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One thing that is vitally important as a moderator is being able to identify what I think of as "plausible deniability techniques."
These are patterns of behavior that give the speaker some degree of plausible deniability while allowing them to threaten or demean someone else. It's a variant of the JAQoffs and in just as poor faith.
I have numerous examples from decades of moderation experience, and it all follows about the same patterns.
1/
What the attacker does is they select some set of imagery that the victim will understand but that gives others cover. Either deliberate cover (e.g., no no we're just joking around!) or incidental cover (where the third party doesn't have context to know what is going on, e.g., what's wrong with badly drawn images of pepe the frog?)
Anything to reduce the cognitive dissonance that a third party needs.
Perhaps it even is something that _is_ innocuous…
…if your remove it from context.
2/
This is an incredibly common channer tactic. It's also a common bully tactic.
You were nervous when you said something and moved your hands in a particular way? That movement now gets weaponized, and no one is the wiser.
Except the victim.
It's the "it's okay to be white" sticker. The pepe the frog meme. The sealion who is "just trying to hold a civil conversation" timed to maximize vulnerability of the victim.
It's the out of context song lyric. The random photo of a gun.
3/
On a forum I moderated we'd have people who knew exactly where the line was and walk right up to it.
Repeatedly. With the exact same people. Over and over and over again.
If you didn't correct it as a moderator you'd lose the person they were targeting as a member and then you'd end up ultimately having to ban the troll anyways.
As a moderator this is the sort of thing that you have to watch for. As a team of moderators this is the sort of thing that you have to analyze.
4/
This sort of thing is also why dense rulebooks tend not to work, but having standards and consensus among your moderation staff is critical.
But if you blithely ignore that this is a technique you will lose to the bullies every single time. Your moderation will break down and, what's worse:
You probably won't know it until it is too late to fix the damage that has been caused. It will continue to get worse and it will continue to escalate until you stop it.
You have to learn to see it.
5/5
I've slept, so some concrete examples:
* Having identified that talking about killing a pig is upsetting, the bully talks about bacon, makes Lord of the Flies references, and uses emoji—seemingly randomly—like 
* A poster followed around another poster and always commented, on everything, "serious business." The meaning isn't known to the moderators, but the target knows.
* Everyone puts 
(or Deplorable) in their name and make innocuous comments whenever someone posts.
@hrefna I fear I have also seen your first example, in the field 