"A New Escalation"

“A New Escalation”

Four days ago, the demented, depraved, and debased fascist maniac atop the US government, the J6 putsch leader Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump, told reporters that “jihadists are being elected all over the place…We have this whether it’s communism, jihadism,” Trump added. As supposed evidence for this wild claim, Herr Donald mentioned Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the progressive physician who won Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary last week.

Trump slowly hissed Dr. El-Sayed’s full name, Abduulrahhman Muhammad El-Sayed, just like he used to say Obama’s full name, Barack Hussein Obama, in a disgusting racist effort to convey evil and scary Otherness. CNN reports:

‘The president [try the wannabe fascist dictator-for-life] has frequently cast Democrats and democratic socialists [um, social democratish progressive Dems] as communists, looking to portray the party as increasingly extreme headed into November — although portrayals of even the party’s most liberal candidates as communists are far from reality…But calling them “jihadists” is a new escalation, which Trump acknowledged in his remarks Monday, recounting that a “friend of mine called up,” and told him, “’You know, really, you should use the word jihadist because that’s what’s happening.’” The president’s escalating rhetoric comes amid broad lines of attack from others in the GOP seeking to pain Muslim candidates as anti-American.’

It gets worse, like it always does with the tangerine tinted Malignant One. As CNN further reports:

‘On Monday, Trump posted on Truth Social an image of El-Sayed with Sen. Elizabeth Warren in a Native American headdress, with the caption, “Pocahontas and ‘Abdul’ want to take your stuff, and Crash the Economy!!!” And over the weekend, Trump shared an image of himself and first lady Melania Trump alongside a photo of El-Sayed and his wife, Sarah Jukaku, who wears a hijab. The caption read: “Two very different America’s.”’

Mein Trumpf and his estranged wife/De. El-Sayed and his wife

What, pray tell, is a jihadist? Google AI gives this useful definition: ‘A jihadist is a person who follows a militant, radical political ideology that uses violent armed struggle, or ‘lesser jihad,’ to create states ruled by strict religious law.”

I’m no fan of the Democratic Party or the notion that fascism can be defeated by the bourgeois US electoral process (feel free to call me a communist), but the “jihadist” smear has nothing to do with Dr. El-Sayed. The new Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan is a doctor who has spent his life ministering to patients, managing Detroit’s public health department, and advocating for universal access to health care. In the choice between “the bullet and the ballot” (to use Malcolm X’s phrase), Dr. El-Sayed has clearly selected the latter. He has never advocated religious law or violence. It is xenophobic and racist —-two key components of the violent fascist ideology that holds power atop the US executive branch — to suggest that he has.

Which brings me to an interesting reflection from the liberal commentator John Casey this morning:

‘If we’re going to use the word “jihadist” loosely, as a shorthand for someone who endangers lives in pursuit of an ideological project, it’s worth asking who actually fits that description right now? …the answer is obvious…On the same day Trump was hissing the slur, he was also signing an executive order that cuts the list of universally recommended childhood vaccines nearly in half. The American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association said the move puts children’s health at risk..In other words, Trump is an accomplice in killing children — that’s a cold, hard analysis that, in my estimation, will come to fruition in the years ahead……Dr. Abdul El-Sayed spent his career trying to keep people alive. It takes real audacity for the man attacking him to reach for the ugliest word he can find, on the very day his own administration was making decisions that public health experts say will put children’s lives at greater risk. If anyone in that Oval Office yesterday deserves scrutiny for policies that endanger American lives, it isn’t the doctor running for Senate.’

That’s very well said, but Casey’s reflection leaves something out: the eugenicist, anti-scientific, Social Darwinian, and ableist fascism that informs the war on modern vaccination Trump has allowed the pandemo-fascist lunatic Robert Kennedy, Jr. to wage as head of the US Department of Health and Human Services.

Killing children and others in service to a radical political ideology? That would properly describe the mass murderer Donald “Immigrants are Poisoning Our Blood” Trump, the mad boat-striking bomber of Iranian schoolgirls. The massive cuts he let his Tech-Reich trillionaire sponsor, Elon Musk make to USAID have resulted in more than 700,000 preventable deaths globally, mainly among children in sub-Saharan Africa, thanks to the interruption of treatment systems and medical supply chains. ms.

The Afrikaner neo-Nazi Musk is an openly fascist “remigration” champion and “empathy” opponent who delights in the mass death of nonwhite children.

No group has more consistently supported the mass-murderous Muslim- and Marxism-hating MAGA agenda than the nation’s wild-eyed RepubliTrumpist evangelicals, whose Christian fascist jihadism rivals the Sunni Muslim jihadism of al Qaeda. These Christian fascist zealots are well represented in the White House Faith Office, from which Trump’s personal lawyer and fascist attorney general Todd Blanche recently promised to impose nationwide female enslaving forced motherhood. A self-described Christian white nationalist Crusader and bloodthirsty war crime enthusiast, Pete Hegseth, currently heads the Pentagon, panting like a hungry dog for his orange-brushed Dear Leader to order martial law. Hegsdeath’s evangelical fascist pastor Doug Wilson advocates the repeal of women’s right to vote and believes that the era of Black chattel slavery marked the highwater mark in the history of American race relations.