Athos_131 · 60041
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
During a visit to the border on Friday, President Trump declared, “Our country is full.”“Can’t take you anymore,” he said, as if he were addressing migrants from Mexico and Central America directly, though none were in the room for the roundtable in Calexico, Calif.Yet people in other countries did take note of his words. In Germany, a local division of the nationalist, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany, or AfD, celebrated the American president’s pronouncement. The party’s branch in Bad Dürkheim, a spa town of about 19,000 in western Germany’s pastoral Rhineland region, hailed Trump on Facebook as a “realistic man who has the courage to speak the truth."A user commented, “Germany is also full.”Trump’s language — repeated on Saturday and affirmed again in a Sunday evening tweet stressing, “Our country is FULL!” — was rebuked in the United States as an aberration. But it fits a pattern of far-right rhetoric reemerging globally. Fear of an immigrant takeover motivates fascist activity in Europe, where, historically, the specter of overcrowding has been used to justify ethnic cleansing.Adolf Hitler promised “living space” for Germans as the basis of an expansionist project, which historians said distinguishes the Third Reich from today’s xenophobic governments. Still, experts found parallels.“The echoes do indeed remind one of the Nazi period, unfortunately,” John Connelly, a historian of modern Europe at the University of California at Berkeley, said in an interview with The Washington Post. “The exact phrasing may be different, but the spirit is very similar. The concern about an ethnic, national people not having proper space — this is something you could definitely describe as parallel to the 1930s.”The president’s words became even more freighted when he repeated them on Saturday before the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas, saying, “Our country is full, can’t come. I’m sorry.”The remarks drew outrage, with critics pointing to the lesson of the SS St. Louis, a German ocean liner carrying Jewish refugees who were turned away by the United States in 1939. About a quarter of the passengers later perished in Nazi death camps.The words chosen by Trump have come to be associated with 20th-century moral catastrophe. An account of Switzerland’s xenophobic reaction to Jewish refugees from the Third Reich is titled, “The Lifeboat is Full: Switzerland and the Refugees, 1933-1945.”Hermann Peiter, a former professor of theology at the University of Kiel, has documented how ideas about the master race gained currency after Germany’s defeat in World War I based on the complaint, “No room for foreigners! Germany is full!”Already on Thursday, before Trump had declared the country “full,” Beto O’Rourke, the former Texas congressman and Democratic presidential candidate, was comparing the president’s language to the rhetoric used by Nazi leaders.“Now, I might expect someone to describe another human being as ‘an infestation’ in the Third Reich,” O’Rourke said. “I would not expect it in the United States of America.”Trump last year described immigrants as “animals,” later saying that he was referring to the MS-13 gang, most of whose members are from Central America. He has used the epithet going at least as far back as 2015, during the first month of his presidential campaign.White House spokesman Hogan Gidley, in a statement to the Associated Press, responded to O’Rourke’s comments by portraying the Democrats as anti-Israel and anti-Semitic.But it is Trump whose language echoes the warnings of white nationalists in Europe — a connection on which the White House didn’t have an immediate comment.Signs declaring that Germany is already “occupied” announce the perspective of the anti-Muslim, nationalist movement “Pegida,” a German acronym for a name that translates as Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West. “The country is full,” the movement’s supporters tell European media, calling Germany the “stupidest country in Europe” for accepting Muslim refugees.In 2014, Nick Griffin, a former member of the European Parliament and chairman of the far-right British National Party who referred to the Holocaust as the “Holohoax,” said on the BBC, “The country’s full. We’ll shut the door.”In the Netherlands, Pim Fortuyn, a far-right maverick who was slain as he campaigned for prime minister in 2002, popularized an anti-immigrant message in part with the catchphrase, “Our country is full.” Supporters of Geert Wilders, the far-right icon who assumed Fortuyn’s mantle, still use the slogan.None of these nations are among the most densely populated in the world. The United States in particular, where the fertility rate is at a historical low, is not full.The notion that Germany required more space in the early 20th century was similarly not born out by reality. Parts of eastern Germany were actually underpopulated, Connelly said. But it was a powerful myth, which drove the agenda of “Lebensraum,” he said — “the idea that this great nation had to expand, otherwise it would wither and die.”Fear of overcrowding has always been a “phantom,” the historian added, “connected also to the idea of there being a pure nation having its own protected territory.” The central obstacle to purity were the Jews, he said; Hitler was less concerned about other ethnic groups.A former member of Trump’s own party said the president’s warning about population density was similarly specific. David Jolly, a former Florida congressman who was unseated in 2016, noted on Sunday that Trump was only concerned about the entry of certain ethnic groups.As far-right parties in Europe aim to normalize themselves, they have dispensed with some of the incendiary rhetoric linking them to their 20th-century progenitors. Last year, the National Front in France rebranded as the National Rally to distance itself from memories of Nazi ties. (The new name, however, was reminiscent of a World War II-era bloc that collaborated with the pro-Nazi Vichy government.)The undertaking has left some of Europe’s most committed far-right activists to look elsewhere for inspiration, including to the U.S. Local party chapters across the continent, fed up with the incremental approach of their national leaders, prize Trump’s flame-throwing. Two years ago, they agreed with the American president that there were “very fine people” on both sides of the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville.In Germany, a regional branch of the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party posted a photo of the car attack that left 32-year-old Heather Heyer dead, including a caption that read, “The Americans aren’t as patient as German nationalists.”
President Trump says he wants to get tougher on illegal immigration. Republican lawmakers are worried he did the opposite with his Department of Homeland Security shake-up.The Washington Post reports that Trump is furious about the record level of migrants coming to the border, a visual reminder that his campaign promise to severely slash immigration is unfulfilled.On Sunday, Trump forced out Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, the person who helped implement some of his most extreme border policies. Since then, he has continued to boot officials at the Department of Homeland Security — most recently the head of the Secret Service. There are reports that the head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement could be next. One official told The Post that this feels like “they are decapitating the entire department.”It’s a strange strategy for Trump, who seems to be casting out allies. As secretary, Nielsen vigorously defended her department, even as it separated families at the border and fired tear gas at crowds. If Trump doesn’t think any of that is tough enough, what is?That’s the question that has Republicans in Congress worried. So worried that they’re going on the record with their concerns.“They are the intellectual basis for what the president wants to accomplish in immigration,” Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), the most senior Senate Republican, said in an interview with The Post’s Seung Min Kim about the immigration officials Trump is ousting."Strikes me as just a frustration of not being able to solve a problem,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) told Politico, adding: " … I don’t know if there’s anybody who’s going to be able to do more.”Before the firings, this was already a precarious issue for Republicans. Polling suggests that Republican base voters take immigration seriously: A December GW Politics poll found that immigration is the top issue Republican voters want Congress to deal with this year. But Congress hasn’t tackled any major immigration issues yet, and Trump may have just made it harder for lawmakers to do so by throwing a key agency into chaos.Also not helpful from Republicans’ perspective is that Trump now seems committed to veer as far to the right on immigration as politically possible. That may have helped him win the presidency, but it’s not where the battle for control of Congress in 2020 is going to play out. It will be fought in swing districts such as Rep. Will Hurd’s (R-Tex.) along the border, where the electorate is much wider than the small slice of immigration hard-liners Trump is catering to. (Surprise: Hurd does not seem like a fan of Trump’s DHS shake-up.)How hard-line to be on immigration isn’t a new tension between Republicans in Congress and Trump. A number of them opposed his national emergency declaration at the border to build a wall, a move Trump made only after Congress refused to fund construction of the wall.But the party’s relationship over immigration has perhaps never been as fraught as it is now. Kim reports that Grassley had plans to go on Fox News and broadcast directly to the president why he’s making a mistake by gutting his main immigration-enforcement agency.Republicans in Congress have worked with Trump enough to understand that the president mostly looks out for his own political career, even when it’s at the expense of the rest of his party. But even when viewed through the lens of Trump’s own political health, a number of Republicans think he just made a big mistake.
Please 'splain to me, what this last post has to do with President Trump?Maybe it belongs in the Basketball thread. Thank you.
Quote from: joan1984 on April 09, 2019, 04:39:37 AMPlease 'splain to me, what this last post has to do with President Trump?Maybe it belongs in the Basketball thread. Thank you.Read the thread title. It seems there are those that belive that President Trump is giving the green light for racism to re-emerge.FUrthermore, the post is more about racism than about basketball.
YouTube shut down numerous chat rooms being flooded for over an hour by racist comments when thousands of people tuned into YouTube on Tuesday to watch a House Judiciary Committee congressional hearing on the rise of white nationalism.The hearings featured officials from Facebook and YouTube, two platforms that have been under fire for their use by white supremacists.When viewers opened up YouTube livestreams during the first hour of the hearings, they were greeted with fast-moving chat rooms filled with racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-Muslim rhetoric. As Alexandria Walden, Google’s public policy counsel, explained to lawmakers the company’s actions against bigotry on YouTube, almost half of the screen on the YouTube-hosted stream was filled up with that bigotry.“We know the very platforms that have enabled these societal benefits can be abused,” Walden said.Several YouTube channels livestreaming the hearing, including the congressional committee’s own channel, shut down their live chats as they became flooded with hate speech. Fox Business channel kept their chat open the longest of those viewed by Gizmodo, even as it was flooded with racist comments.Meanwhile, the popular and overtly racist conspiracy theory YouTube channel Red Ice was fundraising while livestreaming the hearing as their own band of bigots filled up their channel’s chat room. For the first hour of the hearings, YouTube’s search delivered people right to the channel. Eventually, that chat room was shut down as well.Google, which owns YouTube, eventually took action to shut down the chats entirely.“Hate speech has no place on YouTube,” a YouTube spokesperson told Gizmodo. “We’ve invested heavily in teams and technology dedicated to removing hateful comments and videos and we take action on them when flagged by our users. Due to the presence of hateful comments, we disabled comments on the livestream of today’s House Judiciary Committee hearing.”The full process across multiple large channels appeared to take over 90 minutes.One common comment was to compare Eileen Hershenov, a senior vice president at the Anti-Defamation League who testified on Tuesday, to Jewish stereotypes as waves of comments accused Jews of trying to destroy “whites.” Dr. Mohammed Abu Salha, who had two family members murdered “execution style” and appeared before the committee, was mocked and criticized for being Muslim as he recounted the day he saw their bodies.The hearing was linked from 8chan, a den of bigots and racists with outsized influence in the world of white supremacy, whose users helped hasten the toxic flood of hate speech. Conspiracy theorists and right-wingers kept it up from there.
The new Democratic House majority held a hearing Tuesday on the rise of white nationalism, following the mosques massacre in New Zealand, the Pittsburgh synagogue killings and the deadly neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville.Republicans invited Candace Owens to testify.That would be the Candace Owens whom the alleged perpetrator of the New Zealand atrocity called “the person who has influenced me above all.” It’s not clear whether he was sincere in saying that, but perfectly clear was Owens’s glib dismissal of the notion that her words could have encouraged such evil: “LOL!” and “HAHA.” She said the American left tied her to the carnage because it feared her “Blexit” plan to have black people quit the Democratic Party.That’s also the same Candace Owens who in December said “if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, okay, fine. The problem is that he wanted — he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize.” She later clarified that it was not “fine” that Adolf Hitler was “a homicidal, psychotic maniac.”Owens, a 29-year-old African American provocateur, first ran an anti-Trump website that made fun of Donald Trump’s genitals, then became a conservative favorite on the Infowars conspiracy website. In recent months, she erroneously claimed that bombs sent to prominent Democrats by a Trump supporter had actually come from leftists; told France to “defend your culture” against Muslims; said “Europe will fall” to Islam and sharia law by 2050; and mused whether “something biochemically happens” to women who do not marry or have children.President Trump praised Owens in a tweet last year, and the white nationalist Richard Spencer called her “the last stand of implicit white identity, a creation of conservative white people who want to socially signal just how not racist they are.”If Republicans were hoping to sabotage the Judiciary Committee’s hearing, they got what they wanted. Owens’s presence turned a serious inquiry — there were representatives from civil rights groups, social media and a Muslim man whose daughters were killed in a hate crime — into farce.Owens said the Republicans’ Southern strategy “never happened.” She said the rise in hate crimes was fake, from “manipulating statistics.” She called the Ku Klux Klan a “Democrat terrorist organization.” She mocked Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.); proclaimed that “the Russian collusion hoax has fallen apart”; declared that Trump is “bringing everybody together”; and said the real “family separation” crisis is “black babies separated from the wombs of black mothers.”Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) played the clip of Owens’s remarks about Hitler.Owens responded: “I think it’s pretty apparent that Mr. Lieu believes that black people are stupid” because he didn’t play “the full clip in its entirety.”The chairman, Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), told her not to “refer disparagingly to a member of the committee.”“Sure, even though I was called ‘despicable,’ ” retorted Owens, who also said Nadler had an “anti-black bias.”The “despicable” remark that offended Owens came from Rep. David N. Cicilline (D-R.I.): “I regret that there are some on this panel that have tried to hijack this hearing and desecrate the lives lost to the hate crimes and violence of white supremacists . . . I think that is despicable.”Attempted hijacking was a fair description of what Republicans did Tuesday. They also invited to testify Morton Klein of the far-right Zionist Organization of America, who used the pulpit to denounce the “vicious anti-Semitic remarks” of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). He said verses from the Koran inspire “constant murder of Jews in Israel.” Klein was invited to testify even though he recently wrote of “evil murders by your filthy Arab Islamist despicable brethren.”Owens was more flamboyant. She declared that “I’m adamantly against victimhood,” then repeatedly portrayed herself as a victim. (Antifa “threw water at me” and “threw eggs at me.”) She decried “name calling”— while calling Democrats “disgusting,” “cowardly” and “unbelievably dishonest.”Even if Republicans wanted a provocateur, couldn’t they have found somebody else? Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said “I do have to wonder” about the choice, given that “we have a mass murderer . . . who did call out one of the witnesses on this panel as being his inspiration, whether or not she was.”Whatever their motives, Republicans frequently sought validation Tuesday from Owens, who has spoken about the need to overcome “white guilt.”Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio), for example, asked Owens to describe the “hate you experienced” for being a conservative. She obliged.And Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) asked whether her pro-life views “trigger people” (answer: yes). He coaxed: “Tell me a little about how the president has helped the black community.” Answer: “He’s getting us off our feet,” and conservatives are “so supportive.”“Thank God we have you,” Buck remarked.
I like Stephen Miller a lot,
A Republican congressman has spread false allegations that the US representative Ilhan Omar denied the September 11 hijackers were terrorists, as part of a new wave of abuse directed at her by some conservatives.Representative Dan Crenshaw of Texas shared a tweet falsely reporting that Omar had said she “does not consider [September 11] a terrorist attack on the USA by terrorists”, while accusing the Minnesota congresswoman of playing down the attack.Crenshaw was responding to a short video clip of a speech given by Omar in California last month, when she complained that all Muslims suffered the consequences of the actions by a small group of them on 11 September 2001, when al-Qaida terrorists hijacked four passenger jets and flew them into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon building outside Washington, while one crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.Crenshaw was joined by Ronna McDaniel, the Republican party chairwoman, who claimed Omar had shown she was “anti-American”, and the Fox News host Brian Kilmeade, who questioned Omar’s loyalty to the US during a broadcast on Wednesday morning.Omar described the attacks against her as “dangerous incitement” and urged colleagues to condemn them. She said: “My love and commitment to our country and that of my colleagues should never be in question. We are ALL Americans!”Last week, a supporter of Donald Trump in upstate New York was charged with threatening to kill Omar, one of the first Muslim women to serve in the US Congress. Patrick Carlineo was arrested after telephoning Omar’s office and stating that he would shoot her. Carlineo told the FBI “that he was a patriot, that he loves the President, and that he hates radical Muslims in our government”, according to a criminal complaint.The latest round of attacks on Omar by Republicans was prompted by the publication on Tuesday of a snippet from a speech she gave last month to an event hosted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair), in which she referred to the September 11 attacks.“Cair was founded after 9/11 because they recognised that some people did something, and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties,” Omar said. The remark was criticised by Crenshaw and others, who said Omar’s description minimised September 11 and its perpetrators.But a video of Omar’s full speech shows that the disputed remark followed from comments only a minute earlier in which Omar did mention terrorism. She complained that Islam was discussed in schools only in relation to Muslim terrorists.“It doesn’t matter how good you are if you, one day, find yourself in a school where other religions are talked about, but when Islam is mentioned, we are only talking about terrorists, and if you say something, you are sent to the principal’s office,” she said.A spokeswoman for Crenshaw, a retired navy Seal, did not respond to a request for comment.Despite the allegations from McDaniel and Fox News, Omar also used the speech to praise the US as “a country that was founded on religious liberty”. Omar arrived in the US during the 1990s as a child with her family, who were refugees from Somalia.“I know as an American, as an American member of Congress, I have to make sure that I am living up to the ideals of fighting for liberty and justice. Those are very much rooted in the reason why my family came here,” she said in the speech.
Quote from: joan1984 on June 27, 2018, 07:20:43 PM I like Stephen Miller a lot, Are you both ring-wraiths?
President Trump on Friday tweeted a video attacking Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) for the way she phrased a reference to 9/11, adding fuel to a controversy that has swelled in Republican political circles this week.The video showed snippets of comments Omar made last month at a banquet for a Muslim civil rights organization interspersed with footage of the twin towers burning.“WE WILL NEVER FORGET!” Trump tweeted, along with the video.On Thursday, the New York Post had helped set the tone by publishing a front page that showed her comments over a similar image.The remarks in question came in March, as Omar, one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress, spoke about Islamophobia at an event held by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a civil-liberties group. The white-supremacist shooting that left 50 Muslim worshipers dead at two mosques in New Zealand had occurred the week before.“For far too long we have lived with the discomfort of being a second-class citizen and, frankly, I’m tired of it, and every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it,” she said, in the middle of a roughly 20-minute long speech. “CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties. So you can’t just say that today someone is looking at me strange and that I am trying to make myself look pleasant. You have to say that this person is looking at me strange, I am not comfortable with it, and I am going to talk to them and ask them why. Because that is the right you have.”The speech had drawn a protest outside at the time and even news coverage from conservative-leaning outlets such as the Washington Times, which noted that she told fellow Muslims to “raise hell,” and “make people uncomfortable,” as they sought to defend their rights.But this week conservatives began to fixate on a different portion of the speech, after CAIR posted a video on Tuesday: the four words she used to refer to 9/11, as “some people did something.”The comments were the focus of harsh broadsides from people like Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Tex.), Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronda McDaniel, Donald Trump Jr., and “Fox & Friends” host Brian Kilmeade, who questioned whether Omar, a Somali refuge, was “an American first.”And after the New York Post put it on such an incendiary cover, some liberals began to speak up against it, saying they felt it was an incitement to violence against Omar, who has been the target of threats and overt Islamophobia.“Such an ungenerous interpretation of her remarks is only possible if one is inclined to believe that Omar sympathizes more with terrorists than her murdered countrymen,” Zak Cheney-Rice at New York magazine wrote. “That she spoke them in the course of decrying Islamophobia makes it especially disconcerting that her political opponents would decontextualize them to fan the flames — she receives regular death threats on the basis of her faith, including from one New York man who threatened recently to ‘put a bullet in her . . . skull.’”Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) called for more Democrats to speak out to defend her this week.“Members of Congress have a duty to respond to the President’s explicit attack today,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. “@IlhanMN’s life is in danger.”Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders tweeted that Omar is “a leader with strength and courage.”“She won’t back down to Trump’s racism and hate, and neither will we,” he wrote. “The disgusting and dangerous attacks against her must end.”Trump has long wielded 9/11 as a political weapon. In the early part of his presidential campaign, he spread a falsehood that “thousands,” of people in New Jersey — where there is a “heavy Arab population,” he said — he celebrated as the twin towers came crashing down.During a primary debate in 2016, he went after rivals like Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) over George W. Bush’s failure to prevent 9/11.“The World Trade Center came down during your brother’s reign. Remember that,” Trump told Bush.In 2010, Trump made a highly publicized offer to purchase a contentious site that an Egyptian business planned to build an Islamic community center on near Ground Zero.
As long as President Trump has focused on what he said was the danger lurking at the southwestern border, he has also talked about the supposed threat from one specific group already in the country: Muslims.During the 2016 campaign, he would not rule out creating a registry of Muslims in the United States. He claimed to have seen “thousands” of Muslims cheering on rooftops in New Jersey after Sept. 11, a statement that was widely debunked. After deadly attacks in Paris and California, Mr. Trump called for a moratorium on Muslims traveling to the United States.“I think Islam hates us,” Mr. Trump told Anderson Cooper, the CNN host, in March 2016.Now, with 19 months until the 2020 election, Mr. Trump is seeking to rally his base by sounding that theme once again. And this time, he has a specific target: Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota and one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress.Mr. Trump and his team are trying to make Ms. Omar, one of a group of progressive women Democratic House members who is relatively unknown in national politics, a household name, to be seen as the most prominent voice of the Democratic Party, regardless of her actual position. And they are gambling that there will be limited downside in doing so.On Monday, Mr. Trump will visit Minnesota — a state that some of the president’s aides speak of as a place to expand his electoral map — and will hold an economic round table. The event is outside Ms. Omar’s congressional district, but the president’s decision to appear there is a calculated choice.His Minnesota appearance comes after his tweet of a video interspersed with Ms. Omar speaking and the burning World Trade Center towers. Ms. Omar’s critics have claimed a portion of the remarks, in which she highlighted Islamophobia faced by Muslims after Sept. 11, were dismissive of the terrorist attacks.Mr. Trump is banking on painting the entire Democratic Party as extreme. And Ms. Omar has become a point of contention for some members of her own party, after remarks she made about the Israel lobby were condemned as anti-Semitic by some long-serving Democrats, as well as by Republicans and Mr. Trump.But Mr. Trump’s electoral success in 2016 was based partly on culture wars and fears among an older, white voting base that the country it knew was slipping away. Like his hard line on immigration, his plays on fears of Muslims — including inaccurately conflating them with terrorists — proved polarizing among the wider electorate, but helped him keep a tight grip on his most enthusiastic voters. In the South Carolina Republican primary in February 2016, for instance, exit polls showed that 75 percent of voters favored his proposed Muslim ban.Now, as he looks toward 2020, he is betting that electoral play can deliver for him again. It is a strategy that risks summoning dark forces in American society, a point Ms. Omar made in a statement Sunday evening.Editors’ PicksStripping Away Lies to Expose a Painter’s Nazi PastThe Secret to Fried Cauliflower That Is Savory Yet LightCursive Seemed to Go the Way of Quills and Parchment. Now It’s Coming Back.“Since the president’s tweet Friday evening, I have experienced an increase in direct threats on my life — many directly referencing or replying to the president’s video,” Ms. Omar said. “This is endangering lives. It has to stop.”Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Sunday that she had requested a review of Ms. Omar’s security, while Trump aides insisted that the president meant no harm.“Certainly the president is wishing no ill will and certainly not violence towards anyone,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said on Sunday’s broadcast of ABC News’ “This Week.”Privately, Mr. Trump’s advisers describe Ms. Omar as his ideal foil. Her remarks about the power of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States, combined with her role in a progressive contingent of freshman House Democrats who have sparked intraparty battles, have been treated as a gift by Republicans.Trump aides and allies say they are pleased that some of the Democratic hopefuls for the 2020 presidential nomination are defending her against the president’s attacks, claiming they think it will be damaging for them in the general election.Ms. Omar “is the perfect embodiment of the sharp contrast President Trump wants to paint for 2020,” said Sam Nunberg, a 2016 campaign aide to Mr. Trump. He added that Mr. Trump is tethering Ms. Omar to more visible Democrats, like her closest ally in Congress, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, whom Republicans have sought to make a boogeyman.“This contrast gives the president a chance to expand his support closer to 50 percent,” Mr. Nunberg insisted.But on Sunday, Democrats said Mr. Trump was diving into an issue on which he has a shaky standing.“He has no moral authority to be talking about 9/11 at all,” Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. Mr. Nadler noted that Mr. Trump’s real estate company applied for and received grants after the attacks that were intended for small businesses affected by the devastation.Mr. Nadler said he thought Ms. Omar’s comments about the Sept. 11 attacks were being taken out of context.“I have had some problems with some of her other remarks, but not with that one,” Mr. Nadler said.The controversy arose from Ms. Omar’s remarks at an event last month sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an advocacy organization, where she focused on attacks against Muslims after Sept. 11. She said she had “lived with the discomfort of being a second-class citizen and, frankly, I’m tired of it, and every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it.”“CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties,” she said. (The organization was actually founded in 1994.)Critics of Ms. Omar contended that the words “some people did something” were dismissive of the terrorist attacks, but her defenders said her words were taken out of context.The attack was not Mr. Trump’s first on Ms. Omar. Despite repeatedly being denounced for not making forceful condemnations of white nationalists who traffic in anti-Semitism, the president pounced when Ms. Omar unleashed a firestorm in February with her comments on Israel, rejecting her subsequent apology and calling for her to resign.“Congressman Omar is terrible, what she said,” Mr. Trump told reporters.Geoff Garin, a veteran Democratic strategist, said the Democratic presidential candidates who had responded to Mr. Trump’s latest attacks on Ms. Omar were keeping the focus on his tactics. And he predicted that the use of such graphic images from one of the nation’s darkest days would backfire for the president.“Voters are turned off by the use of 9/11 for political purposes, and my guess is that moderate voters are going to see Trump’s use of that as both ugly and extreme,” Mr. Garin said. “I think his over-the-top exploitation of 9/11 is going to turn more voters off than he wins over by attacking the Democrats on this.”
Ilhan Omar has courted controversy ever since she transformed, in the public’s conception, from a telegenic symbol of American pluralism to an actual person with actual opinions. In the months after her swearing-in to Congress, the Minnesota representative has been strident in her criticism of Saudi Arabia and Israel. Both are American allies, but it’s her position on the latter country that has prompted members of her own party to turn against her. The past two months have seen her accused varyingly of anti-Semitism, disloyalty to the United States, and, most recently, of downplaying the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The first criticism can be attributed to her suggestion that American support for Israel is “all about the Benjamins” — a seeming nod to the bigoted trope that rich Jews control the world. The second and third are more flagrantly Islamophobic in origin.The backlash came to a head this week after footage surfaced of Omar speaking about Islamophobia at a Council on American-Islamic Relations event last month. “Far too long we have lived with the discomfort of being a second-class citizen and frankly, I’m tired of it and every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it,” Omar said to an audience gathered in Los Angeles. “CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something,” she said, gesturing as if to separate herself from “some people,” “and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.”Conservatives seized on Omar’s characterization of 9/11 as “some people did something” to cast it as an effort to trivialize the attack. President Trump on Friday tweeted a video that intercut her repeatedly saying “some people did something” and footage of the 9/11 attacks, with the caption, “We will never forget!” Representative Dan Crenshaw, a Texas Republican, tweeted that her comments were “unbelievable.” Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel added that Omar is “anti-American,” while the New York Post on Thursday published a cover photo of airplanes colliding with the Twin Towers. “Rep. Ilhan Omar: 9/11 was ‘some people did something,’” the headline read. “Here’s your something: 2,977 dead by terrorism.” The photo echoed imagery from an Islamophobic poster displayed at the West Virginia statehouse last month, which pictured Omar in front of the collapsing World Trade Center. “‘Never forget,’ you said,” the caption reads. “I am the proof — you have forgotten.” Such an ungenerous interpretation of her remarks is only possible if one is inclined to believe that Omar sympathizes more with terrorists than her murdered countrymen. That she spoke them in the course of decrying Islamophobia makes it especially disconcerting that her political opponents would decontextualize them to fan the flames — she receives regular death threats on the basis of her faith, including from one New York man who threatened recently to “put a bullet in her fucking skull.”Omar’s imprecision regarding Israel can be frustrating for her supporters. Even those who engage with her geopolitical critiques in good faith might find her deployment — intentional or inadvertent — of anti-Semitic tropes unforgivable, were she not so apologetic about her self-proclaimed ignorance and backed by a vocal cohort of Jewish-American progressives who insist that her comments were directed at a government — not a people — whose supporters routinely accuse its critics of anti-Semitism to stifle debate. But it grows increasingly apparent that efforts to discredit her are rooted in a larger project for which her comments are mere pretext. One of the first two Muslim women ever in Congress was always likely to face smears equating her with terrorism and questioning her loyalty and fitness to serve. Such are the wages of embodying an existential threat to a politics that has spent decades profiting from fear of Muslims, immigrants, and — more recently — refugees and asylum seekers, and vowing ruthlessness toward them in response.Omar is a Congressional “first,” and her opponents smell blood in the water. Even her less-spotlit Muslim woman counterpart, Michigan representative Rashida Tlaib, has faced dubious allegations of anti-Semitism and having terrorist sympathies. (Tlaib is Palestinian-American.) The political value of attacking both is apparent. For Republicans, it enables them to deflect from their own bigotry, personified most recently by a president who has attempted to ban Muslim immigration, dissolve the American asylum system, and cast Muslims as latent or active terrorists while demonizing brown-skinned immigrants more broadly. For centrist Democrats, entertaining the suggestion that Omar is anti-Semitic is an opportunity to signal their commitment to pluralism while shoring up their ties to Israel and its supporters. Both rely on a willful misreading of her intentions that is more compatible with anti-Muslim stereotypes than with her actual, documented opposition to human- and civil-rights violators of all stripes.Such reductionism is not a recent trend. Congressional “firsts” have long been targeted by political opportunists and bigoted peers, dating back to Reconstruction. Following the Civil War, lies underpinned by stereotypes were how anxieties regarding free black people holding elected office in the South were articulated. “One cannot study Reconstruction without first frankly facing the facts of universal lying,” wrote W.E.B. DuBois in his history of the period, Black Reconstruction. “There was not a single great black leader [of that era] against whom almost unprintable allegations were not repeatedly and definitely made.” Hiram Rhodes Revels, the first black U.S. congressman ever elected, in 1870 faced legal challenges from white Democratic congressmen who claimed he was ineligible because he had not been a citizen long enough, having only been granted said status a few years prior with the 14th Amendment and 1866 Civil Rights Act. (These challenges were later overruled.) Parroting the prejudices of the era, historians and artists attempted to cast Reconstruction as a time when black vice, sloth, and stupidity transformed government into a corrupt and chaotic free-for-all. D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film, Birth of a Nation, famously portrayed black congressmen voting on bills with their boots off, feet on their desks, gorging on fried chicken.This is how power and orthodoxy respond to threats. Neither has encountered a black Muslim congresswoman before, or such a vocal critic of Israeli policy and the lobbying that supports it. Political discourse has reached the point, with Omar, where good-faith debate over her deployment of anti-Semitic tropes has been largely displaced by pure Islamophobic id. Opponents regularly equate her with terrorists, riling up voters, politicians, and pundits who already believe that the proper response to Islam is violence. Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric has already inspired successful and attempted terror attacks — including by Cesar Sayoc, who sent mail bombs to prominent critics of the president, and Robert Bowers, who killed 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue after being inspired about a Trump-peddled conspiracy theory about criminal immigrants.But Omar’s treatment is a logical extension of decades of Islamophobic rhetoric and policy — much as the Reconstruction-era response to black congressmen was an extension of centuries of anti-black sentiment and violence. Perhaps it should have been expected in a scenario where Republicans — whose platform and standard-bearer, Trump, call for the exclusion and maltreatment of Muslims, refugees, and asylum seekers — came face-to-face with a Muslim refugee and former asylum seeker from Somalia who is now one of their peers. Political disagreement was bound to define the encounter. But anti-Muslim bigotry is not innate — it is a choice that Omar’s detractors continue to make, and the dangers of doing are only becoming more apparent. Now that Trump has fanned the flames, the backlash only stands to intensify further. The costs are already steep, and they will only get higher.
The Monday fire that devastated France’s iconic Notre Dame Cathedral drew expressions of sorrow and sympathy from around the world, including from U.S. lawmakers. The edifice has stood, in some capacity, for eight centuries and is one of the most-visited houses of worship in the world.President Trump tweeted about the fire twice:https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1117844987293487104https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1117910111236681728Vice President Pence also shared his thoughts and prayers. He tweeted that "it is heartbreaking to see a house of God in flames.”But neither man had responded to the recent fires that destroyed three predominantly African American churches in Louisiana.After the publication of this piece, Alyssa Farah, a spokeswoman for Pence, reached out to the Fix with a statement from the vice president.“When tragedy strikes in places of worship, people of all faiths unite. Our hearts go out to the members of the congregations of Mount Pleasant Baptist Church, St. Mary’s Baptist Church, and Greater Union Baptist Church who were victims of arson. No one should be in fear in a house of worship. Justice must be carried out on the perpetrator,” the statement said.On Tuesday, state authorities charged Holden Matthews, a 21-year-old white man and the son of the local police deputy, with hate crimes in the Louisiana church attacks. He was earlier charged with arson.Of course, the churches in Louisiana are significantly younger than Notre Dame. But they also have a rich history and played a significant role in St. Landry Parish’s black community. At least one hosts a cemetery containing graves of black people enslaved in Louisiana.“My church has a lot of history,” the Rev. Gerald Toussaint of Mount Pleasant Baptist Church, which is more than 140 years old, told the Daily Advertiser. “I don’t understand it. What could make a person do that to a church?”Greater Union Baptist Church is also more than 100 years old, according to Pastor Harry Richard, whose grandfather was one of the congregation’s founders.“He left a legacy for me, and I was trying to fulfill that to the best of my ability,” he told CBS News.St. Mary Baptist Church also was targeted by the arsonist.The burning of black churches was a common intimidation tactic during the Jim Crow era. “For decades, African-American churches have served as the epicenter of survival and a symbol of hope for many in the African-American community,” Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP, said last week in a statement condemning the fires. “As a consequence, these houses of faith have historically been the targets of violence.”The church fires have, of course, drawn wide coverage and attention. The Louisiana governor mentioned it in his recent state of the state. But top Trump administration officials have not spoken out on or condemned the violence.Fundraising has also been slow.In the wake of the Notre Dame fire, veteran journalist Soledad O’Brien tweeted about this. “So far no zillionaires have stepped forward to offer to bail them out,” she wrote, a reference to French billionaires pledging hundreds of millions of euros toward Notre Dame’s restoration.On Tuesday, former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton made an appeal on behalf of the Louisiana churches.https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/1118210864652390402So far, a GoFundMe account has raised $180,000 to support the restoration of the churches.Some argue the responses to the Louisiana churches and Notre Dame are not comparable because of the French cathedral’s outsize historic and architectural significance.“It’s a tragedy when black churches + mosques are bombed, burned or vandalized, but of course the world pays more attention to an 800-year-old architectural masterpiece in the heart of a city everyone visits! That’s not white supremacy, and nonwhites who love Paris aren’t dupes.” journalist Thomas Chatteron Williams wrote on Twitter. “How are we going to build the multiethnic/multicultural/pluralistic societies we need on the basis of such petty divisiveness? We really all need to do better.”But the overwhelming response to the Notre Dame fire, compared with the muted response to the attacks on the black congregations, suggests the destruction of some houses of worship is more heartbreaking than others.