Daniel Pipes writes on Twitter:
#Trump again damages anti-#Islamist efforts, now by letting a silent woman in #hijab be expelled from his rally: https://t.co/lQywC2pvrE
— Daniel Pipes (@DanielPipes) January 9, 2016
But see this article:
After Hamid and three others, all wearing stars reminiscent of those worn by Jews during the Holocaust, were escorted out by police and Trump campaign officials, Trump commented on the disturbance.
Hamid joined a group of people — some friends, others strangers — who wanted to silently protest Trump’s proposals, which are viewed by some as anti-Muslim.
Several of those other people attended Trump’s rally in Aiken, South Carolina, last month, including Jibril Hough.
Unlike Hamid, Hough did not stay silent, shouting “Islam is not the problem” as Trump spoke about radical Islamic extemism.
So it sounds like: after one guy in a group wearing these yellow stars (with “Muslim” written on them instead of “Jude”) had caused a ruckus, all the star-wearers got escorted out?
Given the common tactic of having multiple hecklers do sequential interruptions— where one person causes a ruckus, then another, then another, then another, in order to cause maximum disruption and wasted time for the attendees of private events — is it unreasonable to eject the heckler and their accomplices en masse when they’ve conveniently labeled themselves? I don’t think so.
There’s also the issue of the grotesque and anti-Semitic yellow stars. There’s no equivalence at all between the way Muslims are treated in the United States, or the way they are proposed to be treated by Trump, and the way Jews were treated in the Third Reich. To say there is involves a massive denial of reality. It minimizes the actual Holocaust by faking the reality of what Jews experienced. Holocaust denialism is anti-Semitic. It’s slightly trickier to see here, perhaps, because the hecklers weren’t actually denying the Holocaust outright. Instead, they were super whitewashing it, while also partially relying on its accepted badness for the strength of their message. But when you whitewash the Holocaust to the extent these guys did, that starts to come pretty close to outright denial.
Also, rather than damaging anti-Islamist efforts, I think Trump is helping them. For years the left has gotten away with weaponizing designated victim groups in order to advance their agenda. Trump is basically immune to that tactic. People look at his unfazed response to stuff like this and feel less emotionally blackmailed themselves. It’s a good thing.
So why is Pipes, who knows a lot about the problem of Islamism, trashing Trump and buying into/amplifying the media narrative? He should be more careful about sanctioning that kind of stuff. It’s way more harmful to the cause of fighting Islamism than anything Trump’s accused of doing.
Update:
Breitbart points out that Hamid is an anti-Israel activist who says things like:
On September 3, 2014, she commented on the Jewish state: “Israel does not want peace, they want land and they want to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from that land they have lived on for generations.”
So basically she’s a monstrous anti-Semite playing the part of a poor innocent Muslim victimized by the nascent Trump-reich. Utterly predictable outcome.