Risks from Trump’s Reckless Invective
Donald Trump’s invective – suggesting a “Second Amendment” remedy to Hillary
Clinton’s gun control or calling President Obama the ISIS “founder” – may be how
he intends to win but his words carry real danger, says ex-CIA analyst Paul R.
Pillar.
By Paul R. Pillar
One of the more pertinent observations about Donald Trump’s comment this week on
what gun owners could do about a Hillary Clinton presidency comes from columnist
Thomas Friedman, who recalls the assassination in Israel 21 years ago of prime
minister Yitzhak Rabin. The assassination was preceded by a stream of hateful
invective with violent overtones directed by elements on the Israeli right
against Rabin — for his having taken a step, in the form of the Oslo accords,
toward making peace with the Palestinians.
The invective was condoned rather than condemned by prominent political leaders
on the right, including current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The
inflammatory rhetoric and its widespread toleration helped to convince the
assassin that his lethal act would be not only widely accepted but even
legitimate. This whole tragic and abominable story is told in detail in Dan
Ephron’s gripping book Killing a King, which I reviewed for The National
Interest.
The process that took place then in Israel and that Trump’s remark about the
Second Amendment increases the risk of taking place in the United States is
related to one of his slightly earlier comments: the one about how if he loses
in November it will be because the election was “rigged.”
The implied consequences in this instance may be somewhat different from those
associated with the comment about guns but the underlying dynamic is basically
the same: the inculcating in large parts of the population of the idea that
other parts of the population or other leaders are less than legitimate. This in
turn bestows a sense of legitimacy on extra-constitutional or even violent
actions directed against the despised leaders or sub-populations.
Assassination of a leader is one of the most shocking forms that such action can
take. In Israel it took that form with the murder of Rabin. Here in the United
States we can hope that the Secret Service is on the case and can prevent a
comparable crime.
Violence not against an individual leader but instead against ordinary members
of a sub-population is another form such invective-stimulated action can take.
Here the Trump rhetoric to worry about is his stream of comments about Muslims
and Mexicans. And once again Israel provides an example of the sorts of things
that can happen. With even leaders such as the Israeli minister of justice
dispensing rhetoric bound to intensify hatred of Palestinian Arabs, the
unsurprising result is anti-Arab violence, both official and unofficial, that is
so routine and so broadly tolerated that the great majority of it doesn’t even
make the news.
Mostly it is the stuff of specialized reporting by human rights organizations.
It usually is only when an incident happens to be captured on video that the
rest of us view directly the consequences of an entire subjugated population
being viewed as illegitimate — as even having less of a right to live than those
in the dominant population.
Israel is a disturbing demonstration of how far violent intolerance involving
ethnic and religious prejudice can go. Americans should be vigilant regarding
any signs of anything like this happening in the United States.
The phenomenon of antagonistic attitudes held by the many lending legitimacy to
extreme actions committed by the few can be found elsewhere. It is a factor in
anti-U.S. international terrorism. The vast majority of people having anti-U.S.
views, even strong ones, do not become terrorists. But they constitute a
population from which terrorists emerge.
More to the present point, they provide attitudinal support, wittingly or not,
to anti-U.S. terrorists and help to convince the latter that they are acting
nobly on behalf of a cause much larger than themselves. All this is why it is a
mistake to focus narrowly on those who have already crossed the line into
terrorism. It is just as important a part of counterterrorism to pay attention
to the attitudes of the larger populations that form the terrorists’
constituency, and to whatever policies and actions of the United States affect
those attitudes.
Paul R. Pillar, in his 28 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, rose to be
one of the agency’s top analysts. He is author most recently of Why America
Misunderstands the World. (This article first appeared as a blog post at The
National Interest’s Web site. Reprinted with author’s permission.)