Well that all got quite ugly quite fast. Last week Donald Trump, a contender for US Republican party’s Presidential nominee, was asked by a supporter at a rally:
‘We have a problem in this country – it’s called Muslims. We know our current president is one… But anyway, we have training camps growing where they want to kill us. That’s my question. When can we get rid of them?’
In the days since Donald Trump has got some flak for appearing nervously to humour this ill-informed questioner rather than shutting him down or correcting him.
Then during an interview at the weekend the only Republican contender who has been anywhere near Trump in recent approval ratings, Ben Carson (profiled in the magazine last week here) was dragged into hypotheticals about whether America should ever have a Muslim President. Mr Carson said:
‘I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that.’
For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t at all mind seeing a reformist Muslim like Zuhdi Jasser run for the American Presidency — indeed I’d support him over and above any of the current crop of candidates. But neither Zuhdi nor any other Muslim is currently running for the Presidency so it was a stupid trap for Carson to fall into. Nevertheless, America is now having a feverish debate about all this, with Republican and Democrat rivals lamming into Trump and Carson for their alleged bigotry.
All of which is interesting because among other things it continues to overlook a number of obvious points. Not the least is the climate which may have produced such dim-witted questions and answers.
Consider that you are an average citizen in the US and you learn one day that a Muslim Army major and psychiatrist, Major Nidal Hasan, has been giving seminars on the legitimacy of jihad against American troops on a US military facility. And then one day that same Major Hasan guns down dozens of his colleagues at Fort Hood while screaming ‘Allahu Akbar’. Imagine that you finally read about the government investigation into this and that all members of the administration insist, like the report, that this attack had nothing to do with the faith of Major Hasan but was instead simply a mundane, if tragic, case of ‘workplace violence.’ Imagine that this goes on for years, with every beheading and terrorist attack having ‘nothing to do with Islam’ because ‘Islam is a religion of peace’.
Eventually every American official ends up so reluctant to link the words ‘Islam’ and ‘extremism’ that when American hostages are ritually decapitated by the terrorists of ISIS the US President does not simply insist that this has nothing to do with the religion of Islam but that the group’s actions ‘represent no faith, least of all the Muslim faith’.
When an administration indulges in such reckless, wilful blindness, the public who can see things with their own eyes are left to educate themselves and find their own way through all this. The politicians are indeed all liars on this matter. And so a very large proportion of the population is left up-for-grabs by whoever is available to fill them in. Carson and Trump can answer for their own part in this. But the Obama administration hasn’t even begun to be held to account for its role in fomenting such a situation.
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