Michael Lumish: Linda Sarsour and the Rejection of Martin Luther King, Jr.
On a recent MSNBC news discussion show, left-wing anti-Zionist activist Linda Sarsour claimed:
Dr. Martin Luther King warned us about people like Chuck Schumer. He said it wasn’t the Ku Klux Klan and white citizen counselors who were the obstacles towards justice. It was people calling for “civility” and people that were telling us when to protest and at what time and how to protest.
I find it fascinating that “progressives” like Linda Sarsour have the chutzpah to evoke Martin Luther King, Jr., when the very last thing that King stood for was Sarsour’s brand of ideological racism.
The primary admonition of Dr. King was to judge people according to their individual character, rather than immutable characteristics like ethnicity. This was the fundamental message of his “I Have a Dream” speech on the National Mall on August 28, 1963. How someone who represents the American left could not understand this requires explanation.
Anti-racism was the essential message of the civil rights movement in the United States following World War II. Yet Sarsour insists, “If you’re in a movement and you’re not following a woman of color, you’re in the wrong movement.”
This notion contradicts the teachings of King and of the entire movement for social justice — from abolitionism to Abbie Hoffman — because it is racist on its face. What Sarsour is saying, in no uncertain terms, is that the quality of one’s character is directly determined by one’s ethnicity and gender.
This is turning the ideals of the civil rights movement inside out and backwards.
Washington Post Column Says USA Is Reenacting The Holocaust — Minus The Genocide
Over and over again, Beorn hedges his argument by admitting “we are not dealing with a genocidal regime in the United States.” Given that genocide was the chief legacy of Nazi Germany, it is unclear where any parallels are obvious to the Trump administration’s immigration policy.Impact of the Suez crisis on the Jews of Egypt
Nevertheless, Beorn persists in his comparisons.
“Politically, the president has certainly taken actions which are in many ways parallel to those of the early Nazi movement,” he wrote.
“Even his management style has similarities to Hitler. Like Trump, Hitler was reluctant to surrender too much authority to one subordinate, and so his Cabinet (which he never called) was a den of backbiting and maneuvering underlings seeking the support of Hitler, who was the only one who decided policy. There are similarities with Trump, even if he has not achieved this level of dominance,” the column explained.
Don’t worry, however, Beorn thinks he’s being reasonable. After all, according to him, “Trump is not hitler” because “Hitler was arguably a far more astute politician.”
The Suez Crisis, aside from producing an understandable rise in support for President Gamal Abdel Nasser and his regime, had devastating effects for persons living within Egypt who had become ‘egyptianized’ i.e. those who were not Egyptian citizens; or those whose ancestry was not wholly Egyptian, but had attained Egyptian citizenship through various legal statutes.
These people were collectively known as the mutamassirun, and, in the immediate post-colonial period in Egypt (from 1922 onwards) they owned a large share of capital and operated a large number of businesses in Egypt. They were also acknowledged to have made significant contributions to Egyptian cultural, religious and linguistic diversity in the past.
Although measures to expel members of the mutamassirun were already underway before the Suez Crisis came to a head, the Crisis is widely seen as giving Nasser the necessary impetus and legitimacy to proceed to make it extremely difficult for ‘egyptianized’ persons to remain in Egypt. It was a natural step for Nasser to seek to blame the Suez Crisis on the mutamassirun population.
After all, Nasser had risen to power on an avowedly pan-Arab, anti-colonial message. As Britain had directly ruled Egypt from the late nineteenth century until 1922, and France had previously invaded under Napoleon in 1798, the mutamassirun were easy targets for blame post-Crisis Egypt, as many were of British or French nationality or extraction. There was also a sizeable population of Jews living in Egypt around the turn of the twentieth century.