Thread by @monaeltahawy

- Say her name: Representative @IlhanMN.
- Say that the president is endangering the life of a representative of the Democratic Party, which you ostensibly lead.
- This is spineless and a reminder of why I’m a registered Independent.

https://twitter.com/speakerpelosi/status/1117024802403840000

I understood long ago that I was way to the left of the Democratic Party so when I became a US citizen and was eligible to vote, I registered as an Independent. I also understood that if the GOP are overtly Islamophobic, the Dems are not guiltless.

As recently as 2016 election, at DNC, the Muslims on stage were the parents of an American Muslim who died fighting for the US in Iraq. Dems pretend not to be Islamophobic by playing the “Muslims serve in our armed forces and the police” card. Fuck that.

To be clear: fuck Trump and the Islamophobia he peddles in BUT he did not create it. He is an inheritor of:
- GOP outright hatred & incitement vs Muslims
- Democrats’ cowardly use of the “good Muslim” card: “Muslims are in our armed forces & police”

In 2016 elections:
- Donald Trump was vowing to ban Muslims (which he did via Muslim Ban bs 6 countries)
- Clinton had Kizr Khan and his wife Ghazala Irshad at DNC - parents of a Muslim soldier who was killed in the US war in Iraq. ie Muslims are “good” and fight “our” wars.

Russ Feingold was the ONLY senator - Democrat or GOP - who in 2001 voted against the Patriot Act. Who cared about surveillance and all that shit when it was portrayed as targeting a bunch of brown Muslims, hey?

Bush - recently rehabilitated as a cuddly grandpa artist - launched wars against 2 Muslim majority countries as revenge for 9/11.
Obama left office with the US militarily involved in at least five Muslim countries.
Anyone looks “good” compared to Trump but look closer.

Soon after 9/11, FBI Special Agent visited him at home to ask him if he “knew anyone who had celebrated 9/11” & in 2003 my brother had to submit to Special Registration -thousands of non-US citizen Muslim men were fingerprinted & submitted details for national database.

I already told you about arson vs my brother’s Midwest mosque in 2012. A week before that, I was arrested in NYC for spray painting over racist, bigoted pro-Israel ad in the subway. I spray painted over it bec I was fed up with way Muslims in the US have been bullied since 9/11

So are those the only 2 roles available to Muslims in the US: Terrorist or Victim?And is the only way out of that to serve in the US armed forces or be in law enforcement?
Fuck all of that.
Now that there are 2 Muslim women in Congress you will, as @IlhanMN has said, have to deal

2 loud Muslim women, one in hijab & the other who calls Trump a motherfucker, make you uncomfortable? Good!
That discomfort is mirror they hold up that forces white Americans - GOP and Dems - to deal with shit they’d rather ignore/handle piecemeal: misogyny, racism, Islamophobia

So when Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats can’t bring themselves to say Ilhan Omar’s name even after Trump dangerously incites violence against her, understand that their silence is dangerous too. It is complicity. It is cowardice.