I’m an atheist. It doesn’t prevent me from speculating what might be appropriate words to speak in conveying my sadness at the loss experienced by a Christian. If a neighbor’s church burned I wouldn’t be so callous to say “Too bad about all the furniture that was aflame, huh?” Not sharing their belief system hasn’t robbed me of the empathy it takes to express sorrow for their loss.
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But that is sorrow for their loss and the world’s loss. Good grief. So what did you say that honored their faith? I am dying to know.
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Interested in what other Muslim Americans think of Representative Omar’s statements and actions. I am inclined to concur with Stevie Dee111 statements. I hope she can mellow out now and perform the duties for her constituents. However she is now raising large sums of money from her claimed persecution.
Not to be cynical but was this planned out from the beginning? We will have to see how this pans out obviously,
I have viewed Omar as a fool, young and callow, and lacking in understanding of history. Were I to view her as a sympathizer of terrorists (as FOX does) what she said in context, as you point out, actually looks like a wink and a nod. Omar says: we tried hard to fit in, we were discriminated against anyway, fitting in does not work. 9/11 “some people did something” to fight back, we are discriminated against, and we should WINK, WINK, fight back too.
I think the right wing noise machine is wrong, and Trump is just using her as a convenient foil, but there is enough there to make it stick, given her earlier comments.
I think the bigger point is that we ought to be supporting her more vigorously.
If she said, “Good Morning!”, the Right would promptly chastise her for having excluded nighttime from her comments, which is clearly un-American as the Star Spangled Banner includes the line “…gave proof through the night/that our flag was still there”
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I fucking agree.
And anyone who thinks that Europeans are overly concerned with how christian someone’s sympathy is is way off base - they aren’t. That’s not why Parisians love Notre Dame - Jesus ain’t the reason. And neither is his mother.
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And I hate to break it to you, but as an Atheist, and Atheist who has been to Notre Dame, it recognize its spiritual meaning and religious centrality to Catholicism. If Trump said in response to the recent wave of Black Church Burning in the South, that “it is sad to see such beautiful old churches burned down” we would think it odd sounded.
Again, I am not upset by her tweet on Notre Dame, but were I her, I would have recognized the spiritual and religious impact, given the issues she has had with prior statements.
Unfortunately, Trump and the republicans have so degraded our civic discourse that how politicians are supposed to talk about tragic events seems to have been lost.
Really… I guess Obama really is an insensitive secret Muslim, then…
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Hallelujah, I’m EXCLUDED!
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Great Idea, double down on Omar as the face of the democratic party. Put her statements into Facebook ads, bill boards, run on what she says. Beat Trump to the punch. Have her campaign in Michigan (outside of Dearborn), PA, WI,IA.
How much is Putin paying you for this wisdom?
"In reality, the congresswoman was trying to distinguish terrorists from all Muslims. "
And I can think of only a very few things more infuriating to the white Christian nationalist holy warriors of the GOP than statements attempting to undo all their hard work demonizing all Muslims as inferior terrorist savages.
As to their most recent freakout over Omar saying “architecture or art”, it is LITERALLY them manufacturing outrage over NOTHING because they simply CANNOT allow a Muslim woman to commiserate, show compassion, sympathy, empathy and acceptance towards Christianity in general. It is 100% antithetical to their beliefs, totally fucks up their projection of their own bigotry onto all Muslims, and absolutely NOTHING she said would have escaped their manufactured outrage machine. Even her failure to say ANYTHING would have popped up on Twitter as a means of attacking her.
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Obviously much of the controversy is fed because Omar is a current office holder, and a Muslim. The Dem caucus can deal with people bitching about Obama, or anyone else for that matter, they’re not current officeholders. No one is going to demand Pelosi or Schumer deplore what Obama says about an issue like this. But Omar does expose her caucus to criticism, and put her fellow Dems in the position of having to do or say something in response, or appear complicit in her alleged insensitivities.
No doubt it is nigh near impossible to talk often, about a broad range of issues, without the Right pouncing on something regardless how carefully you craft your words. But that is no excuse to skip the step of carefully crafting them in the first place.
Interesting how all muslims are bad except this who killed a reporter in cold blood and were actually responsible for 9/11.
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I hesitate to give this one more molecule of oxygen, but…
That we are talking about this at all is complete bullshit. If there is one person in this country who is genuinely outraged by what she said, as opposed to just posturing, I’ll eat my hat. (I’ll have to buy one first.)
Frankly, we do the same thing with Trump, except that he knows very well, and is counting on, that we will wail and gnash our teeth. It delights his base and keeps them supporting him.
The entire outrage dynamic is stupid, corrosive to our discourse, and Trump and his aggrieved minions are better at it than we are.
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I don’t gnash. They’re mostly crowns and caps now, and repairing a chip or crack is expensive and a pain in the ass.
One would think so… Unless Obama’s tweet is insensitive since it uses the word “treasure”, which implies money, which has historic antisemitic connections, and this is a Catholic church, so he’s managing to insult two religions at once…
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All I can think of is the Catalun guilde we had in Barcelona who when I remarked that the Gaudi could make me want to question my atheism said: O don’t do that!
Europeans see the art and the treasure and not the devotion because for the most part they are not devoted anymore at all.
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So even when we aren’t being offensive YOU still get to set the boundaries of what the rest of us must and must not say because of how YOU think we all should react. Yea, that makes sense. I got the feeling that just like for republicans NOTHING Omar says will ever be up to your standards for some reason…
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I can vouch for that. Even the heavily religious areas like Poland, most of the younger generations rarely attend Mass or that, typically only on the big Holidays like Easter and Christmas, if that.
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