I think it's completely fair; people need to know these extremists exist. After all, extreme factions have been known to grow into larger groups of dangerous thugs (does "al Qaeda" ring any bells?)
You are correct in principle, but not about this particular item. Prior to this thread being removed it was "locked" to prevent further posting to it. While there was a large amount of people bashing the poster Starpass and calling for her banning, there were a large amount of posters coming to her defense and agreeing with her. And once it was locked, threads started poping up all over DU in SUPPORT of Starpass!!! And then after it was removed, MORE started poping up!
It is not a wacko fringe single poster of at DU saying this stuff. It is a sizable portion of the posters who are active over there.
I remember reading the thread, and sending links and copies of the post to Boortz, Best of the Web, and several others. There was a poster who blasted Starpass in no uncertain terms and had many unkind things to say about her. Also called for her to be banned. Another poster responded back that Starpass would not be banned, as she is not alone and many here (meaning DU) have the same feelings.
That would be true except this isn't really all that fringe for DU. I infiltrated that place once. Made it to over a thousand posts. There are some seriously sick people there. Seriously. You know how many threads they had to pull during the hot part of Operation Iraqi Freedom because lots of different members were calling soldiers murderers, wishing they'd get killed etc?
There was one just yesterday entitled "Will you support the troops when they kill their officers". And a hint here- it wasn't a rhetorical question- that's the kind of thing they seriously think about. That thread got dozens and dozens of replies from long time posters trying to sort out whether our troops have a moral responsibility to murder their officers or not. The thread got pulled of course.
Go over there and look in their 9/11 forum. Wall to wall conspiracy kooks. The people on the planes were gassed by the CIA and the planes were replaced with drones ad nauseum.
Look in their Foreign Affairs forum- one solid phlegm ball of anti-Israeli, Pro-Palestinian garbage. They have to keep that forum sort of hidden away- it's too ugly for the general public.
Check out the number of threads over there that don't get any replies. There's quite a lot actually and if you'll study them, after a while you'll see a pattern. Any problem like Zimbabwe, the UN culpability for the security lapses in Iraq that got their workers killed, Africans murdering each other on that Continent etc- anything that questions their worldview or is too hard for them to explain, they simply ignore it. They live in a very strange and black world where they live to "Hate America All the Time".
And contrary to this place, Skinner (their admin mod) did a sort of scientific survey of who their disruptors were and it turns out the ones that post the most inflammatory comments (those comments most often pulled) are members with thousands of posts (not infiltrator/disruptors).
What are they going to show about us here? That we hate the French? Ok, we're Americans. What is more forgiveable- for us to hate the French because of some perceived treachery during wartime or for them to call for our American troops to be killed during wartime?
Fine, let them air our dirty laundry. Paint me xenophobic anyday rather than let it be said I want our soldiers dead on foreign soil.
I've seen loads of threads over there exactly in this vein and for me, this is more typical of that place than not. They really, really do hate America. Hard to fathom but it's true.
The post wasn't removed until AFTER it was reposted on Best of the Web and Andrewsullivan.com and started generating bad publicity for them. If the post had been removed within minutes of having been posted, you'd have a point. It was up for a good 18 hours.