“GOP Outreach To Gays: At Least We Won’t Kill You”: We Only Want To Deny You Your Rights
Conventional wisdom suggests that Republicans decided to trash the RNC’s autopsy that was completed after their loss in the 2012 presidential election. It contained suggestions that the party should do more to reach out to women and people of color – especially Hispanic Americans. But perhaps we got it all wrong. Maybe in some fevered minds, trashing illegal immigrants was actually their idea of how to reach out to the Hispanic community.
I say that after reading an article by Tierney Sneed titled: GOP Makes “Appalling” Pitch to LGBT’s: Dems Are Choosing Muslims Over You. Perhaps this is what Republicans mean by “outreach.” The message basically comes down to this: We may be trying to deny you your rights, but at least we won’t kill you.
Their reasoning? That somehow, in the wake of the Orlando shooting at a gay night club that left 49 people dead, there’s now a mutually exclusive choice between supporting Muslims and protecting gay people, and Democrats have chosen the former.
The unlovely premise of that rationale is that all Muslims are terrorists, as one Republican congressman has baldly stated.
“Democrats are in a perplexing position. On the one hand, they’re trying to appeal to the gay community, but, on the other hand, they’re trying to also appeal to the Muslim community, which, if it had its way, would kill every homosexual in the United States of America,” Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) said on a radio show Thursday.
Sneed goes on to provide similar quotes from Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. But for anyone who still had a functioning irony meter, the one from conservative evangelist Pat Robertson is sure to break it for good.
Pat Robertson – the conservative preacher and Christian media executive who has said gay people are “demonic” and will eventually die out — said the “left” had “a dilemma of major proportions.”
“We’re looking at a favored group by the left, the homosexuals, and that in Islam is punishable by death or imprisonment or some sanction, so what are the left going to do?” he said on his TV show “700 Club” Tuesday.
What makes that kind of talk so outrageous is that Robertson is a leader among right wing Christians who have supported murderous African dictators in singling out homosexuals for both imprisonment and death.
For the record, I know of no liberals – let alone LGBT people – who have any love lost for groups like ISIS that have practiced horrific executions of homosexuals. Nor is there any lack of protest against regimes in the Middle East (or countries like Russia) that imprison them. But just as in the Christian community, there are Muslims who support equal rights for homosexuals and those who deny them. Republicans who would do the latter should revisit the words of Jesus when he suggested that people check out the log in their own eye before judging the splinter is someone else’s.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, June 17, 2016
“There’s One Big Reason We’re Being Radicalized”: America, Look At What Donald Trump Is Doing To Us
During Saturday night’s Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton declared that Trump is “becoming ISIS’s best recruiter.” Clinton was wrong to suggest Trump had appeared in any ISIS videos but she was right to note that his words will help ISIS radicalize people.
She also left something out: Trump has already radicalized Americans to commit and plot acts of violence right here on American soil.
The latest example came Sunday after William Celli of Richmond, California, was arrested for building explosive devices that he allegedly planned to use to kill Muslim Americans. What inspired Celli’s actions? Well, we know that Celli’s Facebook page reads like a Trump speech filled with anti-immigrant, anti-Latino and anti-Muslim comments. Celli also repeatedly praises Trump, even adding that he would follow Trump “to the end of the world.” This is not unlike social media posts pledging undying loyalty to ISIS-type groups.
But Celli is far from the only Trump supporter to turn to violence. In August, two Trump supporters in Boston beat up a Latino man while yelling anti-immigrant slurs. The police reported that after being arrested, one of the assailants stated, “Donald Trump was right. All these illegals need to be deported.”
Trump’s response to this brutal attack in his name was alarmingly tame: “I will say, the people that are following me are very passionate.” He added, “They love this country, they want this country to be great again.” Trump did later tweet that the incident was horrible and that “I would never condone violence.”
But just three months later, Trump changed his tune and did condone violence by his supporters. During a campaign event in Birmingham, Alabama, Black Lives Matter protester Mercurito Southhall Jr. repeatedly interrupted The Donald. Trump responded by imploring the crowd to “Get him out the hell out of here… Throw him out!” Trump supporters then sprung into action and beat up Southhall while reportedly calling him a “nigger” and a “monkey.”
Did Trump condemn the attack and racist words directed at the black man by his white supporters? No, to the contrary. Trump told Fox News the morning after the assault, “Maybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing.”
Trump was sending a clear message that violence in the name of Trump was acceptable. I know some will disagree with me, but the stakes are too high to be politically correct. Trump has and will continue to radicalize people to commit horrible acts just like ISIS does. True, the scope of the violence commited by ISIS supporters has been far worse but if Celli’s bomb had gone off and he’d slaughtered Americans, it would have been exactly like an ISIS-inspired terror attack.
And apart from these three incidents, Trump’s rhetoric about Muslims is responsible, to some degree, for the massive spike in anti-Muslim hate crimes we have seen in the last few weeks.
In recent years, there has been an average of 12.6 hate crimes against Muslims in America per month, according to FBI data. However, since the Paris terrorist attack on Nov. 13 there have been 38 anti-Islamic attacks.
A few examples include a Muslim cab driver in Pittsburgh being shot by a man who went on an anti-Muslim tirade, shots fired at a Muslim woman’s car while exiting a mosque in Florida, hot coffee thrown at a Muslim praying in a California park, and death threats directed at numerous Muslim leaders including Rep. Andre Carson, one of the two Muslim members in Congress.
And we have also seen a rash of attacks on American mosques in the past two weeks, with windows broken at the Islamic center in Palm Beach, a pig’s head thrown at a mosque in Philadelphia, hate-filled, threatening letters sent to a mosque in New Jersey, and more.
Are all these hate crimes due to Trump’s alarming rhetoric in recent weeks about Muslims, from vowing to close mosques to banning all Muslims from entering America? No. But there’s absolutely no doubt his words play a role in ginning up fears and legitimizing hate. It’s akin to the hateful fear-mongering by Southern Democrats in the 1950s and ’60s directed against blacks that then led to violence against blacks and their white allies.
Keep in mind that after the 2013 Boston marathon bombing that left three dead and over 250 injured, we didn’t see anything like this level of anti-Muslim hate crimes. As the Associated Press noted in a detailed article published a few weeks after the Boston bombing, “Muslim civil rights leaders say the anti-Islam reaction has been more muted this time than after other attacks since Sept. 11.” And Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations told the AP reporter then that there had been “no uptick in reports of harassment, assaults or damage to mosques since the April 15 bombings.”
What is the difference between 2013 and now? Simple: Donald J. Trump. After the Boston bombing, leading political figures weren’t actively ratcheting up hate toward Muslims. But that is exactly what Trump has been doing. Trump’s proposals regarding Muslims aren’t about enacting policies, they are about sending the message that all Muslims are a danger to our nation.
Even after nearly 3,000 Americas were killed as a result of the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush did the exact opposite of what we are seeing from Trump. Bush, while addressing Congress two weeks after that horrific terror attack, stated: “I also want to speak tonight directly to Muslims throughout the world. We respect your faith… Its teachings are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah.”
What a contrast to what we now hear from Trump. This is truly the first time in my life that I have been fearful for the safety of my Muslim American family members and friends. And I’m far from alone in that feeling within the Muslim American community.
Is this what Trump means when he says he wants to make America great again? I’m not sure, but it appears that many of his supporters alarmingly believe that’s exactly what Trump means.
By: Dean Obeidallah, The Daily Beast, December 22, 2015
“The Immediacy Of The Harm”: This Is No Time For The Soft Rebuke
Earlier this week, I was wandering around a department store in suburban Cleveland, when a clerk spotted me and mercifully offered to help.
When I told her what I was trying to find, she laughed and said, “You are definitely in the wrong department.” Then, almost immediately, her smile vanished and she took a step back. “I didn’t mean–.”
She was wearing a hijab to cover her head, and we were standing face to face just days after the San Bernardino, California, terrorist attack and within hours of Donald Trump’s widely publicized attempt to cast all Muslims as potential terrorists. Like so many other Americans, I am appalled by his racist vitriol, but this encounter with a clerk just trying to do her job drove home the immediacy of the harm. This woman with the kind face was afraid, and in that moment, both of us knew it, and we knew why.
I began to babble, assuring her that I am as likely to get lost in a department store as I am on a country road in rural Ohio. She smiled and nodded, but her eyes were moist as she pointed to the escalator. “Thank you,” she said. As she turned and walked away, I realized she was thanking me for being nice to her.
This is what we’ve come to — a country where innocent Americans fear that their every encounter with a stranger in this country could be their last.
You don’t have to be a Muslim to experience this anxiety. You just have to be someone Trump and his fellow Republican candidates insist on casting as “the other,” which always means someone who isn’t white. Such political posturing threatens to cripple discourse in our communities, as Deepinder Mayell learned recently.
Mayell is an attorney and the director of the Advocates for Human Rights’ Refugee and Immigrant Program in Minneapolis. This fall, however, he was hoping to be just one of thousands of Minnesota Vikings fans as he showed up with friends for his first NFL game.
In an op-ed for StarTribune, Mayell wrote what happened after a man pushed others aside to make a beeline for him, demanding to know whether he was a refugee.
“In that moment, I was terrified,” Mayell wrote. “But what scared me the most was the silence surrounding me. As I looked around, I didn’t know who was an ally or an enemy. In those hushed whispers, I felt like I was alone, unsafe and surrounded. It was the type of silence that emboldens a man to play inquisitor. I thought about our national climate, in which some presidential candidates spew demagoguery and lies while others play politics and offer soft rebukes. It is the same species of silence that emboldened white supremacists to shoot five unarmed protesters recently in Minneapolis.”
The man who presumed he had the right to demand proof of Mayell’s citizenship had no idea whom he was picking on. He didn’t know that Mayell was born in Queens, New York, and grew up on Long Island. He also didn’t know that Mayell’s parents are Sikh Americans, not Muslims.
After summoning a security guard to his side, Mayell confronted the man and told him that he had frightened him and that what he had said was racist. The man apologized, but Mayell said that wasn’t enough. He wanted the man to be ejected. That didn’t happen.
In the newspaper’s online comments section under Mayell’s op-ed, the usual ugliness flourished like maggots on a carcass. He should have a thicker skin, commenters said. Many called him a liar, accusing him of making up the incident. A number of commenters assumed he is Muslim. Because, you know, his name isn’t Jim Bob or John-Boy and his face isn’t white.
“The man shouted, ‘You’re a refugee!’” Mayell said in a phone interview this week. “Not ‘you’re a Muslim’ or ‘a terrorist,’ just ‘refugee.’ It says so much about how national dialogue affects others.”
Fortunately, Mayell fielded far more positive responses to his op-ed. “In texts, phone calls and emails, there was overwhelming support,” he said. “People are pretty shocked this happened.”
What struck me about his essay and our conversation was how alone and vulnerable he felt in that crowd. “I wish somebody else would have stuck up for me. I understand how stunning it was, that they were in disbelief, perhaps. … But speaking out goes a long way for the person who is afraid — and for everyone in the public sphere.”
But in the moment, no one said a word.
We keep having this conversation in this country, asking ourselves: When is it appropriate to speak out against bigotry and racism? As if there were ever a bad time to stand for what is right or a right time to stay silent.
Our silence is our acquiescence. The time to stand up is now. The appropriate place to speak out is everywhere.
By: Connie Schultz, a Pulitzer Prize-Winning Columnist; The National Memo, December 10, 2015
“Muslim-American Soldiers To Trump: STFU”: Some Choice Words For Draft-Dodging Donald Trump
Republican presidential frontrunner @realDonaldTrump’s repeated insistence that he “love[s] the Muslims,” and believes that they are “great people,” is consistently undercut by his stated desire to impose fascist policies on millions of Muslims.
Over the past several weeks, these have included proposals for a Muslim database, closing down mosques, killing families, and—as a response to the Paris and San Bernardino attacks—the “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” until Congress figures out “what is going on.”
The proposed halt on Muslim immigration and travel was swiftly condemned by the White House, Republican and Democratic presidential contenders, Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan, the RNC, and the Pentagon, which warned that Trump’s blanket ban would weaken the fight against ISIS, not prevent domestic terrorism.
“There are Muslims serving patriotically in the U.S. military today as there are people of many faiths,” Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook told reporters on Tuesday. “Anything that tries to bolster, if you will, the [ISIS] narrative that the United States is somehow at war with Islam is contrary to our values and contrary to our national security.”
Many were quick to point out that the ban would include tourists and Muslim-American citizens who are currently abroad—including men and women serving in the American armed forces who are stationed abroad and who happen to be Muslim.
The prospect has not been going over well with Muslim-American military personnel, given how Donald J. Trump is running to become their commander in chief. (For more on Trump’s own draft deferments, see here.)
“I think what Donald Trump said is completely un-American,” Abdi Akgun, a staff sergeant in the U.S. Marine Corps, told The Daily Beast. “It’s completely outrageous. There are a lot of Muslims in this country who have pledged to be an American, that are paying their taxes, and are law-abiding citizens. And for Donald to make statements that are bigoted in nature is … not what being an American is about.”
Akgun joined the Marines in August 2000, right after high school. Two years later, he was fighting in Iraq in the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit. When asked about the possibility of serving under a President Trump, he simply released a brief sigh of exasperation and conceded that, “Well, there is a possibility, yes.”
“I really don’t have any [further] statement to make,” he continued.
Mohammed Shaker, a Rand-Paul-supporting Young Republican, was deployed to Iraq as an Army medic with the 82nd Airborne. He is, to put it generously, also perplexed by Trump’s position.
“If we’re being completely honest, I have no idea what Donald Trump is doing or why,” Shaker said. “It just doesn’t make sense to me … His policies are very dangerous. One of the worst things we can do, after any kind of tragic event … is to limit people’s freedoms.”
Shaker told CNN that, “as a veteran and as a service member of the United States military, yes, I would serve under Donald Trump,” because the job and mission is still “all about protecting America and our liberties.” However, that doesn’t mean he’s not unsettled by the Republican frontrunner’s rhetoric.
“It is very scary thing,” he told The Daily Beast. “There always will be someone running saying stuff like this … There’s always going to be one sort of authoritarian candidate … Hopefully he doesn’t get to implement any of that stuff.”
Shaker can only imagine what his family and life would have been like if there had been a blanket ban on Muslim immigration in decades past.
“If Donald Trump was president in 1989, or 1984 … if he had been president and had these policies in effect, we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now because maybe I never would have been born in America,” he said. “I would have been in Egypt. I never would have heard of Ron Paul. I never would have served … If we had his policy in practice now, what kind of people would we be stopping from coming to this country?”
Tayyib M. Rashid, also a Muslim-American, dropped out of college at the age of 19 to join the Marines; he served from 1997 to 2002. “We [Muslims] know the frustration we feel when people label us for [an] act of terrorism,” Rashid wrote for USA Today in July, addressing fellow American Muslims. “I say to you to keep your head up and walk proud. Continue to follow Prophet Muhammad’s example of compassion, service to humanity, and love for all, hatred for none.”
Rashid is another proud veteran who has no plans to endorse The Donald.
“This guy is hijacking America from Americans,” he told The Daily Beast.
“Mr. Trump’s suggestion is absolutely preposterous, hate-filled, and bigoted,” he said. “This kind of rhetoric is dividing our armed forces, and actually making us less safe. The personal offense is there, but thinking far beyond that, it could give some extremists within the U.S. the desire to take the law into their own hands. I am concerned about Muslim-Americans’ safety, and I’m concerned about Muslim service members’ safety. There are people who could take Mr. Trump’s comments as sponsorship for their own hate-filled actions.”
Rashid went on to stress that, as a member of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, he wants to “engage our fellow Americans in dialogue … to drive out hate and fear.”
“This is the root of defeating extremism,” he said. “We can’t continue to bomb terrorism out of existence, it just doesn’t work that way.”
It’s the kind of nuance that frequently seems to evade Trump, especially when the topic of conversation turns to war, Muslims, or mosques. For his part, the real-estate mogul and one-time reality-TV super-star would much rather settle for, “bomb[ing] the shit outta them [until] there would be nothing left.”
By: Asawin Suebsaeng, The Dail Beast, December 9, 2015
“The GOP Ignores The Bigger Terror Threat—From The Right”: Why Won’t Republicans Acknowledge Radical White Terrorists?
“I want surveillance of certain mosques,” bellowed Donald Trump to his followers at a campaign rally in Birmingham, Alabama, over the weekend. Ted Cruz recently declared that it would be “lunacy” to allow Muslim refugees into the United States because they “could be jihadists coming here to kill Americans.” And in the aftermath of the Paris attacks, Marco Rubio exclaimed that in order to keep Americans safe, we need to be vigilant in our war against “radical Islam.”
The threat posed by ISIS is real and must be forcefully addressed. But if these Republicans truly want to keep us safe, why don’t they ever raise the issue of right-wing terrorists? After all, as The New York Times reported just a few months ago, “Since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly twice as many people have been killed by white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims.”
The reality, of course, is that talking about scary Muslims plays great with the GOP base. In fact, a recent poll found that three-quarters of Republicans think Islam is “at odds” with American values.
But talking scary white guys gets you nowhere in the GOP. Keep in mind that Trump wouldn’t even unequivocally condemn the white supremacist groups or leaders who have expressed support for him, such as former Klan leader David Duke. The best Trump would do is say to a reporter of Duke’s endorsement that he would repudiate it “if that would make you feel better.”
We hear non-stop whining from the right about why won’t President Obama use the term “radical Islam”? Well, I have a question for Trump, Cruz, and Rubio: Why are you afraid to use the term “radical conservative” and address the threat posed to Americans from the right?
Some are likely asking what right-wing violence am I talking about? Trust me, if the perpetrators were Muslims you would know their names. So here are just a few recent incidents of terror from the right:
- Two white supremacist were arrested just two weeks ago for plotting a terrorist attack to bomb black churches and synagogues in Virginia. As law enforcement noted, these men were planning to shoot and bomb the “occupants of black churches and Jewish synagogues” in accordance with their “extremist beliefs.”
- Glendon Scott Crawford, a self-professed Klan member, was convicted in August for plotting a terrorist attack involving a weapon of mass destruction that would emit radiation in lethal doses. Crawford, who will be sentenced next month to 25 years to life, was planning to slaughter Muslim Americans in upstate New York.
- Craig Tanber, a white supremacist was arrested in September in the murder of Iranian-American Shayan Mazroei in California. Tanber’s girlfriend had reportedly called Mazroei a “terrorist” and said “fucking Iranians” before her boyfriend stabbed the 22-year-old Iranian American to death outside a pub in Irvine, California.
- The criminal trial of Robert Doggart, a Christian minister, will begin in Tennessee next January in connection with his plans to slaughter Muslim Americans in New York. His plot, which was thwarted by the FBI, involved working with far right-wing militia group members and using M-4 assault rifles, armor-piercing ammunition and even machetes to cut the Muslims “to shreds.”
And, of course, the most revolting terror attack from the right involved the case of Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who in June murdered nine African Americans in a Charleston, South Carolina, church in hopes of sparking a race war. Roof, like ISIS, was using violence to accomplish his political goals.
Interestingly Trump continues to lie that “thousands” of Muslims Americans cheered in New Jersey on 9/11 but he doesn’t mention that some white right-wing Americans cheered the killing of these nine African Americans by Roof. And despicably we saw conservatives on social media cheering Friday’s Planned Parenthood shooting because in their view the gunman was stopping abortions. (As of now, we don’t know for certain the motivation of the Planned Parenthood shooter but it could very well turn out to be another example of right-wing terrorism on U.S. soil.)
There are 784 active white supremacist groups in the United States per the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC.) And these groups are not just sitting around drinking Jack Daniel’s and cursing minorities. They have radicalized people to commit violent crimes in recent years, such as the six Sikhs gunned down at a temple in Wisconsin in 2012 and the three people murdered at a Jewish Community Center in Kansas in 2014 by white supremacists.
And that doesn’t even include the violent right-wing anti-government groups like the Sovereign Citizens movement that has in recent years killed police officers and attacked government offices.
But still not a peep from these GOP candidates. Yet Cruz has no problem finding time to demonize the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Just last month he claimed that some BLM protesters are “embracing and celebrating the murder of police officers.”
And a BLM protester was assaulted at a Trump event Saturday night after the man yelled out “black lives matter.” Shockingly, Trump defended the assault saying, “Maybe he should have been roughed up,” adding, “It was absolutely disgusting what he was doing.” Does Trump believe that an African America exercising his First Amendment rights is “disgusting”?
Within days of Trump’s defense of this assault, five BLM protesters were shot at a rally in Minneapolis by three white men that were reportedly white supremacists.
Now just so it’s clear, I’m not saying that these right-wing radicals are beheading people or carrying out massive attacks like we saw in Paris. But in some cases, it seems to be that that’s only because they were stopped before they could do just that.
If these GOP presidential candidates truly want to keep Americans safe, it’s time they stop ignoring the threat posed to Americans from the right. But who are we kidding? Expect more fear mongering about Muslims by the GOP. However, let’s not pretend later that we didn’t all see the warning signs about the threat of radical right-wing terror.
By: Dean Obeidallah, The Daily Beast, November 29, 2015
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