I mean, who knew being a good example was that important?
Every president has walked a careful line on moral issues, gently suggesting anodyne advice that’s so obvious and boring, everyone skips past it with a quick mental blink. God knows, I’d roll my eyes.
And now we have President Donald J. Trump, a man who appeals to our worst angels.
Today CNN reports that bomb threats forced Jewish Community Centers to evacuate in at least 12 states. USA Today reports 31 individual bomb threats to 23 community centers and day schools. Jewish cemeteries in Philadelphia and St. Louis have been vandalized, and swastikas sprayed on cars in Miami Beach. There have been over 100 incidents so far in 2017, a huge increase over 2016, which itself had a much higher number of hate crimes than 2015.
Trump was criticized when he first ignored this uptick in antisemitism. He complained loudly that he wasn’t antisemitic at all, so what was the big deal?
Things haven’t improved much. White House spokesman Sean Spicer eventually mentioned the crimes in yesterday’s Feb. 27 press briefing.
Finally, I wanted to note the President continues to be deeply disappointed and concerned by the reports of further vandalism at Jewish community — Jewish cemeteries, rather. The cowardly destruction in Philadelphia this weekend comes on top of similar accounts from Missouri and threats made to Jewish community centers around the country. The President continues to condemn these and any other form of anti-Semitic and hateful acts in the strongest terms. From our country’s founding, we’ve been dedicated to protecting the freedom of our citizens’ rights to worship.
(I’m pretty sure that if Trump was using “the strongest terms”, they wouldn’t have been “disappointed and concerned”.)
No one in America should feel afraid to follow the religion of their choosing freely and openly. The President is dedicated to preserving this originating principle of our nation.
It may seem churlish of me, but I’m left wondering if Trump really said any of that. It doesn’t sound like him. If he does feel that way, the President needs to say so himself — out loud — especially considering how late he was to first respond, and double-especially, considering his earlier embrace of open hate-speech during the campaign. We’ll see if there’s anything in this evening’s speech to Congress. I’m actually hopeful.
Spicer went on:
And while we’re at it, I don’t want to get ahead of the law enforcement, but I was asked the other day about the story in Kansas — the shooting in Kansas. And while the story is evolving, early reports out of Kansas are equally disturbing.
What, suddenly Trump and his mouthpieces are worried about ‘getting ahead of law enforcement’? Didn’t bug them for brown-on-white violence, even if it’s their imaginary disasters like Bowling Green or Sweden, or the early Quebec City misreport.
So… Kansas. On Feb. 23, Adam Purinton, a white man from Olathe, MO, picked a fight with two Indian men in a bar in Kansas, asking them what kind of visa they had, and if they were illegal. When Purinton got loud, the bar staff threw him out, but he cam back with a pistol yelling what the press calls ‘racial slurs’, saying that the two men should “Get out of my country!” Then he started shooting them, killing one and injuring two (including another man who tried to intervene). After running away, Purinton described them as “Iranian”, but, just as apparently, ‘brown’ was enough to shoot them and people standing close to them.
JUST IN: White House, speaking about Kansas shooting, says any loss of life is tragic but absurd to link to president’s rhetoric
— Reuters U.S. News (@ReutersUS) February 24, 2017
Yeah. Not getting ahead of law enforcement there.
The father of one of the hurt Indian men said:
The situation seems to be pretty bad after Trump took over as the U.S. president. I appeal to all the parents in India not to send their children to the United States in the present circumstances.
So, most of a week later, and the best we get is that it’s ‘disturbing’. To Sean Spicer. Talk about cold comfort.
Horribly, I think the father has the better argument.
And, of course, we’re not done. Alexandre Bissonnette is accused of walking into a Quebec City mosque on Jan. 29 during prayer services. Bissonnette, a 27-year-old white nationalist, is charged with shooting indiscriminately into the crowd of men, women and children with an AK-47 assault rifle, killing six and injuring 17 more, five critically. The CBC reported that this is the same mosque where someone left a severed pig’s head on the mosque’s doorstep during Ramadan last June.
Fox News mistook a Muslim shooting victim for a shooter, and reported this as Muslim violence. I think that’s the only reason the White House acted.
White House spokesman Sean Spicer reported on Jan 30 that Trump called Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau to offer condolences, and again, condemned the attack in the ‘strongest possible terms’. Spicer also implied that this attack helped justify Trump’s Muslim Travel Ban, which shows they still thought the killer was brown. Fox News retracted that tweet and identified the accused killer as a white nationalist. There has been no further comment.
Someone torched a mosque in Tampa, Florida last Friday. This is the second mosque torched — in Florida — in the past six months, almost certainly by white people. No Trump comment. Instead, we have rambling press conferences about imaginary brown-on-white violence in Sweden.
When candidate Trump talks smack about Muslims and immigrants, we have sharp rise in hate crimes. When that candidate becomes President Trump, and continues his hateful speech, things get worse. When the president seems indifferent whenever the attacker is white, the rhetoric and violence increase even more. It’s incredibly obvious that the administration is acting in horribly, devastatingly, destructively racist ways. You could argue whether this is encouraging marginal people to act out, but lord knows — and statistics show — they are.
Adam Purinton, the Kansas shooter, wasn’t an ideologue or a true believer. He was mostly just a fuck-up. His dad died a little over a year ago, and Purinton fell into drinking heavily. Drunk by mid-morning most days, he bounced from one crappy job to another, not quite making ends meet. He wasn’t involved in racist groups or even especially political; he was just broken and lost. He found an object for his frustration in Trump’s ideas, and after drinking heavily that evening, acted on his desperation before running away. Pretty easy to see the connection between the words — the ideas — and his subsequent actions.
Unless it’s your job not to acknowledge the obvious, I suppose.
