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Just got this from Juan Cole’s blog. Well, US security people say that when Sarah Palin went on the attack against Obama, particularly when she suggested he had been ‘palling around with terrorists’, the effect on some of her constituency was to suggest that he(Obama) posed such a great threat to the USA, that he deserved to be killed, hence an upswing in assassination plots.

Link to the story here, excerpt here,

'The Republican vice presidential candidate attracted criticism for accusing Mr Obama of "palling around with terrorists", citing his association with the sixties radical William Ayers.

The attacks provoked a near lynch mob atmosphere at her rallies, with supporters yelling "terrorist" and "kill him" until the McCain campaign ordered her to tone down the rhetoric.

But it has now emerged that her demagogic tone may have unintentionally encouraged white supremacists to go even further.

The Secret Service warned the Obama family in mid October that they had seen a dramatic increase in the number of threats against the Democratic candidate, coinciding with Mrs Palin's attacks.'

It is sad that Waki did not think the three year campaign of hate from Raila and the ODM chiefs against the Gikuyu was at all significant, or that it served to whip up passions to such a level that friends saw no evil in hacking their neighbours.When you see people in prominent positions calling for a Lesotho, when you see Ngilu, Orengo and the thug himself frothing against the privilege of the Gikuyu, or telling the people that Kibaki will hand over to Uhuru and the Gikuyu will rule for ever, then you know a storm is coming.

There’s countless such statements, statements that served to provoke intense hatred in the country. Madoadoa is just the one chosen by Waki for the selective justice against the Rift Valley MPs, but we all knew Majimbo meant just that, we knew the suggestion that Central Province spent the bulk of our national revenue was just that, a call to arms. We knew by the time KTN was getting APs killed as it suggested they were being sent around the country to rig that fires were being stoekd, we knew it when we heard the adui call of Raila’s, we heard the call loud and clear. We heard it when it was claimed that 80% of civil servants were Gikuyu. We heard it when it was suggested that the bulk of the land in the Rift Valley had been stolen by Kenyatta and given to Gikuyus and Kisiis, when he stormed the floor below or above the ECK offices, and stormed SixEighty hotel. Waki and Raila's chums in the civil society want to pretend none of this was significant.

None of this was knew, and none of its consequences particularly surprising.  We heard it and we wrote about it here, we were not seers then, and neither are we now. Waki did not need to be smart, he needed to be honest. Kenyan civil society does not need to be smart, it needs to find its conscience.

In all of our history, when the Majimbo call came up, it came up with bloodshed, but it is not just here either, as Juan Cole says in his blog,

Anyone who knows the history of race relations in the United States knows that accusing a Black man of 'paling around with terrorists' is the prelude to a lynching.................... It should be remembered that rightwing rhetoric in Israel lambasting Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin as a traitor was implicated in whipping up an Orthodox assassin to kill him, thus destroying the Oslo peace process....................... Words have consequences, even ignorant disconnected words like those of Sarah Palin.

Waki of course chose to ignore all this, some of it even carried by the mouths of those who now call for an end to impunity, and who not even one year ago, were asking us to vote for impunity, to vote against our knowledge of  these politicians, their histories, and the accusations that previous commissions had levelled against them. Akiwumi? Kiliku even?

Just words. Words count.