Another day, another unhinged racist screed from Republicans in Congress that results in virtually no mainstream media coverage because the target is a Muslim-American.
Fine’s latest rant—in concert with the killing of Minnesota progressives last month—appears to have been a bridge too far, even for the normally silent and cynical Democratic leadership.
Tuesday night, in response to a post on X/Twitter from Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) that echoed the International Criminal Court’s designation of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a war criminal, Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) posted on X/Twitter. “I’m sure it is difficult to see us welcome the killer of so many of your fellow Muslim terrorists,” he wrote. “The only shame is that you serve in Congress.”
The statement follows a long pattern of targeted racist harassment and incitement from Reps. Fine and Nancy Mace (R-SC). And, just like all previous racist attacks, it did not merit coverage in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NBC, ABC, or CBS network news, or on-air coverage at CNN. The only coverage Fine’s bigoted rant solicited were short write-ups in Politico, Reuters, and CNN.com, and NBC News web only, and the only substantive coverage was from MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, who did an 8 minute, 41 second segment detailing Fine’s long history of incitement.
Adding urgency to the violent rhetoric is the fact that Omar was among the Minnesota officials who appeared on target lists compiled by accused murderer Vance Boelter, who allegedly assassinated Democrats in a shooting spree last month.
Unlike Fine’s previous racist screeds, this one at least resulted in condemnation from Democratic leadership in the House. Previous racist social media posts merited no such response. But Fine’s latest rant—in concert with the killing of Minnesota progressives last month—appears to have been a bridge too far, even for the normally silent and cynical Democratic leadership.
In the past, Fine has called Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) “a terrorist” who “shouldn’t be American.” (Tlaib was born in Detroit, Michigan). He said Tlaib and Omar “might consider leaving before I get [to Congress]. #BombsAway.” He has advocated running over and killing pro-Palestine protesters, called Palestinians “animals,” referred to Muslims as “rapists,” and openly cheered starving civilians in Gaza. In May, Fine attacked Tlaib on X/Twitter, writing in response to her condemnation of Israel’s starvation campaign in Gaza, “Tell your fellow Muslim terrorists to release the hostages and surrender. Until then, #StarveAway.” In June, Fine’s colleague Mace told the PBD Podcast she wanted to “send Ilhan Omar Back To Somalia,” in response to Omar’s criticisms of Trump’s immigration crackdowns. She later doubled down on X/Twitter: “Omar clearly has more loyalty to the corrupt hellhole she came from than to the country she was elected to serve.”
None of these attacks merited any mainstream media coverage—much less any sustained outrage or condemnation. The only reason the latest round of incitement got a handful of blurbs in Politico and CNN.com and (belatedly) a segment on MSNBC is likely because Democrats finally condemned them. And that’s all. Crickets from the New York Times, Washington Post network news, and CNN.
This raises the question: What would Fine or Mace have to say to justify actual media outrage? Actual sustained coverage? These attacks are not subtle or reliant on dog whistles. They’re out in the open, proudly hateful, and an invitation for their proudly bigoted social media followers to double down.
Contrast this media silence after months of sustained racist incitement against Reps. Omar and Tlaib with the week-long media meltdown last September when Tlaib suggested that Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel filed charges against pro-Palestinian activists at the University of Michigan because she was potentially biased against pro-Palestine protesters. “We’ve [protested for] climate, the immigrant rights movement, for Black lives, and even around issues of injustice among water shutoffs,” Tlaib told the Detroit Metro Times. “But it seems that the attorney general decided if the issue was Palestine, she was going to treat it differently, and that alone speaks volumes about possible biases within the agency she runs.”
“Antisemitism” scandals in our media are almost never about combating the very real dangers of antisemitism. They’re about disciplining critics of Israel.
This comment turned out to be entirely correct. The Nessel-led prosecution arrested seven pro-Palestine protesters in a pre-dawn raid in April and the charges were later dropped after Nessel was pressured to recuse herself for anti-Palestinian bias. But at the time, despite the interviewer himself defending Tlaib, the congresswoman’s remarks solicited a full-blown “antisemitism” scandal meriting coverage in USA Today, Newsweek, Fox News and The Free Press, and culminating in a smear campaign by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, which outright asserted Tlaib was an anti-Jewish bigot. This was is addition to the countless articles and segments in the New York Times, Washington Post, Politico, Axios, CNN, MSNBC, NBC News, CBS News, and ABC News in late 2023 lamenting Tlaib’s alleged “antisemitism” because she defended the term “from the River to the Sea” as a call for equality and freedom in Palestine.
Tapper, who hosts two influential cable news shows—his daily weekday show The Lead, and the Sunday morning agenda-setting news program State of the Union—is the most nakedly hypocritical commentator in all of media. He effectively manufactured the “antisemitism” scandal targeting Tlaib last September out of whole cloth, outright lying about her in an interview with Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. “Congresswoman Tlaib is suggesting,” Tapper somberly said on air, “that [AG Nessel] shouldn’t be prosecuting these individuals that Nessel says broke the law and that she’s only doing it because she’s Jewish”—which is not at all what Tlaib said. A smear neither Bash nor Tapper ever apologized for or retracted, only opaquely saying they “misspoke” in a throwaway line days later.
Since this shameful, false smear of Tlaib, there’s been a half-dozen racist attacks on Tlaib and her Muslim colleague in Congress by Fine and others, and has Tapper done a single segment on it? He has not. He did, however, find time last night to platform the head of pro-Israel pressure group ADL Jonathan Greenblatt so he could (again) defend Musk’s neo-Nazi gesture from Trump’s inauguration and accuse the largest union in the country, the National Education Association, of “antisemitism” for cutting ties with the ADL over its promotion of anti-Palestinian racism and Israeli foreign policy. Tapper also conspicuously failed to ask Greenblatt about a recent high profile rebuke of Greenblatt by Yehuda Cohen, father of Israeli captive Nimrod Cohen, who accused Greenblatt of fabricating a story about his family to promote “cheap patriotism” and “endless war in Gaza.”
Defending the expression “from the River to the Sea” and noting allegations—entirely correct, it turns out—of anti-Palestinian bias from a state prosecutor results in weeks-long media scandal, meltdowns, cable news mentions, pundit commentary, and congressional censures. Yet out-in-the-open anti-Muslim bigtory and calls for violence against sitting members of Congress are barely mentioned at all. The double standard—which, as Zeteo’s Prem Thakker notes, isn’t really a double standard since only one side is actually being bigoted—could not be more obvious. The question is, why?
The reason is that “antisemitism” scandals in our media are almost never about combating the very real dangers of antisemitism. They’re about disciplining critics of Israel. They’re about using the language of liberalism against liberalism, protecting US and Israeli regional hegemony by attacking anyone undermining its ideological underpinnings. Meanwhile, actual racism, actual incitement, and actual defamation of Muslim-Americans solicits a yawn because it poses no challenge to US and Israeli national security interests and, in key ways, assists them by stoking the anti-Muslim racism essential for its maintenance. It’s an inconsistency that has always been present, but with the latest crop of cartoonishly racist MAGA trolls in Congress, the glaring double standard has grown wider and more obvious. The question is whether anyone in mainstream media, beyond a one-off segment on MSNBC, will note it, much less gin up a scandal over it.
This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Adam Johnson.