When I was a child, my mother and I were told in a supermarket to “go back where you came from”. This puzzled me greatly. My mother and I were born and bred in London. It was my first experience of anti-Jewish prejudice. The bigotry was unambiguous. Because our assailant perceived we were Jews, she was telling us we didn’t belong in Britain.
Now a storm has erupted in America over tweets by President Trump in which he apparently took aim at four young ethnic minority congresswomen: Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley. They are known as The Squad because of the way they operate as a far-left minority caucus.
For months, American politics has been convulsed over Trump’s attempts to stop illegal immigration across the Mexican border. In his tweet, Trump called out unnamed “progressives”, who “originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe”, for “loudly and viciously” telling America how its government should be run. “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came?”
This language was undeniably offensive, unacceptable and — if he was indeed referring to all four women — factually wrong. Only Ilhan Omar, who was born in Somalia, is not native to America. For the other three, who are variously of Palestinian, Puerto Rican and African-American heritage, America is where they were born.
Read the article by Melanie Phillips in The Australian (from The Times).