Press Critique: The Times and the Islamophobes
A Right-Wing Congressman Dishes Out Hate and the Paper of Record Dithers
The New York Times has a problem with the framing of some of its political coverage, especially when it comes to calling out the bigotry of those in high places.
It took the paper much of the four-year Trump term to find language to describe Donald Trump’s language as lying and his slurs as full-on hate, and it seems they are still struggling to address the best way to address the same issues with Congress.
The evidence arrived in a dispatch on last night’s debate over a proposal to create a special envoy on Islamophobia similar to one in place on Antisemitism. The bill was passed in the House on a party-line vote, with Republicans offering a variety of critiques, many of which were disingenuous and downright deceitful.
But it was U.S. Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, described by the Times describes as “the incoming leader of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus” (translation, House Trumper-in-chief), who gave voice to what has become the mainstream of his party.
“American taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to pay terrorist organizations, organizations that the maker of this bill is affiliated with, like the one that’s an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terror finance case in the United States of America’s history,” Mr. Perry said.
Perry used language designed to inflame and that seemed to purposely conflate terrorism and Islam, to make them one and the same. In the process, he has followed on the same post-9/11 script used by Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and many of the party’s intellectual leaders over the last two decades, a script that paints Democrats as enablers or, worse, “co-conspirators” in a civilizational war.
The Times presented its report under a headline that shifts attention away from the GOP and onto the victim, by casting it in the passive voice and only identifying the target, Rep. Ilhan Omar: “Muslim Lawmaker Comes Under Fire in House Debate on ‘Islamophobia.’” This use of the passive voice is fairly common, eliding any sense of agency, any sense that someone acted. The headline implies that Omar was the central player, that she caused the firestorm on which the Times is devoting so much real estate.
A better headline would focus on Perry: “GOP Lawmaker Calls Muslims Terrorists in Debate on ‘Islamophobia.’”
The story is only nominally better, opening with this lede:
A House effort to pass a bill to combat anti-Muslim bigotry became enmeshed in charges of exactly that prejudice when a right-wing Republican from Pennsylvania accused the bill’s co-sponsor, Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, of antisemitism and harboring terrorist sympathies.
Note the muddled syntax, the extreme use of qualifiers, the effort to avoid actually accusing anyone of anything — aside from Omar, who does get accused by the yet to-be-named “right-wing Republican” of being Antisemitic.
The story does attempt to provide some context, both on the comments made by Perry, on Omar, and on Perry’s fellow Trumpist Lauren Boebert, who has made attacking Omar in bigoted language the hallmark of her tenure in the House.
The Times describes Perry’s comments as “a convoluted reference to a case more than a decade ago against the Holy Land Foundation, an Islamic charity that in 2008 was convicted of funding Islamic militant groups” was at best a muddled effort at context. It reminded readers that the case to which Perry refers, one in which the Bush Justice Department the “un-indicted co-conspirator” label to implicate by proxy the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a legitimate human rights group.
None of that information was imparted by Mr. Perry,” the Times said, as if Perry’s effort was meant as a factual rebuttal to a policy proposal and not a case of overt anti-Muslim bigotry. The Times then went on to describe the “kerfuffle” — the paper’s word — as indicative of a “gulf between the two parties, even as House Democratic leaders are trying to defuse the incendiary issue of bigotry.
For the Times, this is about politics, about partisan gamesmanship. But that does not do justice to the people being smeared by Perry’s overt bigotry, and it downplays the ways in which the Trump wing of the GOP is both bigoted and uses its bigotry as a strategy to appeal to its overwhelmingly white constituency. And it downplays the use to which supposedly mainstream Republicans like House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy use the party’s extremist wing to hide the underlying bigotry the party as a whole has embraced or at least tacitly tolerates.
Perry and Boebert — and others like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, and others — are not outliers in their Islamophobia. They have the support of much of the party’s base, and their rhetoric contains more than echoes of earlier attacks — not just on Muslims, but also on Jews, and nearly every immigrant group in the country’s history.
But the vitriol against Muslims over the last 20 years has been especially harsh — so harsh, in fact, that many of us have trouble seeing it. I came across this cartoon on Twitter yesterday, tweeted by a liberal seemingly using it to attack Trump. The cartoonist, Rick McKee, is a self-described anti-Trump conservative.
My point was a simple one: That “These images play off long-standing hate. That they still show up in the mainstream is an indication of just how little progress we’ve made toward a goal of equal treatment.”
Political cartoons exaggerate for effect, to underscore the political arguments they make. McKee obviously is exaggerating Trump and his MAGA backer, but not in ways that play into ethnic stereotypes — or not the kind of hateful stereotypes he uses here for Arabs and repeated has used to portray Muslim groups in his work. His point in this cartoon is that Trump the the Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud were permanent allies, even though the Saudi prince was believed to be the mastermind behind the killing and dismembering of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Like Trump, he could kill someone and not lose support.
The thing that strikes me, though, about this cartoon, is just how exaggerated the caricature of MBS is and how he relies on a set of stock characteristics to strip Muslims/Arabs/Afghanis (they are all one in the same in his drawings) of their individuality and humanity.
Perry is doing exactly the same thing with phrases like “pay(ing) terrorist organizations” and by rhetorically tying a sitting Congresswoman to them through a tortuous guilt-by-association argument. He is asking his fellow Republicans — and the public at large — to equate Islam and terror, in the same way that many have for decades.
The Times, by not being more direct in calling him out, enables this behavior, makes it seem more mainstream than it should be. This is not just a matter of Perry offering a fringe opinion, or playing politics. He is using his platform to foster hate.