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At a rally in South Carolina in December 2015, then-candidate Donald Trump announces his proposed “total and complete shutdown of Muslim immigration to the United States.” Image Credit: CNN.
President Trump’s whole political career has been built on Islamophobia
This op-ed by Bridge Initiative Senior Research Fellow Arsalan Iftikhar originally appeared in The Washington Post.
You know things are bad in your country when the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan praises the president of the United States for retweeting misleading videos about Muslims, peddled by a right-wing hate group from England whose leader was convicted of a hate crime last year.
But that is exactly where we find ourselves.
President Trump’s latest Twitter controversy revolved around him sharing three murky videos purporting to show violent acts by Muslims. The original tweets were sent out by a leader of the right-wing Britain First party, a 31-year-old felon named Jayda Fransen who was convicted last year of “religiously aggravated harassment” for verbal abuse of a Muslim woman wearing a hijab in front of her children. The British government sharply rebuked Trump, which prompted the president to lash out Wednesday night at Prime Minister Theresa May on Twitter. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended the retweets, saying that even though the videos were unverified and at least one didn’t show what Fransen said it did, that doesn’t matter: “Whether it’s a real video, the threat is real.”
Sadly, it was just the latest outburst of Islamophobia from Trump.
“I think Islam hates us,” he told CNN last year. But the thread runs through his entire (relatively short) political career. Trump began his whole “birther” controversy against President Barack Obama by publicly suggesting during a 2011 ABC television interview that Obama was trying to conceal his religion by withholding his birth certificate, because “maybe it says he’s a Muslim.”
In November 2015, he told Sean Hannity that the United States has “absolutely no choice” but to close some mosques in response to terrorist attacks in Paris that month. A few days later, during a campaign rally in Alabama — which included a physical altercation between a black protester and several white supporters — Trump suggested that law enforcement should monitor Islamic houses of worship across the United States: “I want surveillance of certain mosques, if that’s okay.” The crowd cheered. He kept at that theme all through 2016, including telling Fox News that “we have to be very strong in terms of looking at the mosques” across the country.