The Council on American-Islamic Relations had planned to hold a news conference unveiling a report on Islamophobia, including the rise of “Muslim-free” businesses, anti-Muslim rallies by armed protesters, direct attacks on Muslims and the vandalism of mosques.
Then Orlando happened — an American Muslim slaughtered 49 people in a gay nightclub. CAIR officials realized they needed to hold off on their report and postpone the news conference, in part because the country should be focusing on homophobia and not Islamophobia.
But then came Donald Trump. In an incendiary speech Monday in New Hampshire, Trump described American Muslims in sweeping, harsh terms, depicting them as a kind of enemy within, prone to radical ideology and guilty of harboring terrorists. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee said the terrorist attack in Orlando would never have happened if the gunman’s parents had not been allowed to emigrate from Afghanistan: “The bottom line is that the only reason the killer was in America in the first place was because we allowed his family to come here.”
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While speaking in Manchester, N.H., on June 13, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said, if elected, he would ban immigration from “areas of the world where there’s a proven history of terrorism against the United States, Europe or our allies, until we fully understand how to end these threats.” (Reuters)
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Trump’s speech had a recurring theme: The enemy is already inside the gates, and current U.S. leaders are too fixated on political correctness to do anything about it, or don’t really want to stop it, and can’t even say the words “radical Islam.” Syrian refugees, allegedly fleeing war, may be terrorists in disguise — “a better, bigger, more horrible version than the legendary Trojan horse ever was,” Trump said
CAIR officials and other American Muslim leaders were beside themselves Tuesday. Corey Saylor, another CAIR spokesman, said Trump is spreading false information when he says Muslims don’t report suspicious people in their midst. Saylor said he personally gave the FBI the identity of someone who possibly had become radicalized and that the person was later arrested… President Obama also reacted vociferously Tuesday to Trump’s remarks on Muslims and defended his reluctance to use the term “radical Islam.” He said there is no “magic” to those words and that everyone knows whom the nation is fighting. He rejected Trump’s implicit demand to scrutinize American Muslims more closely than other citizens.
Source: The Washington Post