Justice in America: Authorities are Cracking down Hard on Black Protesters while Treating White Supremacist Reopeners with Kid Gloves
NB: Sound familar? Read this and the other links beneath this post.. DS
My social media feeds have been full of comparisons between the
treatment by police of Reopener mobs, some of whom invaded the Michigan state
house while fully armed with assault weapons, and the treatment of protesters
in Minneapolis regarding the killing of George Floyd by a policemen who kept
his knee on his neck. Why does the Far Right
all too often get a pass by American law enforcement?
‘The names change but the colour is always black’
Protests Erupt Nationwide Over Death Of George Floyd
Black woman medical worker killed by police in her home
Fatal shooting of black jogger in Georgia
The Shooting Of Black Americans Started Long Before The Looting
Why the officers fired for the George Floyd killing could ultimately get their jobs back
1. The white
supremacists and other far right elements are armed to the teeth. There are
about 255
million guns in the US, but something like 75 percent of Americans say
they don’t own a gun. So between 22% and 31% of Americans, about 80 to 100
million people, own all the guns. Then 3 percent of the population, some 10
million people, own 100 million guns.
Let me underline that.
About 40 percent of all guns in the United States are owned by about 10 million
people, some 3 percent of the population. So owning guns is legal, and I’m from
a family of farmers who hunted with them, and I’m not knocking gun ownership.
And I’m sure there are perfectly innocent hobbyists who collect guns the way
other people collect vintage automobiles. But a tiny percentage within that
percentage of super-gun-owners are far right wing extremists, and law
enforcement is understandably reluctant to get them het up.
2. White supremacists
are very good about playing passive aggressive games and nursing and sharing
grievances. In the 1990s, Federal agencies like the FBI and Alcohol, Tobacco,
and Firearms were called in to deal with heavily armed white terrorists. A 1992
stand off at Ruby
Ridge, Idaho, between gun nut Randy Weaver (whose family was with him)
ended in tragedy when FBI snipers took out Weaver’s wife and child. Weaver had
refused to show up for his trial on weapons charges (he had sawed off a
shotgun, which is illegal in Federal law). Then the following
year the David Koresh splinter of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas,
was investigated for
stockpiling weapons, and a raid left 4 ATF agents and 6 Branch Davidians dead,
with many agents wounded. That firefight led to an FBI siege of the compound
and ultimately to the deaths of 76 members, including Koresh, in fires that
they may have set themselves.
Timothy McVeigh and
Terry Nichols, both on the fringe of white supremacy and conspiracy theories,
cited Ruby Ridge and Waco when they blew up the Murrah Federal Building in
Oklohama City in 1995 with a fertilizer bomb (and ended up targeting the day
care center on the first floor). They killed 168 people and wounded hundreds
more. They killed more persons per capita than any other terrorists in American
history up to that point.
It isn’t usually said
out loud, but the Oklahoma City bombing was the most successful act of
terrorism in American history. It led the FBI and other Federal agencies, as
well as local law enforcement in many instances, to back off the white
supremacists, neo-Nazis and kindred groups, leaving them be unless they did
something really egregious. Terrorism was defined at the time in the US Federal
code as the use of violence by a non-state actor against civilians to change
politics. So that worked. ... read more
https://www.juancole.com/2020/05/authorities-protesters-supremacist.htmlsee also
Safoora Zargar: Why did India jail a pregnant student during Covid-19? By Geeta Pandey
