On “bigotry”

This is a follow-up to yesterday’s post, which you can read here.

I’m posting a link to this piece by Peter Beinart not because I agree with all of his argument or its framing, but because it clarified for me a few things I tried to say in my original post. The key point in his piece–written by a longtime liberal Zionist, writing in the Jewish Daily Forward–is the sentence “Her fiercest critics in Congress are guiltier of bigotry than she is.” (And he’s not talking about just the Republicans, as we’ll see). And her fiercest critics outside of Congress are guiltier of supporting bigotry* than she is. Using Beinart’s list (and starting with the easy ones):

• Anyone who supported Trump’s “Muslim ban”–and many of her most vocal critics in Congress did so–is guilty of much worse bigotry than even the worst possible misinterpretation of Ilhan Omar’s tweets.
• Mike Pompeo, who is Secretary of State and thus in charge of US foreign policy, has spread repeated lies about Muslims in America, and received an award from a vicious hate group, ACT for America (read the Beinart for details). Anyone who voted to approve Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State–and they all did–is guilty of much worse bigotry than Ilhan Omar’s tweets.
• Donald Trump ran for office on the historically antisemitic slogan “America first.” (There’s an unambiguously antisemitic “trope!”) He referred to the “fine people” in Charlottesville who chanted “Jews will not replace us.” As Beinert writes, ” If you denounce Ilhan Omar but support Donald Trump, you don’t really oppose bigotry. You don’t even really oppose anti-Semitism.”  Everyone who has supported Donald Trump actively supports bigotry exponentially worse than anything anyone can imagine in Ilhan Omar’s tweets.

OK, those are some easy ones. And you may say that a Democratic representative like Omar should be held to a higher standard than Donald Trump. I’d hope so, too. But here’s another quotation from Beinert:

• “Establishing two legal systems in the same territory—one for Jews and one for Palestinians, as Israel does in the West Bank—is bigotry. Guaranteeing Jews in the West Bank citizenship, due process, free movement and the right to vote for the government that controls their lives while denying those rights to their Palestinian neighbors is bigotry.”

Anyone who supports aid to Israel–which, like the apartheid state of South Africa, established and enforces  these two legal systems and denies equal rights to Palestinians–is guilty of supporting much worse bigotry than even the worst possible misinterpretation of Ilhan Omar’s tweets. If you supported any Democratic candidate for President in 2016 (yes, including Bernie Sanders, whom I supported) you supported this bigotry. If you voted for almost any Democrat for Congress in 2018–except Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, and maybe a couple of others–you supported this bigotry.

The Democratic statement denouncing Ilhan Omar’s tweets starts by saying “We are and always will be strong supporters of Israel in Congress….” Thus this statement itself affirms bigotry in worse ways–more material, more consequential, more brutal, worse in every way–than the worst possible misinterpretation of Ilhan Omar’s tweets.

That second list could go on, and on, and on. As I said in my original post, I think the assumptions made by the attacks on Omar that AIPAC represents a uniform Jewish American people to be more deeply antisemitic than anything Omar tweeted.

The nicest way I can think of to sum up my point is to say that we need a sense of proportion here. If we had a sense of proportion,  anyone who has put energy into denouncing and questioning and scolding and carefully parsing the history of the “tropes” behind Ilhan Omar’s tweets (and this includes me) should spend exponentially more time denouncing both Republicans and Democrats in Congress for the bigotry Beinart outlines and that I summarize above.

Put another way, in a world with a sense of proportion, a few friends and allies of Ilhan Omar might have sent her some private e-mails advising her on more careful phrasing of her tweets that would be less likely to provoke what I think are (mostly but not all) biased and bigoted misinterpretations. If we had a sense of proportion,  the media, the op-ed pages, the Democratic Party, and others would be issuing resolutions condemning the serious bigotry (of antisemitic and other sorts) that pervades the Trump administration, and the bigotry of Israel and its enablers and supporters.

I hope someday to see a world–or even just a Democratic Party–with that sense of proportion.

*”Bigotry” is not a word I use often; I don’t know much about its history or implications. (Maybe it’s a keyword?). But it’s the word in Beinart’s article that I’m taking off from here, so I’m using it throughout this post.