Armwood Editorial And Opinion Blog

Wednesday, April 17, 2019

Donald Trump Isn’t Playing Games With Ilhan Omar—He’s Inciting Violence

"The most fair reading of President Donald Trump’s persistent attacks on Congresswoman Ilhan Omar is that the President has entered the Henry II phase of his tyranny. During one of his disputes with Archbishop Thomas Beckett, Henry II is said to have exclaimed, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” (he didn’t really say it that way)—and, later, four knights assassinated Thomas Beckett, believing they were acting on the King’s orders. One assumes that our barely literate, intellectually incurious, spiritually bankrupt President has never heard the story, but one imagines he’d like it if Stephen Miller read it to him at bedtime.

Trump’s incitement against Omar is the latest eruption of Trump’s established pattern of exhorting his followers to violence. During the campaign, he told supporters at a rally that if they saw someone about to throw a tomato, they should “knock the crap out of them,” adding that he would “pay for [the] legal fees.” In fact, Trump did say that he was thinking of paying the legal fees of a supporter who sucker-punched a man at a rally in North Carolina (Trump didn’t, of course, because Trump is a cheap liar). Trump also warned that the “Second Amendment people” might do something about Hillary Clinton, if she won. Just recently he suggested that there might be violence if he was impeached.

That’s just off the top of my head. There are many, many more comments Trump makes that suggest an affinity for violence. There are many more violent people he supports. Trump uses language, both what he says and what he doesn’t say, to encourage his supporters to commit acts of violence. His aides that go on TV argue that, essentially, Trump is too stupid and glib to know what he’s saying. But, given the pattern, a reasonable observer would be forced to conclude that Trump actively wants violence to be done against his perceived enemies.

Most likely, Trump has already gotten people killed. The Christchurch, New Zealand mass murderer is the most obvious and deadly doppelganger for the four knights who killed Thomas Beckett. The killer directly cited Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.” But there are more subtle clues that the very worst people hear President Trump loud and clear. Hate crimes are up 17 percent since 2016. And there was the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville—the one Trump would retroactively describe as including “good people on both sides”—which led to the death of Heather Heyer.

We should call Trump’s statements and tweets “incitement” to criminal behavior, but the standard for such a charge, as interpreted by the Supreme Court under the First Amendment, is that the speech must encourage “imminent” lawless action, or the speech must be likely to produce such imminent crime. Saying “snitches get stitches” in the middle of the street would not be “incitement.” Saying “snitches get stitches” in the middle of the street outside the snitch’s house, while pointing at it, to a crowd of people all armed with stitch inducing paraphernalia—well, now you might be outside the bounds of “protected speech.”

Our current standard here comes from a case called Brandenburg v. Ohio, which was a case where a Klansman, the aforementioned Brandenburg, was convicted under an Ohio law that made it a crime to advocate “crime, sabotage, violence, or unlawful methods of terrorism.” The Supreme Court threw out that conviction and gave us the current standard of “imminent” criminal action.

How do you think the current, conservative Supreme Court would rule on a case where it was a Muslim, not a white supremacist, who was arrested and convicted for advocating “unlawful methods of terrorism”? Do you think we’d hear a lot from conservatives about how the offensive speech was protected because it didn’t immediately result in a crime? These days, Muslims can barely advocate for a set of fashion statements without conservative scholars buying pearls so they have something to clutch.

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We don’t have to imagine the double standard, because we’re seeing it play out in real time. Ilhan Omar has said nothing as offensive or dangerous to anybody as what Trump says about Muslims in general and Omar specifically. Omar hasn’t authored or promised to author legislation to ban people entry to this country based on their religion. Omar hasn’t referred to other people’s countries as “s**tholes.” She hasn’t offered to pay legal fees as a bounty for any of her supporters who commit violence. Her statement, the one she is being punished for—that all Muslims are blamed for the conduct of a few—was not controversial; it’s an obvious fact to most people who achieve non-whiteness through methods that don’t involve shoe polish.

But she’s the one under attack. Trump is literally putting her life in danger, yet the law does nothing to stop him. His threats and attacks are being amplified through inaccurate reporting by the Rupert Murdoch empire, both through The New York Post and Fox News, and yet they hide behind the freedom of the press. Trump is riling up his supporters on Twitter, a platform that is not even subject to the rigorous standards of the First Amendment, and yet people throw up their hands and say “well, freedom of speech.”

What is it going to take before the law does something to stop this growing lynch mob? If I talked about the stupid subway the way Trump talks about Muslims, I’d get a visit from the Department of Homeland Security. If I tweeted about Trump Tower the way Trump tweets about Omar, I’d get a visit from DHS and the Secret Service. Law enforcement, Twitter, and every media organization, big and small, take threats to public officials very seriously—unless those threats are made against brown public officials and come from the White House, apparently. Then it’s just all how some Klan jerkface established the right of white people to threaten whoever they want as long as they’re not physically in the room where it happens.

Just like Henry II, Trump has the good sense not to give the order. Trump is no student of history, but he has intuited that he can accomplish as many of his nefarious goals through the ambition of his sycophants as through the allegiance of his henchmen. He supposes—correctly—that the law is set up to protect his style of white supremacy, as opposed to rooting it out. If you pick four sentences from Donald Trump at random, one of them is bound to be dangerously racist, but he is the one who is protected from threats, not the people he threatens.

Which is why he’s not going to stop until more violence is committed in his name. He’s got a taste for it now. He knows what he’s doing. He’s growing more confident. It’s the power trip that we’ve read about in every good biography of any tyrant throughout history. He says something here and somebody he thinks is “bad” is hurt or dies there. If you want to understand this part of the Trump presidency, you don’t need to read Shakespeare, you need to watch Dexter.

Donald Trump is no longer playing politics. He’s playing God. I’m afraid for Omar. I’m afraid for all of us."

Donald Trump Isn’t Playing Games With Ilhan Omar—He’s Inciting Violence

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Tuesday, April 16, 2019

The Dangerous Bullying of Ilhan Omar | The New Yorker

"You know how bullying works. The victim is marked long before the bullying begins: it’s the kid no one really likes, the weirdo who is barely tolerated by the larger group. The defenseless, isolated kid. And when the bullying starts to happen, the rest of the children look the other way. Even the ones the victim thought were his friends go silent. Especially the ones he thought were his friends.

Political violence can work the same way. In modern states ruled by autocrats, or aspiring autocrats, political violence is dispersed and delegated. Its first weapons are ridicule and ostracism. Once a person has been marginalized and discredited among allies, physical violence becomes a likely option. In Russia, I witnessed this several times among people I knew, who stood alone and embattled before they were killed. The Parliament member Galina Starovoitova, who had once been a prominent member of Boris Yeltsin’s Cabinet, was, by the late nineteen-nineties, portrayed by the Russian media as someone whose ideas were outdated and irrelevant. She was shot dead in the stairwell of her apartment building, in November of 1998. The journalist Anna Politkovskaya was an often short-tempered person whose reporting was viewed as partisan and unreliable by many of her more mainstream colleagues. She was shot dead in the elevator of her apartment building, in October of 2006. The politician Boris Nemtsov, once viewed as Yeltsin’s most likely successor, was by the twenty-tens seen as an old-timer who, even as he protested the regime, didn’t quite grasp the new language of protest. He was shot dead on a bridge in central Moscow, in February of 2015. In all three cases, the people convicted or accused of the murder did not have a direct relationship to the Kremlin but were seemingly moved by a desire to act on their loyalty to it.

After their deaths, all three victims were idealized. Most Americans who have heard of them probably imagine that they were widely revered. They certainly deserved to be widely revered, but in fact they had been abandoned, late in life, even by many of those who should have been their political allies. They were difficult people with uncomfortable views; standing by their sides in an increasingly hostile political environment was hard work. But, by omitting this part of the story, we elide a key fact about contemporary political violence: bullies don’t go after the strong. In Russia, the anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny is walking around, not only alive but also mostly free, solely because the government knows that he has the support of hundreds of thousands of people who will protest if he is jailed and may revolt if he is killed. His life depends on this support.

For the past three months, Americans have observed the process of drawing a target on a politician’s back. The politician is Representative Ilhan Omar, of Minnesota. Two of her fundamental positions—that the United States government and many of its elected officials support an apartheid regime in Israel-Palestine, and that the civil rights of Muslims in the U.S. are routinely trampled by entities that include the government—are as uncomfortable for many Americans as they are indisputable. Her way of expressing those positions—unabashed, and at times seemingly unaware of context—makes her the kind of disagreeable person who is easy for presumptive allies to shun. This, in turn, makes her vulnerable to attack.

The first Omar controversy, in February, did not, contrary to popular perception, begin with an Omar tweet. (A piece by Matthew Yglesias, on Vox, did a handy job of untangling the whole story.) In the beginning was the House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, who, as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (J.T.A.) news service reported, planned to take action against the freshman representatives Omar and Rashida Tlaib, the first two Muslim women in Congress. It wasn’t immediately clear what he wanted them reprimanded for, but it seemed that the cause was the two representatives’ support for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, known as B.D.S. In the discussion that stemmed from the J.T.A. report, Omar issued her infamous tweet, which she has since deleted: “It’s all about the Benjamins baby.” She followed up to clarify that the tweet referred to political donations from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, a body that exerts powerful—and well-financed—pressure on elected officials.

In substance, the only disputable word in the tweet is “all,” as congressional supporters of Israel are not motivated solely by campaign contributions. But the tweet was widely interpreted as tapping into the anti-Semitic trope of linking Jews with money. Democratic public figures, including Chelsea Clinton, condemned the tweet; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the House Democratic leadership issued a “Statement on Anti-Semitic Comments of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.” It was a wildly disproportionate reaction, seemingly designed to show that Omar was on her own. Omar deleted the tweet and apologized. (She has also deleted a tweet that she sent in 2012: “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.”)

Less than a month later, speaking at a bookstore event in Washington, D.C., Omar said, “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is O.K. for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country”—meaning Israel. In Washington and in the media, across the political spectrum, her comments were once again condemned as anti-Semitic. (A rare exception was Jordan Weissmann in Slate, who called Omar “tone-deaf” but suggested that she had a point.) Amid much media outrage, the Democrats spent two days debating a resolution condemning anti-Semitism and “the myth of dual loyalty,” then ultimately broadened it to include other oppressed groups.

The third Omar controversy in as many months concerns remarks that the congresswoman made during an event of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “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, among many other things. A right-wing activist Web site in Australia pulled the quote, making it look like Omar was diminishing the scale of the events of 9/11. Then President Trump tweeted a video that combined repetitions of that quote from Omar’s speech and footage of devastation that occurred on 9/11, suggesting that “some people did something” was an attempt to dismiss the memory of the terrorist attack. “WE WILL NEVER FORGET!!!” the President’s tweet said.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see Trump’s tweet as an invitation to aggression. Speaker Pelosi responded with a tweet of her own, demanding that Trump take down his and also noting that she had spoken to the congressional sergeant-at-arms to insure that necessary protection is provided to Omar. She seemed to see the threat of violence against Omar as real and immediate."

The Dangerous Bullying of Ilhan Omar | The New Yorker