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M.I.A. on “Framed” Julian Assange: “You Should Thank Him”

performs during day 1 of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival at the Empire Polo Field on April 26, 2008 in Indio, California.

For almost five years, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has been holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, hoping to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he was accused of rape over an incident in 2010. Today, Swedish prosecutors dropped those charges–not because they believe he is innocent, necessarily, but because they are unable to proceed with the case without Assange’s presence in court. “I can conclude, based on the evidence, that probable cause for this crime still exists,” Sweden’s chief prosecutor Marianne Ny said, according to the New York Times. 

Nor do the dropped charges mean Assange is finally free to roam the Earth: He is still wanted on charges of failing to appear in court in Britain, and London police told the Times they would be “obliged” to arrest him if he left the embassy. Still, M.I.A., a longtime Assange supporter, took the news as an occasion to celebrate. Today, Stereogum notes, she posted a portrait of Assange to Instagram, along with a long caption implying that the rape charges against him were untrue and possibly orchestrated as payback for his history of revealing government secrets. The caption reads:

Every time I ve seen Assange I’ve asked him why he doesn’t design an app for apple or sell out humanity and their data and rape them for all their money to be a rich and respected corporate humanity rapists . I mean he’s as smart as any of the sili”con” valley respected celebrated humans. The “call of duty” guy or the guy installing gps systems into drones that’s killed thousands of innocent people. Why not cash in ur intellect as most of us do? That type of collective social rape is ok. The porn images or fucked up weird shit my kid has popping up on YouTube every time he searches lego on the internet or constant peddling out of images and messages that say it’s ok to be rampant fuck boys and girls , in this is modern society. system that perpetuates over sexualisation of women in the name of freedom wants to bomb countries where women cover up and killed how many women and children- Hilary and condoleezza rice joined forces to represent women and said the war in Iraq was to liberate women so they didn’t have to cover up!!!! . Lets not ask questions about that because that’s normal but dismiss everything this guy did because it hasn’t occurred to you that we are not in the 60s and 70s where they just kill you like Malcom x or JFK , they just “slander” or “frame” you mostly use sex or drugs or money to do it, and sadly thats enough because humanity has become that complacent and is rapidly loosing critical thinking faculties. ‬ by now if you haven’t be slandered and framed when you’ve hit the dollars 💵 or social reach it means your probably working for the system. Grab that pussy is a symptom of your broken system that was allowed to grow without question. He helped You to see hypocrisy you should thank him and fast fix your system not hide him or the cracks he exposed.

Assange’s case is a complicated one. Whatever you think about Wikileaks–most people’s feelings seem to be pretty mixed these days–you have to acknowledge the reality that Assange is a person and not a walking representation of some political ideal. It’s entirely possible that for a person to be both a defender of free speech and government accountability and a person who has committed sexual assault. But for M.I.A., it seems, there are no such gray areas.