Curt Schilling, whom Wikipedia informs me is a former baseball star and current ESPN commentator, sent a tweet on Tuesday that seems to have emerged straight from the internet nether-void of racist email forwards. Al Monitor journalist Arash Karami captured a screenshot just before Schilling deleted the tweet:
Curt Schilling’s tweet comparing Muslims to Nazis is even worse than it sounds
Did Curt Schilling @gehrig38 delete this tweet b/c the numbers were off or b/c it was a horrible thing to tweet? pic.twitter.com/rK86wyZPmm
— Arash Karami (@thekarami) August 25, 2015 The argument here is pretty clear, even if the numbers are pure nonsense, but just so it’s not lost: Schilling is saying that the religion of Islam is akin to Nazi Germany, and that the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims are responsible for the actions of a tiny minority of extremists in the same way that Nazi-era Germans were complicit in Nazi crimes.
Putting aside the many obvious ways this is breathtakingly bigoted and hateful, let’s briefly go through the motions of why it is also wrong. Muslims are by far the number-one victims of extremist groups such as ISIS: They are the most likely to be killed by ISIS, and they are the most likely to actively fight ISIS. Nazi-era Germans, on the other hand, overwhelmingly supported and fought for the Nazi regime. So in fact the relationship between Nazi-era Germans and Nazi crimes is the exact opposite of the relationship between Muslims and ISIS.
It is a universal truth that no one should ever tweet under any circumstances, but Schilling in particular should never tweet. In November, for example, he got in a bunch of toxic Twitter fights over evolution, which he claimed to have debunked, 140 characters at a time.
But it would be wrong to focus just on Curt Schilling here. American TV news media is awash in out-in-the-open Islamophobia. It is really little wonder that a cranky former baseball person would think anti-Muslim bigotry was not only correct but acceptable discourse. In America, it sort of is. He just happened to state too overtly what American cable TV personalities are otherwise free to say without punishment: that Muslims are different from you and me, that they are inherently violent, and that they are to be feared.
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