“America Needs To Get A Grip”: Want Less Terrorism? Start By Rejecting Trump’s Crusade
America needs to get a grip.
Since the slaughter of 14 innocents by two radicalized Muslim terrorists in San Bernardino, California, common sense has been a collateral casualty. Leading a wave of hysteria has been Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, with his harebrained ideas for denying various civil liberties to Muslims.
None of them would pass constitutional muster, thank goodness, and while his diatribes have found fertile ground among his party’s base, the Republican establishment has begun to push back against Trump.
That’s good sign, because we do have a terrorism problem that requires clear thinking and sober judgment. Our actions and policies must be grounded in accurate and detailed information. A report that received relatively little press at the time of its release in early December deserves a spotlight.
It’s far from comforting. The main message is that there is no snapshot profile to identify the jihadist on the block. That fact alone renders much of the blather we’re hearing about restrictions on this group or that beside the point.
“ISIS in America: From Retweets to Raqqa” is the result of a six-month study by the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. It studied online chatter, arrest data and other information in the cases of the 71 people arrested since March 2014 for crimes related to support of the Islamic State, along with counter-terrorism research. Fifty-six were arrested in 2015, a record number in a single year since the 9/11 attacks.
The report asks a crucial question, in the context of students and others caught heading to Syria, intending to join the Islamic State: “How could these seemingly ordinary young American men and, in growing numbers, women, be attracted to the world’s most infamous terrorist organization?” The answer is that we don’t know, “as each individual’s radicalization has its own unique dynamics.”
Average age of those studied was 26, but they ranged in age from 15 to 47; 86 percent were male, and most were U.S. citizens or permanent residents.
Another point that might surprise those who obsessed with Islamic immigrants: Converts to the faith were 40 percent of the people arrested.
In some ways, the study proved to be a bit prophetic about San Bernardino. It noted a decrease in the numbers traveling to join the Islamic State overseas, which raises the possibility that homegrown terrorists will increasingly focus on U.S. targets.
At less than 1 percent of the total adult population, Muslims in America are at a disadvantage with respect to public perception. Many Americans literally don’t know a single one of the estimated 1.8 million adults in the U.S. who are Muslim.
Assimilation and acceptance, as opposed to isolation, the report notes, are key to blocking radicalization. That’s actually a hopeful point we can look to. Despite the caustic debates about Islam playing out in our media of late, America’s Muslims are far more integrated than their coreligionists in many European countries. That’s a huge strength — and one that should not be undermined.
About 63 percent of Muslims in the U.S. are immigrants. They are also more likely to hold a college degree than native-born citizens, and Muslim women stand out for educational attainment. They’re an asset to our nation, and it’s in everybody’s interest, in the measures we take to protect ourselves from terrorism, not to alienate them.
If American citizens are truly to follow the “if you see something, say something” mode of alertness, we need to be knowledgeable. A mentality of Muslim-equals-terrorist will not help keep us safe.
Here’s a more helpful attitude. How about taking up some of the burden? Read up on the politics and history of the regions and countries where Muslim immigrants and refugees come from, on the conflict now ravaging Syria and Iraq, on the Islamic State and how it is recruiting and how its tactics morph. And get to know more Muslims.
This is an awkward time in our history when Muslim Americans are being expected to speak out after each radical attack, to defend their faith, to denounce bloodshed.
The presumption is offensive.
God forbid if I had to answer for every horrific deed committed by any Latino, or any woman, or any Catholic, or any journalist, or any other member of a group with which I could identify.
That’s a burden that can be lifted from Muslims in America only when the rest of us gain more insight into the faith, its members and the horrific ways that the Islamic State seeks to radicalize.
By: Mary Sanchez, Opinion-Page Columnist for The Kansas City Star; The National Memo, December 12, 2015
“A Task That Cannot Be Avoided”: The Necessary Task Of Integrating Islam Within The West
In what is both a reflection and an amplification of rising anti-Muslim sentiment in this country, Donald Trump has called for a ban on all Muslims entering the United States “until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”
Trump’s xenophobic statement and the popular fears it reflects have to be addressed intelligently and forcefully. We should begin addressing them by admitting that there are unique challenges with integrating Muslims and Islam itself into polities shaped by Western liberalism. But it is a task that has to be done. It cannot be avoided even by the most extreme restrictions on immigration or travel, because Muslims are our already our neighbors. And in an age of decentralized authority and instant digital communication, Islam will remain a way of life available to anyone in the West.
A particularly intense example of America’s Trumpian Islamophobia was captured at a town meeting in Virginia over plans to build a mosque. A man erupted at a Muslim who was speaking, “Every Muslim is a terrorist, period.” Others at the meeting applauded the erupting man for saying that he didn’t want Islam’s “death cult” in his town.
That is ignorant and wrong. But if you will, consider a more thoughtful and advanced version of this argument: The Prophet Muhammad was a military leader and conqueror, a militant posture that shapes Islam to this day. The Grand Ayatollah was telling the truth when he said “Islam is politics or it is nothing.” Osama bin Laden’s fatwa against America was totally consistent with the texts and spirit of early Islam. Today’s millions upon millions of non-violent Muslims could reasonably be described as lax Muslims.
It’s easy enough to dismiss that argument as bigoted, too, and to note that it fails to recognize the very real variety within Islam. At the same time, we should recognize that our culture entertains similarly structured arguments against more familiar religions.
People argue that Christianity is inherently sexist. Or that Catholicism’s view of authority makes it resistant to civil law. We see and sometimes nurture the same preening, vandal spirit of the “Draw Muhammad day” when we call a condom-portrait of Pope Benedict art. Some of the right-wing criticisms of Islam or the customs of immigrants from Islamic countries can have a distinctively secularist flavor, for instance, their fear about the spread of female genital mutilation. It’s possible that the discomfort some progressives have with criticizing Islam itself forcefully would disappear if Muslims seemed like a less vulnerable minority than they are. How do we get there?
Some say that today’s anxiety around Muslim immigration is as irrational as previous fears about integrating immigrant Catholics in American life. That’s too glib. While even the highest authorities in Catholicism of the 19th century did occasionally declare itself hostile to liberal society, the truth is that liberalism itself was shaped by its Christian inheritance. Islam’s tensions with the West run much deeper than Catholicism’s tensions with America ever did. Islam differs in important ways from Judaism and Christianity. There is Islam’s emphasis on jurisprudence over theology. And Islam’s form of triumphalism, which has more difficulty reconciling itself to a world in which Islamic ideas are marginal.
But Western Christians or secular people should not presume to tell Muslims that true Islam is violent. It is easy to find quietist strains of Islam that impress with their piety and devotion to the texts that are at the heart of Islam. A number of scholars and Islamic commentators, from Muhammad Abduh to Fazlur Rahman, have preached an Islam that is in creative tension with the West, rather than outright conflict.
Besides, America’s liberal bargain, more than Europe’s, is capacious and could accommodate a variety of expressions of Islam, just as it accommodates a variety of other religions, some of which build communities that strike us as illiberal. The challenges this represents may be truly awkward, but they are nonetheless necessary.
Consider the community of Samtar Hasidic Jews at Kiryas Joel in Monroe, New York, which has historically fallen within my own Congressional district. This community of Jews sees huge increases of its population because of its incredible fertility rate and welcome attitude to its own co-religionists. Nearly 90 percent of the community speaks Yiddish at home. Nearly half cannot speak English competently. It is widely reported that religious authorities in Kiryas Joel can swing the vote of the town and with their vote, the divided Congressional district in which it sits. Kiryas Joel’s residents have an awkward and sometimes legally combative relationship with their Monroe neighbors over planning and development.
There in Kiryas Joel is much of what people claim to fear about Islamic integration, a separate, “unmeltable” group, one that keeps to its own language and folkways. And yet Kiryas Joel’s peaceful existence with its neighbors is a testament not only to that community’s genius, but the genius of America as well. There is simply no pressing reason for New York to tear up its very generous legal settlement to assimilate Kiryas Joel on its own terms.
Similarly, there is no inherent reason for America to tear up its legal settlement in response to Islam itself. There may be good reasons to limit immigration from Muslim nations. I believe there are. But they are not substantively very different from reasons to limit immigration from any or all nations.
And finally, if the anti-Muslim chauvinists really cannot handle any of the above arguments, the final argument for finding a way to better integrate Muslims should be to prove the superiority of the West itself. Christians, Jews, and other religious minorities have existed within Islamic civilization for over a millennia, not without incident, and not without awkward or painful compromises. If the West is better and stronger than Islamic civilization, it should be able to tolerate religious minorities better than Islamic civilization, too.
By: Michael Brendan Dougherty, The Week, 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 Real Danger In Trump’s Rhetoric”: Hurting America’s Standing With Allies And Helping Recruit More Extremists
September, 2015: “I love the Muslims, I think they’re great people.”
Would he appoint a Muslim to his cabinet? “Oh, absolutely, no problem with that.”
Yes, that was Donald Trump three months ago. Now, his campaign’s Dec. 7 press release states: “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” This comes in addition to his calls for surveillance against mosques and the possible creation of a national database of Muslims in the U.S.
Many of the Republican candidates for president have not hesitated to echo Trump’s bellicose rhetoric on immigration or other anti-Muslim statements. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz even introduced legislation to keep refugees from coming to the U.S. for at least three years who are from countries where there is a “substantial” amount of control by the Islamic State group or al-Qaida.
But, now, they seem to have had enough: Jeb Bush tweeted that Trump is “unhinged”; Ohio Gov. John Kasich condemned Trump’s “outrageous divisiveness that characterizes his every breath”; former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore called it “fascist talk”; Sen. Lindsey Graham tweeted “every candidate for president needs to do the right thing & condemn” Trump; and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said “we do not need to resort to that type of activity.”
Even Dick “Darth Vader” Cheney said, “I think this whole notion that somehow we can just say no more Muslims, just ban a whole religion, goes against everything we stand for and believe in. I mean, religious freedom has been a very important part of our history and where we came from. A lot of people, my ancestors got here, because they were Puritans.”
But the real danger of Trump’s rhetoric and policies is not domestic or political here at home – though one can argue that it makes us less safe and more vulnerable – it is from our friends and allies abroad.
Here is what the French prime minister tweeted: “Mr. Trump, like others, strokes hatred; our ONLY enemy is radical Islamism.” A spokeswoman for British Prime Minister David Cameron called the remarks “divisive, unhelpful and quite simply wrong … what politicians need to do is to look at ways they can bring communities together and make clear that these terrorists are not representative of Islam and indeed what they are doing is a perversion of Islam.”
A columnist for Israel’s Haaretz wrote: “For some Jews, the sight of thousands of supporters waving their fists in anger as Trump incited against Muslims and urged a blanket ban on their entry to the United States could have evoked associations with beer halls in Munich a century ago.” In Pakistan it was called “the worst kind of bigotry mixed with ignorance” by a leading human rights activist.
Trump’s ban would even include world leaders who are Muslim. They would not be allowed into the United States, let alone tourists or relatives of Americans or world renowned individuals coming for a scientific meeting here.
Just like his plan to deport 12 million people, the absurdity is readily apparent. But put yourself in the shoes of of one of the 1.7 billion people across the globe who is a Muslim, 23 percent of the world’s population; you are watching the leading Republican candidate for president of the United States making these statements.
How many recruits will the Islamic State group gain from Trump’s move toward fascism? How confused will young, angry, poor Muslims in the war-torn Middle East be, and how many Muslims will believe “successful” Donald Trump represents American thought and values and our approach to the world?
How long will it take for us to undo this damage? How many years? What price will we pay?
Those may be the scariest questions of all.
By: Peter Fenn, Political Strategist and Head of Fenn Communications, U. S. News and World Report, December 9, 2015
“Trump Proves That Liberals Have Been Right All Along”: Republicans Letting Expediency Get The Better Of Them
If you’ve been following Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy and his effect on the Republican primary closely, you were perhaps beset Monday by a strange sense of speechlessness—one born less of ineffability than of tedium.
Trump’s plan to prohibit Muslim immigration into the U.S. is indeed extreme, but to students of the Trump phenomenon and conservative politics more broadly, it was neither unexpected nor the source of any new or profound lesson.
While closing the country to foreign Muslims altogether is a radical idea relative to our founding ideals and current policy, it is but an incremental step relative to the outer bounds of legitimate debate in the GOP primary. Republican presidential candidates have supported discriminating against Muslims in our refugee policy, and opposed the very notion of a Muslim-American president, all without subjecting themselves to universal condemnation. The most surprising part of the latest Trump story is that it proves a Republican candidate can take Islamophobia too far for his party’s tastes.
For most liberals, and for the Trump-backing or Trump-curious segments of the right, the Trump phenomenon needs little further explanation. The only people who claim to be befuddled by the Trump phenomenon are officials on knife-edge in the party he leads.
On the left, the view that Republicans allowed the conservative grassroots to turn their party into a political action committee for white ressentiment has evolved over the years from an argument into a creed. Since at least 2012, liberals have been warning (at times mockingly, but never disingenuously) that by indulging and at times fanning the hostilities and procedural extremism of this part of their coalition, Republicans were letting expediency get the better of them.
When large swaths of the conservative movement resisted the notion that the GOP needed to widen its appeal to minorities, and could win by appealing to a broader base of whites, it was liberals who warned that these voters would drag the party into a racial abyss.
Trump is the fulfillment of that prophecy. Better than any Republican candidate in recent memory, he intuits the mood of the disaffected Republican electorate. Or rather, because he’s almost entirely uninterested in straddling party factions, he gives voice to their paranoia and racism without massaging it the way the pretenders to his lead do. It’s possible to imagine a more traditional politician, like Ted Cruz, taking up Trump’s mantle without ever making Reince Priebus or House Speaker Paul Ryan angry, but their platforms would look practically identical.
This is the main reason GOP protestations, five months after Trump reached the top of the polls, ring so hollow. Republicans behave as if Trump is both a self-contained phenomenon and a singular mouthpiece for the most important segment of their electorate. An unmetastasized malignancy and a vital organ, simultaneously. The former view serves to reassure the rest of the public (and GOP donors among them) that Trump is merely a passing fad—an unlovely figurehead for a perfectly lovely segment of the voting base. That once he’s gone, everything will return to normal.
But the former view is also facially incompatible with the latter. It’s why their condemnations of Trump are either half-hearted, or paired with some alternate, less overtly discrediting appeal to his fans. The modus operandi of second-tier candidates has been to tiptoe around Trump’s controversies, rather than create contrast with them. Even Ryan, who denounced Trump’s Monday comments in the most unambiguous terms, still pledged to support him should he win the Republican nomination.
The Republican National Committee developed its candidate pledge as a way to hem Trump in. The pledge has evolved into a symbol of the party’s commitment to keeping Trump’s fans in the fold. If Trump were to vanish suddenly, his supporters would either defect to an alternate poll leader over whom the party could better exert control, or else the remaining candidates would enter a race to the bottom to win their support.
And yet, while there’s something novel and fascinating about the pageant—the Republican House speaker rebuking his party’s presidential frontrunner; the fraying ties between Trumpistas and the rest of the party—the nature of the crisis is totally mundane to liberals. So common is it on the left to compare the Trump phenomenon (and the Sarah Palin phenomenon before it) to a Frankenstein’s monster, that the analysis has become trite.
To really shake things up—to raise new questions and provoke new thinking about conservative politics—the Republican Party would have to do something drastic like rescind the loyalty pledge as it pertains to Trump. Unless and until that happens, Trump is likely to continue shoring up support on the basis of increasingly grotesque views, and leave those of us who’ve been clear-eyed about it all along with nothing much to add.
By Brian Beutler, Senior Editor, The New Republic, December 9, 2015
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