Which pro-terrorist Salon tweet is parody and which is deadly serious?
or
The first one is from the Salondotcom parody account. The second is real:
MONDAY, JUL 18, 2016 12:30 PM PDTApplying the blanket label of “evil” to mass shooters with vastly different motives obscures more than it reveals
CHAUNCEY DEVEGA
…The first narrative is that “killing someone because of the color of their uniform is the same thing as racism.” This claim reveals a profound misunderstanding of what constitutes racism, as well as its impact on the life chances of people of color in the United States. A police uniform can be removed. A person’s skin color — and the value assigned to it by dominant society —cannot be so easily changed. In all, a belief that racism and the wearing of a uniform have anything in common with one another is the type of lazy thinking which is encouraged by the fiction that America in the Age of Obama is somehow “colorblind” or “post racial.”
The second narrative is that, “Dylann Roof and Micah Johnson did the same thing”. This is not true. Yes, both men committed a horrible act of mass murder. But their motivations as well as the social and political context of their deeds are fundamentally different.
Roof is a terrorist. He committed an act of political violence against a marginalized and historically oppressed group.
Roof is a white supremacist. … This is perverse and delusional: white people are the most economically and politically powerful racial group in the United States; American society is oriented around the protection of white privilege.
Ultimately, Roof’s views are absurd, twisted, fantastical, and possess little if any relationship to the world as it actually exists.
Micah Johnson is also a terrorist. Unlike, Roof, he targeted symbols of state power and authority.
Micah Johnson supposedly told police that he wanted to “kill white people,” especially “white officers,” because he was angry and upset about the recent killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, as well as a broader pattern of anti-black bias and violence by America’s police. While Johnson may have exhibited signs of mental illness, his analyses, observations, and claims about police thuggery and violence against black and brown people in the United States are not untrue — no matter how vile his response may have been.
Gavin Long is also a terrorist, who like Johnson, targeted police. Long communicated via Facebook and other means his anger at the recent killing of Alton Sterling by the Baton Rouge police. He also felt that non-violent resistance and protest by groups such as Black Lives Matter would do little if anything to stop police thuggery and abuse against African-Americans.
Gavin Long felt that violent resistance would ultimately be necessary:
One hundred percent of revolutions, of victims fighting their oppressors, from victims fighting their bullies, 100% have been successful through fighting back through bloodshed…Zero have been successful through simply protesting. It has never been successful and it never will.”“If y’all want to keep protesting, do that, but for the serious ones, the real ones, the alpha ones, we know what it’s going to take.”
As such, he endorsed the actions of Micah Johnson. A day after Johnson killed 5 Dallas police officers, Gavin Long said via a video posted online that: “With a brother killing the police you get what I’m saying—it’s justice.”
Social scientists and other researchers have repeatedly demonstrated that America’s police racially discriminate against black people.
Read the whole thing at the real Salon.
[Comment at Unz.com]
