If you’ve been watching the 2016 campaign, you know that Donald Trump has been saying
increasingly extreme things about Muslim people.
A complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.
But his poll numbers seem to only go up.
So i’m in Detroit on the way to Des Moines to go to a Trump rally and talk to supporters of his
My conversations started out pretty much how you’d expect.
"I’m not one who is a bigot or anything, but I will tell you that I think
we need to look much harder at the people who are causing the problems."
Who is that?
"Radical Muslims. Radical Islam."
"After all the crap that’s going on everywhere, it would be nice to have someone
who would show some balls."
And of course, people were savvy about what Trump was doing, too.
"First of all, I don’t think it’s plausible he’s going to get that
through."
"I consider that a marketing ploy."
But the issue is that these sentiments easily slip from the perpetrators of real crimes,
to everybody else.
"The Muslims pose a threat. Not all Muslims. But you can’t tell the good
ones from the bad ones. His thing is put a pause in until we can figure out a way to
vet the people who are coming in…"
"I do think we need to put a halt on the visa situation... I don’t have
a racist bone in my body. I’m not that way, i just think we need to vet people a little
better and find out why they’re here..."
The comments weren’t really pointing to a cult of personality around Trump.
They were pointing to pre-existing fear.
We want our country back. And I don’t appreciate that I have to be not
safe in my own country because there are some tenets of their religion that basically teach
them to kill people who don’t believe that they believe."
"He’s trying to secure the country. The country needs more
security, and it appears that they are a problem so we have to address it."
But is it really fair to say that Muslims are a problem?
"If you break it down, yeah, they’re a problem. Sorry to say it, but can’t help it. Can’t
help but feel that way. Right now, I don’t feel safe. And I think a lot of the country
feels the same way."
That’s true. These views are held by many Americans.
It used to be that trying to protect against terrorism and Islamophobia were both bipartisan
issues.
George W Bush: "I also want to speak tonight directly to Muslims throughout the world. We respect your faith.
It’s practiced freely by many millions of Americans"
But that seems to be over.
And so, as there have been more terror attacks in the news, it seems hate speech is accepted
a lot more in the mainstream media.
Judge Jeanine Pirro: "We need to kill them. We need to KILL them... And there’s only one group who can stop
this war — the Muslims themselves."
Don Lemon: For the most part, there’s not a free and open society for women in those States.
Reza Aslan: Well it’s not in Iran or Saudia Arabia. It certainly is in Malaysia and Indonesia;
it certainly is in Bangladesh, it certainly is in Turkey. But again this is the problem
— you’re talking about a religion with one and a half billion people, and certainly
it becomes very easy to paint them all with a single brush.
I think that the thing that became most clear to me talking to the Trump supporters was
that it really is not Trump.
"Rand Paul just said the same thing, but he said it in different words. He
said we’re going to stop 34 countries. It’s the same thing."
Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz also called for accepting refugees from Syria only if they are Christian.
Cruz: "Christians who are being targeted for genocide or persecution; Christians who are being beheaded
or crucified. We should be providing safe haven to them."
"If there are even a few bad
apples out of a billion, that amounts to quite a few people. It’s the Muslims that are
killing Americans, right now, isn’t it."
This culture of Islamaphobia, it really does do harm. There really are more hate crimes now than there were,
certainly before 9/11.
Days after the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, a man in Chapel Hill shot three
Muslim students to death.
And there has been a wave of threats and violence since November’s terror attacks
"You are terrorists. Every one of you are terrorists. I don't care what you say."
"Demonstrators carrying long rifles gathered at a North Texas mosque again today."
"A customer questioned the driver's heritage before shooting him."
"He was called a member of ISIS before being shot in the face"
According to the FBI, most terror attacks in America were not carried out by Muslims.
But Muslims are the No. 1 victims of ISIS terror, and so Muslim views of ISIS are overwhelmingly
negative.
And Islamophobia in the US does function as a recruitment tool for extremists.
Still, there are a shocking number of Americans who support Trump’s Islamophobic proposals.
I don’t think it’s a coalition large enough to win an election.
But it’s a reminder that our country has many times had a political coalition plenty
large enough to subjugate groups who are “different.”
"Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected four terms as President of th United States. Four terms.
People absolutely loved him. WWII, he gathered up all the Japanese and put them in encampments."
Do you think that was a good thing?
"He did what he thought was best for protecting the United States. And that’s all Trump
is suggesting…"
The idea that anyone would defend the Japanese internment is a good reminder that the consensus
against things like bans on Muslim travel is much more fragile than many realize.
Ronald Reagan: “The legislation that I am about to sign provides for a restitution payment
to each of the 60,000 survivors, surviving Japanese Americans of the 120,000 who were
relocated or detained. Yet no payment can make up for those lost years.”
We’ve targeted groups like this, again and again.
So we can’t just laugh this off.
"The establishment media just thinks this guy’s a joke. Well he’s not a joke.
He says what people think when nobody else can. He’s not politically correct. He’s
going to close the borders. That’s what people want. They want to feel protected;
they want to feel safe. And that’s what he’s going to provide. So that’s why I
support him."