Representative Ilhan Omar (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images)
A distinct feature of this current presidency is an embrace of one of Vladimir Putin’s favorite known political tactics called whataboutism. For Putin and this president, whataboutism can be described as responding to any criticism by pointing out that somebody else, sometimes decades ago such as when Bill Clinton was president, did something bad too once. Unfortunately for the country, this president of the United States has engaged in a lot of racist statements and associations that no whatabout should ever be able to obfuscate.
Birtherism was/is a disgusting, racist concept that no one, and not a shred of evidence, suggested this president should champion. No whatabout morally alters the fact that this president purposefully misrepresented the nature of what was rather obviously headlined and carried out as a white supremacist rally. Neither should anyone else’s bad deed matter to the fact that this president referred to the obvious white supremacists attending the rally as being “very fine people.” More recently, but no less obviously, the president’s textbook racism was on display yet again in the form of telling four members of Congress, all of whom are American citizens — though I am not quite sure that even matters at this point — to “go back” to where they came from.
As Adam Serwer, staff writer at the Atlantic, correctly pointed out at the time the “go back” statements were made, the importance of condemning the president’s racism does not require any personal affection towards the particular members of Congress the president was referring to. That is because condemning the president’s racist tropes should be about “defending the idea that America should be a country for all its people [emphasis mine]” not just someone in particular. For my part however, I purposefully took the time to differentiate the president from at least one of the members of Congress he used racist tropes against: Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.
To be clear, I did accuse both the president and Representative Omar of making racist tropes in the past. Nevertheless, I made the decision to distinguish Omar from the president by accurately stating that only “Congresswoman Omar has apologized for or admitted ignorance to such ‘tropes,’ and thereafter consistently publicly denounced the racism attributed to the trope.” In just the last week however, it has become clear that the recent actions and associations of Congresswoman Omar need to be addressed independently from the actions of anyone else, including this president.
Last week, it was revealed that not only did Congresswoman Omar and a fellow member of Congress, Rashinda Tlaib, fail to take part in a large bipartisan delegation to Israel (a largely innocuous decision by itself), the two members of Congress decided instead “to go on an independent trip to Israel sponsored by vicious anti-Semites.” By any acceptable measure, the fact that two members of Congress refused a Congressional trip in favor of the company of an anti-Semitic group represents a crying scandal in American politics. Moreover, when it comes to Congresswoman Omar especially, the fact that she has used anti-Semitic tropes in the past coupled now with associations to clear anti-Semitic organizations means that past apologies and claims of ignorance have begun to carry little to no weight. Given that its members of Congress are partnering with organizations that celebrate suicide bombers and sharing arguably racist tropes certainly authored by bigots, the Democratic Party leadership must be viewed under some kind of obligation to address this scandal.
But as New York Times columnist Bari Weiss right points out, complicating everything is the fact that the president has made racist remarks directly against Congresswoman Omar. It therefore likely remains a question whether the left, specifically the Democratic Party leadership, will confront the obvious scandal relating to Congressmembers Omar and Tlaib or instead choose to obfuscate the issue by using the president’s racism as a whatabout.
What is more troubling is that the need to confront anti-Semitism is not just a problem for the American left. Across the Atlantic in Great Britain, prominent liberals have for years been struggling to address institutionalized anti-Semitism within the Labour Party. There is simply no justifiable explanation to explain why the state of Israel should ever be condemned in a single year at the U.N. more than the regimes of Syria, North Korea, Iran, and South Sudan combined. Neither does it make any logical sense that Israel is the subject of a nationwide boycott movement here in the United States while objectively worse places (and places that have greater economic ties to the United States), such as China and Saudi Arabia get a pass.
It is past the time where the attempt to obfuscate immoral transgressions by using someone else’s bad behavior gets labeled as the childish tactic that it is. We can do better than this. The president’s statements in support of and association with white supremacy and the anti-Semitism on the left need to be condemned independently of one another whenever they occur. Unfortunately the American right, other than a few virtuous exceptions, have refused to break with their dear leader, despite years of furthering racist beliefs such as birtherism. With the primaries still ahead, the American left is presented with an important choice not to engage in the same whatabout obfuscation in the future.
Tyler Broker’s work has been published in the Gonzaga Law Review, the Albany Law Review, and is forthcoming in the University of Memphis Law Review. Feel free to email him or follow him on Twitter to discuss his column.