For those of you out there who can’t get enough of mindless Islamophobic racism, I’ve got more of Josh Trevino’s Greatest Hits and Tweets served up by Beyond Compromise. These particular tweets mostly revolve around the Mavi Marmara massacre, though it should be said that Trevino’s views are beyond the pale in a number of other areas as well and should be publicly vetted.
Here are some of Josh’s more egregious tweets:
1. When I wake up the MV Rachel Corrie better be a nascent coral reef or overrun with armed Zionists
2. Flotilla participants complaining about being in IDF custody should be thankful still above water than beneath it.
3. They say what Israel did to the flotilla is unjust. I agree. Why are six ships still afloat?
4. Flotilla crowd hoped for violence on MV Rachel Corrie, but those hopes were crushed. Fell really flat, bulldozed as it were.
5. There is no meaningful difference between supporting flotilla and supporting extermination of Jews. One begets the other.
6. Why do I support Israel despite not being Jewish or Israeli? Because the people coming for it are coming for me next.
You can certainly argue that some of these tweets are simply puerile and in bad taste. But others go far beyond that. Likening the supposed disappointment that the attempt to break the siege did not end in violence, to the death of Rachel Corrie at the hand of an IDF bulldozer, takes us into a far more noxious realm in which not only taste, but basic human decency have been thrown to the winds.
To argue, for example, that those who support the Gaza flotilla also support the extermination of Jews goes far beyond rhetorical overkill and into the realm of paranoid delusion. It’s one thing to defend Israel’s response to the siege breakers and quite another to argue that they’re the second coming of the Holocaust. That goes beyond the Pale, I’m afraid.
Further, the argument that Islamists are “coming for Israel” is yet another base canard. But even more offensive is the notion that Islamists are coming for Trevino as well. It’s one thing to express oneself flamboyantly and hyperbollically. But quite another to cross over into arrant, offensive nonsense.
Before he became a paid flack for pro-Israel causes, he was simply a far-right Republican spear-thrower. As such, he advocated genocide in Iraq here:
It is indeed difficult to imagine now the methods that transformed the Philippines for us, and South Africa for the British, from bitter foe to steadfast friend being applied in Iraq. Would that they were.
At least 1 million Filipinos died in the war that “liberated” the Philippines from Spain and the rebellion that followed. The Boer War was a similar bit of mayhem. That’s what he advocated for Iraq in 2006 (as if the 1 million Iraqis we killed were not enough).
Ali Abunimah has offered the most comprehensive exploration of Trevino’s record. You’ll find even more to take offense at here, including the statement that Furkan Dogan, a Turkish-American citizen deserved to die as a “bad American.” It’s equally eye-opening, or perhaps moreso than what I’ve published here.
Guardian: do yourselves and us all a favor, drop Josh Trevino. In a sense, they already have. Abunimah received a message from the Guardian that Trevino had been demoted from a regular columnist and member of Guardian America’s editorial board to a freelancer publishing only in Comment is Free (which is akin to my own status there). In fact, Trevino had already published four CIF articles as a freelancer in the past. If they’d intended to announce with great fanfare that they offered him the same position as a freelancer he already had, it would be nonsensical. Or as Helen Lewis writes here:
It would be odd to press release “Person Who Has Written For Us Before is Still Writing”.
In effect, the Guardian did itself in by trumpeting Trevino’s appointment alongside Glenn Greenwald’s. They were supposed to complement each other. But the editors didn’t realize that while Greenwald was perhaps an intellectual and political firebrand, Trevino was a case of TNT waiting to explode. They really have no one but themselves to blame.
It seems virulent Islamophobic expressions have become rather tolerable, if not acceptable, in mainstream American discourse as Antisemitic ones were in the 19th century European discourse.
with some of the same consequences, including race riots (progroms) in Israel, the attempted lynching of four Palestinian youths by a mob, murder. These sorts of things went on in Eastern Europe and Russia. The bigoted speech becomes magically acceptable as it is increasingly uttered (and nobody calls the police or sues or files charges.)
I have discovered that bigotry begins with fantasies. Isn’t it, for example, some comfort to think (fantasize) that Islam really is “coming for” Trevino, after all ? It sure makes me feel better.
This is the new Guardian that attacks Julian Assange and supports humanitarian intervention in places like Syria.
There’s nothing wrong with helping the Syrian people as long as the west wasn’t to ask for handouts and resources from the Syrian people. This, so far, is a far-fetched idea in the sense that the west is doing almost nothing.
More to the point: Trevino is obviously some sad and pathetic character who supports ethnic cleansing and mass murder when done by zionist forces or the americans. In other words, a morally reprehensible idiot.
I guess Trevino wasn’t paying attention just four years ago when our two little boats, LIBERTY and FREE GAZA, broke Israel’s blockade by becoming the first international boats to reach the port of Gaza in over 41 years. Our book “Freedom Sailors” reads like the adventure story it is. Zionists are already bombarding Amazon.com with accusations of anti-semitism, though there is none in our book. They claim to have read it, but it’s not available till tomorrow. Clearly these people have been recruited by Stand With Us since they all confuse our Freedom Sailors with the flotilla, which came two years later.
Would “Stand With Us” shamelessly complain without ever reading the book? I am shocked.
I’ll feature it in my Amazon store & you can buy it by clicking on the store in the sidebar & order it there!
Thanks Richard.
Are you serious?
Dead serious.