Trump’s Wink Wink to ‘Second Amendment People’
nytimes.com
Excerpt:
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabingot assassinated.
His right-wing opponents just kept delegitimizing him as a “traitor” and “aNazi” for wanting to make peace with the Palestinians and give back part ofthe Land of Israel. Of course, all is fair in politics, right? And they had Godon their side, right? They weren’t actually telling anyone to assassinateRabin. That would be horrible.
But there are always people down the line who don’t hear the caveats. Theyjust hear the big message: The man is illegitimate, the man is a threat to thenation, the man is the equivalent of a Nazi war criminal. Well, you knowwhat we do with people like that, don’t you? We kill them.
And that’s what the Jewish extremist Yigal Amir did to Rabin. Why not? Hethought he had permission from a whole segment of Israel’s political class.
In September, I wrote a column warning that Donald Trump’s languagetoward immigrants could end up inciting just this kind of violence. I neverin my wildest dreams, though, thought he’d actually — in his usual coy,twisted way — suggest that Hillary Clinton was so intent on taking away theSecond Amendment right to bear arms that maybe Second Amendmententhusiasts could do something to stop her. Exactly what? Oh, Trump leftthat hanging.
“Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish, the Second Amendment,”Trump said at a rally in Wilmington, N.C., on Tuesday. “By the way, and ifshe gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the SecondAmendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.” |
