By David Futrelle
Right-wingers on Twitter stopped their incessant attacks on congresswoman Ilhan Omar long enough to notice that Notre Dame was on fire, apparently (according to police) because of a construction accident. And then they started tweeting again, with many of them simply incorporating the devastating fire into their attacks on the congreswoman and Muslims in general.
More than a few have used her now famous remarks about 9/11, taken out of context and distorted by right-wing media and MAGA trolls, as a sort of joke template, imagining her reacting with indifference of not joy to the monumental disaster.
I wonder how many MAGAs will end up believing that these fake quotes are real?
The “some people” tweeters aren’t the only ones convinced that Omar, and Muslins generally, are celebrating the fire en masse.
Others are suggesting that Omar herself is somehow connected to the fire.
A few tweeted their accusations directly at Omar, with some adding ominous, if deliberately vague, threats. These people definitely aren’t joking.
It’s still early. As the hours and days go by, I’m sure it will get uglier. The memes will spread; the YouTube videos will go up; the accusations will become more lurid and the conspiracy theories will become more baroque. Regardless of what any investigations of this fire find, there will be many on the right — if not most of them — who will not only blame Muslim terrorists for this historic tragedy but will hold Omar herself personally responsible.
I can only imagine how ugly it will get on Fox News tonight, to say nothing of the reactions on right-wing forums and the chans. We live in hateful times.
EDITED TO ADD: Here’s some of the ugliness from Fox in the wake of the fire.
And here’s Glenn Beck with his own conspiracy theory:
EDITED TO ADD PART TWO: Talia Lavin takes a broader look at the anti-Muslim conspiracy theories, citing among other things this post.
We Hunted the Mammoth is independent and ad-free, and relies entirely on readers like you for its survival. If you appreciate our work, please send a few bucks our way! Thanks!
@Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation
AIPAC was founded in 1951 and incorporated in 1963.
Seems to me that some of the hate-tweeters haven’t quite grasped that it’s about a cathedral in France, not the college football club in America.
Re: Muslims not caring about Nôtre-Dame:
If the media would only take the trouble to look around and ask them, they’d probably find them already coming together and raising funds for the reconstruction of the church. And if they asked why, they’d probably receive a response they hadn’t expected: namely, that as fellow “people of the book”, Christians (who share a number of prophets with Islam) deserve compassion and support when one of their holy sites is devastated. And that in so doing unto others, they’re just being proper Muslims.
Of course, I don’t expect any right-wing donkey-bonkers and dead-horse-floggers to inquire terribly deeply into THAT — nay, inquire into it AT ALL. Anything which doesn’t support their fuckheaded fascist conspiracy theories will be studiously ignored.
It’s the associated “American Israel Education Foundation” that was founded in 1990. And …
It’s a spinoff of AIPAC.
Sure looks like there was a jump in activity designed to promote and maintain an aggressive foreign-policy posture in the Middle East around 1990. Right when the end of the track for the defense industry’s Cold War gravy train was coming into view. I doubt that is coincidence.
Those who call for peace, justice, and the destruction of Israel remind me of that species of aliens in Douglas Adams'”Hitchhiker” series, who declare they want love, beauty, and the elimination of all other life forms.
@anonymous : I disagree a lot with what you say, but you indeed prove why one need a lot of fortitude to remind people that Israel and Palestine are problematic. To cite a few :
* the countries you cite have thoroughly epured their nation to the point where native are all but non existing. Israel is in the process of doing that. It’s the difference between holding a country accountable for its past crime, and saying a country is doing a crime.
* you confuse jews and inhabitants of Israel, which is the usual fare of people conflating antisionisme and antisemitisme. You also willfully ignore that I said that there is 0 good solutions right now. You even ignore the fact that I put moving the Israeli at the exact same level as moving the palestinian to act like I even said to make jews go to other countries.
* you don’t address the real problem, which are A – palestinians are getting epured from their country and B – if a war start, there are every element for it to destroy the entire middle east.
Now, if Gauls spring back to life and want the territory of the France, we would have a problem. I hope that hypothetical problem won’t be solved by putting them in refugees camps and giving them land then trying to evict them from it by so-called “colonies” ; and it’s not like we could relocate frenchs, gauls or both of to the moon.
As an aside, I know quite well a couple of “pied noirs”, which are the descendants of french who were forcibly moved from Algeria to France when the decolonization of Algeria was done.The trauma is still here for their grandchildren who weren’t even born in Algeria. I take that both as a clue of how horrible relocating the Israelis would be, and as a clue about how big the pain is on the expulsed palestinians.
Funny thing, “American Patroit(sic),” I figured people like you reacted to the Notre Dame fire that way, because you saw it as a golden opportunity to paint all Muslims as terrorists even though the fire has been conclusively shown to be an accident. Not that you or your vile bigot cohorts care. You people can’t even stub your toes on a rock without claiming a Muslim put the rock in your path.
Husbeast alerted me to the possibility that Ubisoft may be able to help with the Notre Dame fire reconstruction. https://nypost.com/2019/04/17/video-game-could-be-key-to-rebuilding-notre-dame/
But, yeah. Disney could kick in some bucks considering that they made a fair few dollars off the place.
@WWTH
That’s an understatement.
In my home province, there’s a tiny little town where the nazis settled in the 60s or something. Catholic people dug tunnels from their back yards to the grocery store, schools, etc, because it wasn’t physically safe for them to walk in the streets.
But of course, white Catholics are still far better than black people to a nazi, so obviously they’ll pretend to care if it gives them an excuse to stir up racist violence.
@anonymous
Talking like those against the occupation want “the destruction of Israel” is incredibly simplistic and disingenuous, and I think you know it. That is the kind of reactionary dogwhistle statement I have come to loathe in many a Kiddush lunch.
If you are going to claim to be a patriot, you should at least know how to spell the word. Remember: you can’t be a patriot without “r-i-o-t”.