The Opportunist Wizard Of Oz Makes A Deal With The Trump Devil
Dr. Mehmet Oz was incensed and insulted and had really, really harsh words for Kathy Barnette, Oz’s former opponent in the Republican primary election for U.S. Senate from Pennsylvania, after Barnette said “Pedophilia is a Cornerstone of Islam.”
Oz wants to be the first Muslim American to win the nomination of a major party for the U.S. Senate. The celebrity heart surgeon known as “Dr. Oz,” jumped all over Barnette after media reports surfaced of her long history of anti-Muslim tweets. With all the righteous indignation he could muster, Oz said that Barnette should be disqualified from running for office. It didn’t matter as Barnette came in a distant third while the winner of the GOP nomination is still is too close to call between Oz and former hedge fund executive David McCormick.
Barnette’s comments were in a tweet from 2014 which also read, “If you love freedom, Islam must NOT be allowed to thrive under ANY condition” and another said falsely, “Obama is a Muslim. Doing Muslim like THINGS.”
McCormick also questioned Oz’s loyalty because he is a Turkish and American citizen and served in the Turkish army. Oz called the comments a “distraction” and accused McCormick of making “bigoted attacks” that were “reminiscent of slurs made in the past about Catholics and Jews.”
Unless he suffers from a grand case of amnesia, Oz is aware of the historical, toxic bigotry that many Americans harbor toward Muslims, especially since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Oz has made it clear that he is no terrorist but is rather a happy, very rich, moderate Muslim who has raised his children as Christians and is married to a woman who is a member of the Swedenborgian Church of North America, a liberal sect that “values freedom of thought in matters of belief. Any precepts of faith that we accept should make sense to our minds and our hearts.”
Oz also has acknowledged that he once served in the Turkish military but that it was in order to maintain his dual citizenship so he could continue to visit his elderly mother.
It’s funny that Oz has not commented on even more virulent anti-Muslim comments from Doug Mastriano, who won the Republican nomination for governor of Pennsylvania. Maybe, just maybe that’s because trump endorsed Oz and Mastriano. And how about Oz winning that coveted endorsement from trump, the same trump who demonized Muslims and championed efforts to stop all Muslims from entering the U.S. and order a “total and complete shutdown” of the entry of Muslims to the United States “until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”
To Oz, a handful of tweets from Barnette were “disqualifying” to be a senator, whereas a tsunami of anti-Muslim hate from Trump was apparently not so bad.
I would hazard a guess that a caveat of any trump endorsement is you don’t do anything il duce opposes, like dump on another trump-endorsed candidate. It is otherwise called a deal with the devil, like Anne Frank accepting an endorsement for mayor of Dornsuch, Holland, from Hitler.
And I haven’t heard Oz voice righteous or even milquetoast indignation because Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, a potential 2024 presidential candidate, once addressed one of the most hateful, anti-Muslim organizations.
Can you imagine how Americans would have responded to the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama if he was found to have served in the Kenyan army in order to maintain dual citizenship. My feeling is he would have very quickly become a forgotten one time senator from Illinois. Curiously, trump hasn’t said a peep out of Oz’s time in the Turkish army, well, not so curiously because all the amoral trump cares about is padding the congress with trumpers, regardless of who they are.
Politics is a funny game where the key requirement is to be totally devoid of ethics. Trump’s endorsement was key to Oz’s strong showing so the native of Turkey can excuse the former president for his history of pathological xenophobia. That would be trump, who led the twisted farce that Obama was not a U.S. citizen and should be barred from running for president because he was a Muslim, a lie; trump who has been one of the loudest opponents of the Muslim world who tried his darndest to stop Muslims from coming to the U.S. and that could have included Oz’s own parents when they sought to immigrate to the U.S.; trump, who trumpeted the lie that hundreds of Muslims danced on a Jersey City rooftop and cheered as two planes crashed into the World Trade Center. And it all played a role in inciting a massive spike in hate crimes against Muslims around the nation.
First let’s hear from Mastriano, a QAnon conspiracy theorist and supporter and participant in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. Mastriano previously shared a Facebook image with the words, “Stop Islam.” On his page, “Doug Mastriano Fighting for Freedom,” he shared a piece on Aug. 20, 2018, from the defunct website DailyTack.com which had the headline “Over 90 Jihadi’s Are Running For Office As Democrats.”
In the piece that Mastriano re-posted, author Harry Cherry wrote that “between 90 and 100 Muslims are running for office this year, the most since September 11th, 2001,” and that “the American People have a right to be fearful of the prospect of a large number of Muslims being elected to congress, specifically if they practice Sharia law.”
Mastriano inaccurately defined Sharia law as “the practice of utilizing the punishments listed in the Quran in one’s daily life, including in public. Sharia law also promotes the killing of Jews and Gays.”
Mastriano also shared a Faceboom comment on Dec. 8, 2018, which stated: “In the name of tolerance we have imported intolerance. People who respect neither the culture nor the rights of the original population.” The text was imposed on a graphic stating, “Stop Islam.”
Florida Gov. DeSantis spoke at a conference in 2018 for the virulently anti-Muslim ACT for America. The Anti-Defamation League noted that ACT for America has consistently spread false and “hateful propaganda” about immigrants, especially Muslims. The group’s founder has falsely claimed “25 percent of all Muslims support a radical form of Islam” that backs suicide bombings and organized events that have drawn “anti-government extremists.”
“Tens of thousands of Islamic militants now reside in America, operating in sleeper cells, attending our colleges and universities, even infiltrating our government,” ACT for America’s website once claimed. “They are here — today. Many have been here for years. Waiting. Preparing.”
Not a word of criticism from Oz was heard.
Now, as for trump, he once said, “I think Islam hates us. We have to be very vigilant. We have to be very careful. And we can’t allow people coming into this country who have this hatred of the United States.”
He also retweeted anti-Muslim propaganda videos from a British hate group, Britain First. One claimed to show a Muslim man destroying a statue of the Virgin Mary; another professed to have captured a “Muslim migrant” beating up a “Dutch boy on crutches,” and a third seemed to show Muslim men pushing a boy off a building. It turned out none of the bile was true.
Before running for president, trump told anyone who would listen that Obama was not a U.S. citizen and should be disqualified as president. There was trump asking “Why doesn’t he show his birth certificate? There’s something on that birth certificate that he doesn’t like.” And “He’s spent millions of dollars trying to get away from this issue. Millions of dollars in legal fees trying to get away from this issue. And I’ll tell you what, I brought it up, just routinely, and all of a sudden a lot facts are emerging and I’m starting to wonder myself whether or not he was born in this country.” And “His grandmother in Kenya said, ‘Oh, no, he was born in Kenya and I was there and I witnessed the birth.’ She’s on tape. I think that tape’s going to be produced fairly soon. Somebody is coming out with a book in two weeks, it will be very interesting.”
Oz is deluding himself if he believes that if elected to the Senate as a true blue trumper, he will get the respect he craves. Not from the likes of hardcore Islamaphobe Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., a venomous anti-Muslim who suggested that Muslims do not belong in government; nor from Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., who joked in November 2021 that fellow member of Congress, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who is Muslim, could be a suicide bomber.
Wa’el Alzayat, CEO of Emgage, a political advocacy organization that aims to engage Muslims in the political process, said prior to the 2020 presidential election, “To most Americans and really most people of conscience, it would sound absurd for anyone who identifies with the Muslim faith to vote for Trump, given what he has done and said over the last four years and really throughout his history.”
Or for that matter, it would sound absurd for anyone who identifies with the Muslim faith, to accept an endorsement from trump. Oz, are you listening?