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Dear Bret. I do "spot the problem." As I am sure many others do. But the problem lies not with Omar's words, but with the ridiculousness of your "argument." Let me help you out.
Very short Thread
Your argument is basically summarized in the two passages below. The problem of course, that I spotted in half a second just as countless others must have also, is that these four examples simply do not work / do not make any sense in the context of a critique of Omar's speech
For your parallel about Oklahoma City to work, you would need to live in following universe:
For decades, white people have been considered 2nd class citizens. Every time a white person commits act of "terrorism" all white people are blamed for it. "T" is associated w/ whiteness.
At some point down the road, a white person gives speech, presents that context of historical bigotry against whites & then notes how "some people did something" in 1995 in Oklahoma City and every single white person got blamed for it as an illustration of this history of bigotry
Would there be anything wrong with such a statement? Would the correct response to these four words be "disgust at the deliberate attempt to conceal the scale of the horror, the identity of the perpetrators, and the racist ideology that motivated them?"
Of course not. Especially not if that same white person had also, in other contexts, condemned terrorism in general, condemned this specific act as a terrorist act & its perpetrators as terrorist, AND proposed legislation to ensure that the victims in OKC had proper healthcare
Your examples about Christchurch & Charleston are ridiculous for exactly same reason: There is no history of people identifying "Terrorism" & white people AND THEREFORE words "some people did something" cannot possibly have same meaning when expressed in these different contexts
You reject idea that Omar's four words were "taken out context" & yet you yourself ERASE this context by creating those 3 ridiculous scenarios. The context is bigotry v Muslims, ie the fact that when "some" Muslims do something, all Muslims get blamed.
Last Thursday, at beginning of controversy, I had my students watch 3 minutes of Omar's speech &analyze it for themselves & then showed them that infamous NY Post front page, Here is how they reacted. Unlike you, they DID understand Omar's words IN CONTEXT
Final point: Bret Stephens concludes that "we must hold those we have shared values with accountable." Over last year, Stephens (like rest of US media) has remained SILENT about extraordinary revelations that Israeli officials created & ran a "terrorist" group in 1980s
I wrote about these revelations a year ago. They can be found in Ronen Bergman's "Rise & Kill First" published in Feb 2018. Bergman is Stephens' colleague at NYT. & yet these revelations have not been mentioned ANYWHERE in US media. Thread:
AND of course: your reminder that Bret Stephens, when asked to explain his (infamous) "disease of the Arab mind" a few years back explicitly refused to do so while insisting that this was all a "made-up controversy." You cannot make this stuff up:
(Note: after posting thread re: exercise I did in class last week I got LOTS of insults (vs me &my students!) &several critics used same argument as Bret. I tried to explain why it made no sense. Never thought someone would write a whole column based on such ridiculous scenarios)
(and needless to say: the TWEET by Stephens is problematic for yet another couple of obvious reasons:
1: he adds the word "just"
2: & then follows it up by changing her wording to "something someone did")
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