Peter Shurman's Reaction to the Response of his Denouncing Israeli Apartheid Week (Mentions Rabble!)

Interesting.  They made it sound like the "self-destructed" and "gone over the deep end" was in response to her support for the motion, as opposed to a response to her incoherent ranting on Saturday night where she called people fascists and idiots on her Facebook page.

Anyhow, if that's the worst he can find on babble, then good enough.  I figure that's fair comment.

What's not fair comment is the e-mails he's been receiving calling him anti-semitic names, calling him a "Nazi", etc.  That's over the top, unacceptable, and downright abusive.  What's also not fair comment is phone calls at Cheri DiNovo's home, threatening calls or e-mails, and such.

And the thing is, you'll always find marginal wingnuts with anger issues on any side of the political spectrum who will fly off the handle and write stupid or threatening stuff to people they disagree with.  And those people completely delegitimize opposition in the eyes of the media and of people who are undecided.

What bothers me about this - besides the fact that these people are getting this abuse in the first place, of course - is that it's being used to completely marginalize those people who have a real point to make.  It's being used to smear those of us who are not being abusive, but who are trying to speak out and tell these politicians how unhappy we are with what they're doing.

And the problem is, it's by e-mail, so there's nothing any activist can do about it - there's no pressure that can be brought to bear on people who do it, because we will never know who did it, and probably we'll never even see what they wrote - we'll just get one or two-word snippets.  And considering how the "self-destructed" and "gone over the deep end" snippets form babble were taken completely out of context, we can't even know how much might be being exaggerated.

That said, those anti-semitic insults that Shurman has been receiving, using the "k-word" and such - there is no context in which that can be okay, and whoever is writing that crap to him needs a figurative swift kick.

I don't believe for a second that any left-wing progressive wrote such a thing to Sherman, or that a left-wing progressive made threatening calls to DiNovo.  Not for a second. 

I believe that someone did those things, though.  There are a lot of wingnuts around who do that kind of shit, as anyone in the public eye who has said anything controversial knows.  And there's no excuse for it.  It victimizes the people they write it to, and marginalizes those of us who disagree with them.  They're just as much enemies of opposing activists as they are of the politicians they write to.

Have you ever seen a left-wing progressive on babble call people the k-word?  Or utter death threats?

Come on.

I never said they issued death threats. I said over the top. Also, babble has banned a lot of over-the-top posters so perhaps it just never got there. 

Politicians get nastygrams all the time. I know from experience, as I'm sure do the other politicos here. Consider that in the light of the dogmatic and heated threads here (for example only, I'm not blaming babble) on the ME, and the unfortunate speed of communications that the internet has spawned and it's easy to see how an inflammatory topic and some heated responses can lead to very inappropriate communications.

Yes, the tables get turned, the aggressors become the victims and then we're expected to denounce them as if we some how are responsible for their actions. It's a circle game. Sometimes makes you wonder? (I'm not suggesting Dinovo or Shurman had anything to do with orchestrating anything <can't believe I'm using those two names in the same breath> ).