In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, Fox News guest commentator, Erik Rush, tweeted "Yes, they're evil. Let's kill them all," to his nearly 50,000 twitter followers. Rush was talking about Muslims, who he had immediately blamed for the bombing, and said we should kill all the Muslims.
The shocking and unacceptable nature of his words, however, has much deeper consequences. In the United States, free speech is valued -- after all, it is the first right guaranteed under our constitution. Yet what Rush tweeted is not protected as free speech because it insights violence and threats to the safety of others. If one just ignores his words or dismisses them as being intentionally controversial -- they run the risk of encouraging and promoting hateful ideology and perpetuating the cycle of violence in humanity.
Encouraging others to "kill" an entire certain group -- whether a religious, racial, or ethnic group -- is polarizing and dangerous. Rush might explain the scandal away by saying he was only being sarcastic, but hate speech isn't something that we should ignore or just explain away.
Rush has a global platform that most do not -- he is invited to speak on Fox News as an unpaid commentator. His hate inducing words are completely unacceptable. Fox News should drop Erik Rush from their program, or else they will be endorsing his hateful ideology. It's time to take a deep breath and stop the cycle of violence.
If Fox News gives Erik Rush more air time, they send the message that his statements and hateful ideology are acceptable. The Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel once said that, "The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference." If we turn a deaf ear to hateful public statements, then we are indifferent. Let's not allow humanity to be infected with violent loathing of our fellow global citizens. Let's stop that now.