https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rutN06v9sew
Saturday, August 29, 2020
Outrage Grows Over Police Treatment of Alleged Kenosha Killer Kyle Rittenhouse Compared to Shooting Victim Jacob Blake
In the streets and on social media, anger and questions about systemic racism and white privilege abound in the wake of Kenosha shootings.
by
Anger and questions mounted on Wednesday night and into Thursday over the disparity in police treatment of Jacob Blake, a Black man shot numerous times by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin while intervening to stop a fight, and Kyle Rittenhouse, the heavily—and unlawfully—armed white teen who was given a pass by officers after he allegedly shot and killed two Kenosha protesters.
Veteran Kenosha officer Rusten Sheskey fired seven shots at Blake, a 29-year-old father of five, hitting him four times in the back at near point-blank range on Sunday, paralyzing him from the waist down as three of his children looked on. Police said they found a knife under the floorboard of Blake's car, although there are no claims he was threatening anyone with it.
Bishop Talbert Swan, president of the Springfield, Mass. chapter of the NAACP, tweeted video of a white man menacing police officers with a bladed weapon in response to critics playing up Blake's knife.
Blake's shooting stands in stark contrast with the police treatment of Rittenhouse, an aspiring cop and staunch supporter of President Donald Trump whose social media accounts are brimming with Blue Lives Matter posts, and who boasted online about being an armed vigilante. The teen, who posted numerous photos in which he poses with guns, apparently heeded calls on social media encouraging armed militia members to travel to Kenosha to protect property from "evil thugs," and urging "patriots" to "shoot to kill."
The 17-year-old teen—the age to legally carry firearms in public in Wisconsin is 18—is seen in a video with other armed civilians violating Kenosha's 8:00 pm curfew. However, police challenged neither of these violations. Instead, officers in armored vehicles gave them water and told them that, "we appreciate you guys, we really do," while simultaneously ordering protesters to disperse and accusing them of "trespassing."
Cellphone video shows Rittenhouse running away after shooting three people, two of them fatally. "I've just killed someone," he says. Only one of the victims, 26-year-old Anthony Huber of Silver Lake, Wisc., has been identified as of Thursday morning.
After the shooting, Rittenhouse walked toward police with his hands in the air, his rifle slung across his chest, as protesters shouted to the officers that the teen had just shot two people. The officers allowed Rittenhouse to pass unmolested. He was able to travel back to his hometown of Antioch, Illinois, some 20 miles (32 km) away, before finally being arrested the following day and subsequently charged with first-degree intentional homicide.
Outraged observers took to Twitter and other social media to note the racist double standards and white privilege highlighted by the two shootings.
"Jacob Blake was shot several times in the back while walking away from police officers," tweeted Nathalie Baptiste, a reporter for Mother Jones. "Kyle Rittenhouse made it all the way home before being arrested. Law and order is only for certain people."
Some compared the latest incidents to past police shootings of Black people and the treatment afforded to white shooters, including Dylann Roof, who massacred nine Black worshippers at a Charleston, South Carolina church in 2015.
Others criticized media coverage of the incidents.
"A 17-year-old white supremacist domestic terrorist drove across state lines armed with an AR-15," tweeted Rep. Ayanna Presssley (D-Mass.). "He shot and killed 2 people who had assembled to affirm the value, dignity, and worth of Black lives. Fix your damn headlines."
On Comedy Central's "The Daily Show," host Trevor Noah wondered "why some people get shot seven times in the back while other people are treated like human beings and reasoned with and taken into custody with no bullets in their bodies."
Meanwhile, Kenosha Police Chief Daniel Miskinis blamed Rittenhouse's victims for their own deaths because they were "out after curfew"—as was the shooter—while defending vigilantes' right to "exercise their constitutional rights."
As professional athletes and teams from numerous sports and leagues postponed games in protest of police killings of Blake, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others, right-wing media and sports personalities defended and even applauded Rittenhouse, while demonizing victims of police and white supremacist violence. Popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson said that Rittenhouse "had to maintain order," while disgraced former San Francisco Giants slugger Aubrey Huff, who has been disinvited from the team's 2010 World Series championship reunion over past racist and misogynistic comments, called the teen "a national treasure."
At the Republican National Convention, police brutality and the Kenosha killings went virtually unmentioned, while speakers heaped praise upon President Donald Trump for his tough "law and order" rhetoric. Trump, who has often been accused of courting and even inspiring white supremacists, has been conspicuously silent in the wake of the Kenosha shootings.
Some RNC speakers decried the looting and "mobs" in cities run by Democrats while ignoring police and racist violence.
"From Seattle to Portland to Washington and New York, Democrat-run cities across this country are being overrun by violent mobs," South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem said. "There's looting, chaos, destruction and murder."
Some commentators wondered what it would take for many white Americans to finally see the racism that so many others are protesting.
"The fundamental unfairness of [the Blake and Rittenhouse] tragedies in one Wisconsin city... should be enough for even the most stubborn of white Americans to understand why people are marching to assert and rightfully demand that Black lives matter," wrote Chicago Tribune columnist Rex Huppke. "The clear-as-glass unfairness of it all should be enough."
But, he concludes, "it won't be."
Venezuela: Aggression in October?
https://www.resumen-english.org/2020/08/venezuela-aggression-in-october/
By Ángel Guerra Cabrera, on August 26, 2020
A US-sponsored military aggression against Venezuela could take place before the November 3 elections in that country. On August 22, Admiral Remigio Ceballos, chief of the strategic operational command of the Bolivarian National Armed Force (FANB), said that “The international intelligence agencies allied to Venezuela inform us that Colombia is preparing an aggression, and the FANB will respond with force and forcefulness to any aggression against the sovereignty and independence of Venezuela, under the command of our Commander in Chief Nicolas Maduro Moros”.
“We are in the presence of a Colombian government that has attacked Venezuela the most in all our history,” he added. Ceballos also wrote on Twitter: During the year 2000, Plan Colombia was installed with 7 U.S. military bases in that country “to prepare its aggression against our nation and the entire region”. Days before, Samuel Moncada, Venezuela’s ambassador to the UN denounced; “Washington’s propaganda bodies already promote the invading multinational force in Venezuela … it must be with military occupation but without the visible presence of the United States in the front line. It is the armies of Colombia and Central America that will do the dirty work”. In another message, Moncada pointed out that the “final phase” of aggression against Venezuela, whose campaign of maximum pressure… is already underway, is moving to the military dimension. “They are looking for the ‘October surprise. In Venezuela we must prepare ourselves for the provocation in the making”. In another tweet, the Venezuelan representative in the UN showed a fragment of the article of the conservative website Washington Examiner, where the insinuations of the chief of the US Southern Command, Admiral Craig Faller and Phil Gunson, of the International Crisis Group, about an eventual invasion against Venezuela. According to the publication, in a seminar convened by the toxic Atlantic Council, Faller expressed, “The key is in how we can better share intelligence and how the international community can be more influential to force and change Maduro’s behavior and that of the “external state actors”, in obvious reference to Cuba, Venezuela and Iran.
Coinciding with this, they met in Bogotá with President Iván Duque, Faller together with Robert O’Brien, national security advisor to the White House, his deputy for Latin America, the Cuban-American Mauricio Claver-Carone, archenemy of Cuba and Venezuela and Trump’s candidate for president of the Inter-American Development Bank, and US ambassador to Colombia, Phillip Goldberg. The Colombian bowed down and announced that it would review “issues of security, the fight against drug trafficking, ‘the situation in Venezuela’ and the immigration of citizens from that country to Colombia. Washington’s cynicism goes so far as to accuse Venezuela of drug trafficking while its main ally in the region, Colombia, produces 90 percent of the world’s traded coca.
For its part, the Mexican website La Politica Online states that Cuban-American Senator Marco Rubio is agitating Trump’s campaign to convince the president to invade Venezuela in order to get Florida’s 29 electoral votes: Members of the Republican war room working to line up the Latino vote recently commented that, in at least two meetings, Rubio expressed himself in favor of a military action in South America in order to secure Florida’s votes in the Electoral College in November.
Fundamental antecedents reinforce the possibility that the aggression would be directed at Venezuela. First of all, President Donald Trump’s fixation with the South American country and its splendid natural resources, which has led him to ask military chiefs of the Pentagon about the feasibility of attacking it directly with US forces along with the enormous and incessant subversive attack and economic war it maintains against it. But, in addition, there is the fact of his current unfavorable situation in the polls, which if it continues, or worsens, could lead to the Democrat Joe Biden evicting him from the White House. U.S. presidents who have wanted to be reelected have increased their sympathy among voters by resorting to the so-called “October Surprise,” a military adventure that allegedly brings the country together around the commander in chief.
During the Donald Trump administration, military and paramilitary actions against Caracas organized from Colombia under the direction of Washington have not ceased. Among them the failed attempt to assassinate President Nicolas Maduro and the high political-military command of the Bolivarian Revolution on August 4, 2018, the defeated coup attempt of April 30, 2019, and the dismantled maritime invasion, with the participation of US mercenaries, in May 2020, called Operation Gideon. This was planned through a contract signed between the self-proclaimed Guaidó and the mercenary chief and former Green Beret Jordan Goudreau.
Source: La Pupila Insomne, translation Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau
A Tale of Two Teens: When White Killers Are Treated Better Than Black Victims
Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager, was killed for walking home at night. Kyle Rittenhouse, a white teenager, is being defended by Republicans after murdering two BLM protesters.
August 27, 2020 Hana Kiros THE PROGRESSIVE
https://portside.org/2020-08-27/tale-two-teens-when-white-killers-are-treated-better-black-victims
I remember being thirteen and staying up to see if Trayvon Martin’s killer would be convicted. The announcement of the verdict kept being pushed back, but I kept watching—hoping that the anguish I was feeling would somehow be resolved by seeing George Zimmerman jailed.
My mom said the delay was tactical: designed so more people would be too busy sleeping to riot when the verdict came up not guilty. I, naive and accustomed to being called smart for my age, thought it impossible. A kid—a Black Florida teenager, just like me—was stalked and killed for no reason. The government was good. The world had to care.
But it didn’t. Zimmerman walked free. Martin—older than me then, never to reach my age now—stayed just as miserably dead. My world view shifted.It’s Cowboys and Indians updated: a wicked game where Black people, too beastly to be left uncontrolled, are seen as predators but almost always end up prey.
When I heard that the person who shot two protesters to death in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was seventeen, I thought of Trayvon.
Kyle Rittenhouse: seventeen, White, holding a semi-automatic rifle, with a chorus of witnesses identifying him as a killer, walked right past a swarm of police and, unpursued, put twenty miles between him and his victims. The next morning, he was arrested alive and unharmed.
Trayvon Martin: seventeen, Black, holding the Skittles and juice that he’d just bought from a 7-Eleven, is stalked and murdered by a self-appointed neighborhood guard for walking home and “looking about” suspiciously.
One boy lives, one boy dies. Who do you think America has sympathy for?
Depends where you look. Kyle Rittenhouse, a Trump supporter and idolizer of police, has become a conservative darling. Tucker Carlson—host of the most-watched show in cable news history—defended his actions as inevitable, even heroic: a testament to a boy who stepped up where “no one else would.” Conservative pundit Ann Coulter wants Rittenhouse, known only for killing Black Lives Matter protesters, to be President.
He’s been afforded a degree of leniency and linguistic care that is the inverse of the racist smears Trayon Martin faced. During the Kenosha protest, a police officer is recorded thanking Rittenhouse and his armed compatriots multiple times, who were breaking curfew just the same as tear-gassed racial justice protesters. Rubber bullets flew elsewhere, but police stopped to offer Rittenhouse and his good ol’ boys water.
When describing the triple shooting that took two lives, Kenosha’s police chief called Rittenhouse someone “involved in the use of firearms to resolve whatever conflict was in place.”
Imagine painting someone who crossed state lines illegally armed with an automatic rifle as interested in conflict resolution, or describing Jeffrey Dahmer—another Wisconsin killer—as “involved in the use of teeth.”
The goodwill, even reverence, that’s been granted to this white boy who has taken two lives will never be given to Trayvon Martin or Jacob Blake. I remember in 2013 when white supremacists hacked Martin’s phone and critics cited photos obtained of him wearing a grill as proof of his “violent nature.” I remember yesterday, when pundits used the fact that Blake had a knife in his car to justify the shooting that has left him paralyzed.
Yet gangs of heavily armed white men who migrate to extrajudicially “police” anti-police brutality protests are just concerned citizens fighting the good fight. A teenager from my hometown who, in a racist viral video, threatened to shoot “n*ggers” while firing shots out of his truck, was just a kid pretending. It’s Cowboys and Indians updated: a wicked game where Black people, too beastly to be left uncontrolled, are seen as predators but almost always end up prey.
Jacob Blake’s spine is severed. It will take “a miracle” for him to walk again. His children—aged three, five, and eight—had to watch a police officer put seven bullets into their dad for opening his car door.
Seven bullets.
It’s almost cartoonish carnage. Too horrid to bear.
When I think of those kids and that family—of the devilishly cruel, unjustifiable violence Jacob Blake endured—I feel trapped in the same disbelief and despair that I got my first taste of at thirteen. His little kids, as precious as any, will bear the trauma and terror that police subjected them to forever. If they saw cops and ran, would you blame them?
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