Last month’s presidential debate was a travesty for myriad reasons. Most of the focus right now is on the zombie-like performance of President Joe Biden, which has left everyone from the New York Times editorial board to the Pod Save America boys to nearly a dozen Democratic Congress members urging him to bow out. Biden’s rambling, incoherent answers on abortion, immigration, and Medicare (We finally beat it!) have eaten up a lot of attention in the debate’s aftermath as the political class scrambles to figure out what to do about Biden’s obviously deteriorated mental state. The moment that disturbed me the most, however, has managed to largely slip under the radar: when Donald Trump decided to use “Palestinian” as a slur with which to insult Biden.

In the context of an exchange about Israel’s U.S.-backed destruction of Gaza, Trump said: 

He’s [Biden has] become like a Palestinian. But they don’t like him, because he’s a very bad Palestinian. He’s a weak one.

Yes, you read that correctly. On live TV in front of more than 51 million people, a candidate for president of the United States used an entire ethnic group as a pejorative to insult his opponent. It’s not entirely clear the precise nature of the insult here—whether it’s meant to merely accuse Biden of being insufficiently supportive of Israel (a laughable implication on its own) or to accuse him of active disloyalty to the United States. But regardless, by calling Biden a “Palestinian,” Trump is expecting the audience to have a visceral negative reaction by lumping him in with a group that Americans are told to perceive as an undifferentiated mass of terrorists, savages, and antisemites. 

Joe Biden barely responded to the slur, dismissing it as “foolishness” and moving on to criticize Trump’s position on NATO. The moderators, who basically refused to press either of the candidates on the false things they said, did not remark upon Trump’s insult either.

Later in the debate, Trump said that “We have the Palestinians and we have everybody else rioting all over the place… You talk about Charlottesville. This is 100 times Charlottesville, 1,000 times.” Again, neither Biden nor the moderators point out that this is clearly untrue—the protests that have swept the nation were almost entirely peaceful. Trump used “Palestinian” as a slur again the very next day at a rally, where he said that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer “has become a Palestinian. He’s a Palestinian now. Congratulations. He was very loyal to Israel and to Jewish people. He’s Jewish, but he’s become a Palestinian.” Trump seems to be implying that Schumer is antisemitic. In a bizarre twist, this is all in line with Trump’s own wildly antisemitic belief that Jews who do not support him are “very disloyal to Israel.”

Trump has said countless racist things over the course of his political career. But even he is rarely this blatant. Can you imagine if he had insulted Biden by saying he was “like a Black” or “like a Mexican” or “like a Jew”? There is no way that Biden—even with his brain leaking out of his ears in real time—would not have responded with indignation. In the past, he has extensively called Trump out for stoking hatred of those groups. And there’s no way that two CNN moderators would have responded with “Thank you, former President Trump,” as they did after his “Palestinian” insult.

Other than from Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who is Palestinian American herself, I have not been able to find a single official statement from a member of the House or Senate Democratic caucus condemning Trump. Not even Bernie Sanders or other members of the Squad, who have been vocally supportive of Palestinian rights, have said anything. 

American media institutions, which have spent months dissecting boilerplate statements of Palestinian solidarity for hints of antisemitism, have largely been silent. While some independent left-wing outlets like The Intercept and Mother Jones dedicated whole articles to the subject, the only mainstream news outlets to actually run full op-eds condemning the statement were CNN and, to my immense shock, The Atlantic! (Clearly they heard that we rated them America’s Worst Magazine in our Briefy Awards, a title they still more than deserve for running this piece about how it’s “possible to kill children legally.”) 

While serious analysis and criticism of Trump for this racist remark has otherwise been extremely sparse, it has been widely mentioned in passing. MSNBC mentioned Trump’s statement briefly in a larger op-ed criticizing his debate performance. The New York Times ran one news article with the understated headline, “Trump’s use of ‘Palestinian’ as an insult raises alarms for some.” (To the Times’ credit, they at least quoted Arab writers who described the remarks as racist.)¹ The Washington Post buried a mention of the comment in a single article about the debate more broadly and did so without commentary. The Wall Street Journal mentioned it only once at the end of a single article about ceasefire negotiations. Politico covered it in a single article that barely cracked 100 words and issued no condemnation. With the exceptions of the Hill, Barron’s, and Reuters, most other mainstream English language outlets did not cover the remarks at all.

Compare this muted reaction to other racist things Trump has said. In 2019, when Trump told non-white members of the Squad—all U.S. citizens—to "go back" to their countries, the statements not only got days of rightfully outraged news coverage, but that coverage did not hesitate to describe the comments as “racist.” Trump has also been pretty strongly called out for use of  racist “tropes,” such as his comments about the late Congressman Elijah Cummings’ “rat and rodent infested” Baltimore district, which the New York Times, Washington Post, and Politico, among many others, had numerous articles about, many of which didn’t just relay Trump’s comments but described in detail how they played into racist stereotypes.

Taken in a vacuum, you could argue that the lack of focus on Trump’s remarks about Palestinians has less to do with any sort of double standard and more to do with the fact that Biden’s mental acuity is now the only thing the media is hyper-fixated upon. 

But throughout the last nine months, it has become clear that anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic sentiments have been largely tolerated by elected officials and the media. When Republican members of Congress have openly dehumanized and called for the genocide of Palestinians in very blatant terms, they’ve received little pushback from their Democratic colleagues or from the mainstream media. Just as a few examples:

• In November, after Rep. Rashida Tlaib placed a Palestinian flag outside her congressional office (again, she is the daughter of two Palestinian immigrants), Rep. Matt Miller of Ohio said on Fox News that Palestine was “a territory that’s about to probably get eviscerated and go away here shortly, as we’re going to turn that into a parking lot.” 

• Later that month, Rep. Brian Mast of Florida wore an IDF uniform on the House floor and introduced an amendment to limit humanitarian aid to Gaza. He said: “Any assistance should be slowed down…because I would challenge anybody in here to point to me, which Palestinian is Hamas, and which one is an innocent civilian?” He went on to say, “I would encourage the other side to not so lightly throw around the idea of ‘innocent Palestinian civilians.’” When asked about babies who have been killed in Israeli attacks, Mast later said, “These are not innocent Palestinian civilians.” In other words, Palestinians are congenitally dangerous and effectively combatants from the moment of birth.

• When confronted by a protester who said, “I’ve seen the footage of shredded children’s bodies — that’s my taxpayer dollars going to bomb those kids” in Gaza, Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee said “You know what, so, I think we should kill ’em all. If that makes you feel better.”

• Another protester, who has lost more than 100 family members in the war, confronted Rep. Chuck Fleischmann of Tennessee about whether he was concerned about the number of children killed. Fleischmann responded, “Israel will always exist. […] And that is for God to decide… And you can tell the Palestinians that I will never support them!” When the protester responded “I am a Palestinian,” Fleischmann responded, “Then I will tell you, I will never support you. I will tell you to your face: Goodbye to Palestine!”
• In May 2024, after having previously said Israel should “level the place” and that “we are in a religious war,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina suggested that Israel should nuke the Gaza Strip, saying “Give Israel what they need to fight the war they can't afford to lose. This is Hiroshima and Nagasaki on steroids.”

Such a staunch defense of Israel obviously requires a concomitant racist dehumanization of Palestinians. This has been so thoroughly baked into mainstream society that any digression from either provokes strong backlash. It’s worth pointing out that Rashida Tlaib was formally censured by the House of Representatives—including 22 Democrats—as an antisemite for using the phrase “from the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free” and calling Israel an “apartheid state.” Marjorie Taylor Greene said, “We have a terrorist, Rashida Tlaib, serving as a member of Congress,” and referred to her repeatedly as “terrorist Tlaib.” Greene was not censured for these comments.

Tlaib has made clear that she intended “From the river to the sea”² to be “an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate.” And numerous human rights organizations have assessed Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories as an “apartheid” system. Earlier that year, Democrats joined Republicans in attacking Rep. Pramila Jayapal for calling Israel “a racist state.” That racism is a central element of Israeli policy is obviously true to anyone with a basic knowledge of its civil rights abuses toward Palestinians. 

When it came to punishing Tlaib for criticizing Israel, taking a “stand against hate speech,” as Bronx Representative Ritchie Torres put it, was of the utmost importance. But where was that eagerness when it came to standing up to overt calls for genocide? Only one of the Republicans listed above, Mast, even had a censure resolution against him introduced, and Democrats quickly dropped it. While picking apart Tlaib’s comments extensively, mainstream liberal publications almost totally ignored the genocidal comments made by Republicans. (For a more detailed account of how they were covered, see this footnote.)³  

Anti-Palestinian racism shows up not just in inflammatory statements like the ones I’ve described but in leaders’ collective response to the loss of human lives in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since Oct. 7. Even when our leaders have not been actively encouraging the mass slaughter of Palestinians, they have often consciously avoided acknowledging it. They send an unmistakable message that the deaths of Israelis warrant outpourings of grief, while the deaths of Palestinians are not something to be concerned about. 

 Throughout the fall of 2023, hundreds of congresspeople attended multiple vigils that exclusively honored the 1,200 Israeli civilians and soldiers killed in Hamas’ attack on October 7 without a mention of any of the innocents killed in Gaza. 

In early November, hundreds of legislators attended a candlelight memorial for Israeli victims, at which they expressed horror at “what is happening to Israel, to innocent men, women, children, and civilians at the hands of evil men.” At this point, more than 8,000 Palestinians, including 5,000 women and children, had been killed by Israel’s military response. The fact that nearly seven times as many Palestinians had been killed since Oct. 7 was not mentioned once.

On November 30, Rashida Tlaib, by this point roundly condemned by her peers as an antisemite, joined with Congresswoman Cori Bush to organize the first vigil to honor both Israelis and Palestinians killed during the war, a vigil which included Jewish, Muslim, and Christian faith leaders. “We grieve the lives of every innocent civilian killed, no matter their faith or ethnicity. We cannot lose sight of our shared humanity. This is the first vigil on Capitol Hill that mourns both the Palestinian and Israeli lives lost to this horrific violence,” Tlaib posted on X. Only seven of the 535 members of Congress attended.

Is there any more profound statement on how our leaders view Palestinian life? As political activist Peter Daou posted on X recently, “Racism. Unadulterated, ugly racism. That's why so many people are unmoved by Palestinian deaths.”

The killing of Israelis elicited immediate horror and sympathy. Nearly seven times as many Palestinians meeting similarly horrible fates did not. Using these figures you can start working out the math. To most of the people who represent us, one Israeli is worth at least seven Palestinians. To most, it’s more. When Israel launched an operation that rescued four Israeli hostages and killed 274 Palestinians in the process—including 57 women and 64 children—while wounding more than 700 others, members of Congress, as well as President Biden, praised the operation as a massive success. So we have still not found the ratio of how many Palestinians is equal in worth to one Israeli, but we know it’s at least 68.

Most of the people who represent us, with the exception of a brave few who have risked their careers to speak out, seem to view Palestinians as if they are ants. Even those who do not actively cheer for their extermination are willing to overlook their existence whenever possible. And this attitude, which treats Palestinians as something less than human, has allowed mass slaughter and starvation to proceed largely unabated.

The dehumanization of Palestinians has consequences for those in America, too:  the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee said that between October 2023 and March 2024, it had seen a fivefold increase in reports of hate incidents since the previous year. Just a week and a half after the October 7 attacks, a Chicago man stabbed his Palestinian tenants—a mother and her six-year-old son, Wadea Al-Fayoume. The child was killed as a result. According to the murderer’s wife, he believed they’d “call Palestinian friends to come and harm” him. He’d gotten that idea after hearing a conservative talk radio host say that Palestinians were planning a “day of Jihad,” and reportedly stabbed the mother after she’d said Israel and Palestine ought to “give peace a chance.” In a statement President Biden said he rejected “Islamophobia,” but he did not acknowledge that anti-Palestinian racism played a role in the attack. A month later, three Palestinian American college students wearing keffiyehs and speaking Arabic were shot in Burlington by a gunman who they said might have been waiting for them that day. Another man, in Dearborn,  Michigan, was arrested after posting that he wanted to “hunt Palestinians.”

Anti-Palestinian racism, like all forms of racism and bigotry, is truly a poison, and it has infiltrated all levels of society. If it weren’t enough that mainstream leaders and media tolerate inflammatory, genocidal rhetoric and disregard for human life, our domestic laws criminalize those who seek to challenge this state of affairs. Our government has treated protesters for Palestinian rights as essentially a foreign terrorist threat operating on American soil. Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein reported that the FBI “is now working overtime to find evidence of foreign funding of pro-Palestinian student protesters” by having undercover agents penetrate protests. They have justified this by claiming that these students’ pro-Palestinian speech constitutes “material support to foreign terrorist groups.” At least  3,100 people were arrested or detained for participating in protests, the overwhelming majority of whom were charged with nonviolent offenses. The Nation, meanwhile, found that several Muslim women who participated in pro-Palestinian encampments had their hijabs forcibly removed by police while in custody, a blatant violation of their First Amendment rights.

Dozens of college professors and faculty members have been fired or disciplined across the country for publicly speaking out against the destruction of Gaza. One survey of employers found that more than 1 in 5 were reluctant to hire students who’d participated in pro-Palestine protests. And thousands of Americans who have expressed the slightest whiff of sympathy for the Palestinian cause have been doxxed by groups like the Canary Mission, which seeks to have the targets blacklisted for employment.

Racial inequality is obviously far from solved in the United States. And blatant racism is certainly not something we’ve banished to the past. But at the very least, open bigotry and dehumanization are generally frowned upon. Politicians have, rightly, apologized for and denounced offensive remarks and tropes against Black people, Jews, Asian Americans, and Muslims for things that—while certainly offensive and dehumanizing—often pale in comparison to what has been said about Palestinians. They are the one group it is considered acceptable to mock and denigrate. And those who stand up for their basic humanity are more liable to be punished than those who call for their extermination. 

In such an environment, it’s no wonder Trump believes that by simply uttering the word “Palestinian” in reference to his opponent, he can cause his audience to recoil in horror.

notes

1. The Times has, of course, also been more than willing to publish demeaning statements about Middle Easterners. In fact, two of its currently employed columnists have described them as insects. In February, the Times published a piece by Thomas Friedman titled “Understanding the Middle East Through the Animal Kingdom”—already a questionable premise—in which he referred to Iran as a “parasitoid wasp.” The Times also continues to publish the writings of Bret Stephens, who has in the past wrote for the Wall Street Journal that Palestinians “remain trapped in ideological amber,” likening them to a “four-million-year-old mosquito.”

2. The charter of Israel’s ruling Likud Party, written in 1977, says “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” Compared with the slogan stating “Palestine will be free,” this is much closer to a call for ethnic domination or expulsion, but it is rarely characterized as such. Perhaps more importantly, unlike the hypothetical Palestinian “from the River to the Sea,” we can actually see what the Israeli version looks like: The mass expulsion of Palestinians in the Nakba, their displacement in order to create Israeli settlements, and their mass killing in Gaza.

3. Here is a scorecard of how major publications covered Republicans’ comments:

• Miller’s comments about turning Gaza “into a parking lot” were not covered by the New York Times, Politico, or the Wall Street Journal. The Washington Post did cover them, and they were mentioned briefly in an opinion article by Dana Milbank, who disagreed with the idea of censuring Miller, not because he agreed with the comments but because he thought there was too much censuring going on in the House generally. Milbank said “from the River to the Sea” is antisemitic and that “Tlaib richly deserves reproach.”

• Mast’s statements about civilians were not covered by the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. The Washington Post did cover Mast’s statements briefly in an article titled “House members emotional after seeing footage of Oct. 7 attack on Israel” and in the aforementioned article about how there are too many censures in general. There was also a single sentence about the failed censure effort of Mast in a Politico newsletter, which did not even quote him.

• Andy Ogles’ “kill ’em all” comments were not covered by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, or Politico.  

• Fleischmann’s “Goodbye to Palestine” comments were not covered by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, or Politico. 

• Graham’s “Hiroshima and Nagasaki on steroids” comments were not covered by the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Wall Street Journal. Politico mentioned the statement in two newsletters, neither of which was critical of him.