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AUGUST 16, 2022
Meyerson on TAP
Fatwas, Foreign and Domestic
There's the Iranian brand and the Republican brand.
Barbaric violence encouraged from on high is all the rage these days.
Within the past week, we've seen the savage attack on Salman Rushdie
and an attempted attack on the FBI's Cincinnati office by a Trump
follower brandishing an AR-15. The Rushdie attacker was attempting to
carry out the death sentence pronounced on Rushdie by the Ayatollah
Khomeini for passages he deemed sacrilegious in Rushdie's novel The
Satanic Verses. The FBI assailant was acting out the Republican
right's and Donald Trump's rage at the Mar-a-Lago document search,
which included Breitbart's decision not to redact the names of the FBI
agents that appeared on the search warrant, and the pro-Trump social
media that deemed them to be "traitors."
The American Fatwa-er in Chief, of course, is Trump himself. Courtesy of
the January 6th hearings, we've learned that he knew many members of
the crowd that turned out to hear him and then march to the Capitol that
day were armed; that his vilification of Mike Pence led members of that
mob to attempt to attack Pence (or worse); and that it took the physical
restraints of his Secret Service detail to stop Trump from joining his
mob. Trump, of course, is not alone in encouraging the neofascist core
of his supporters to intimidate with the threat of violence his
opponents, though going beyond encouraging violence to actually
directing it-something we saw as early as his 2016 campaign, when he
told his crowds to beat up hecklers-is still largely confined to Trump
himself.
Our homegrown parallels to Ayatollah-istic conduct aren't confined to
death sentences, of course. They're apparent in the kinds of thought
control mandated by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who recently signed
legislation that bans history professors from expressing or relating an
analysis that "espouses" or "promotes" anything that a student may
consider making themselves feel guilty about some aspect of our
nation's record on issues of race and gender. One ayatollah's
"sacrilegious" is another ayatollah's "woke."
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter
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