From Religion News Service (RNS)
by Arsalan Iftikhar
(RNS) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump delivered a lengthy address at a campaign stop in Youngstown, Ohio on Monday (Aug. 15) entitled “Understanding the Threat: Radical Islam and the Age of Terror,” where he continued his jihad against Muslims and Islam.
Anyone who cannot name our enemy, is not fit to lead this country. Anyone who cannot condemn the hatred, oppression and violence of radical Islam lacks the moral clarity to serve as our president.
Donald Trump believes that if we just utter the words “radical Islamic terrorism” enough times, an Aladdin-esque blue genie in a bottle will come defeat ISIS in one fell swoop.
But before embarking on his latest anti-Muslim tirade, he took the time to praise Middle Eastern dictators:
Let’s look back at the Middle East at the very beginning of 2009, before the Obama-Clinton Administration took over.
Libya was stable.
Syria was under control.
Egypt was ruled by a secular president and an ally of the United States…
In less than four sentences, Donald Trump managed to implicitly praise Muammar Qaddafi of Libya, Syrian leader Bashar Al-Assad and Egypt’s military dictator Abdul Fattah El-Sisi, who has successfully transformed himself into the second coming of Hosni Mubarak.
Donald Trump then turned his focus back on Muslims and immigration:
A new immigration policy is needed as well. The common thread linking the major Islamic terrorist attacks that have recently occurred on our soil – 9/11, the Ft. Hood shooting, the Boston Bombing, the San Bernardino attack, the Orlando attack – is that they have involved immigrants or the children of immigrants.
Why didn’t he mention the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre or the Aurora, Colorado movie theater rampage, or the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabby Giffords in Arizona?
Probably because they were all committed by white non-Muslim men.
Donald Trump then basically doubled-down on his Muslim ban by stating that:
In the Cold War, we had an ideological screening test. The time is overdue to develop a new screening test for the threats we face today.
In addition to screening out all members or sympathizers of terrorist groups, we must also screen out any who have hostile attitudes towards our country or its principles – or who believe that Sharia law should supplant American law.
Donald Trump has clearly never read the “supremacy clause” of the U.S. Constitution (Article VI, Clause 2), which states quite clearly that the“Constitution and the laws of the United States… shall be the supreme law of the land” and that no other law (either foreign or domestic) can “trump” it.
But this next piece had to be the most genius idea Donald Trump to date:
That is why one of my first acts as president will be to establish a commission on radical Islam – which will include reformist voices in the Muslim community who will hopefully work with us. We want to build bridges and erase divisions.
Wait a minute. Did he just say a “commission on radical Islam”? What about the white supremacist terrorists (KKK and others) who have killed throughout history without any sort of presidential commission to stop them.
I would love to meet Donald Trump’s “reformist voices in the Muslim community” who would support a Muslim ban, increased surveillance and special ID’s for over 7 million American Muslims.
He finished his address by channeling his inner-George W. Bush:
We will also keep open Guantanamo Bay, and place a renewed emphasis on human intelligence. Drone strikes will remain part of our strategy, but we will also seek to capture high-value targets to gain needed information to dismantle their organizations. Foreign combatants will be tried in military commissions.
So as our nation moves closer to the November 2016 general election, we as Americans should be quite concerned that a charlatan who doesn’t understand basic constitutional principles like religious freedom, due process and free speech is only 270 electoral votes away from becoming president of the United States of America.
(Arsalan Iftikhar is an international human rights lawyer, founder of TheMuslimGuy.com and author of Scapegoats: How Islamophobia Helps Our Enemies & Threatens Our Freedoms)
