It would be too simplistic to dismiss Donald Trump’s outrageous outburst — “We need a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States while we figure out what the hell is going on” — as merely a partisan comment at election time. It’s a barb of hate rhetoric that can divide the world.
Principally, it confuses Muslims with radical Islam. Trump’s xenophobic words after the San Bernandino mass shootings — the 353rd such incident this year in the US — may even find favour with the disaffected and the disgruntled, articulating as they do the frustration of a large uneducated and unskilled part of white America.
But then we must also remember that he has so far branded Mexicans as rapists and Chinese as cheats. The White House has made its opposition to Trump’s divisive tactics known with a spokesperson going so far as to say that Trump has disqualified himself from serving as US President with his “incendiary” and “morally reprehensible” comments. UK Prime Minister David Cameron has called them “divisive, unhelpful and quite simply wrong”.
To equate all Muslims with extremists and militants driven by hate and misguided notions based on bigotry and interpretations of history of wars and religious texts is to betray an ignorance that ill serves a world already divided between the haves and have-nots. The only concession Trump has made to logic is that he thinks his statements were “probably not politically correct”. Echoing Nazism and Stalinism of old, Trump represents a threat to peace.
