‘This Could Have Been Their 9/11 Moment’

On March 16, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

NEW YORK—The prayer space at the Islamic Center at New York University is like any other college conference room: big windows, tall ceilings, retro carpeting. But when it’s transformed for Friday prayers, called jummah, there’s a certain familiarity to it, too: rows of tape showing worshippers where to sit, a line of chairs dividing women from men, people sitting cross-legged and chatting. This prayer space is similar to the two mosques, thousands of miles away in New Zealand, where 49 worshippers were killed and scores of others were injured by a gunman on Friday.

For Mohammed Hojaij, a junior at NYU who serves on the board of the Muslim Students Association, that’s what was most sickening as he watched the video of the attack that was allegedly posted by the shooter: “Looking at the carpet, the design, the greeting at the door,” seeing how similar it was to the mosque he grew up attending in Dearborn, Michigan, “it was almost a part of me,” he said. “I felt it.”

To the group of young Muslims who showed up for prayers on Friday, the deadly shooting in Christchurch and the ugly ideology that apparently motivated it does not feel far away. They see similar versions of white supremacy and anti-Muslim rhetoric all around them in America. Many of them are too young to remember 9/11, or were barely even born when it happened; their formative moment is happening now, in the shadow of ascendent white nationalism. Young Muslims are scared and grieving over what happened in New Zealand. But they’re also ready to get political.

[Read: American Muslims Are Young, Political Liberal, and Scared]

Because New Zealand is located in a time zone 17 hours ahead of New York City’s, Muslim students at NYU had the whole, brutal day to think about whether they wanted to attend jummah prayers. “It was difficult … to decide whether or not it was appropriate for people to go out,” said Hojaij. “It felt like it was almost dangerous—like there was still a threat looming.” Asad Dandia, an NYU alumnus who still volunteers at the Islamic Center, told his mother in Brooklyn not to leave her house without him. He was worried that someone might target her, because she wears a hijab and doesn’t speak English very well.

In the end, though, people turned out—a lot of people. More than 300 men and women crowded into the space, standing in rows shoulder to shoulder to pray. Omer Malik, an NYU senior who serves as president of the Muslim Students Association, said the turn out was as big as he’s seen it in his four years at school.

The message shared at the beginning of prayers was emotional. “If you’re angry, man, it’s okay to be angry. If you feel scared, it’s okay to be scared,” said Imam Khalid Latif, the executive director of the Islamic Center.  “We’re going to do what we can to make sure tomorrow is as best as it possibly can be. … This is divine promise. Indeed with hardship, there is relief.” The room was completely still as Latif spoke. Several students were crying.

But Latif’s message was not just about grieving: He stated forcefully, in a voice edged with emotion, that the New Zealand shooting was driven by a dangerous ideology. “That act is … rooted in the same white-supremacist mindset that underlies the very systems and structures of the country we live in,” he said. “On a globalized level, it is running rampant.”

[Read: How White Supremacist Violence Echoes Other Forms of Terrorism]

In his role as a Muslim chaplain, Latif told me afterwards, he is responsible for caring for students, but also coaching them to use their voices. “Our young people have shown over and over that they can be a real catalyst for change,” he said. “Organized evil will triumph over disorganized righteousness.” In his message to the community, he explicitly encouraged students to get politically active. “We are in the beginning of 2019, and 2020 is ahead. And each one of us has to say to ourselves what our commitment will be,” he told the room. “One of the most American things we can do is speak out in protest against injustice in any administration’s policy.”

The students in the room seemed to resonate with this message. “Because of everything that’s been happening in this country since 2016, politically, we’ve had to come together as a community in the MSA,” said Maha Hashwi, a junior who serves on the board of the Muslim Students Association. The students have been working on building partnerships with other groups on campus, added Malik, and they’re not afraid to be outspoken about political issues.

They are coming of age in a political environment in which anti-Muslim rhetoric is common; a number of students told me they were devastated, but not surprised, to hear about the New Zealand attack. “We are the generation that’s going to do something about it,” said Samina Saifee, a sophomore. “We are young, we’re passionate, and we understand things in a different way.”

From a demographic point of view, Saifee may be right. As recently as 2017, polling from the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding showed that American Muslims as a whole are much younger than other religious groups, with nearly 40 percent of Muslim adults aged 29 and under. They’re overwhelmingly sympathetic to liberal and progressive policies.

And they live with a lot of fear: As I reported in 2017, roughly one-fifth of Muslims under 30 have made plans to leave the U.S. if they need to, and nearly half say they fear being the victim of a white-supremacist attack. The shooting in New Zealand confirmed what many young, American Muslims have grown up knowing: White supremacist individuals and groups want to hurt people like them. In Christchurch, the white supremacist succeeded.

[Read: Trying to Be an Apolitical Muslim in America]

A growing group of Muslims in their 30s and 40s have become visible leaders in U.S. politics: figures like Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, the newly elected Muslim congresswomen, or Linda Sarsour, the Palestinian activist who co-headlined the Women’s March. Latif is one of those leaders: He told me that in the wake of the New Zealand attack, he got calls from the New York City Comptroller’s office and the office of New York Mayor Bill de Blasio. For leaders like these, September 11 was the formative moment for their identity as Muslims in America, and for many, that experience drove them to get involved in politics.

But for the next generation of Muslim leaders, these students who are still in school, 9/11 is something they’ve only heard spoken about by their parents and other elders.  “The young kids, for whom this is the first Islamic Center that they’ve ever been to, their first time making a real community—this is what their first experience has to be, and that’s just very unfair to them,” said Dandia. “This could have been their 9/11 moment.”

Court-Packing Is Not a Threat to American Democracy. It’s Constitutional.

On March 16, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

America’s founders probably would not have been surprised by former Attorney General Eric Holder’s statement last week that if he were president—though he’s not running—and the Democrats controlled Congress, he would “seriously consider adding two seats to the Supreme Court” to counteract Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s “power-grabbing antics.” The same goes for a competing proposal from South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who is running for president, seeking to expand the court to 15 justices. Within 20 years of establishing the new federal government, our early statesmen had changed the size of the Supreme Court three times to ensure that a politically hostile judiciary did not thwart the goals of the party controlling Congress and the presidency.

The Constitution does not entrust to public officials the responsibility to check their own power. The founders assumed that people with political muscle (including judges) would show little self-restraint, and they built a government that would provide each branch with many checks against the others. The Supreme Court was no exception. Rather than leaving the size of the Court in the hands of the justices, or fixing the size for all time, the Constitution grants that power to Congress. As soon-to-be Justice Robert Jackson testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1937, “It was obvious at the founding of the Government that the Court would not always remain of the same size, and that changes in its size would be made, as they have been made, at those times when its decisions caused dissatisfaction.”

Critics of Holder’s remarks, including at The New Republic, argue that if Democrats violate the “norm” of a nine-person court, Republicans will do the same once they return to power. This tit-for-tat allegedly will spell the end to an independent judiciary and our democracy.

Such end-time worries are nothing new. When Congress voted to increase the size of the Court during the Jefferson administration, one newspaper wrote that “the Constitution has received a wound that it will not long survive.” Another lamented: “The independence of the judicial power is prostrated. A judge, instead of holding his position for life, will hold it during the good pleasure of the dominant party. The judges will of course become partisans, and the shadow of justice alone will remain in our courts.” Despite these histrionics, a moment’s reflection on the history of the Court shows that it remained fiercely independent after each of the seven instances in which Congress changed its size. It is difficult to believe that a future expansion of the Court would break this mold.

Far from leading to democratic death spirals, changes to the size of the Court have gone hand in hand with the most vibrant periods of our democracy. The first three changes centered around the political reaction to the “Revolution of 1800,” when Thomas Jefferson and his new political party swept into power. The outgoing Federalist Party, which represented big-money interests, reduced the size of the Court from six to five to keep Jefferson from filling an anticipated vacancy. Once Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party was firmly in power, they increased the size back to six justices, then to seven, to allow Jefferson to appoint new justices. Over the next 30 years, Congress denied repeated attempts to expand the Court, but President Andrew Jackson gained sufficient power to add two new justices in 1837.

The final changes to the Court’s size flowed from the upheaval and revitalization of our democracy during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans first increased the size to ten to prevent judicial attacks on his war policies. After Lincoln’s assassination, Congress reduced the size to eight to prevent the new president, Andrew Johnson, from harming Congress’ reconstruction efforts. Shortly after assuming the presidency, Ulysses S. Grant and his supporters added a justice to ensure the overturning of a recent Court decision that invalidated the legal tender law that had allowed the government to finance its war efforts. FDR’s failed attempt to pack the Court similarly took place at a time when political and economic elites were being replaced by a new coalition. These were not times of democratic decay, but of rebirth, and leading figures of the day knew that political change could and would be thwarted by the Supreme Court.

We were never intended to be a government by judicial fiat, but the threat has always existed. As Alexis de Tocqueville famously noted, every major political dispute in the United States eventually finds its way into the courts, and courts have the final say in these disputes. Courts can, and have at times, stagnated our government’s ability to respond to critical political and economic issues of the day. That is exactly what is happening today. A Supreme Court majority, sharing a constitutional vision that harkens back to the days when political power was enjoyed by only a landed, male, white aristocracy, is preventing our democratic processes from solving problems that go to the very heart of our democracy. The court’s conservatives stand in the way of our efforts to keep dark money out of politics, to prevent the suppression of the voting rights of people of color, and to solve the polarization that has come with political gerrymandering.

But as the Court’s originalists must acknowledge, it’s no accident that the Constitution grants Congress the right to make the Supreme Court as large or small as it likes. Having the ability to change the composition of the Court in this way ensures that Congress has the power to prevent stagnant visions of our law from threatening the growth of our democracy.

When Poems of Resilience Get Twisted for Terrorism

On March 16, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

One of the U.K.’s propaganda films in World War II remixed portions of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will by overdubbing various Nazi leaders’ speeches at the 1934 Reich Party Congress at Nuremberg into English. In this version, Adolf Hitler and his lieutenants confessed to being pitiful and weak. “I grew into a discontented and neurotic child,” the führer said to rallying masses. “My lungs were bad. My mother spoilt me and secured my exemption from military service. Consider my triumphant path to power.”

The author of the words spoken in the satire was Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet who had a record of jeering at the fascists seeking power in Europe. In a particularly sick perversion of authorial intent, Thomas’s most famous poem, 1951’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” opens the 74-page manifesto written by one of the alleged murderers of 49 people at two New Zealand mosques on Friday.

The shooter’s document goes on to invoke fascist and white-separatist ideology as the rationale for the murder spree. Certain passages of meme-driven sarcasm appear aimed at amping up political divides and creating confusion. But quoting Thomas’s poetry is not like trollingly praising a black right-wing pundit or a popular and putatively apolitical videogamer, as the shooter did. The manifesto advocates direct terroristic action by likeminded racists, and Thomas’s refrain “Rage, rage against the dying of the light”—believed to have been written initially about the poet’s ailing father—may just have been straightforwardly repurposed to fit that violent goal.

[Read: Social media are a mass shooter’s best friend]

Two other poems are fully quoted in the manifesto. One is a doctored version of Rudyard Kipling’s “The Beginnings” that replaces the original’s refrain “When the English began to hate” with “When the Saxon began to hate.” The rest of the poem, originally written about the anti-German sentiment that took root in the U.K. during World War I, is untouched. In the context of the manifesto, the verses might as well be about online radicalization: “It was not preached to the crowd. / It was not taught by the state. / No man spoke it aloud / When the Saxon began to hate.”

The manifesto closes with “Invictus,” by the 19th-century English writer William Ernest Henley. With its avowal that “my head is bloody, but unbowed,” it’s among the most commonly cited poems ever, with famous invocations including Nelson Mandela while he was imprisoned for resisting South African apartheid and Timothy McVeigh before his execution for killing 168 people in the the Oklahoma City bombing. Henley wrote the poem in 1875 while recovering from surgery on his leg. It is a straightforward statement of resilience in the face of death, or, as Henley puts it, “the Horror of the shade”: “I thank whatever gods may be / For my unconquerable soul.”

These are not obscure poems, and the varying circumstances around their creation do not tightly align with the New Zealand terrorist’s ideology (though, it’s worth noting, Kipling’s legacy is bound up with racist imperialism). He chose them, plausibly, to undergird his broader message about taking the difficult but necessary action in the face of great odds. He could have turned anywhere in Western culture for other odes to lonely, steely bravery—among the most common story tropes there are—but it may be no coincidence he drew specifically from the dead white male literary canon.

Other mass murderers have invoked different art works to evoke the same sense of grandiose anti-heroism. James Holmes, who shot up an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater in 2012, found inspiration from the Joker of The Dark Knight. Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who massacred a Charleston church in 2015 quoted two movie characters in his manifesto. One was Edward Norton’s neo-Nazi in American History X: “I see all this stuff going on, and I don’t see anyone doing anything about it. And it pisses me off.” The other was the troubled teen vigilante of the 2011 manga adaptation Himizu: “Even if my life is worth less than a speck of dirt, I want to use it for the good of society.” The killer’s actions, it was widely noted at the time, betrayed these movie’s underlying critiques of violence and hate.

The language of messianic bravery can be adopted by anyone, of course, including those of noble intent. But there’s a particular nauseating pattern in it being repeatedly invoked by men who kill groups of defenseless people. The Dylan Thomas work actually most relevant to the New Zealand killer’s case is thus not the one quoted in the manifesto, but the Hitler mockery movie. The übermensch rhetoric that still poisons the world, Thomas suggested back then, is but the costume of pathetic men.

O’Rourke Mostly Gets a Pass for His Lack of Specifics

On March 16, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

MT. VERNON, Iowa—The first woman who asked a question wanted to know about ethanol. E10 or E15?

This is more than an academic question. The E number is the percentage of the corn-based fuel that can legally be mixed in with gasoline. More ethanol, which President Donald Trump said in October he wants to make the year-round standard, means more corn being used and so more money in the pockets of Iowa farmers, more jobs for Iowans at processing plants. But more ethanol also more federal subsidies to pump money in to cover the costs of making the biofuel, and more environmental risks from what would be released by corroding engines.

Beto O’Rourke’s full answer went on for a bit.

“How do we free ourselves from a commodity market over which we have no control? We do so by adding value to what we grow at the same time that we meet our energy needs, renewable standards that we have in this country and the crisis of climate change,” he said. “The farmers in Iowa are able to do that. We visited an ethanol facility today: 50 jobs in a community that wants to have high-wage, high-skill, high-investment industry in their home towns—drawing young people back or keeping them there in the first place. Owned not by some gigantic corporation in another place, owned cooperatively by the farmers that are growing the corn there in the first place. In other words, we’re addressing not just a fuel standard, not just environmental concerns, but we’re reviving rural America in the process. So let’s stand behind and with those farmers. Iowa is showing us the way.”

[Read: Beto wants to be Obama—but came off like Trump]

Not included: E10 or E15, or an alternate, or what any of the answers would entail.

That’s all right, said Mirt Bowers, a retired former vice president of patient services at a local hospital who asked the question.  “I’m not sure he answered,” she said. “I think his position is yes, we need to look at it. I’m not quite sure where he is firmly with the E15.”

Bowers said she is willing to give O’Rourke a pass. He’s from oil country, she said. He can’t take a clear position, because he has to be careful of the politics back home in Texas, she figured.

She said this as she was waiting in a line at the bar afterward, eager to take a photo with O’Rourke on her phone. Bowers said she would expect more out of other candidates—Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, for example, aren’t from oil country, so she’d want a clear answer.

Peter Beinart: Secular Democrats are the new normal

Earlier in the day, leaving an art gallery in Washington, Iowa, O’Rourke was asked about impeaching Donald Trump. He’d been in favor of it, a reporter pointed out. Was he still?

“To be clear, I didn’t say that. You asked me one time if I would vote, and I said yes. So I wasn’t out there calling for it, so I think the distinction’s important in this case,” O’Rourke said. “Beyond the shadow of a doubt that the president sought to collude with a foreign power against the United States to undermine our democracy. Beyond a shadow of a doubt the president sought to obstruct justice in the investigation into what happened into what happened in 2016.”

He said that he thinks Trump’s fate will be decided by the 2020 election, and that’s what he’s focused on as a presidential candidate, while staying out of the debate in Washington now that he’s no longer a congressman. Was he saying there isn’t time to pursue impeachment before the election, the reporter asked him, or was he saying that he isn’t in favor of impeachment at all?

[Read: The voters Democrats aren’t really fighting over]

“I’m not asking Congress to do one thing or the other,” he said. “You’re asking me, ‘Has the president committed impeachable offenses?’ Yes. Period.”

He turned, trying to get to the rental car and drive to the next event. Another reporter stopped him and read him a quotation from when he was running for Senate, long after he came around to opposing Obamacare when he was first running for Congress. Then, he said that a single payer, Medicare for All sort of program was the best way to ensure all Americans get the health care they need. Was he still for that?

“I think that’s one of the ways to ensure that we get to guaranteed high quality health care for every single American. I’m no longer sure that that’s the fastest way for us to get there,” O’Rourke said.

He said, as he’s been saying at every event, that he’s for good health care. He’s interested in a bill that Representative Jan Schakowsky of Illinois has that would keep employer-based insurance but reinvest in Medicare and have that as an option for whoever wants it. A public option, but not single payer.

Later in the day, at a podcast taping in Cedar Rapids, he was pressed on more. What about the criticism he’s faced for saying that he helps out raising his children, but that most of it is on his wife?

“We have a long way to go. I have got to do everything within my power to do my part. And there’s much more that we can do. Much of it will be guided by the women in my life and the women that I meet,” he said, later adding that on women’s issues overall, he’s glad to see a lot of women running in the primary with him, so there’s “a lot of work left to do, but all of those issues, important. And I’m grateful for a lot of the leadership that a lot of these women are providing right now.”

Pushed on specifics of reproductive rights by one of the people in the audience, he thanked the woman who asked the question for working for Planned Parenthood, condemned the moves of the Texas state legislature and the Trump administration to scale back rights, and reminded people that Roe v. Wade is in the balance depending on the Supreme Court appointments that are on the line in the next election.

“When I talk to people across the state of Texas who may not agree with me on every position,” O’Rourke said, “when I talk about the lives that we are losing, and the health care we are losing out on, I begin to find the common ground.”

Asked how he’d address gerrymandering as president, O’Rourke spoke about how bad the voter laws are in Texas and how he wants to address “systemic racism.” Then he invoked his success drawing people out in his own Senate race last year.

All the answers drew applause.

As he headed back into his car after the event with the woman who asked about ethanol on Friday afternoon, I asked him whether he thinks it’s unfair for people to be pressing him on specifics, two days into his race.

“I leave it up to them to decide. All I can do is answer the questions that are posed, introduce myself, describe what I think this country can do, and I’m trying to do that,” he said.

He got in the driver’s seat of the rental, buckled in. He’s driving himself between events, eating submarine sandwiches. He said he’s reading two books as he goes, the just released The Uninhabitable Earth, which describes how climate change will destroy the planet if concrete steps aren’t taken quickly, and Joseph Campbell’s classic The Power of Myth.  

There were no lines around the block, like there have been for Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Bernie Sanders. The crowds for O’Rourke could be measured by the dozens, not the hundreds, about the same number of voters who showed up for Colorado Senator Michael Bennet and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio when they came to Iowa a few weeks ago to tease runs of their own—but a clump of reporters and photographers tracking him that Bennet and de Blasio and most of the others in the race could only dream of.

Events look packed in part because they’ve been in small spaces—coffee shops, a small town art gallery. He doesn’t have the staff to fully plan the events that he’s doing, let alone build anything bigger.

But over his first 48 hours and with the schedule through the midwest that’s been released for the days ahead, O’Rourke is running with confidence in his savant understanding of political tactics in the time of Trump and social media celebrity, and as a sort of endurance test. No other candidate has done as many events on a full Iowa swing as he’s tried to squeeze in. He’s looking to replicate his senate campaign last year, put himself forward as a vessel for what he likes to call the “genius of our democracy”: pour your hopes and aspirations into him, and he will carry them forward with his spirit of positivity and the level of drive that had him schedule a 5k run on the morning of his third day in the race. Believe in him, because he believes in you, and together, believe in what more America can be.

Asked earlier Friday what he thought his challenge would be in this race, he said it was about impressing himself personally on enough voters to win.

“It’s a big country, and traveling to be with everyone,” he said. “It’s a function of geography and time. But I will work with everything I’ve got.”

One question that looms over his entry: how much money has he raised online, given how much of a juggernaut he proved to be in his Senate race, and the enthusiasm he’s thought to generate online. O’Rourke set that standard himself, writing in one of the emails that he sent to his list on Thursday, “our momentum right out of the gate will determine whether or not we are competitive.”

As pretty much all the other candidates have, he announced that he had raised money from all 50 states shortly after jumping in. But while most of the other candidates have released their fundraising totals for the first day or two—Sanders raised nearly $6 million online without specifically asking for a donation—O’Rourke has so far left his own total unspecified.

“I can’t right now,” he said, when a reporter asked him if he would release the number.

Well, he could, I pointed out to him.

“You’re right, I could,” he said. “Let me answer the question better: I choose not to.”

He has repeated over and over that he won’t knock his competition, that they’re all great, and the number of people running is a credit to the Democratic Party. But he thinks he’s better than all of them, I pointed out to him, since that’s inherent in jumping in late himself.

His explanation for why is rooted in the Senate race, and how he proved able to bring people together, increase turnout and become a sensation.

That may be, but along the way, he also lost. His campaign made him a celebrity and an inspiration to many people. It did not make him a senator.

“We lost by 2.6, but we also in some larger sense transformed politics for the better in Texas. You saw people win races that were thought before to be un-winnable,” he said. “In part our campaign, in part contributed to those successes and the successes you see down the road.”

Preparing for O’Rourke’s visit to that piano bar in Mt. Vernon, the owner’s son Joe Jennison looked through his catalog for a good song for the player piano up front to get an autograph on.

“Happy Days Are Here Again” seemed like the obvious choice. O’Rourke took the red and white box and a marker as he walked in and signed one word: Beto, scrawled in his loose script.

“I feel that he was sincere and genuine,” Jennison said after.

Asked if he heard anything that could help him pin down exactly what O’Rourke stood for or what he’d do as president, Jennison grimaced. “I don’t know how to answer that,” he said, but waved his hands to say no when asked if that didn’t matter. “Of course it matters,” he said.

There are 11 months to go, he said. He didn’t know who O’Rourke was before two days earlier, when an aide reached out and asked to book the bar for half an hour. Now he’s hoping he can get the rest of the candidates in, and he’s already thinking about what songs he’ll try to get them to autograph.  

But, Jennison said, “if the caucuses were tomorrow, he’d have my vote.”