Ilhan Omar on terrorism last year: America should be more fearful of white men

There’s a truncated version of this clip going around but you’re better off with the fuller version posted by the Free Beacon, as there’s a dispute raging over what Omar’s intent was when she said, “I would say our country should be more fearful of white men across our country because they are actually causing most of the deaths within this country.”

“It’s almost like the entire point of this statement was to make conservative men experience the stereotyping that Muslim people have to deal with. And it worked!” sneered Vox-er Dylan Matthews at the righties outraged by Omar’s response. He thinks she was being sarcastic, asking the white majority hypothetically how they’d feel if they were viewed as suspiciously as Muslim men are. I took her as somewhat more serious than that: If we’re going to police Muslim men more closely because of jihadist violence, she’s saying, it makes sense that we should police white men more closely too because of white nationalist violence, which is in fact a growing problem. She’s not floating the idea because it’s inherently absurd, to highlight the absurdity of profiling Muslims. She’s complaining about a double standard in application. If we truly want to reduce violence, we should focus on the main perpetrators in the United States, white men. Certainly we should fear them just as much as, if not more than, Muslims.

She’s saying this, mind you, in response to a question specifically about jihadism, as a refugee from a country tormented by jihadists, as the western world ruminates what to do about the thousands of Muslim men who chose to trade comparatively comfortable lives for jihad in Syria and now want to return home. The takeaway is at least as much that she’s dismissing the threat from Islamism internationally as being somehow special or unique as that she’s stereotyping white men. Note, in fact, how she steers back to U.S. foreign policy as a way to keep Americans safe in the second part of her answer, an allusion to “blowback.” Her top priority in this exchange, I think, wasn’t to demagogue whites but to scoff at the risk posed by jihadism. White nationalists are at least as bad, she’s saying, and to the extent they aren’t it’s America’s own fault for antagonizing people. (And for allying itself with Israel, of course.)

I think there’s a deeper point too in what she says about white men, something of a piece with the Squad’s general political and social outlook. “We’re not the Other anymore,” she and the others mean to say to Trump and his white, right-wing base. “At least no more than you are.” And that’s the heart of the Trump/Squad war, isn’t it? Who defines the nation in 2019 — the shrinking, aging, reactionary white majority or the growing, younger, progressive nonwhite minority? In a country where the former dominate, one might expect the balance of suspicion for evils like terrorism to fall on nonwhites. In a country where the latter are building influence, whites should expect to find themselves under suspicion as well. Anxiety about that struggle for cultural dominance helps explain why the right has veered away from conservatism and towards nationalism and why Trump has cannily sought to elevate four young minority women progressives as his prime enemies. Of the four, Omar is the one most willing to frankly articulate the subtext of the deeper dispute with him, as she does here. She’s one of his greatest political assets — at least until the white majority becomes the white minority.