INFLAMMATORY RHETORIC
In 1965 Malcolm X was assassinated in New York City. He had left the Nation of Islam after discovering that its leader, Elijah Muhammad, had fathered a large number of children out-of-wedlock. Muhammad was somewhat jealous over Malcolm’s charisma, and their relationship became toxic.
Malcolm was Louis Farrakhan’s mentor, but Farrakhan sided with Elijah and made a series of speeches that condemned Malcolm in an inflammatory manner.
Farrakhan was 31 at the time and didn’t become the Nation’s leader until 1977 after Elijah Muhammad’s death. Years later he conceded that his rhetoric may have contributed to Malcolm’s assassination, and he apologized to the family for his role in the slaying.
In 1995 Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin was assassinated after an anti-violence rally in support of the Oslo peace process. This was perceived as an attempt to forfeit occupied Palestinian territories by religious conservatives and members of the Likud party. Likud leader and future prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Rabin of being “removed from Jewish values and tradition, and that withdrawing from any “Jewish” land was heresy. He addressed protesters of the Oslo movement at rallies where posters portrayed Rabin in a Nazi SS uniform or being the target in the cross-hairs of a sniper.
Unlike Farrakhan, Netanyahu denied provoking violence and some culpability for Rabin’s murder.
Since the first days of his announced candidacy when he described Mexicans as “rapists,” President Donald Trump has created a climate of racial and religious intolerance and anti-immigrant fervor among his cult-like supporters.
In 2016, after his election, there was a 34% increase in anti-Semitic acts, and that increased to 57% in 2017. This culminated in the massacre of 11 Jewish worshipers in a Pittsburgh synagogue last Saturday morning.
“President Trump and his political allies told a series of racist lies about a caravan of migrants. Those lies dominated right-wing websites and, for a few days, the mainstream news…. A deranged man who frequented right-wing websites then cited the caravan as a reason to commit mass murder. The apparent spark for the worst anti-Semitic massacre in American history was a racist hoax (that Jews were bankrolling the caravan of immigrants) inflamed by a U.S. president seeking to help his party win a midterm election, “There is no political gesture, no public statement, and no alteration in rhetoric or behavior that will change this fact. The shooter might have found a different reason to act on a different day. But he chose to act on Saturday, and he apparently chose to act in response to a political fiction that the president himself chose to spread, and that his followers chose to amplify.”
David Leonhardt, New York Times,10/29/18
Republicans who deny that Trump was responsible for the recent attempted bombings and the tragedy in Pittsburgh are being deliberately obtuse. He has emboldened racists and white supremacists, and right-wing politicians who formerly spoke in dog whistles now proudly brandish megaphones.
Trump has opened the closet door for our friends and relatives, and they’ve come out in defiance. We’re shocked, because we didn’t know until November 2016 that people we thought we knew had that mindset.
You can’t compare a future Nation of Islam leader and a future Israeli prime minister to the President of the United States. Nobody has a bigger platform and more influence, more access to publicizing his views, that a US president.
Trump didn’t pull the trigger or send the bombs, but he’s made racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and homophobia socially acceptable by more people than we could have ever imagined.
Donald Trump has got to go, and it is scary to think how much more damage he can do if the Democrats do not win back the House of Representatives next Tuesday.
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