Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Big Peace Blogger Jim Hanson Promotes Violence Against Wikileaks' Spokesman

In the new scandal revolving around the dissemination of classified military documents to Wikileaks, an online publisher of anonymous submissions, conservatives have moved to attack the whistle blower and Australian internet activist Julian Assange, who is the spokesperson and editor-in-chief of Wikileaks.

As reported previously, Republican Representative Mike Rogers has called for the execution of Private Bradley Manning, who is being charged with distributing classified information to Wikileaks, but a new attack, one against Assange, is what caught my interest - Jim Hanson of Andrew Breitbart's Big Peace targeted Assange in his new blog post, calling the online publisher "fair game" for violent action.
Now the Taliban have a long history of killing anyone they can find who works with us or the Afghan government, but Assange put that front and center. He put crosshairs on hundreds of Afghans whose names he handed to the Taliban on a silver platter. Most of these people risked their lives to try and make their homeland a decent place to live. They trusted us to keep their names “Secret”, a trust which Bradley Manning and Julian Assange disgracefully violated. Manning is in custody and will face a jury of better men than himself; Assange should join him, well after we have a long, earnest talk with him about returning the other stolen items.

Assange has made himself another unlawful enemy combatant. As such he is fair game for our pipehitters or the CIA to pick up just like any of those terrorist facilitators, money movers and fixers we already have. Heck it wouldn’t break my heart if they returned him to his component molecules in a rain of Hellfire, you know “pour encourager les autres“. He claims to have more documents and that he will release them as well. I mean if you had a guy in France broadcasting the names of the Resistance on the radio during WWII, wouldn’t we have squashed him flat like a bug? Well….disagree, explain the difference then. You better watch your Ass-ange, Julian.
This blog post is reminiscent of another recent news event - the planned attack on the Tides Foundation by a man, Byron Williams, who was influenced by Glenn Beck, the right-wing pundit who constantly demonized the organization on his program. 

According to the gunman's mother, her son was influenced by the news on television and was upset with"the way Congress was railroading through all these left-wing agenda items."  Byron reportedly wanted to "start a revolution" by "killing people of importance at the Tides Foundation" - as Media Matters had noted, the only mention of the Tides Foundation was on Beck's program on Fox News.
As Media Matters has detailed, a LexisNexis search reveals that the Tides Foundation has been mentioned 29 times on Fox News' Glenn Beck in the time between the show's premiere and Williams' attempted rampage. In contrast, the Tides Foundation has not been mentioned once on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, or PBS in the same timeframe.
While I may not agree with the leaking of classified military information, I find the call for violence coming from the right-wing media to be quite alarming and contradictory of the justice they claim to want to defend.  Hanson should be ashamed of his rallying call for conservative "pipehitters" to seek out Assange.

1 comment:

  1. So on a site called BigPeace is a post asking or physical harm to come to a person. Not only that but an individual who is actually doing something that Breitbart claims he himself is trying to do?

    I could be wrong, but isn't the whole purpose of the "BIG" websites under Breitbart to exose important stories and issues that are supposedly hushed and never see the light of day (due to "progressive" controllers of said information)? And isn't that what WikiLeaks is doing? They are an online whistle blower with no agenda against any one person/country/entity.

    i think we should demand that Breitbart and contributors to the BIG sites applaud Wikileaks for doing what its doing.

    Chew on this. What would their stance be if the documents exposed were for another country's military. Britain, France, China, etc and Wikileaks was strongly considering not releasing it. I'm sure they would be crying that it would be a crime NOT to publish them.

    ReplyDelete

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