Enemy Combatant
Saturday, June 26, 2004
The Difference Between Michael Savage and Tom Metzger? You And I Own Savage's (FCC) License To Spew Racial Hatred
From Media Matters For America:
On his June 23 radio show, host Michael Savage asserted that only when he sees Muslim extremists "hanging from lampposts in the entire Middle East . . . with their guts hanging out, then I'll believe that there's a difference between radical Islam and the rest of Islam over there."
Compare that to this, about Tom Metzger:
In 1988, three young skinheads in Portland, Oregon - members of a group called East Side White Pride - used a baseball bat to beat an Ethiopian student to death. The three were caught and convicted - that was the easy part. The important fact for [the Southern Poverty Law Center], however, was that East Side White Pride was affiliated with a much larger and more powerful group called the White Aryan Resistance (WAR), based in California.
Tom Metzger, WAR's leader, trained young racists in techniques of violence and incitement, and then sent them out to other areas to train others in their turn. [ . . . ]
One of the three youths convicted in the case had, in fact, at 16 been recruited and trained by John Metzger, Tom Metzger's son and the leader of WAR Youth, and then dispatched to Portland to make contact with East Side White Pride. SPLC was even able to obtain the letter of introduction he brought from WAR to ease his acceptance into the Portland group. Another of the killers - the one who actually swung the bat - called Tom Metzger from jail after his arrest. There was enough evidence to pursue the Metzgers and WAR for their responsibility in the crime.
Using Oregon's existing wrongful death statute, the Center sued WAR on behalf of the murdered student's family. SPLC was able to demonstrate that, even though the Metzgers were 1,500 miles away at the time of the murder, and didn't know it was being committed, they nonetheless shared in responsibility for it as a result of their urging and training the ringleader to commit this sort of violent, hate-inspired act. By careful detective work, and by gaining the help of the ringleader, who gave evidence against his former mentors, The Center obtained a $12.5 million settlement for the Ethiopian student's family, and effectively put WAR out of business.
The question is, do we have to wait for some Savage acolyte to actually kill a Muslim or an Arab, before we decide this kind of racist incitement isn't deserving of the taxpayers' license to use OUR public airwaves?
(And as a cardcarrying member of the ACLU, I can say I have no problem with kicking Savage off the air for spewing this kind of hatred. He can stand up on a soapbox in a public park, to say all this, if he wants. I just don't think he deserves nationwide syndication to broadcast such filth -- and it's a helluva better example of a "clear and present danger" to our youth than, say, catching a fleeting glimpse of Janet Jackson's titty.)
