Local Muslim leaders are frustrated and hurt by this, but are not fighting back with angry remarks.
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Ben Carson has said that no Muslim should be president of the United States because Islam is incompatible with our Constitution.
State Rep. Derham Cole, R-Spartanburg, said Trump’s call to ban Muslims from entering the United States was an “overreach”.
That process is quite a bit longer than, for example, the mere minutes it takes for a background check that will allow you to buy a gun (and abuse of gun ownership has proven to be the far greater security issue, having taken hundreds of thousands of American lives over the same period).
Gov. Jay Nixon said, “I think there’s a very real likelihood that talk of that type can make the situation worse, not better”.
Enter the Man in the Trump Tower with a plan to “get tough” by closing the borders to Muslims, all Muslims, simply because they are Muslim.
“I call myself a true Muslim, and a patriotic American”, UMD Professor and Ahmadiyya Muslim Community member Imran Hayee said.
As a historian, however, I have to say that Trump is no anomaly. “He’s not going to go against the Constitution”.
Trump has the same right to freedom of speech as every other American under the First Amendment – the same amendment that protects freedom of religion. While the Republican presidential candidates press their varying views, Congress as a whole has been strangely silent.
Mehmud added that if Trump were elected president, his community would respect Trump’s governing, as they would any commander-in-chief. Naturally, police logs don’t reveal dirty looks or harsh words uttered on the street, but I have not heard of those things either.
Saadeh, however, said he has felt tense at times when out in public with his wife and daughters, who wear the traditional Islamic head covering, a hijab.
“You can not negate and defeat hate with hate”, Hayee said.
“People might notice somebody acting differently at the mosque”, Rhodes said.
I have not found any evidence in those police logs, or in conversations at the street level with some Muslim leaders, of widespread retaliation against innocent Muslim residents following the attacks on Paris, and more recently, the terror attack in San Bernardino, CA.
“The shooter in Newtown, he was a Christian, but that was not mentioned”, Mehmud said.
The 10 Arab allies against ISIS have refused to say how many airstrikes they have carried out against ISIS, but Pentagon statements reveal that half the Arab countries in the coalition have carried out no bombing in Iraq and Syria at all. “Religion shouldn’t be mentioned (in cases like this)”.
The reason for this increase is said to be a matter of “simple demographics”, as Muslims tend to have more children than those in other major religions, and that – at a median age of 23 – young Muslims are on the verge of starting large families of their own. Our military and counterterrorism professionals have relentlessly pursued terrorist networks overseas – disrupting safe havens in several different countries, killing Osama bin Laden, and decimating al Qaeda’s leadership. “The Quran has 700 commandments, and no commandment calls for violence”. On key Islamic principles like the idea of one God and on the teachings of Prophet Muhammad, all Muslims around the world whether Sunnis or Shias are united.
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But critics say they could be doing more than they are. If he were serious, he would know that preventing radicalization, extremism and terrorism is more important than soundbites, more complex than profiling, and more in need of a human rights-based approach than he seems able to contemplate.
