Steve King: How did white supremacist become offensive?

[Dill]

(02-18-2019, 04:56 PM)fredtoast Wrote: To me "whataboutism" is simply pointing out the other side doing the exact same thing.  Pretty much people on both sides agree that it is bad when  a politician cheats on his wife or takes bribes even if he is on "their side".

But in this case it is a little different.  In order to define Oman as an anti-Semite first it has to be proven that her comments are clearly anti-Semitic with no other possible meaning.  So pointing out that the other side has done the exact same thing in this case is not about saying both sides are anti-Semitic.  Instead it is about proving that her comments were not anti-Semitic in the first place.

Since no one has condemned the comments of these Republicans as being anti-Semitic then that proves that Oman's comments were not anti-Semitic either.

Or, it could prove they both were, just that it is selectively acknowledged in one case.  Whataboutery is deployed only for two reasons: to change the subject or to undermine another's higher moral ground.  I can't condemn you for smoking cigarettes when I smoke them too. 

The first part of my post indeed questions whether we should rush to judge Omar's comments antisemitic, though I grant the "hypnotized" remark might be.  Not clearly so, though.

But my second point calls attention to the disparity in magnitude of attack.  GOPs have clearly stepped over the line many times--especially in those ads with smiling Jews holding money.  My point is not to show that "they do it too so everyone shut up!"   It is to suggest that antisemitism might not really be the issue, the real concern of the GOP, when they level charges at a Freshman member of the opposing party who is Muslim and likely to vote against a bill they want.  In this environment, antisemitism can be weaponized to use against a Semitic person of the "wrong" religion. Someone who did not want to have that conversation might hold hard and fast to the "Whataboutery" charge.

Here is a good way to think about whataboutism, in lawyerly terms.

Imagine you are falsely accused of stealing a car.  You come to court and your lawyer opens your defense by saying.  Why is everyone complaining about Fredtoast stealing a car?  Lots of people steal cars in our community. What about Joe blow, the police chief's cousin? He has stolen three!

You'd quickly want to take over you own defense, knowing however many cars Joe has stolen, none of that gets YOU off the hook.  You need to establish that 15 witnesses place you in a restaurant at the time of the crime, or something like that.  You see immediately how that kind of whataboutism won't work in a court room, where procedures and protocols of evidence already determine what is relevant.  But there is little of that in the public sphere, where whataboutism works frequently to divert or to equivocate. 

On the other hand, if a police detective accuses you of stealing a car, and you maintain that you haven't stolen one but Joe Blow has. From the detective's perspective, that is not really whataboutism if you know Joe did steal a car--even if you did actually steal a car too.  There are standpoints from which we assess the performance of two or more sides of some factual/ethical issue, sometimes to exonerate one or to condemn both.  The trick is to understand the in which context and to what end a comparison is made.  Otherwise all comparative analyses are invalid.

(Another example, imagine having to argue relevant legal precedents in a court.  Similar comparison would be required to determine whether some litigant could legitimately cite one or not. Dissenting briefs often turn around issues like this.)