(Orlando Sentinel) In my opinion, Trump is an unpatriotic and un-American buffoon whose anti-Muslim Islamophobia is dangerous and places Americans all over the world at risk, particularly our military and diplomatic personnel. Trump’s negligent fear mongering is scaring Americans and may be inciting a new era of anti-Muslim bias and hate crime that radicalizes American Muslims.
In a campaign press release on Monday, Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” He has called for the surveillance of mosques and a national registry for American Muslims. Putting aside the U.S. Constitution and international law that would forbid such a ban, my question to Trump is simple: How do you know that a Muslim is a Muslim? Should we deploy new P-9 units, contingents of sniffing horned boars, at our borders and watch who runs away from them?
African-Americans have not escaped Trump’s apparent bigotry. Even though Trump claims to “have a great relationship with the blacks,” he is the only presidential candidate with a documented history of arguably discriminatory behavior against African-Americans.
In a 1999 magazine interview, Trump confirmed racialized claims made in a book called “Trumped!” written by John R. O’Donnell, a former president of Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino. In the book, O’Donnell accuses Trump of making racist comments about African-Americans such as “laziness is a trait in blacks” and “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.”
If this brand of thinking lies beneath Trump’s notion of his “great relationship” with “the” blacks, I pity his opportunistic Negro and Walmart-Republican supporters.
Trump has a long history of what some believe is anti-black bias. According to The New York Times, in 1973 Trump Management Corp. was sued by the Justice Department for allegedly discriminating against blacks, Puerto Ricans and other minorities seeking to rent apartments in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island. The Department of Justice argued that Trump and his father Fred C. Trump’s corporation violated the 1968 Fair Housing Act in the operation of 39 apartment buildings.
To resolve the matter, Donald Trump, who was president of the corporation, entered into an agreement with the Department of Justice that required him to provide the New York Urban League with a list of apartment vacancies, every two weeks, for two years so that it could present qualified applicants for every fifth vacancy in Trump buildings where less than 10 percent of the tenants were black.
If Trump was forced to submit to the will of the New York Urban League and accept a quota system, is he really qualified to negotiate with Iran, Lebanon, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey or better yet defeat the Islamic State?
Trump’s most recent barrage of indignant religious bigotry against Muslims and Islam is dangerous. He is no less extreme than Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of the so-called Islamic State and the band of vicious psychopathic killers that follow him. Like al-Baghdadi, Trump is a fear monger who seems to preach a political gospel of extreme violence against Muslims including expulsion, detention, torture and indiscriminate bombing that when taken together could amount to genocide.
For this reason, Donald Trump is likely the preferred candidate of the Islamic State and al-Qaida, who want to provoke the U.S. into a conventional “holy war” with the Muslim world. Trump’s rhetoric legitimizes the Islamic State’s propaganda that Americans are ignorant and evil enemies of Islam and Muslims. Trump will become the central figure in the Islamic State’s anti-American propaganda machine because he enflames and illuminates the fascist dark underbelly of Americans to the world.
Trump’s Muslim plan and accompanying hate speech will undoubtedly help the Islamic State radicalize violent Islamic extremists abroad, ignite homegrown American jihadists, alienate our allies, perpetuate hate crimes against American Muslims and other minorities, implode the Republican Party and ultimately guarantee Hillary Clinton the American presidency.
