Jun 23, 2015

Articles & Rachel Maddow Show Prove That The Charleston Shooting Was Basically Domestic Terrorism


There is a ton of evidence that this was a terror attack. First a talk on the Rachel Maddow show followed by a ton of evidence (in articles) of how this sort of terrorism (white on black crime) is actually an epidemic;

Many see terrorism in church shootingTarek Ismail, former Columbia Law Counterterrorism fellow, talks with Steve Kornacki about what defines an act of terror and how that definition fits the murderous shooting attack on a prayer group in Charleston, South Carolina's Emanuel AME Church.





NY Times: The Growing Right Wing Terror Threat (They kill more people than Muslims extremists)

Addicting Info: Why Don’t We Know Much About Right-Wing Terrorists? Conservatives Fired The Guy Studying Them

Article Extracts from Salon;

Blaming "mental illness" is a cop-out -- and one that lets us avoid talking about race, guns, hatred and terrorism

I get really really tired of hearing the phrase “mental illness” thrown around as a way to avoid saying other terms like “toxic masculinity,” “white supremacy,” “misogyny” or “racism.”
We barely know anything about the suspect in the Charleston, South Carolina, atrocity. We certainly don’t have testimony from a mental health professional responsible for his care that he suffered from any specific mental illness, or that he suffered from a mental illness at all.

We do have statistics showing that the vast majority of people who commit acts of violence do not have a diagnosis of mental illness and, conversely, people who have mental illness are far more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators.

We know that the stigma of people who suffer from mental illness as scary, dangerous potential murderers hurts people every single day — it costs people relationships and jobs, it scares people away from seeking help who need it, it brings shame and fear down on the heads of people who already have it bad enough.

But the media insists on trotting out “mental illness” and blaring out that phrase nonstop in the wake of any mass killing. I had to grit my teeth every time I personally debated someone defaulting to the mindless mantra of “The real issue is mental illness” over the Isla Vista shootings.

“The real issue is mental illness” is a goddamn cop-out. I almost never hear it from actual mental health professionals, or advocates working in the mental health sphere, or anyone who actually has any kind of informed opinion on mental health or serious policy proposals for how to improve our treatment of the mentally ill in this country.


Dear white allies after Charleston: Please understand this about your privilege
White America, it's time we talk. In the days after Charleston, here's the way we're talking about race in America - 

The Charleston shooting is a textbook example of White Privilege. Let’s start with the manner in which the cops apprehended Dylann Storm Roof, the murderer and domestic terrorist.
Note that at the time of his arrest, Roof was an armed and dangerous fugitive, who heartlessly gunned down nine church members — and still received the utmost care when he was taken into police custody. The cops gave him a nice bulletproof vest to assure that he wouldn’t receive any damage on his way to the station and genteelly guided him out to the squad car. When the cameras flashed, he was clean and spotless, with every hair of his Lloyd from “Dumb and Dumber” cut in place.

If he were black, he probably would have ended up like the innocent, unarmed Cleveland couple, Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, who fled in a similar manner as Roof, but received no love or restraint — just 137 shots for being on the wrong side of privilege. And this is the norm; there’s a collection of contemporary cases that display similar results.

Walter Scott was black and unarmed. He died at the hands of law enforcement while Craig Stephen Hicks, a white male who shot three unarmed Muslims over a parking space in North Carolina, is alive and well.

Michael Brown was an unarmed black teenager who was on his way to college before he was murdered by a white police officer. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the white guy who bombed runners in the Boston Marathon, is alive and received his day in court.

James Holmes, another white domestic terrorist, shot up a movie theater during a Batman movie; Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old kid. was murdered for having a toy gun.

Freddie Gray, black and innocent with a pocket knife equals dead. White killers like Roof get award-winning restraint. The list goes on and on: White privilege allows you to survive and being black could get you killed.

Always remember that talking about white privilege makes white people uneasy — probably because no one wants to feel like they have an unfair advantage over another person solely based on skin color. However, if you are white in America, you have an unfair advantage solely based on skin color.

You’ll probably go to a better school, never be profiled by police officers, get lower interest rates, and always have the luxury of walking around convenience stores in peace. It is that way, it has been that way, and chances are it will remain that way.



White America is complicit: Charleston, Dylann Roof and the country’s real race warQuestioning the motivations of the Charleston shooter is worse than obtuse. It is itself an act of violence
If you are shocked by any aspect of Roof’s story so far—including that he is being described in news outlets as “quiet and soft-spoken” instead of as a terrorist—you are not only willingly obtuse but complicit in his crime. There is a single conclusion to draw in this moment, and it is that we are here again, because this is exactly who we are.
It seems likely to me that Roof had some sense of this, that his own knowledge and recognition of history helped guide him toward committing this horrific crime. Emanuel African Methodist Church is one of the oldest houses of worship in the South, and it has long served—like the institution of the African-American church itself in this country—as a sanctuary and safe haven for black people from white racism. Though the roots of the church stretch back to 1787, its foundation is more firmly pinned to 1816. Six years after its establishment, when a slave rebellion plot was tied to the church in 1822, accused leader Denmark Vesey—a free black man—and five alleged co-conspirators were hanged and the church burned down. The date of that rebellion was to be June 17, also the date Roof walked into Bible study at the church, pretended to worship with parishioners for an hour, and then shot nine people to death.
I would wager that Roof knew not just that bit of history, but understood in his own perverse way what it meant to kill—to literally hunt—black folks in a space they were hopeful enough to believe was safe, and that he recognized his place alongside white racist terrorists like those who carried out the 1963 Birmingham, Alabama, church bombing that killed four black girls. (Not to mention those I’ve just written about, who burned the church itself down nearly two centuries ago.) Roof adorned his car with the same Confederate flag that once flew over slaveholding states and today waves over the South Carolina statehouse. America may be unwilling to face its history, despite a mounting pile of black bodies that forces African Americans to reckon with it daily. But Roof is more honest than those—and there are so many—whose complicity lies in looking the other way, in denying the past, in pretending that each new murder is an isolated anomaly. As long as they are unwilling to admit to our past’s stranglehold on our present, Roof and others like him will continue to draw truth, and strength, from the legacy and reality of white terror and supremacy. The lies white America tells itself cost actual black lives.


Related posts:

Nightly Show Defines Charleston Shooting As Domestic Terrorism: Fox News/GOP Rush To Cover Up The Rhetoric Trail For The Charleston Shooting To Themselves Pretending It Was An Attack On Christianity



GOP's War On Colored People OR The Case To Categorize The GOP As A Hate Group


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