Gfagan PA 10 hours ago
I am Irish. For many years in my native land the Rev. Ian Paisley spouted bigoted hatred about Catholics in Northern Ireland, but then claimed innocence when some militant sectarian group massacred Catholics. Speech was not murder, he said. He would never condone killing, he said. Then he went right back to feeding the attitudes that spawned the killing. Few were fooled.
We should not be fooled in America today.
In this country the “mainstream” right-wing has made an industry of demonizing African-Americans as “thugs” and criminals – just look at the divergence in tone between the recent coverage of Ferguson or Baltimore and the (mostly white) biker massacre in Waco, TX. For decades, white America has been told that black Americans are lazy leeches, dependent on hand-outs funded by your hard-earned taxes to bankroll their immoral lifestyles.
The first black president was greeted by the right not only with diehard obstructionism but a chorus of color-coded abuse (“lazy,” “food-stamp president” etc) and questions about his very American-ness: he was “not one of us,” a foreigner adhering to a foreign religion who has no right to be president.
The siren song of racial hate relentlessly put out by the “mainstream” right finds echo in the gunshots that rang out in Charleston.
Rightists will, of course, deny the connection, the way Paisley did. But we are not fooled.
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