The New York Times’ international taxicab correspondent can’t make up his mind.
On the one hand, Thomas Friedman hates what President Trump has said about Muslims. He also dislikes the president’s executive order temporarily banning travel from several Middle Eastern countries. On the other hand, Friedman is also the guy who wrote this week that there would probably be bipartisan support for gun control if more mass shooters were Muslim.
Railing against Trump’s comments on Muslims and the so-called “travel ban” while also wishing tongue-in-cheek for more Muslim-led murder sprees doesn’t make a lot of sense. Then again, punditry rarely does.
Friedman’s column this week deals with the Clarke County, Nevada, massacre. It is titled “If Only Stephen Paddock Were a Muslim.”
Oh, boy.
“If only Stephen Paddock had been a Muslim … If only he had shouted ‘Allahu akbar’ before he opened fire on all those concertgoers in Las Vegas … If only he had been a member of ISIS … If only we had a picture of him posing with a Quran in one hand and his semiautomatic rifle in another,” Friedman wrote. “If all of that had happened, no one would be telling us not to dishonor the victims and ‘politicize’ Paddock’s mass murder by talking about preventive remedies.”
He added, “No, no, no. Then we know what we’d be doing. We’d be scheduling immediate hearings in Congress about the worst domestic terrorism event since 9/11. Then Donald Trump would be tweeting every hour ‘I told you so,’ as he does minutes after every terror attack in Europe, precisely to immediately politicize them. Then there would be immediate calls for a commission of inquiry to see what new laws we need to put in place to make sure this doesn’t happen again. Then we’d be ‘weighing all options’ against the country of origin.”
Well, probably not. You have to live in a special kind of echo chamber not to know that a common response to mass casualty events involving perpetrators of Middle Eastern descent is to warn that it is wrong to hold all Muslims responsible. It’s kind of amazing that Friedman could write about such a hypothetical without even thinking to mention Omar Mateen, the Pulse nightclub shooter.
We get what he’s going for, we really do. It’s a cute rhetorical dance, but does Friedman not see that he is explicitly arguing that the further demonization of Muslims could get gun control advocates closer to their desired goal? Does he not realize how silly this week’s column looks in comparison to some of the earlier stuff he has written and said about the president’s remarks on Muslims?
“The Trump campaign spent an enormous amount of energy making people afraid,” the Times columnist told CNN’s Anderson Cooper in January. “Making people afraid of Muslims … and then presenting Donald trump as the man who would protect you from all that.”
By the way, he didn’t say this to be flattering.
In October 2016, Thomas said Trump was a “legal alien” who “denigrated” Muslims.
Earlier, in December 2015, in a column embarrassingly titled “#You Ain’t No American, Bro,” Freidman accused Trump of alienating “the Muslim world with his call for a ban on Muslims entering America.” The Times columnist also argued that Trump was, “acting as the Islamic State’s secret agent.”
“ISIS wants every Muslim in America (and Europe) to feel alienated. If that happens, ISIS won’t need to recruit anyone. People will will [sic] just act on their own,” he added. “Lumping all Muslims together as our enemies will only make that challenge harder.”
Let’s see if we have this straight: Friedman abhors Trump’s scapegoating of Muslims, writes that the so-called travel ban is both immoral and counterproductive and then writes a tongue-in-cheek column suggesting gun control advocates would be better off if more mass shooters were Muslim?
Again, we get what Friedman is going for here, but does he not see how his gun-control argument could make Muslims feel as othered as he claims Trump’s rhetoric makes them feel?
Are you going to defend them or throw them under the bus? Pick a lane, my man.
