IT'S TIME TO PLAY RIGHT-WING RUMPLESTILTSKIN AGAIN

Jake Lang, a pardoned January 6 insurrectionist who threatened to burn a Qur'an in Minneapolis earlier this year, tried to stir up trouble on Saturday at Gracie Mansion in Manhattan, where the mayor of New York lives. His intent was to stage another anti-Islam demonstration -- he brought a roast pig, a live goat (with which he feigned copulation after a similar provocation a day earlier), and a couple dozen ideological soul mates.

I was there, hoping for a peaceful counterprotest, but things looked ugly -- as in Minneapolis, Lang and his crew were outnumbered by young anti-fascists who wanted to rough him up. The scrum seemed like a bad place for your elderly correspondent, and I left.

Then a bomb was thrown.

A device thrown outside Gracie Mansion on Saturday during dueling protests in New York City was confirmed to be an improvised explosive device, according to police.

Two men, described by police as an 18-year-old and a 19-year-old, were taken into custody after at least one of two devices was ignited....

Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch described the devices Saturday as being smaller than a football and said they appeared to be jars wrapped in black tape with nuts, bolts, screws and a hobby fuse....

A test of the explosive compound found in a container thrown by one of the men has preliminarily come back as triacetone triperoxide, or TATP, a notoriously volatile and dangerous type of homemade explosive....

The two men arrested said they were inspired by ISIS, as the police commissioner noted.

“The defendants were inspired by ISIS to carry out their attack,” NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said Monday during a briefing outlining the five-count federal indictment against Emir Balat and Ibrahim Kayumi. “There should be no confusion about what ISIS constitutes. It is a designated foreign terrorist organization responsible for deadly terrorist attacks across the globe, and has taken credit for mass casualty attacks in Europe, the Middle East and right here in the United States.”

But the right-wing language police told us they were outraged by what the mayor said, or didn't say. The New York Post reported:

Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Monday repeatedly refused to condemn the pair of alleged bomb throwers as ISIS-loving radical Islamists....

Really? What did he say, or fail to say?

“They are suspected of coming here to commit an act of terrorism,” Hizzoner said during a press conference outside Grace Mansion....

Yeah? What else?

On Sunday, Mamdani issued a mealy-mouthed statement denouncing the organizer of a right-wing anti-Muslim rally — but not directly commenting on the alleged bomb tossers.

“Yesterday, white supremacist Jake Lang organized a protest outside Gracie Mansion rooted in bigotry and racism. Such hate has no place in New York City. It is an affront to our city’s values and the unity that defines who we are,” the statement said.

“What followed was even more disturbing. Violence at a protest is never acceptable. The attempt to use an explosive device and hurt others is not only criminal, it is reprehensible and the antithesis of who we are.”

"Criminal" and "reprehensible" seem like negative words to me. What else?

He again stopped short of condemning radical Islam in a statement following the unsealing of the criminal complaint.

“Emir Balat and Ibrahim Kayumi have been charged with committing a heinous act of terrorism and proclaiming their allegiance to ISIS,” he said in a statement. “They should be held fully accountable for their actions.”

Saying that they were inspired by ISIS and committed "a heinous act of terrorism" isn't enough? I guess not. Mamdani didn't say the secret phrase -- "radical Islam"!

In the past, I've called this "wingnut Rumplestiltskin." Steve Benen has invoked "Beetlejuice." The Republican argument is that Democrats have to utter a particular phrase or the terrorists have won. The phrase keeps changing, but it usually includes some form of the word "Islam" or "Muslim."

So at the 2008 Republican convention, Rudy Giuliani attacked Democrats because they refrained from using the phrase "Islamic terrorism." In 2010, after a failed terror bombing in Times Square, The Weekly Standard chided President Obama for, among other things, refusing to use the phrase "Islamic extremism." In 2013, after the Boston Marathon bombing, Charles Krauthammer wagged a finger at Obama for refusing to use the words "jihadist" and "Islamicist." In 2015, after the Charlie Hebdo bombing in Paris, Ralph Peters of Fox News said that Obama's response was inadequate "because it has to say 'Islamist terror,'" adding, "This administration is just soft on radical Islam."

And then, after the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, Marco Rubio said, "What we're involved in now is a civilizational conflict with radical Islam." Shortly afterward, in a presidential debate, Hillary Clinton refrained from using the phrase "radical Islam," but said this:

We need to have a resolve that will bring the world together, to root out the kind of radical, jihadist ideology that motivates organizations like ISIS, a barbaric, ruthless, violent, jihadist, terrorist group.

Rubio went on to criticize that statement as not strong enough.

There was a reason that Obama and Clinton, his first secretary of state, avoided the words Republicans demanded that they use. After Obama left office, Richard Stengel, who worked in his administration, explained:

To defeat radical Islamic extremism, we needed our Islamic allies — the Jordanians, the Emiratis, the Egyptians, the Saudis — and they believed that term unfairly vilified a whole religion.

They also told us that they did not consider the Islamic State to be Islamic, and its grotesque violence against Muslims proved it. We took a lot of care to describe the Islamic State as a terrorist group that acted in the name of Islam. Sure, behind the scenes, our allies understood better than anyone that the Islamic State was a radical perversion of Islam, that it held a dark appeal to a minority of Sunni Muslims, but it didn’t help to call them radical Islamic terrorists.

Obama ordered the assassination of Osama bin Laden. Obama began the process of weakening ISIS that continued in the first Donald Trump presidency. Obama didn't shrink from fighting the violence represented by those words.

Similarly, Mamdani has denounced Saturday's failed bomb attack, and his police force arrested the perpetrators. But for Republicans, deeds are irrelevant. Mamdani and all other Democrats are supposed to use words that make Muslims seem evil. If they refuse to do so, Republicans say, they clearly love evil.