Brief History Of Donald Trump Stoking Islamophobia: The President Spreading Anti-Muslim Sentiment
01 December 2017With a series of
casual retweets, the president has once again spread anti-Muslim sentiment.
By Antonia Blumberg, HuffPost
President Donald Trump is once again promoting anti-Muslim propaganda.
On Wednesday, the president retweeted a series of overtly Islamophobic videos
shared by British far-right activist Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader for the
anti-Muslim group Britain First.
The videos purportedly show Muslims committing violent crimes ― but, like many
things on social media, they are misleading. One video, captioned "Muslim
migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches!" depicts a boy beating another boy.
But the video's original caption on a Dutch website does not mention race or
religion, and local media reported that the 16-year-old pictured in the video
was not actually a migrant.
The British government denounced Trump for casually retweeting Fransen's
posts. Downing Street said the U.S. president was "wrong" to retweet videos
from a group that "peddles lies" and is "overwhelmingly rejected" by the
British public.
Trump has a track record of stoking Islamophobia. Nearly a year before he won
the presidential election, he called for a "total and complete shutdown of
Muslims entering the United States" following deadly terror attacks in
California and France.
Trump followed his proposal with an email to reporters in December 2015:
"Without looking at the various polling data, it is obvious to anybody the
hatred is beyond comprehension. Where this hatred comes from and why we will
have to determine. Until we are able to determine and understand this problem
and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of
horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of
reason or respect for human life."
Trump did not distinguish between fringe groups of violent extremists and the
rest of the world's nearly 2 billion Muslims.
Several months later, he declared, "I think Islam hates us" in an interview
with CNN's Anderson Cooper. He went on to say that his objection was to
radical Islam, but added: "It's very hard to define. It's very hard to
separate. Because you don't know who's who."
The president's anti-Muslim rhetoric has hampered his efforts to impose a
travel ban on non-visa holders from several countries, including five with
majority Muslim populations. The Trump administration has claimed the proposal
doesn't constitute a "Muslim ban," though Trump has called it one. And judges
have pointed to the president's numerous Islamophobic comments to question the
ban's legality.
"There is nothing 'veiled' about a press release titled 'Donald J. Trump is
calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United
States,'" U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson wrote in March.
During his campaign, Trump liked to tell an apocryphal story about an American
general shooting Muslims with bullets dipped in pig's blood. He also made the
dubious claim that he saw "thousands" of Muslims in New Jersey "cheering" as
the twin towers fell, failing to note that Muslim Americans lost loved ones in
the Sept. 11 attacks, too.
Trump additionally suggested that the mother of a fallen Muslim American
soldier wasn't allowed to talk while her husband spoke at the Democratic
National Convention. And Trump's inauguration in January included prayers from
a pastor who thinks Islam is "evil."
After a Muslim American man killed 49 people at a nightclub in Orlando,
Florida, Trump called for increased surveillance of mosques and warned that
radical Muslims were "trying to take over our children."
The month after the election, an anti-Muslim hate group bragged about its
influence in the White House, saying it had a "direct line" to the incoming
Trump administration.
Early on in his presidency, Trump surrounded himself with a number of known
Islamophobes, including former national security aide Sebastian Gorka and
former political adviser Steve Bannon. Trump's pick for national security
advisor, Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn ― who was fired after 24 days on the job
― called Islam a "cancer" and said fear of the religion was "justified."
Senior Trump adviser Frank Wuco has claimed that Muslims "by and large" want
to "subjugate" non-Muslims.
Trump's comments have been accompanied by growing Islamophobia and a rise in
anti-Muslim incidents in the U.S., which last year reached the highest levels
since the period immediately following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
Last year, a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center showed that the
number of anti-Muslim groups in the U.S. had tripled in 2016.
Meanwhile, the president has been largely silent on attacks on Muslims,
demonstrating a double standard in how he reacts to acts of terror.
After a man participating in a white supremacist rally drove a car into a
crowd in Charlottesville, Virginia, this August, killing a woman, Trump
insisted that he needed to know the facts before making a statement.
But mere hours after an Uzbek immigrant inspired by the self-described Islamic
State killed eight people by plowing a pickup truck down a bike path in lower
Manhattan in October, Trump was already tweeting about ISIS and about placing
heavier restrictions on the country's immigration system.
In a November segment of "The Daily Show," host Trevor Noah summed it up by
saying: "When it was a Nazi, Trump needed more facts. When it was a Muslim,
that was the only fact that he needed."
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