“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.”
.. 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.
Ben Carson’s Exonerating Racism
Carson is a scientist who disavows evolution, a citizen who professes to be deeply concerned about democracy yet supports a religious litmus test for public office, and a physician who devoted himself to saving the lives of children but indulges the hypertensive claims of the anti-vaccine element. His bifurcated thinking calls to mind James Watson, the Nobel winning co-discoverer of DNA, who spent years mouthing racist and sexist theories of human intelligence. On the stump, Carson seems like an object lesson in what happens when STEM majors don’t take enough courses in the humanities and social sciences.
.. By stating that he believes that Islam is inconsistent with American democracy and that President Obama is a Christian born in the United States, he validates the substance of birtherism, just not this specific instance of it.
.. But Carson appears to mean what he says, and there is a consistent market for his brand of exonerating racism, for bigotries so valid that even a brilliant black man endorses them.
Daniel Larison Carson and Religion in the Public Square
Ben Carson said some objectionable things yesterday about Muslims, but I thought this defense of his position was by far the strangest one he could offer:
Muslims feel that their religion is very much a part of your public life and what you do as a public official, and that’s inconsistent with our principles and our Constitution.
I say this is the strangest defense he could offer because it is extremely easy to imagine this same argument being deployed against Carson–or any religious conservative–in exactly the same way.
.. On top of that, it is self-defeating to insist on the great importance of protecting religious liberty for Christians while declaring in the next breath that members of a religious minority cannot be considered fully American.