“Why wasn’t Assange garroted years ago?”

Sir Roger had thought that there was a limited number of people who had urged or advocated the murder/assassination/execution of Wikileaks’ Julian Assange.

Two people had stood out particularly – Canadian Professor Tom (“Obama should put out a contract”) Flanagan and US Army Lt-Col. Ralph (“Assange should be killed”) Peters.

Now he discovers there is a small website where you can find a much larger number of people involved in what looks to Sir Roger a lot like incitement to murder.

It’s “People OK With Murdering Assange“.

So it’s the usual suspects except it’s not all FoxNews or crackpot Republicans (but I repeat myself).

Australian terrorism law defines a terrorist act as

“an action done or a threat made with the intention of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause including the intention of intimidating the public or a section of the public and where the action causes serious physical harm to a person or causes a person’s death, or endangers a person’s life.”

Advocating a terrorist act means directly or indirectly counselling the doing of a terrorist act, or directly or indirectly providing instruction on the doing of the terrorist act.

The US Code of Federal Regulations defines terrorism as

“…the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives”.

The UN General Assembly resolved (non-bindingly) that

…Criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, a group of persons or particular persons for political purposes are in any circumstance unjustifiable, whatever the considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or any other nature that may be invoked to justify them…

So in general…

…surveying the various academic definitions of terrorism, Vallis concluded that:

• “Most of the formal definitions of terrorism have some common characteristics:

  a fundamental motive to make political/societal changes;

• the use of violence or illegal force; attacks on civilian targets by “nonstate”/”Subnational actors”;

• and the goal of affecting society. This finding is reflected in Blee’s listing of three components of terrorism:

1. Acts or threats of violence;

2. The communication of fear to an audience beyond the immediate victim, and;

3. Political, economic, or religious aims by the perpetrator(s).”

See if you can discern the vaguest hint of any sentiment or intent described in the definitions above, in any of the following statements made in the American media.

BOB BECKEL – FOX News commentator

“A dead man can’t leak stuff…This guy’s a traitor, he’s treasonous, and he has broken every law of the United States. And I’m not for the death penalty, so…there’s only one way to do it: illegally shoot the son of a bitch.”

Reading this over very carefully, one is wondering whether a person can be a traitor to a country of which he is not a citizen and wondering, too, whether it’s actually possible for one individual to break absolutely every law of a country with 50 states and numerous territories, and indeed how a Fox News “analyst” could have completely examined the facts of Assange’s life in relation to every single law of the United States – civil, criminal and corporate – and come to his conclusion so swiftly.

One is left only in awe of such an intellect. And yet one struggles to grasp the logic of a person who is “not for” the death penalty nevertheless advocating the intentional punishment of a person with death by gunfire. But perhaps one is indeed dwarfed by genius and can never hope to comprehend the product of such an advanced intelligence.

ERIC BOLLING – FOX News commentator

“[Assange] should be underground — six feet underground. … He should be put in jail or worse, hanged in a public forum.”

 JOHN HAWKINS – townhall.com

“5 Reasons The CIA Should Have Already Killed Julian Assange

[ … ]

” … there’s no reason that the CIA can’t kill him. Moreover, ask yourself a simple question: If Julian Assange is shot in the head tomorrow or if his car is blown up when he turns the key, what message do you think that would send … ?”

Sounds a lot like advice – instruction, even – on how to carry out an act, do you think?

RUSH LIMBAUGH

“Back in the old days when men were men and countries were countries, this guy would die of lead poisoning from a bullet in the brain.”

Just wondering … does this bring a flutter of recognition? Why does Sir Roger have flashes of Dallas? Tucson?

RUSH LIMBAUGH

“(laughing) Ah, folks, even Greg Palkot of Fox News interviewed Assange, which means that Roger Ailes knows where he is. Ailes knows where Assange is. Give Ailes the order and there is no Assange, I’ll guarantee you, and there will be no fingerprints on it.”

WILLIAM KRISTOL Chairman, New Citizenship Project 1997 to 2005, co-founder Project for the New American Century (PNAC), board member of Keep America Safe, a think tank co-founded by Liz Cheney and Debra Burlingame, board member of the Emergency Committee for Israel.

“Why can’t we act forcefully against WikiLeaks? Why can’t we use our various assets to harass, snatch or neutralize Julian Assange and his collaborators, wherever they are?”

You gotta love the political sophistication of the guy who fought so hard to get the “Coalition” into Iraq to root out those pesky weapons of mass destruction at the cost of only several hundred thousand lives.

G. GORDON LIDDY – Former White House Adviser

“This fellow Anwar al-Awlaki – a joint U.S. citizen hiding out in Yemen – is on a ‘kill list’ [for inciting terrorism against the U.S.]. Mr. Assange should be put on the same list.”

Sir Roger is musing whether Mr Liddy would therefore logically agree that all people whose statements and actions coincide with the generally agreed definitions of advocating terrorist acts ought to be on the same list? But no, Sir Roger fears that Liddy and the others in this list would subscribe to the doctrine of American exceptionalism.

JOHAN GOLDBERG – Editor-at-large of National Review Online

“I’d like to ask a simple question: Why isn’t Julian Assange dead? …Why wasn’t Assange garroted in his hotel room years ago? It’s a serious question.

Is it also a serious suggestion?

 DONALD DOUGLAS – Right-wing blogger

“I won’t think twice if Julian Assange meets the cold blade of an assassin, and apparently a significant number of others don’t care for the guy.”

Sir Roger wonders if Mr Douglas realises that a prerequisite of thinking twice is to have thought once.

 MARC SCHENKER “Vancouver American Politics Examiner” whatever that means

“So if you look at Peters’ call to have Assange killed analytically, it makes a lot of sound sense, and he probably even has a legal footing to stand on.

What might it mean to kill someone ‘analytically’? Would that mean having a pedant bore them to death, Sir Roger wondered pedantically. What might it mean legally for Schenker to be making the suggestion – to who knows which unstable or merely fanatical mind – that a person who followed his exhortations and actually killed Assange would meet with legal approval?

The question is, when it is clear that all of these people are advocating and urging an illegal and potentially terrorist act and, whether or not the act is done they could be charged with offences under US federal and state laws, why has no action been taken or warning given by any legal or political official in the US, or any representations been made by anyone in Australia?

Sir Roger is left after all this with the most disturbing mental image of a mass of men, of advancing age and declining virility, greying hair, bloated bellies, wrinkling skin, sitting in a circle, their pants around their knees, trying to excite their various and reluctant erections, jerking as fast and hard as they possibly can to the pornography of death in a mutual masturbation society.

“God damn, Earl! Ah hain’t bin so hard since the last time we burnt a cross and linched a nigger! Ah think ah might be a-cummin’!”

But that’s Sir Roger’s mind for you.