August 7, 2012
by wkirkland
Another massacre, another yawn from the gun creeps. ‘If only those Sikhs had pulled guns from their turbans none of this would have happened.’ And, although the shooter, Page, has routinely boasted and sung of his hatred of non-whites, he and his kind don’t rise to the level of surveillance they deserve — in part because of hurt feelings and out of whack vision among the GOP in congress.
Analysts for the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security routinely monitor violent extremist Web sites of all kinds, including those attracting white supremacists, according to former officials of both agencies. But the department’s work on the topic has been criticized. In 2009, conservatives in Congress strongly objected to a department report titled “Rightwing Extremism,” which speculated that the recession and the election of a black president could increase the threat from white supremacists.
Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary, withdrew the report and apologized for what she called its flaws. Daryl Johnson, the homeland security analyst who was the primary author of the report, said last year that after the flap, the number of analysts assigned to track non-Islamic militancy had been reduced sharply. Homeland Security Department officials denied his assertion and said the department monitored violent extremism of every kind, without regard to its religious or political bent.
NY Times
Right Wing message boards popped up with mixed reactions – some saying Page was a loner lunatic, others calling him ‘brother’ and praising his action.
See SPLC
His music? Lovely stuff:
Album covers from End Apathy and Definite Hate [in which Page played] are shown on MySpace—a record called Violent Victory released by End Apathy shows a drawing of a tattooed white arm punching a shirtless black man, who has blood coming out of his mouth.
The Daily Beast
For a long, relevant post by Juan Cole, go to his site:
A discourse of Islamophobia has plagued the United States in the past decade, pushed by unscrupulous bigots in public life and by entire media organizations such as Fox Cable News and other media properties of billionaire yellow press lord Rupert Murdoch. Among them is also Rush Limbaugh, who, incredibly, is still broadcast to US soldiers abroad.
Among the hatemongers are Frank Gaffney, and his acolyte Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn), Rep. Peter King (R-NY) Daniel Pipes, James Woolsey, Robert Spencer, Steve Emerson, John Bolton, and sometimes Rudi Giuliani, Mike Huckabee and others, most associated with the Republican Party. The push for hate speech against American Muslims is funded by a small group of billionaires through their foundations. Some of the Muslim-haters are connected to the US arms industry and are hoping for profits from further wars in the Middle East. Others are Israel-firster fanatics. Others are looking for a bogey man to scare Americans with, so as to convince them to vote against their interests, as they used Communism during the Cold War to convince ordinary Americans to give up their constitutional rights.
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Hours after the murder of the Sikhs in Wisconsin, a mosque in Joplin, Missouri, was burned to the ground in a second arson attack.
And for a site that watches the state of Islamophobia, try this.
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