A crowd of several hundred turned out for a vigil against hate in Lewiston's Kennedy Park on Sunday. Speakers included Gov. Janet Mills, the mayors of Lewiston and Portland, Muslim city councilors and faith leaders from the Muslim and Jewish communities.
They condemned the attack on the mosques in New Zealand last week that killed 50 people and left dozens more injured. They also urged non-Muslims to stand up against white supremacy and Islamophobia.
Dequa Dhalac is the first African American and Muslim member of South Portland's City Council. "Racism, hatred and white supremacy is a global terrorist threat and it should be called for what it is and we need to end it," she said.
Which is good but it is entirely inadequate when the hundreds who went to that rally are drowned out by the thousands and millions who listen to FOX and the fascists-to-"balance"-"liberals" on CNN (Lou Dobbs spread anti-Latino hate there for years) and the ubiquitous hate-talk radio messages from a myriad of networks spreading syndicated hate, online hate sources, the source of everything from covert to overt encouragement to hate and kill Muslims, Black People, Latinos, LGBT people, Women (don't forget the most frequent target of hate murder) and other "others".
The absurd claim that to suppress the fascist media that encourages the mass murderers, something we know from so many of them naming their inspirations, is to endanger those who would rally in their meager numbers to oppose discrimination, hate, inequality and mass murder is one of the stupidest poses of moderny America. If we're too stupid to distinguish between the encouragement to violence as opposed to the encouragement to peace, the encouragement promoting discrimination as opposed to the promotion for equality we should all stop pretending to favor democracy over despotism because any people too stupid to notice the difference are incapable of democracy.
If we are not going to take action to effectively suppress the hate-talk that inspired the Australian mass murderer in New Zealand, if we are not going to take action to disarm the mass murderers in the FOX and online-hate media audience, all of these good and well meaning people at these rallies are not only wasting their time, they are covering up the real source of the hate media driven mass murders and actively preventing its ending.
Hate speech has to be reduced to the idiocy of single, unamplified voices ranting in a bar or a street corner where they will not have the artificial credibility of coming out of a TV or radio. As it is, instead of coming out of a nutcase that the bar tender will tell to go home and sleep it off because he's bothering the sane customers, it's on the TV above the bar, it's in the corner of the waiting room on the TV there.
Rupert Murdoch and his media empire are the foremost source of this stuff, the insight I have already mentioned that the three countries where he is most influential, Australia, Britain and the United States have all been pitched into neo-fascistic sewer politics is directly attributable to his media empire. And what you can say about that you can say about other media companies that carry it, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, etc. even though they don't originate it. It is not going to stop without stopping those sources of it.
As I'm typing this I have the source of that story, the NPR affiliated Maine Public Broadcasting on the radio. They just ended a piece about this with the disclaimer from the Trump regime discounting his role in the New Zealand killings, repeating his flacks saying it's "unfair" to attribute any role in it to him. Well, that's a lie spread by NPR on behalf of Trump, we know that because the mass murderer in New Zealand NAMED TRUMP AS AN INSPIRATION TO HIM, THERE IS NO MORE RELIABLE SOURCE FOR THAT INFORMATION THAN THE KILLER, HIMSELF.
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