US and European state police forces are making arrests (and here) for social media posts that threaten retaliatory violence or intend to incite retaliatory violence against the police.
At the same time, some members of state police forces are posting threatening statements and, as reported by Glenn Greenwald, are not being arrested.
Now, responding to the terror attack against French journalists and in addition to government and media incitements to violence, private citizens are issuing incitements to commit genocide against Muslims.
Examples of statements being made on Twitter:
“…f**king Muslims I always hated and will always hate them #killallmuslims”
“#killallmuslims is the only viable response…”
“KILL ALL MUSLIMS! WE HAVE TOLERATED THEM LONG ENOUGH!”
(The above are documented by Greenwald here. Also see link to peruse Greenwald’s poignant comments on the events and hypocritical reactions they are eliciting.)
It will be interesting to see whether people using the #killallmuslims hash-tag and making these very serious incitements to genocide will be prosecuted, as is explicitly required by the highest law in the world.
The UN charter, on the prevention and punishment of genocide, lists, as one of the punishable acts, “Direct and public incitement to commit genocide”, then says people committing this act, “whether constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials, or private individuals”, “shall be punished”.
We shall see. As noted above, people are currently being punished for far less, but only for statements that allegedly threaten Western state power.
It is also of interest that some major media outlets such as CBS are calling the France attack “the worst terrorist attack in Europe since the attacks in London in July of 2005.”
FAIR notes that this is false, since terrorist Anders Breivik killed 67 civilians in Norway in 2011, which is far more than the twelve just killed (which included police), and also more than the 56 killed in the 2005 London bombings.
For some, an attack must apparently meet certain qualifications, such as allegedly being carried out by Muslims, to constitute a “terror” attack. This helps in part to explain why CBS and other mass media outlets do not refer to US attacks on civilians or journalists, if they report them at all, as terrorism (or aggression, or even crimes, let alone unequivocally).
Also in keeping with reporting that highlights events useful towards expansion of US/Western state power domestically and internationally, while suppressing/downplaying events that would serve to restrict and limit the already historically unprecedented scope of US violent expansionism (~1,000 foreign attack bases), a recent terror-bombing of an NAACP building yesterday in Colorado has been largely overlooked or downplayed in US corporate media.
For example, while CNN has reported on the bombing, the reports or even the term NAACP are nowhere to be found on CNN’s main general page for news or its main page for US news (same with TIME). However, the CNN main page yesterday and today, while devoting most of its space to the attack in France, makes room for information about the NFL, NBA, the People’s Choice Awards, a “real life Peter Griffin” from the Family Guy cartoon, and the like.
On people noticing this, USA Today reports (using the borderline racist qualification of “one of Twitter’s most vocal communities”): “The hashtag #NAACPbombing has gone viral, reflecting frustration among one of Twitter’s most vocal communities about what they say is a glaring disparity in how news outlets cover violence against blacks.”
Also of continued note is the frenzy to get “others” for attacking journalists while Western or Western-backed journalist-killers on the loose enjoy immunity in corporate media and vast state subsidy and protection. Mostly to blame for this dynamic (it is hard to blame the state since of course it is going to do what it has always done and protect its own criminals) are Western corporate/state-linked media outlets that know about and intentionally hide crimes of their states from their viewers/readers.
As Al Jazeera notes, “More journalists were killed during the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq than in any war in history”, mostly by “targeted killings”, such as the US bombing of Al Jazeera offices (in both Iraq and Afghanistan – offices for which the US had been given exact coordinates by Al Jazeera). During the invasion, the Pentagon issued the “chilling” warning that journalists not embedded with US troops “should not be there”. The rate at which “perpetrators have escaped prosecution for killing journalists, is the worst in the world at 100 per cent.”
Indeed, US reps (and corporate media partners), ever-vigilant when it comes to attacks that can be used to continue the expansion of their violence and markets, “have shown no interest” even in “investigating these murders”.
While the idea of restricting what people draw or write is of course absurd, the US is uniquely guilty of doing this (and protecting its criminal actors who do it), both through repressive and deadly direct action and supporting other repressive regimes, as Greenwald yesterday noted when he said the US is the country that “invades, bombs, occupies, and props up tyrants more than any other.”
Robert Barsocchini focuses on global force dynamics and writes professionally for the film industry. He is a regular contributor to Washington’s Blog, and is published in Counter Currents, Global Research, State of Globe, Blacklisted News, LewRockwell.com, DanSanchez.me, Information Clearing House, Press TV, and other outlets. Also see: Hillary Clinton’s Record of Support for War and other Depravities. Follow Robert and UK-based colleague, Dean Robinson, on Twitter.
