTA board member on the news call another PTA board member a Nazi. Unless a person invades Poland and engages in genocidal massacres, I would refrain from calling them a Nazi.

On the other hand, if it's unthinkable to call someone a fascist, what will we say to a fascist when one tries to take over?

Also, the KKK exists and is active in our country. And something tells me there isn't a single Democrat under those hoods, so Republicans either need to do something about this problem themselves, or suffer a little discomfort when people suggest that their white sheet is showing.

I also wanted to point out that I'm not advocating making any of this speech a crime of any sort. Thanks to our somewhat diverse media (that I hope the FCC won't succeed in watering down), when people make obscenely hateful comments (a la Ann Coulter, or whathisface Savage, or the Alec Baldwin case you mentioned) the public outcry usually takes care of the problem just fine. But that's why its so important to stand up and say something about it when you hear it.






 

iVillage Member
Registered: 07-25-2003
Tue, 12-09-2003 - 9:56am
<>

Mine, too, but in the media, it's not 'people' calling 'people' Nazis; it's Democrats & liberals calling Republicans & conservatives Nazis.

Renee

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-23-2003
Tue, 12-09-2003 - 11:29am

...but you don't see anyone going out and killing Republicans just because they are Republican - no matter what the inference against them is...however, you do see doctor's being murdered because they perform abortions, gays being beaten/murdered because of their sexual orientation, Muslims (or people who just LOOK like they might be Middle Eastern) threatened & beaten, etc.


That's the point here.