Opinion | Yes, the President Bears Blame for the Terror From the Right - The New York T... - 0 views
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For years, conservatives have rightly pointed out that Islamist terrorists don’t spring from an ideological or cultural vacuum. It usually takes a village, real, virtual or proverbial, to make an Islamist terrorist — one composed of hate-spewing imams, TV programs saturated with anti-Semitic and anti-Western conspiracy theories, neighborhood vigilantes enforcing fundamentalist religious strictures, and political leaders excusing, reflecting or disseminating many of the same beliefs and attitudes.
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Conservatives used to understand the danger. Why care about social formalities, modes of dress, niceties of speech, qualities of restraint? Not simply because manners make the man, although they do, but because manners also shape political cultures
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What are the villages from which Sayoc and Bowers hailed? For Sayoc it was the real-world villages of the Trump rally, with its mob-like intensity and unquestioning fidelity to one supreme leader. For Bowers, it was the virtual villages of Twitter and alt-right social networks, digitally connecting angry loners who follow nobody.
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Just so with the Trumpist and alt-right villages. Different methods and values — but not altogether different. Both draw on similarly cramped ideas about nationhood and sovereignty. Both see political opponents as enemies and immigrants as invaders. Both are susceptible to conspiracy theories. And both feed off the same incessant background noise of Trump-speak. “Lock her up.” “Enemy of the American people.” “Illegal alien mob.”
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In other words: the criminalization of political opposition, the vilification of the media, and the demonization of foreigners
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At some point, the distance between word and deed becomes short. And then they are joined, as they were last week
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The villagers are rarely terrorists themselves. They often condemn terrorism. Sometimes they are its victims. Yet they also provide the soil in which the seeds of terror germinate.
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How does a conservative movement that is supposed to believe that every healthy society needs powerful moral guardrails give itself over to a president whose every other utterance cheerfully knocks those guardrails down?
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Abe Foxman, the former longtime head of the Anti-Defamation League, precisely expresses the president’s level of responsibility for what happened in Pittsburgh.
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“Pittsburgh is not Trump,” Foxman says. “It’s also Trump.” Trump, he adds, is not an anti-Semite. But fanning one set of hatreds against immigrants has a way of fanning others
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Turning to last year’s neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Foxman says of Trump, “He didn’t create them. He didn’t write their script. He didn’t give them the brown shirts. But he emboldened them. He gave them the chutzpah, that it’s O.K.
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“And when he had an opportunity to put it down,” Foxman adds, “he didn’t.” The blood that flowed in Pittsburgh is on his hands, also