ALSO SEE: Trump Doubles Down on Islamophobic Attacks as
Threats Against Ilhan Omar Rise

SEE ALSO: Ilhan Omar Faces Death Threats and "Dangerous Hate
Campaign" as Right-Wing Attacks Continue

The Dangerous Bullying of Ilhan Omar

By Masha Gessen, The New Yorker

16 April 19

ou know how bullying works. The victim is marked long before the bullying begins: it’s the kid no one really likes, the weirdo who is barely tolerated by the larger group. The defenseless, isolated kid. And when the bullying starts to happen, the rest of the children look the other way. Even the ones the victim thought were his friends go silent. Especially the ones he thought were his friends.

Political violence can work the same way. In modern states ruled by autocrats, or aspiring autocrats, political violence is dispersed and delegated. Its first weapons are ridicule and ostracism. Once a person has been marginalized and discredited among allies, physical violence becomes a likely option. In Russia, I witnessed this several times among people I knew, who stood alone and embattled before they were killed. The Parliament member Galina Starovoitova, who had once been a prominent member of Boris Yeltsin’s Cabinet, was, by the late nineteen-nineties, portrayed by the Russian media as someone whose ideas were outdated and irrelevant. She was shot dead in the stairwell of her apartment building, in November of 1998. The journalist Anna Politkovskaya was an often short-tempered person whose reporting was viewed as partisan and unreliable by many of her more mainstream colleagues. She was shot dead in the elevator of her apartment building, in October of 2006. The politician Boris Nemtsov, once viewed as Yeltsin’s most likely successor, was by the twenty-tens seen as an old-timer who, even as he protested the regime, didn’t quite grasp the new language of protest. He was shot dead on a bridge in central Moscow, in February of 2015. In all three cases, the people convicted or accused of the murder did not have a direct relationship to the Kremlin but were seemingly moved by a desire to act on their loyalty to it.

After their deaths, all three victims were idealized. Most Americans who have heard of them probably imagine that they were widely revered. They certainly deserved to be widely revered, but in fact they had been abandoned, late in life, even by many of those who should have been their political allies. They were difficult people with uncomfortable views; standing by their sides in an increasingly hostile political environment was hard work. But, by omitting this part of the story, we elide a key fact about contemporary political violence: bullies don’t go after the strong. In Russia, the anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny is walking around, not only alive but also mostly free, solely because the government knows that he has the support of hundreds of thousands of people who will protest if he is jailed and may revolt if he is killed. His life depends on this support.

For the past three months, Americans have observed the process of drawing a target on a politician’s back. The politician is Representative Ilhan Omar, of Minnesota. Two of her fundamental positions—that the United States government and many of its elected officials support an apartheid regime in Israel-Palestine, and that the civil rights of Muslims in the U.S. are routinely trampled by entities that include the government—are as uncomfortable for many Americans as they are indisputable. Her way of expressing those positions—unabashed, and at times seemingly unaware of context—makes her the kind of disagreeable person who is easy for presumptive allies to shun. This, in turn, makes her vulnerable to attack.

The first Omar controversy, in February, did not, contrary to popular perception, begin with an Omar tweet. (A piece by Matthew Yglesias, on Vox, did a handy job of untangling the whole story.) In the beginning was the House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, who, as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (J.T.A.) news service reported, planned to take action against the freshman representatives Omar and Rashida Tlaib, the first two Muslim women in Congress. It wasn’t immediately clear what he wanted them reprimanded for, but it seemed that the cause was the two representatives’ support for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, known as B.D.S. In the discussion that stemmed from the J.T.A. report, Omar issued her infamous tweet, which she has since deleted: “It’s all about the Benjamins baby.” She followed up to clarify that the tweet referred to political donations from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, a body that exerts powerful—and well-financed—pressure on elected officials.

In substance, the only disputable word in the tweet is “all,” as congressional supporters of Israel are not motivated solely by campaign contributions. But the tweet was widely interpreted as tapping into the anti-Semitic trope of linking Jews with money. Democratic public figures, including Chelsea Clinton, condemned the tweet; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the House Democratic leadership issued a “Statement on Anti-Semitic Comments of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.” It was a wildly disproportionate reaction, seemingly designed to show that Omar was on her own. Omar deleted the tweet and apologized. (She has also deleted a tweet that she sent in 2012: “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.”)

Less than a month later, speaking at a bookstore event in Washington, D.C., Omar said, “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is O.K. for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country”—meaning Israel. In Washington and in the media, across the political spectrum, her comments were once again condemned as anti-Semitic. (A rare exception was Jordan Weissmann in Slate, who called Omar “tone-deaf” but suggested that she had a point.) Amid much media outrage, the Democrats spent two days debating a resolution condemning anti-Semitism and “the myth of dual loyalty,” then ultimately broadened it to include other oppressed groups.

The third Omar controversy in as many months concerns remarks that the congresswoman made during an event of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “CAIR was founded after 9/11, because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties,” she said, among many other things. A right-wing activist Web site in Australia pulled the quote, making it look like Omar was diminishing the scale of the events of 9/11. Then President Trump tweeted a video that combined repetitions of that quote from Omar’s speech and footage of devastation that occurred on 9/11, suggesting that “some people did something” was an attempt to dismiss the memory of the terrorist attack. “WE WILL NEVER FORGET!!!” the President’s tweet said.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see Trump’s tweet as an invitation to aggression. Speaker Pelosi responded with a tweet of her own, demanding that Trump take down his and also noting that she had spoken to the congressional sergeant-at-arms to insure that necessary protection is provided to Omar. She seemed to see the threat of violence against Omar as real and immediate.

But something was pointedly missing from Pelosi’s tweet, and from most of the coverage of Omar and her words: an expression of solidarity with her position, or at least with the congresswoman herself. Pelosi’s tweet pointedly called for protection but didn’t offer a defense. None of the Democratic leadership has chosen to do the one thing that can prevent bullying and political violence: none of them is standing with Omar.

Omar is a difficult person to stand with. She is not merely a relatively inexperienced politician, unschooled in the ways and language of Washington—she explicitly refuses to be schooled. A refugee, she also refuses to assume the posture of the good immigrant. She has apologized for stumbling into anti-Semitic tropes, but the repetition of them makes it seem like more than an accident. Or perhaps Omar doesn’t consider it essential to watch for offensive inferences when she is speaking of pressing political issues such as the ongoing violence against Palestinians. She performs neither humility nor gratitude. This is what makes her predicament dangerous.

Only Rebellion Will Prevent an Ecological Apocalypse

By George Monbiot, Guardian UK

16 April 19

No one is coming to save us. Mass civil disobedience is essential to force a political response

ad we put as much effort into preventing environmental catastrophe as we’ve spent on making excuses for inaction, we would have solved it by now. Everywhere I look, I see people engaged in furious attempts to fend off the moral challenge it presents.

The commonest current excuse is this: “I bet those protesters have phones/go on holiday/wear leather shoes.” In other words, we won’t listen to anyone who is not living naked in a barrel, subsisting only on murky water. Of course, if you are living naked in a barrel we will dismiss you too, because you’re a hippie weirdo. Every messenger, and every message they bear, is disqualified on the grounds of either impurity or purity.

As the environmental crisis accelerates, and as protest movements like YouthStrike4Climate and Extinction Rebellion make it harder not to see what we face, people discover more inventive means of shutting their eyes and shedding responsibility. Underlying these excuses is a deep-rooted belief that if we really are in trouble, someone somewhere will come to our rescue: “they” won’t let it happen. But there is no they, just us.

The political class, as anyone who has followed its progress over the past three years can surely now see, is chaotic, unwilling and, in isolation, strategically incapable of addressing even short-term crises, let alone a vast existential predicament. Yet a widespread and wilful naivety prevails: the belief that voting is the only political action required to change a system. Unless it is accompanied by the concentrated power of protest – articulating precise demands and creating space in which new political factions can grow – voting, while essential, remains a blunt and feeble instrument.

The media, with a few exceptions, is actively hostile. Even when broadcasters cover these issues, they carefully avoid any mention of power, talking about environmental collapse as if it is driven by mysterious, passive forces, and proposing microscopic fixes for vast structural problems. The BBC’s Blue Planet Live series exemplified this tendency.

Those who govern the nation and shape public discourse cannot be trusted with the preservation of life on Earth. There is no benign authority preserving us from harm. No one is coming to save us. None of us can justifiably avoid the call to come together to save ourselves.

I see despair as another variety of disavowal. By throwing up our hands about the calamities that could one day afflict us, we disguise and distance them, converting concrete choices into indecipherable dread. We might relieve ourselves of moral agency by claiming that it’s already too late to act, but in doing so we condemn others to destitution or death. Catastrophe afflicts people now and, unlike those in the rich world who can still afford to wallow in despair, they are forced to respond in practical ways. In Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi, devastated by Cyclone Idai, in Syria, Libya and Yemen, where climate chaos has contributed to civil war, in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador,, where crop failure, drought and the collapse of fisheries have driven people from their homes, despair is not an option. Our inaction has forced them into action, as they respond to terrifying circumstances caused primarily by the rich world’s consumption. The Christians are right: despair is a sin.

As the author Jeremy Lent points out in a recent essay, it is almost certainly too late to save some of the world’s great living wonders, such as coral reefs and monarch butterflies. It might also be too late to prevent many of the world’s most vulnerable people from losing their homes. But, he argues, with every increment of global heating, with every rise in material resource consumption, we will have to accept still greater losses, many of which can still be prevented through radical transformation.

Every nonlinear transformation in history has taken people by surprise. As Alexei Yurchak explains in his book about the collapse of the Soviet Union – Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More – systems look immutable until they suddenly disintegrate. As soon as they do, the disintegration retrospectively looks inevitable. Our system – characterised by perpetual economic growth on a planet that is not growing – will inevitably implode. The only question is whether the transformation is planned or unplanned. Our task is to ensure it is planned, and fast. We need to conceive and build a new system based on the principle that every generation, everywhere has an equal right to enjoy natural wealth.

This is less daunting than we might imagine. As Erica Chenoweth’s historical research reveals, for a peaceful mass movement to succeed, a maximum of 3.5% of the population needs to mobilise. Humans are ultra-social mammals, constantly if subliminally aware of shifting social currents. Once we perceive that the status quo has changed, we flip suddenly from support for one state of being to support for another. When a committed and vocal 3.5% unites behind the demand for a new system, the social avalanche that follows becomes irresistible. Giving up before we have reached this threshold is worse than despair: it is defeatism.

Today, Extinction Rebellion takes to streets around the world in defence of our life-support systems. Through daring, disruptive, nonviolent action, it forces our environmental predicament on to the political agenda. Who are these people? Another “they”, who might rescue us from our follies? The success of this mobilisation depends on us. It will reach the critical threshold only if enough of us cast aside denial and despair, and join this exuberant, proliferating movement. The time for excuses is over. The struggle to overthrow our life-denying system has begun.