LOL. What he said was far, far worse than “some people doing something”. He praised white supremacists.
Point comprehensively missed.
Pretend he’d never said they were good people. Pretend he described the event as ‘Some people doing something’.
Picturing that? Good.
Regardless of context, posters here wouldn’t have let him forget it for a thousand years.
Okay, I’d suspect that posters would have moved on very quickly, because he’s since said many (hundreds?) things that were much, much worse than that.
Yeppers. Trump says shit that we’d have not let GWB forget for months at least, and it’s just another Thursday. On Friday, he’ll say something equally crazy.
If he had said “some people were doing something and it shouldn’t be assumed that all white people agree with them” it would be a non controversial statement that nobody would have talked about for a thousand years.
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I think the context though is the issue. She gave the speech in front of CAIR. CAIR is at the very least a suspect organization and she historically revised their founding to provide cover.
Let’s do the Trump analogy again. He’s standing in front of the European Heritage Club which presents itself as a group dedicated to fighting injustices against European Anericans. We know that its founders were involved with the Klan and went to great trouble to hide that fact. The group has been accused of contacts with the Aryan Brotherhood by the FBI. Their founder has written letters to Anders Breivik thanking him for his donation and calling him a great defender of European heritage. Trump then goes in front of the group and says that for too long Europeans have been oppressed and that the European Heritage Club was founded after that stuff that happened in Charleston to combat oppression. We would certainly find such a statement inappropriate at best.
Obviously the treatment of Muslims in the US is not the same as the treatment of Europeans, but that is still essentially what Omar just did. CAIR does not have a spotless history, (though I am not suggesting it truly is an Islamist front group as some on the right contend ) and while it does good things, a Congressperson should at the very least be wary of giving them political cover and certainly should choose their words more carefully, especially in light of the fact that she can’t go two weeks without saying another shady thing. Eventually, people are going to assume the smoke is indicative of fire.
Missing the point does seem to be a strong suit with the right these days.
If what had happened after the “Unite the Right” rally was that white people as a group started getting, say, their churches firebombed and their immigration and visa requests denied and their civil liberties curtailed and their kids harassed at school and their entire cohort constantly and viciously attacked as bloodthirsty murderers…
…and if Trump or any other white conservative then complained, not unreasonably, that “some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties”…
…then posters here would not have objected to that remark at all. Your attempted analogy is crap.
…this isn’t about “CAIR.” This is about narrative framing. This is about understanding how propaganda works. For example:
You’ve just recontextualized a two-second sound byte as comparable to a hypothetical involving Trump. You’ve invoked the Klan, the Aryan Brotherhood, Anders Berivik and compared that to an organization that actively disputes every allegation that it has ties to terrorist organizations.
That’s how you “narratively reframe” a story. Its literally how propaganda works.
Nope.
If you want to argue that people shouldn’t associate with CAIR then make that case here. Lay out the evidence.
And when Omar gets labeled “anti-Semitic” for calling known white nationalist Stephen Miller a “white nationalist”: it should be pretty fucking clear that no matter how carefully she “chooses her words”, she is going to get attacked for what she says regardless. As long as people like you continue to “reframe the narrative” then people are going to assume the smoke is indicative of fire. So just stop doing that already.
Sure, if you had in “and white people everywhere were ostracized, attacked, and felt their liberties severely curtailed for no reason other than sharing the same skin tone as the perpetrators.”
Ignoring the rest of the quote is to completely miss the point, no matter how you try to argue that Dopers are as dumb and narrow-minded as many Republican leaders.
I was about to post the same thing: in context, “some people did something” would not be the remarkable part of the sentence (although even in context, the SCROTUS does find a way to make everything he says objectionable so it would still likely draw comment.)
She was likely attempting to minimize the awfulness of the event to make a political point. I believe this to be the case because 99% of politicians are similarly adept with their use of words. It’s what politicians do. Sure, Omar be among the 1% of politicians who steelman opposing arguments but until otherwise proven I’m lumping her in with the 99% of politicians who euphemise or exaggerate when they feel it helps their cause.
While I can picture “some people did something” as an understatement in reference to the 9/11 attacks, I can’t quite contort mentally enough to see how it could be offensive.
I think what she was trying to say was just because some group of people did something bad doesn’t mean that the rest of the country’s Muslims have to pay for it. She could have chosen her words with more precision. She might have subconsciously been trying to downplay the association of Islam with 9/11 but that makes sense considering that she was trying to deliver a speech to empower Muslims so that they don’t have to feel ashamed of who they are.
Meaning is conveyed in different ways, not just the literal denotation of words – we all know this on some level. The people criticizing her could make an attempt to listen and understand the speech in its entirety, but they’re not interested in that. They’re deliberately choosing to mischaracterize what she’s saying so that they can justify their own bigotry toward the new faces of Congress, like Reps. Omar, Ocasio-Cortez, and Tlaib. The right wing is playing a dangerous game of trying to use ethnicity to smear Omar and others. But it’s hardly surprising because racism is their brand.
Tweeting out a 45 second video of Omar cut & looped with interspersed video of 9/11 attacks seems much more offensive (and in the modern climate even dangerous for the congresswoman’s safety).
It’s the demonization of “the other”
Sorry, but I can’t conceive of any possible universe in which Trump could describe the Unite the Right rally as ‘Some people doing something’ without posters here raining scathing condemnation on him from now until the end of time, no matter what happened afterwards. Especially if the ‘Unite the Right’ marchers had killed three thousand people.
This is a central point, precisely because of how absurdly wrong it is.
9/11 is the single most influential event in American culture in the past half century, certainly in this millennium. It’s shaped how we view world politics, how we view each other, and how we view Muslims.
If there is one thing that a savvy American Muslim politician will not do, it’ll be to “attempt to minimize the awfulness” of 9/11. That plays so perfectly into the xenophobic right’s narrative that it’s political suicide.
There’s no fucking way that she was doing that on purpose.
Omar needs to pay better attention, in my opinion. She needs to look at the alligators snapping at her from the swamp, and she needs to keep her feet well away from the water. It was clumsy and foolish of her to phrase things this way, and although it’s kind of ridiculous that it’s this way, she ought to phrase everything so that those snapping alligators can’t get at her. She should’ve said something like, “CAIR found new purpose after 9/11 because they recognized that as a result of that act of brutal mass murder by a few madmen, all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.”
As for this, I’m going to concede this imaginary point in this imaginary universe to you, and join you in condemning Alt-Me in that Alt-Universe as a hypocrite, mostly because I don’t give a shit about imaginary hypocrisy in other timelines.
You must have a dull imagination, since Trump has said many much, much worse things than this, and those things have been moved on from once he said something even worse, because he always says something worse.