“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
“Another Inconvenient Truth For The GOP”: How Will 2016 Republicans Lead A World That Largely Agrees With Obama?
The 14 Republicans running for president can’t decide if Russian President Vladimir Putin is a great leader or a dangerous and despicable “gangster” and “KGB thug,” but they all agree on one thing: President Obama couldn’t lead his way out of a paper bag.
When discussing Obama’s foreign policy, they routinely rely on words like “feckless” and “weak” and “indecisive,” arguing that this alleged lack of spine has left the U.S. where “our friends no longer trust us, and our enemies no longer fear us.” They all say that any of them — Mike Huckabee, Donald Trump, Ben Carson — would be better able to lead the world than Obama or any of the Democrats running to replace him. Even Jeb Bush, who appears to despise Trump, said Sunday he would support him in the general election “because anybody is better than Hillary Clinton. Let me just be clear about that.”
Here’s the thing: On just about every major topic in world affairs, Obama is more closely aligned with America’s major allies than any of the Republican candidates. Either the Republicans are in denial about this inconvenient truth or they have a plan to work around it. If they do, I for one would love to hear it.
Let’s start with climate change, since all major world leaders — America’s friends, foes, and those the U.S. has a complicated relationship with — gathered in Paris last week to discuss not whether climate change is real but what hard decisions need to be made to address it. Obama worked toward this summit, which ends later this week, for years, talking with world leaders one-on-one and setting up the U.S. emissions cuts. It’s frankly hard to imagine any of the Republican presidential candidates even attending COP21.
Frontrunner Trump has called climate change a “hoax,” and Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas), rapidly rising to runner-up status, accuses U.S. climate scientists of “cooking the books” and espousing “pseudoscientific” theories on human-influenced global warming. Even the GOP candidates who do believe that humanity is adversely affecting the climate say they don’t think that’s a big deal or don’t believe the government can or should do much about it. And even if one of those candidate open to the idea of addressing climate change is elected, he will still lead a party that is opposed to any such action.
There are different ideas on how to best reduce carbon emissions, but the GOP’s indifference to or denial of climate change would put it on the lunatic fringe in America’s closest allied nations. In a recent study, Sondre Båtstrand at Norway’s University of Bergen examined the policy platforms of the main conservative party in nine countries — the U.S., U.K., Norway, Sweden, Spain, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Germany — and found that “the U.S. Republican Party is an anomaly in denying anthropogenic climate change.” (The article is behind a paywall, but you can read a summary at The Guardian, or Jonathan Chait’s more opinionated synopsis at New York.)
The GOP is so out-of-step with the rest of the world on climate change that one of the big hurdles to a global climate agreement is the expectation that the Republican-controlled Congress won’t ratify a legally binding treaty. Obama insists that parts of the deal will be binding under international law, but proponents of an effective climate pact are concerned that GOP opposition will leave it toothless. Other countries, The Associated Press reports, are annoyed that the world is “expected to adjust the agreement to the political situation in one country.”
Let’s turn to Syria, a country where the world only really agrees on one thing: The Islamic State must be defeated. This is one area, broadly, where Obama and the GOP candidates agree, though they differ on the best way to defeat ISIS. Jeb Bush, like Turkey, wants a no-fly zone over parts of Syria, and Trump wants Russia to wipe out ISIS for everyone else. But most countries, and certainly most U.S. allies, favor bombing ISIS in Syria and helping local militias fight them on the ground, something Obama was the first to initiate.
Russia has committed ground troops (as has the U.S., to a very limited degree, just recently), but Russian forces are mainly propping up the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. A few of the Republicans, like Cruz, support leaving Assad in power, a position held mostly by Russia and Iran. European allies, Israel, the Gulf Arab states, and Turkey agree with Obama that Assad must go.
When it comes to refugees from the Syrian mess, the GOP field is unified against accepting any in the U.S. Among U.S. allies, Obama is on the stingy side, but his pledge to take in 10,000 refugees in 2016 still puts him closer to Canada, taking in 10,000 this month alone; France — the site of the terrorist attack that prompted the Republican refugee retreat — which has vowed to take in 30,000 over the next two years; and Germany, signed on to accept 500,000 asylum-seekers.
On Cuba, the U.S. diplomatic freeze and economic embargo has put the U.S. at odds with Europe and the overwhelming majority of Latin America for years. All but two Republican candidates — Trump and Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) — oppose Obama’s Cuba thaw. Only three of the 14 candidates — Bush, Paul, and Gov. John Kasich (Ohio) — aren’t totally against the Iran nuclear deal Obama’s team negotiated with not just U.S. allies Britain, France, and Germany, but also China, Russia, and Iran.
For what its worth, the world thinks highly of Obama’s leadership, according to a Gallup poll of 134 countries — the U.S. got top leadership marks in 2014, as it has every year since a low point in 2008. Still, the Iran deal is a good prompt to note that not every U.S. ally hews closer to Obama than the GOP on foreign policy.
Israel and Saudi Arabia, for example, oppose the Iran accord, and Israel’s conservative government neither likes nor trusts Obama. But here again, Obama’s hard line against new Israeli settlements is closer to the world consensus than the GOP’s unwavering allegiance — as is evident from every United Nations vote in favor of the Palestinians and every lone U.S. veto in U.N. Security Council resolutions condemning some Israeli military action in the Palestinian territories.
And Obama has certainly made mistakes, which Republicans are right to call him out on. Drawing a figurative “red line” in Syria and then failing to enforce it, even when it became clear Congress wouldn’t support him? Obama would probably take that back if he could. Libya? The U.S. followed France, Britain, and the Arab League into that intervention, but it was Obama’s decision to commit U.S. air and sea assets to the fight and wrangle U.N. approval. “Leading from behind” — the most enduring phrase (coined by an anonymous Obama adviser) from the Libya campaign — is a questionable idea of leadership.
The Republican presidential candidates may talk about the U.S. leading with its freedom beacon, or its values, or the example of its raw exceptionalism, but when they get down to specifics, they really only talk about raw power, usually of the military or theatrical variety. A president has to make tough calls, and when you’re the leader of the world’s sole superpower, those decisions have very real, potentially catastrophic consequences.
Most of Obama’s big foreign policy victories — the Russian nuke-reduction treaty, the Iran nuclear deal, the Cuba thaw, perhaps a COP21 accord — have been off the battlefield, and he’s probably not unhappy about it. All of those have involved finding common ground with at least one hostile country, and Obama has been the driving force behind all of them. “Your credibility and America’s ability to influence events depends on taking seriously what other countries care about,” Obama told reporters in Paris on Tuesday. He was talking about climate change, but it could just as well be a guiding policy.
That may not be the kind of global stewardship Republicans are talking about when they talk about leadership. But if they want to win the right to lead the United States, they should explain how their White House would lead a world in which, on just about every major issue, the U.S. president is the odd man out.
By: Peter Weber, The Week, December 7, 2015
“Endangering Christian Lives”: Ted Cruz Demonized Arab Christians Before He Liked Them
Just over a year after giving Middle Eastern Christians advice that could have put them in danger, Sen. Ted Cruz has announced Syrian Christian refugees are not a threat and should be first in line to enter the U.S.
And some of his old critics say that’s a long-overdue change in tone.
On Sept. 10, 2014, Cruz headed to the Omni Shoreham hotel in Washington to speak at the gala for a conference called “In Defense of Christians,” which brought together Christian leaders from throughout the Middle East to highlight the brutal persecution their congregants faced at the hands of the Islamic State.
The fact Cruz was speaking there at all caused waves in the conservative Beltway press. It started when the Washington Free Beacon reported earlier that day that some of the conference’s speakers and attendees had controversial affiliations; one speaker had previously defended Hezbollah, and another—years earlier—had touted a conspiracy theory about “Christians with Zionist orientations.”
Despite the bad press, Cruz took the stage that evening and launched into a speech, saying that everyone present was united by their commitment to defending persecuted Christians and Jews. He criticized ISIS, Hamas, al Qaeda, and Hezbollah, all to applause. But then he started talking about Israel.
“Christians have no greater ally than the Jewish state,” he said, to a mixture of boos and applause. “Let me say this, those who hate Israel, hates America.”
A mixture of boos and applause followed.
“If you will not stand with Israel and the Jews, I will not stand with you,” he concluded, exiting the stage.
The next day, Cruz doubled down, defending his decision to walk out on the group. He even gave a statement to Breitbart saying the evening “deteriorated into a shameful display of bigotry and hatred.”
“[B]igotry and hatred have no place in this discussion,” he continued in that statement. “Anti-Semitism is a corrosive evil, and it reared its ugly head tonight.”
Breitbart’s initial headline of one story even implied the event’s attendees weren’t really Christians.
The event’s organizers—who brought together a historic group of Christian leaders at a moment when their communities faced (and still face) genocide—weren’t impressed.
“He came to a summit in defense of Christians and actually endangered Christian lives,” said the group’s executive director, Andrew Doran, according to the National Catholic Register.
Doran noted to the paper that “standing with Israel”—as Cruz demanded that event attendees do—can make already-vulnerable Christians top targets for Islamist extremists. And in the case of the Syrian civil war, Christian bishops have pushed for their flocks to stay neutral. Middle Eastern geopolitics make for happy hour chit-chat in Washington; for Christians in that region, though, those stances are sometimes matters of life or death.
“People had come here trusting us not to put their lives in danger,” Doran continued to the paper. “People had come here for the sake of unity, and for politicians to take advantage of this for their own agenda is absolutely disgraceful.”
So while Cruz has apologized to conservative political pundits, he has never expressed remorse for demanding that attendees applaud Israel or for characterizing them as hateful bigots.
Since launching his presidential campaign, though, event organizers say Cruz’s tone has changed. In particular, they point to comments he made on Sunday about Syrian Christians.
“There is no meaningful risk of Christians committing acts of terror,” Cruz said at a recent campaign stop in South Carolina, arguing that the U.S. should admit Christian refugees but not Muslim ones.
That particular debate arose in the wake of the terror attacks on Paris, as one of the shooters entered France by pretending to be a refugee.
“If there were a group of radical Christians pledging to murder anyone who had a different religious view than they, we would have a different national security situation,” he continued. “But it is precisely the Obama administration’s unwillingness to recognize that or ask those questions that makes them so unable to fight this enemy. Because they pretend as if there is no religious aspect to this.”
An adviser to the In Defense of Christians group told The Daily Beast that this new approach represents a change in tone for the senator, and a welcome one at that.
“Senator Cruz took an unfortunate posture at last year’s IDC Summit considering the lives of some in the room were imperiled by what he said, and since some of the attendees were recent survivors of the invasion by Daesh, and others had lost family members to Daesh,” the advisor said.
“That said, we are pleased to now see Senator Cruz offer more thoughtful and constructive comments to improve, rather than imperil the Christians of the Middle East who seem to be forgotten when it comes to the soundness of the strategies and tactics to defeat Daesh, on the matters of refugee status, and qualifying Middle East Christians as victims of a genocide,” he continued.
Catherine Frazier, a spokeswoman for Cruz’s campaign, strongly disagreed that the senator’s tone on Middle Eastern Christians has changed.
“Cruz rightly spoke against those who loudly booed his support for Israel,” she said. “The entire purpose of the dinner, of which he was a keynote, was to support persecuted Christians in the Middle East, a cause for which he has consistently and strongly supported. I completely disagree with any assertion that he has changed his ‘tone.’”
Does Ted Cruz talk differently about marginalized populations depending on who’s listening—defending their integrity when it’s convenient and characterizing them as hateful bigots when needed? You decide.
By: Betsy Woodruff, The Daily Beast, November 18, 2015
“Pillars Of Moral Values”: Hey, Hobby Lobby Boss; Thou Shalt Not Steal
In their brief to the Supreme Court defending their “right” to deny their employees access to contraception, Hobby Lobby owner David Green and his family asserted (PDF) their principles of “[h]onoring the Lord in all we do by operating the company in a manner consistent with Biblical principles.”
Apparently, that doesn’t include “Thou shall not steal.”
According to an exclusive by The Daily Beast’s Candida Moss and Joel Baden, the Green family has been under investigation by the federal government for smuggling antiquities. Moss and Baden report:
A senior law enforcement source with extensive knowledge of antiquities smuggling confirmed that these ancient artifacts had been purchased and were being imported by the deeply-religious owners of the crafting giant, the Green family of Oklahoma City. For the last four years, law enforcement sources tell The Daily Beast, the Greens have been under federal investigation for the illicit importation of cultural heritage from Iraq.
In 2011, a shipment of several hundred clay tablets was seized by U.S. customs agents in Memphis. The tablets, which had been shipped from Israel, were inscribed in cuneiform, the ancient script of Assyria and Babylonia in what is now present-day Iraq. And the tablets were confirmed to be several thousand years old. Yet on the customs filings, the Greens had listed the contents of the shipment as “hand-crafted clay tiles”—which was true, technically, but pretty damn misleading. Moss and Baden draw an analogy to another recent customs scandal in which a Picasso worth $15 million was shipped into the United States with a custom declaration form saying it was a “handicraft.” Again, technically true. But a deception meant to evade the scrutiny of customs officials.
So much for “Thou shalt not bear false witness.”
The tablets were supposedly intended to join some 40,000 or so ancient artifacts the Green family owns and will include in the Museum of the Bible, which the family is funding and will open in Washington, D.C., in 2017.
Of course the perverse irony in all of this comes from the fact that the Green family won its historic Hobby Lobby lawsuit in the Supreme Court, establishing that corporations, which are people, too, can have religion and thus claim religious exemptions under the law. And now we have the same family allegedly breaking the law in order to build a religious museum that reflects their values. Hot damn, that’s some audacity.
Recall that in the Hobby Lobby case, the Green family didn’t want its employees to be able to access certain types of contraception under the company’s insurance plan. Prior to filing their suit, Hobby Lobby’s insurance had in fact covered such contraception and the medical and scientific community agrees that those forms of contraception are not equivalent to abortion. But the Greens asserted their personal opinion as fact, attached them to their business and used their supposed “fundamental values” to fundamentally upend the course of corporate jurisprudence and civil rights in America. Perhaps all while they were stealing religious antiquities from Iraq.
What remains unclear is how the Greens came by the antiquities in the first place. Were they outright stolen? Or purchased in the black market, from some shady group? At best, the Greens are taking the cultural heritage of Iraq. At worst, the Greens are wittingly or unwittingly supporting some really bad actors over there.
Personally, I would usually think myself above this sort of finger pointing and eyebrow raising. But the Greens brought this on themselves, not simply by illegally importing antiquities from Iraq but by doing so while promoting themselves as pillars of moral values—and altering the entire legal precedent of the United States to impose their values on others. You know how they say people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones? Well, people who want to use their narrowly construed extremist religious views to deny basic reproductive rights to women shouldn’t flout the most universal of religious principles by stealing and lying.
By: Sally Kohn, The Daily Beast, October 27, 2015
“Fox News Wants Kids To Fear Muslims”: Don’t Confuse Children With Facts Or Valid Information They Haven’t Been Told By Fox News
It appears that Fox News is not content with just feeding anti-Muslim crap to its older-skewing audience and now wants schools to teach children to fear Muslims, too.
On Tuesday’s episode of the Fox News show Outnumbered, the brain trust gathered to express outrage that a Georgia public school was teaching students about Islam in a way they viewed as being far too positive.
Fox’s Keith Ablow demanded the young students be taught in world religion classes that Muslims want “to destroy the United States,” adding, “How can you leave that out?” Fox’s Harris Faulkner chimed in, “Why wouldn’t you teach it in the context of the headlines today?”
And Andrea Tantaros, who never misses the opportunity to up the hysteria, added that schools should teach students that Muslims have “been killing people for hundreds of years” and that they “have sought to destroy the West.”
So in sum, Fox News wants 11- and 12-year-old kids to learn about the best of the other faiths, but the worst about Islam. Unless, of course, these Fox hosts are truly arguing that the radicals of every faith should be taught to the kids as well.
For example, in discussing Christianity, the students would be taught about the Christian terrorists like the Army of God, “a network of violent Christianists” that openly promotes killing abortion providers like George Tiller, who was killed by a member of the group in 2009. They could also be taught about the Christian militiamen who are slaughtering Muslims in in the Central African Republic, including beheading a young Muslim man in that nation’s capital.
In teaching Judaism, the lesson plan would include the Jewish terrorists who just a few months ago burned down the famed “Loaves and Fishes” church in Israel. These Jewish radicals have also in recent years engaged in other attacks on Christian churches because they view anything that’s not Jewish in Israel as being idolatry, and as they put it, “idols will have their heads cut off.”
I’m sure that the Fox News types would object to a curriculum that included these radicals when teaching the basics of Christianity and Judaism. And they would be correct. The students should be taught about the mainstream beliefs and followers of each faith, especially when learning about these religions for the first time. By making radicals part of that lesson plan, however, they would be wrongly elevating these terrorists to the level of being a mainstream part of the religion. (Of course, incidents about religious extremism should be part of any current events curriculum.)
But the views of these Fox News personalities are almost tame when compared to some parents in states like Georgia, Tennessee, and Florida that are upset their children are learning anything about Islam. Greg Locke, a Tennessee pastor, was so outraged that students were being taught about Islam in world history class, he encouraged students last month to not do the assignments concerning Islam and instead “take an F because this history class is part of an ‘Islamic invasion.’” He also claimed that teaching kids about Islam was “absolute brainwashing” and declared, “We’re not going to stand for it.”
Likewise, a father in Georgia demanded last year that if students are taught about Islam, they must also be told about the Muslims he claims are “going around beheading people in America.”
Some parents didn’t expressly object to Islam being taught, but were concerned that Islam is being taught in school at the expense of Christianity. That sounds like a valid issue, but time and time again school officials have made it clear in these various states that Christianity and all other major religions are taught equally. In Georgia, for example, a school official explained that the curriculum on world religions has been the same for 30 years and teaches all major faiths in equal increments.
But the comment that probably best sums up how many of these parents feel comes from one in Georgia who stated: “I honestly don’t want my child learning about Islam at all.” And troublingly this sentiment is held by 44 percent of American adults who responded in a recent poll they don’t want to learn more about Islam. Apparently these people have learned all they need to know about Islam and aren’t open to changing their views. They don’t want to be confused with facts or valid information they haven’t been told by Fox News.
In a time when anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States is at record highs and with people like Donald Trump and Ben Carson ginning up the hate against Muslims, there was never a more urgent time for an accurate counter narrative to the scary images we see of terror groups like ISIS.
Thankfully, younger people have more positive view of Islam and Muslims than their older counterparts. In fact, a July poll found that 76 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds would support a Muslim for president. Sorry, Ben Carson.
The hope is that those older people who have concerns about Muslims will at least be open minded enough to have a discussion about the issue. But at the very least we shouldn’t prevent young Americans from learning about what mainstream Islam truly is, as opposed to what ISIS and al Qaeda want you to believe the faith is about. Why give these terrorist groups exactly what they want?
By: Dean Obeidallah, The Daily Beast, October 2, 2015
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