If Sarah Palin Were an Animal Rights Activist, She’d Have Already Been Convicted of “Terrorism”

by Will Potter on January 9, 2011

in Terrorism Court Cases,Terrorism Scare Mongering

palin_terrorism_reload_mapSpokespersons for Sarah Palin and Tea Party groups have bristled at the suggestion that their violent rhetoric may have contributed to the recent shooting in Arizona that left six people dead and Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in critical condition. The topic is, for the most part, being treated with kid gloves in the press, and the “terrorist” label is conspicuously absent from the discussion.

However, animal rights and environmental activists have been labeled as “terrorists,” and sent to prison, for much, much less.

The murder attempt of Gabrielle Giffords needs to be put in a political context: Sarah Palin’s PAC used this map with gun targets on lawmakers, including Giffords; Palin has repeatedly used the rallying cry “Don’t Retreat, Instead – RELOAD!”; Tea Partiers have carried assault rifles to political rallies; and militia members have urged followers to vandalize the offices of politicians (including Giffords), which they have done.

As I have reported here many times previously, none of this is being labeled terrorism by the government. Meanwhile, the animal rights and environmental movements are labeled the “number one domestic terrorism threat.”

To draw an even more specific comparison: the SHAC 7 were convicted of “animal enterprise terrorism” for running a website which posted the names and addresses of individuals tied to the animal testing lab Huntingdon Life Sciences. They were not charged with any act of property destruction, they were charged with “conspiracy” on the grounds that they should be held accountable for the actions of others in the same movement.

To be clear, I am not arguing that Sarah Palin should be accused of terrorism. However, such a stark hypocrisy needs to be addressed.

Simply put:

If Sarah Palin cannot be held responsible for the actions of those who visit her website, neither can animal rights activists.

And if animal rights activists are terrorists for running a website listing “targets,” then Tea Partiers and Sarah Palin, who have gone much further, must be labeled terrorists as well.

UPDATE: Well, it was only a matter of time. At least one person is proposing prosecuting Palin as a terrorist and using the SHAC 7 case as justification. It’s this type of sweeping application that SHAC 7 attorneys have been warning about for years.

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  • Butthole67

    The marks on the Palin map aren’t “gun targets”. Palin herself has stated that they are surveyor’s marks. It’s also very obvious that Palin was targeting people for defeat in the elections, not assassination.

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  • Houstonhelpanimals

    SHAC was marking them for protests and nobody was physically harmed, so that is very hypocritical. I guess the govt is a popularity contest for morals, because its harder to condemn political extremists and activists since more could fall into that category. Not to mention the government subsidizing many of the factory farm and animal testing facilities.

  • Houstonhelpanimals

    What about abortion groups, George Tiller killed someone and many more have violently protested, they should downgrade it to all activist groups then, but the government supports/funds/subsidizes their and other peoples addictions despite obama even admitting in a Vegan Outreach video that its best for our health, environment, resources…

  • http://www.examiner.com/atheism-in-norfolk Kenneth M. Montville

    Get real. First, the rhetoric was always that of a sort of second amendment nut, gun-savvy perspective. Tweets like, “don’t retreat, RELOAD!” spell out the nature of this map perfectly well. Secondly, those are not surveyor’s marks they are cross-hairs. I have never seen a surveyors mark that looks remotely like a cross-hair and if you do any searching on this neat invention we have called the internet you will see that is because benchmarks and surveyors marks look nothing like cross-hairs.

    Second, what Sarah Palin meant and what is expressed is subject to interpretation as meaning is not necessarily inherent within the rhetoric itself. She may not have actually wished physical harm on the people who were targeted on the map, but that doesn’t mean someone else may have seen it the same way. Now, seeing as Palin took down both this map as well as the aforementioned tweet within moments of the shooting I would say that she was full aware that her vitriol may have come back to bite her in the ass. This pedantic backpedaling is all that she can do to distance herself from this tragedy.

  • http://www.greenisthenewred.com Will Potter

    Surveyor marks? Is Palin in real estate now?

  • Yakov Wolf

    Palin herself, in a tweet dated Nov. 4, referred to the marks as “bullseyes” and “targets”. [ http://tinyurl.com/2f6lzxy ] . So, you are factually wrong and she is lying.

  • Boo

    >Palin herself has stated that they are surveyor’s marks

    If you believe that, you are a butthole.

  • bobbymav

    So when did we lose the ability to recognize metaphor as a construct of the English language?

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  • James – FORMER Republican

    FALSE. Palin’s AIDE claimed that after all this went down and Palin was getting heavily criticized for it. Palin herself referred to it as a bullseye on her twitter page.

    http://i.huffpost.com/gen/235505/SARAH-PALIN-BULLSEYE.jpg

    Palin’s motto after this map became “Don’t retreat, reload!”

    Enough said.

  • hi 2 u

    I am confused. This makes your website, but the death threat on Daily Kos does not gets no mention. (Sarcasm) yes you are a real journalist.

    Daily Kos was swift to scrub its post from a Tucson writer explaining how the congresswoman was now “dead to me.”

    One of the blog’s diary writers, identifying himself as BoyBlue, had written a post only two days before the shooting titled “My CongressWOMAN voted against Nancy Pelosi! And is now DEAD to me!”

    Friends describe this gut as a “left wing nut job,” So what makes you even think he was reviewing Palin’s website.

  • Mcs8244

    ad hominem attacks are the crutch of a weak mind.

  • http://www.greenisthenewred.com Will Potter

    I’m not sure it can still be considered a metaphor when people are actually carrying rifles to rallies, and people have been killed.

  • http://www.greenisthenewred.com Will Potter

    It was not mentioned because it is irrelevant: I am not speculating about the shooter’s politics (although at this point to suggest any link to Daily Kos is beyond absurd) but showing the blatantly disproportionate responses to this type of speech. Animal rights activists have been imprisoned for much less.

  • Alice2112

    I bet you’d be singing a different tune if it was a Muslim website using gun metaphors against American politicians?
    And then there’s this –Giffords opponent held June event where they could “Shoot a Fully Automatic M16″ to “Get on Target” & “Remove Gabrielle Giffords” http://mmflint.me/hF1BN5

  • hawkgirl

    Gotta agree with Will. The double standard of the feds continues. Waziyatawin is a historian and activist dedicated to helping the Dakota people reclaim tribal lands. Not surprisingly, her comments about using counterforce to resist oppression drew immediate attention from the feds when she used the phrase “by any means necessary” last November at a public gathering. But hey, guess it’s fine for the government to violently continue unjust colonization policies against native peoples, to use tax dollars to subsidize killing animals in the food industry and vivisection labs, and to guard the interests of corporate empires such as Monsanto that poison the earth.

    Counterforce remains one of many strategies of self-defense. It’s not a threat to national security as the feds like to claim. Counterforce is national security, to those who want to protect justice and civil liberties. And I’m not saying cart Palin off into the hinterlands of a Communications Management Unit, but she’s an excellent example of what irresponsible, violent rhetoric really looks like.

  • beforewisdom
  • beforewisdom

    @Butthole67

    Is the political ad in this picture similar to an ad for a surveyor?

    Picture of an ad calling to shoot Gifford
    http://www.boingboing.net/2011/01/08/Screen-shot-2011-01-08-at-11.43.jpg

    The article it was from
    http://www.boingboing.net/2011/01/08/congresswoman-gabrie.html

  • beforewisdom

    It is not “we” that are the problem. It is unstable, impressionable people who will take the Right’s hate rhetoric one step further.

  • beforewisdom

    So are calls to shoot your opponents

  • JHenderson

    Will, are you compiling quotes from politicians and “journalists” who called animal rights activists terrorists and are now falling all over themselves to call rightwing nutjobs champions of free speech?

  • tribalscribal

    o right, the lame-ass “surveyor’s marks” cover story. sorry, creating your own reality went out with the bush era. “man-up”: admit to all the overt hostility the far-right has created.

  • http://www.greenisthenewred.com Will Potter

    Yep, but now that you mention it, it would make a good post. I’ll try to pull it together this week. Thanks, Will

  • Anonymous

    It’s useless to expect fairness and consistency from those in power (or their henchmen in the press) when it comes to radical left groups that seek to threaten their power and radical right groups that seek to defend it. This issue is another drop in the bucket of evidence that the corporate media, the politicians, the whole damn system is completely corrupt and needs to be done away with ASAP. The radical right is growing increasingly militant and becoming a major force in this country. Where is the radical left? Where are the Black Panthers? Where are the Anarchist and Antifascist militias? Who will be there to challenge these neo-nazis in the streets, on the page, in the minds and hearts of our neighbors?

  • Cause_for_revolution

    Did you not see the awesome antifa action in arizona (mecca of american fascism) this fall? I think this is a fine start

    http://www.anarchistnews.org/?q=node/12724

  • http://www.greenisthenewred.com Will Potter

    I’m not sure how that is related.

  • Lawndebri

    another attempt to divide and conquer
    another reason to take out guns and our speech
    another reason to be afraid
    a Bigger reason to Love your neighbor

    people are people

    But we are all animals on on this planet let us start acting like it! Please xox

  • Lawndebri

    they blamed OZZy and rock n roll for teen suicides
    they burnt Joan of Ark and many other women at the stake
    they killed JFK, and Dr. King , and Malcom X
    they support an illegal war and have killed millions
    they like wall street and don;t like to lose money –the shac campaign is a threat to the financial security of a horrendous industry built on cruelty exploitation and murder.
    they do not play fair
    they do not shoot from the hip
    they print the money
    they buy the laws
    they foster hate
    they fear that real peace and nonviolence begins at breakfast!
    Vegan Love peace to all the earthlings

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  • Person

    Sarah Palin has said they were bullseyes. Note the date. http://i943.photobucket.com/albums/ad276/heater262/Picture1.png
    Only now does she claim they were surveyor’s marks which only makes her look even more stupid and unfit for office.

  • Kim

    It’s amazing how subject to interpretation the terms “free speech” and “harassment/conduct” are. Essentially, if the activity in question threatens minorities with little power (for ex, anti-abortion radicals harassing women seeking abortions at clinics, or pornographers distributing material with abusive content), then it’s free speech. If the activity threatens profits or powerful groups (such as home demonstrations against vivisectors, or protesting against hunters / hunt sabs), then it’s conduct/harassment.

    It’s free speech if you want to scream “Murderer!” at a scared, pregnant teen, and it’s harassment if you want to walk through the woods making noise to warn nonhuman animals that there’s danger (hunters out to prove how tough they are by shooting unarmed, mostly defenseless creatures).

  • Saraswati628

    The sheer amount of backpedaling that Palin is doing is utterly ridiculous. Does she think this is some sort of Orwellian world, and that if she alters history, it’ll alter our collective consciousness? First her team pulls down the website immediately, the morning of the shooting(if they were just surveyor’s marks, why do so). She gave some sort of 8min response on the shooting today. She isn’t even holding office anywhere, and she’s giving speeches like she’s the POTUS. The other day she said she “hated violence.” I guess grizzly bears are actually the gentlest creatures of the forest, given all of her Mama Grizzly branding. And shooting caribou and wolves(from a helicopter no less), I suppose that’s gentle and non-violent too.

    I really fail to understand how having a website with “targets” of any kind, can be tried as any sort of conspiracy. Conspiracy implies a secret agreement to break the law at a later point in time. Is posting the information somehow implicitly making an agreement to break the law with persons you may or may not know? What kind of precedent does that make, it blows my mind.

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  • BB

    Imagine what would have happened had these same hate groups that are so vocal today [and so silent for the 8 years our civil liberties were being stripped], called Bush–Hitler, a fascist, a communist, a socialist [oh, how I wish--I'll take Sweden anyday]; brought guns to ANY venue within a 100 mile radius of Dubya, or called him a LIAR during one of his speeches. I guarantee they would have been rounded up, renditioned, tortured and probably murdered with lightening speed. [ And I'm not defending Obama, he has proven himself a super fascist in his continuation of Bush's Big Brother Regime.]

    Neocons KNOW that progressives will only denounce their hate using civil discourse. They KNOW there is no real threat from the left. I have been saying for years that it will be the blood of liberals that flows, because they have the one thing rightwingers don’t–sanity. I equate the GOP with the Mafia. They are a criminal organization which incites terror and extortion upon disadvantaged Americans to enrich themselves. They murder people to carry out their agenda. Whether thru wars, or denying health care to the terminally ill, or starving people by eliminating social programs, the result is the same — millions dead. Yes Palin IS a terrorist and she has a lot of company.

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  • Alex Melonas

    Can you imagine the media attention and public outcry if animal rights activists protested a factory farm, for example, while carrying signs that read: “We came unarmed…this time,” or “It might be time for second-amendment remedies.” Statements of this kind are common at “Tea Party” rallies. Moreover, “Tea Party” supporters, and “Tea Party” candidates, say similar things in the media and throughout the blogosphere.

    And yet, we can’t name a *single* person killed by an animal rights activists, and the list of people harmed or nearly harmed by animal rights activists is quite small (I can only think of a few examples). But obviously the same is not true when it comes to sympathizers of Right-wing causes.

  • Kathylenape

    Do you not know the meaning of the expression “dead to me?” If you don’t know the meaning, what are you doing suggesting that it was a death threat?

  • Craig_is_one

    Palin slaughters animal for fun, she worships the gun she most certainly knew what she was doing when she placed those gun targets on the map! You are deluded.

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  • Guest

    There is such a hypocritical double standard between extreme righters and environmental/animal rights activists…Its sad what this messed up country is becoming, a democracy in name only.

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