The White House on Tuesday condemned “death to America” chants that surfaced online from a recent rally in Dearborn, Mich., protesting Israel’s war in Gaza.
Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre replied, “yes” when asked if President Biden condemns the comments in the chants, which were captured on video by some attendees.
“Peaceful protests are something that the president has also been very clear that, its important to give folks space to peacefully protest. But any type of violent rhetoric, we are going to denounce,” she said.
Dearborn mayor Abdullah Hammoud (D) has also denounced the chants, sharing in a statement on X that “Dearborn is a city of proud Americans.”
Not this again. This is based on the original Persian, which is a mistranslated figure of speech. In Persian language it means down with America, it’s not talking about actual deaths. In Persian, they even say death to potatoes.
One constructs a message for the recipient.
If you say “death to America”, to Americans, in America, knowing full fucking well that it will be interpreted as “death to America”, then I hate to break it to you, you ARE saying “death to America”.
Only if done in the recipient’s language.
When Bush said there should be a crusade against terrorism, it’s not his fault if the Arabic speaking media used the word for the historic Crusades.
And as for the chanting in Dearborn, it was one nut job chanting and everyone from the mayor to president Biden condemned it.
No. If I know full well how my message will be received, it’s irrelevant. Language is a construct for communication, it isn’t intrinsically the transference of ideas. If I blabber or gesticulate anything knowing that it will be received to mean X, then I have knowingly and intentionally communicated X.
It ABSOLUTELY was the fault of his administration: when you’re communicating to a global audience, which he was doing, you pay a TON of people to avoid making exactly this kind of error.
And while I agree that ignorance when individuals make this mistake is understandable, as soon as it’s been pointed out… If you keep doing it, it’s no longer a mistake, it’s intentional.
That’s fair. I’m not implying it isn’t.
All I’m saying it’s childish to say something that you know will be interpreted. It’d be like me saying the argument was “retarded”, and then if saying “As someone who is bilingual, I was using the french word”.