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Political pulse rises after Orlando
WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama lit into presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump and other conservatives over their escalating anti-Muslim rhetoric, telling
WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama lit into presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump and other conservatives over their escalating anti-Muslim rhetoric, telling them in his angriest remarks on the issue yet “that’s not the America we want”.
“We now have proposals from the presumptive Republican nominee for President of the United States to bar all Muslims from emigrating to America,” O ba ma said after a meeting of his national security council on Tuesday. He added: “We hear language that singles out immigrants and suggests that entire religious communities are complicit in violence.”
Trump, who has suggested a temporary ban on immigration from areas of the world with a “proven history” of terrorism against the US and its allies after the Orlando shootings, hit back at the President, saying Obama was more angry with him than the shooter and implying, as he has before, the President was not as committed to fighting terrorism.
On Monday, Trump had said the President ‘‘doesn’t have a lot of anger at what happened to these wonderful people (the victims of Orlando shooting)”.
Trump and others in his party have also questioned Obama’s counter-terrorism efforts, saying he won’t even use the phrase “radical Islam” to describe the threat. Obama hit back, barely concealing his annoyance :“Calling a threat by a different name does not make it go away.”
And he went beyond, “We hear language that singles out immigrants and suggests that entire religious communities are complicit in violence.”
“Where does this stop? The Orlando killer, one of the San Bernardino killers, the Fort Hood killer--they were all US citizens. Are we going to start treating all Muslim Americans differently? Are we going to start subjecting them to special surveillance? Are we going to start discriminating against them because of their faith? We’ve heard these suggestions during the course of this campaign.”
Malik Mujahid, a Chicago area imam, said Trump is using a general sense of fear and insecurity stemming from the San Bernardino attacks last December and the Orlando shootings to stoke Islamophobia in the hope of rallying his supporters.
But Trump, Mujahid argued, may have overplayed his hand. The imam said these attacks on the community have strengthened its resolve to fight back: “it has encouraged Muslim voters to become more active …and the response to Islamophobia is getting organised”. Trump, who first called for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the US in the aftermath of the San Bernardino attacks, has ratcheted up the rhetoric since the Orlando shootings. After extending his call of suspending entry to Muslims for areas with “proven history”, he held the community responsible for these incidents. “Muslim communities must cooperate with law enforcement and turn in the people who they know are bad,” he said.
