New York Times
(Op-Ed)
By Thomas Friedman
September 23, 2015
There
is a movie I’m looking forward to seeing when it comes to Washington.
It seems quite relevant to America today. It’s about what can happen in a
democratic society
when politicians go too far, when they not only stand mute when hateful
words that cross civilized redlines suddenly become part of the public
discourse, but, worse, start to wink at and dabble in this hate speech
for their advantage.
Later,
they all say that they never heard the words, never saw the signs, or
claim that their own words were misunderstood. But they heard and they
saw and they meant.
Actually, I don’t need to see the movie, because I lived it. And I know
how it ends. Somebody gets hurt.
The
movie is called “Rabin: The Last Day.” Agence France-Presse said the
movie, by the renowned Israeli director Amos Gitai, is about “the
incitement campaign before the
1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin” and “revisits a
form of Jewish radicalism that still poses major risks.” This is the
20th anniversary of Rabin’s assassination by Yigal Amir, a right-wing
Jewish radical.
“My
goal wasn’t to create a personality cult around Rabin,” Gitai told
A.F.P. “My focus was on the incitement campaign that led to his murder.”
Sure, the official investigating
commission focused on the breakdowns in Rabin’s security detail, but,
Gitai added, “They didn’t investigate what were the underlying forces
that wanted to kill Rabin. His murder came at the end of a hate campaign
led by hallucinating rabbis, settlers who were
against the withdrawal from territories and the parliamentary right,
led by the Likud (party), already then headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, who
wanted to destabilize Rabin’s Labor government.”
The
film, A.F.P. said, “relied on documents, photos and videos,
particularly from the months before Rabin’s assassination, including
those showing speeches from politicians
such as Netanyahu at rallies against the Oslo accords, where Rabin was
depicted in a Nazi uniform.”
I
hope a lot of Americans see this film — for the warning it offers to
those who ignore or rationalize the divisive, bigoted campaigns of
Donald Trump and Ben Carson and
how they’re dragging their whole party across civic redlines, with
candidates saying, rationalizing or ignoring more and more crazy,
ill-informed stuff each week.
Trump
actually launched his campaign on June 16 with a message of
polarization, saying: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending
their best. … They’re sending
people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems
with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re
rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
The
Washington Post’s Fact Checker column gave him four Pinocchios, its
highest rating for not telling the truth, noting: “Trump’s repeated
statements about immigrants
and crime underscore a common public perception that crime is
correlated with immigration, especially illegal immigration. But that is
a misperception; no solid data support it, and the data that do exist
negate it.”
And
then Trump insulted John McCain, saying he was only a war hero because
he got captured, adding, “I like people that weren’t captured, O.K.?”
McCain spent five and
a half years as a P.O.W. in Vietnam and was repeatedly tortured and had
his bones broken. As CNN reported, “Trump, meanwhile, received four
student deferments and one medical deferment to avoid serving in the
Vietnam War.”
What does it mean to impugn a man who has sacrificed so much for his country? It means you can smear anyone.
Last
week another redline was crossed. At a Trump town hall event, the first
questioner began: “We got a problem in this country. It’s called
Muslims. We know our current
president is one. We know he’s not even an American. But anyway. We
have training camps brewing where they want to kill us. That’s my
question. When can we get rid of them?”
Trump
responded: “A lot of people are saying that bad things are happening
out there. We’re going to be looking into that and plenty of other
things.”
Trump
could have let the man ask his question and then correct his racist
nonsense, without blocking his free speech, which is exactly what McCain
did in a similar situation.
Instead, he later said it was not his place to defend Obama. As someone
who aspires to be president it is his place to defend the truth, but
since Trump himself has been the source of so much birther nonsense
about Obama, I guess that would be hard. Instead
he tweeted: “Christians need support in our country (and around the
world), their religious liberty is at stake! Obama has been horrible, I
will be great.”
And
then, like clockwork, Ben Carson saw Trump blurring another civic
redline and leapfrogged him. Carson stated, “I would not advocate that
we put a Muslim in charge
of this nation.”
So
a whole faith community gets delegitimized and another opportunity for
someone to courageously stand up for what’s decent is squandered. But it
will play well with
certain voters. And that is all that matters — until something really
bad happens. And then, all of it — the words, tweets, signs and boasts —
will be footage for another documentary that ends badly.
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