OK. Do you agree that we, and Omar, should all also be doing our best to avoid wording that plays into antisemitic tropes? And do you agree that people were right to call Omar on her original statements, and that she was right to apologize, not as a pro forma of apologizing for political reasons to people who were being unreasonable, but because those who called her on it were in fact being reasonable?
I felt very uneasy about Sarah Huckabee Sanders after I watched her response to the SOTU. It came within a hair of encouraging political violence, in my view.
Here’s a Harvard Business Review article from 2010 that uses the word “uneasy” in the title of an article about women in positions of power.
Should I avoid criticizing Sarah Huckabee Sanders with the word “uneasy” based on her speech the other day, just in case @Banquet_Bear thinks I am a bigot who is opposed to women in positions of power?
To be clear, if @thorny_locust was trying to imply that Ilhan Omar couldn’t be a loyal American because of her religion, that would be bigoted. But he didn’t do that, and saying that a specific set of actions that she took made him uneasy in no way implies that.
…its more to do with Muslims being forced to identify more strongly with their religious values and less with the culture of their adopted home because of anti-muslim backlash.
I think that if you hate someone for being muslim (and I don’t think that you, or anyone else in this thread do), then you should just come out and say it, and not use any code-words. And in a situation like this, where anti-muslim bigotry is closely aligned with much of the things that have been said about Omar, then you need to be careful about the things that you say. And when you say that “she us uneasy” and that “It’s a quick and logical jump from there to pogroms” then yeah, you are starting to cross that line.
Of course.
I think that my position in this thread has been made quite clearly, that yes, she was right to apologise, and many people were being reasonable.
But many other people were not. And I reserve the right to call those people out.
Did anyone say that she was uneasy in America or as an American because of her faith? I didn’t see any posts like that. I only saw “uneasy” being used in the context of “these specific things she said make me uneasy”. If I missed something, kindly quote it?
…the post, quoted in full for context, but untagging Johnny_Bravo because they (rightly) no longer want to be part of the conversation:
I think that this post is unfair because Ilhan Omar is one of the biggest fighters for progressive ideals in congress. She has spoken out time and time again in support of Jewish people and against antisemitism. She isn’t perfect, and has said in anti-Semitic language in the past. But shit like this isn’t how it starts. We have over 300 anti-trans bills on the books right now and many of them are going to pass. States have banned abortions. States are banning books. The police are out of control. The industrial prison complext continues, unabated. Antisemitism is already rampant.
It doesn’t start with Omar. Its already here. Omar is not the person anyone needs to be uneasy about. The facists are already at the door.
Just to clarify:
a) I’m not the one who said Omar made them uneasy. That was @Johnny_Bravo. I don’t know whether @Banquet_Bear got confused about that, or just quoted in a fashion that made it look confusing.
b) I’m not a “him”. (My pronouns are actually in my avatar, if you click; but I’m not expecting everybody to click on my avatar.)
– it is, however, certainly true that I didn’t say, and don’t mean, that I think Omar’s religion means she can’t be a loyal American. I don’t think Johnny_Bravo, or anyone else in this thread, has done so either. Of course Muslims can be loyal Americans.
I think @Banquet_Bear has a point that it’s a good idea to be careful about one’s language, because, just as there are a lot of people who think Jews can’t be loyal Americans, there are also a lot of people who think Muslims can’t be loyal Americans. (In some cases those are the same people.) And yes, that’s a non-removable part of the context, even if the speaker doesn’t intend it; just as tropes about Jews and money are a non-removable part of the context.
Whether the specific term ‘uneasy’, as it was used by Johnny_Bravo, comes into that context I’m uncertain. I note that we don’t, as near as I can tell, have any Muslims posting in this thread; or very many on this board, for that matter. Could it be that they’d feel uneasy about it?
OK. What I’ve been objecting to was the claim that it was entirely unreasonable of anybody to call Omar out. I don’t know for sure that we’d put all the same people in the ‘reasonable’ and ‘unreasonable’ categories; but we may be basically in agreement here.
…the people I put in the “unreasonable camp” are the hypocrites who call out Omar but indulge in behaviour like this. I think that otherwise we are in agreement.
As Jews, we’ve unfortunately come under attack from both the far-right and far-left. I can’t point blame at one end of the political spectrum and give the other side a pass. As a corollary to something TFG said, there are bad people on both sides.
…I haven’t asked you to give anyone a pass.
Still reading, but I do apologize for that. My bad.
You pointed to an article in The Guardian which claims that people like Omar is not the issue, rather it is the Republicans. My counter is that it can be both the left and the right.
Here’s the article so others can see the headline, not just the link:
I think we’re in agreement on that, too.
No problem. It’s not really relevant to the thread; but I do sometimes speak up about what I tend to see as the ‘default male’, which may not have been what you were doing. I can’t keep track of everybody’s gender, either.
…to be precise here: I pointed to that article to show examples of people that I considered “unreasonable”, not that Omar is “not the issue.”
I mean, if you want to treat the things that Omar has said and apologised for in this thread as equivilant to "tweeted that “Joe Biden is Hitler”, speculated that the wildfires in California were caused by a beam from “space solar generators” linked to “Rothschild, Inc.”, then sure. Go ahead.
I think there are actual anti-Semites on the left as well as on the right; but I don’t think Omar is one, and I also don’t see the Democrats in Congress excusing or ignoring blatantly antiSemitic behavior among their own.
That’s my best understanding, too. Omar did something clueless, not something that demonstrates that she’s personally antisemitic.
I’d be happy to condemn antisemitic beliefs among elected Democratic officials, and I’m almost certain they’re out there; I just don’t know any examples off the top of my head. Are there any examples that rise to the level of space lasers or Trump telling American Jews to show more loyalty to Israel or the like?
Of course not. But the other day when we were all pointing out to another poster why “uppity” is offensive, we didn’t say “well, you vote Democrat, so it doesn’t really matter if you use the term “uppity” since it doesn’t come close to the level of racism expressed by Republicans”.
Agreed with the second sentence, but a little confused by the first. Is it really an “of course not” situation? Honestly asking, not trying to make some roundabout point here: is there really no antisemitism among elected Democratic officials that comes close to what’s on the right?
And they’re kicking people like Omar off committees.
On the contrary, Democrats call it out even when it’s a possibly inadvertent touching on a trope.
My take? I agree 100% with these posts and will add that, on the list of things American Jews like myself should be worried about, Omar is barely a footnote.
I was specifically responding to the “Jewish Space Lasers” bit. That’s a new and exciting level of ignorance, antisemetism, and stupidity all bundled into one. But I guess if, a day before MTG made that comment, you’d asked me whether any elected officials on the right were stupid and antisemetic enough to make a comment like that, I’d have said “of course not” as well.
The Trump bit on the other hand is a little more subtle, and I think a more common level of antisemetism, and I think you could find examples rising to that lower level on both the right and left.
And if you leave off the “elected officials” qualifier, well, there are some real antisemetic whackjobs on the left, for sure. They just don’t tend to be elected to national office.