This past June Pastor Terry Jones of the Dove World Outreach Center hung Obama in Effigy in front of his Gainesville FLA church in retaliation for the president’s views on same-sex marriage. The countless calls for the lynching of Obama slither on the internet from hate groups and citizens incensed by the rise of socialism in the land of the Free. Yesterday an image floated onto Facebook transforming Obama’s ‘Hope’ poster into “Rope’ showing him hanging by the neck. Thousands of us called from the removal of this offensive image and Facebook reacted to a petition against the photo by pulling it from whatever site generated this overtly racist pitch to the radical white right.

According to Wikipedia lynching is the practice of killing people by extrajudicial mob action. It was almost a sport in the South during the last century with organized crowds storming jails and black houses to seize prisoners, accused criminals, or innocent men to enforce segregation of the races. Republicans supported an anti-lynching law in the 20s, while Southern White Democrats filibustered against such a measure as a curtailment of State’s Rights. Millions of blacks fled the reign of terror creating the future voting blocs for politicians siding with equality of racism, but in 1921 blacks resisted the lynching of a young man and a white man was shoot in the street. Whites in that city retaliated by burning down black Tulsa.

The Klu KLux Klan led the way for lynchings throughout the 20th Century. The numerous photos of these atrocities are worsened by the gleeful expressions of the white spectators posing around the hanging bodies and I suppose that there are thousands of white Americans viewing the above photo with the same simian smile on face of those men in the photo below.

Calling for the murder of the president is a crime.

It is not a joke.