Have you ever heard of Howard Lutnick? You most likely will soon.
Howard W. Lutnick is the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, the venerable financial services firm. He was one of the lesser-noted speakers at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday — you know, the one where, if you believe MSNBC, jackbooted Trump supporters were goose-stepping around and shouting “Sieg heil!” in terrifying unison when a Charlie Chaplin-mustachioed Trump appeared and gave them the straight-arm salute.
While all that is lurid fantasy and the left’s latest shameless smear of the Bad Orange Man, Lutnick really did appear at the rally, and some leftists are using something he said there to try to stir up their cadres to hate Trump even more than they did already (as if that were possible).
The recasting of the mild-mannered Lutnick as a dangerous right-wing extremist comes to us courtesy of the New Republic, a publication that many people don’t realize still exists, but which is still churning out primo Trump-hate content for its tiny cadre of remaining readers.
The New Republic’s front page on Monday featured article after article designed to send a thrill of horror down the spine of the most fanatical Trump-hater: leftists can indulge in a veritable orgy of outrage toward and contempt for the Emmanuel Goldstein of our age with articles including, “Trump’s Ugly Racist Rally Finally Unmasks His Real Closing Argument”; “It’s Not Just Trump We Have to Fear Anymore”; “Trump’s Promise to Young Men: I Am Your Retribution Against Women”; “Trump Spirals After Michelle Obama Destroys Him in Blistering Speech”; and for those who are starting to worry about how this election seems to be going, a grim warning: “If You’re Being Fatalistic or Panicking, You Are Helping Donald Trump.”
Amid all this risible nonsense and hysterical fear-mongering, we get a particularly grim story: “Top Trump Aide Makes Terrifying Threat at Madison Square Garden Rally.” This is where Howard W. Lutnick comes in. “At Donald Trump’s rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden Sunday,” writes the New Republic’s Hafiz Rashid, “one speaker took a bigoted swipe at Muslims—and he holds an important position in the Trump campaign.”
Oh, heavens to betsy, a “bigoted swipe.” And at Muslims, no less — one of the left’s cherished victim groups. What did the dastardly Lutnick say? Did he call for mass deportations? Internment camps? A new “Muslim ban,” a fictional bogey that the left used to great effect to bedevil Trump’s first term?
None of the above. Lutnick, Rashid writes indignantly, is part of Trump’s transition team, and he “told the crowd why they should vote for the former president and, raising a fist, invoked Islamophobia. ‘So, the first thing: We must elect Donald J. Trump president because we must crush jihad,’ Lutnick shouted to cheers.”
“Crush jihad”? That’s it? That’s the terrifying threat to Muslims? If you’re of a certain age, you’ll remember that in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, we were told repeatedly that the vast majority of Muslims rejected terrorism, and that the terrorists were only a “tiny minority of extremists.” So what happened to that?
For Rashid, the problem is that Lutnick didn’t say “crush terrorism,” he said “crush jihad.” Rashid asserts that “Lutnick’s use of the word ‘jihad’ in this context is an allusion to bigoted views about Islam. The term is widely mistranslated as 'holy war,' when the literal Arabic translation is ‘to strive’ or ‘to struggle.’ In a religious context, the word is used to describe a person’s internal or external struggle to do good deeds.”
Yeah, no. Cantor Fitzgerald had offices in the World Trade Center; 658 of its employees were murdered on that day by men who explained that what they were doing was a jihad. In 2009, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his fellow 9/11 plotters wrote a long self-justificatory letter in which they stated: “Many thanks to God, for his kind gesture, and choosing us to perform the act of Jihad for his cause and to defend Islam and Muslims.”
Times Square car bomb terrorist Faisal Shahzad explained, “Jihad, holy fighting in Allah’s course, with full force of numbers and weaponry, is given the utmost importance in Islam….By jihad, Islam is established….By abandoning jihad, may Allah protect us from that, Islam is destroyed, and Muslims go into inferior position, their honor is lost, their lands are stolen, their rule and authority vanish. Jihad is an obligation and duty in Islam on every Muslim.” Innumerable other Islamic terrorists worldwide have used the word jihad over the years to refer to their acts of violence.
Related: Islamic Scholar Lets Slip the Truth: ‘If Preserving Life Had Priority, There Would Be No Jihad’
Lutnick’s call to “crush jihad” is perfectly understandable, not just in light of the devastation of Cantor Fitzgerald on 9/11, but in light of ongoing jihad activity in the U.S. and worldwide. It’s remarkable that Hafiz Rashid and the New Republic still think they can fool people with this nonsense. But the American people have been hammered since 9/11 with false and misleading propaganda about how “Islam is a religion of peace,” so Rashid doesn’t have to work hard to get his point across.
In denouncing Lutnick’s words as “bigoted” and “Islamophobic,” Rashid is following a playbook that has been used innumerable times since 9/11 to marginalize and silence those who spoke the truth about what happened that day. It has worked quite well up until now; there is no reason why it can’t work again.
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