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President Trump’s Muslim Witch Hunt

Horrible people reveal themselves in crisis. In the crucible of urgency they expose their own toxic hearts.

Just moments after the deadly London terrorist attacks this past week, Donald Trump took to Twitter (which seems to be his only pressing responsibility these days), and the first thing he chose to do was step on the backs of the victims for his own purposes.

Let’s try for a moment to put aside the complete absurdity of a perpetually Tweeting President using a personal account to disseminate the steady stream of nonsense bouncing around in his troubled head. This is neither normal nor helpful, but that’s a discussion for another day.

The fact that the “leader of the free world” would be so callous, so self-serving, and so completely tone-deaf in a time of tragedy shows how far we’ve fallen in a few short months from being a source of dignity and steadiness in the world. It reminds us all once again that we are being held captive by a man devoid of nobility or goodness.

It also reveals just how desperate this Administration is to make Islam the bogeyman; the lengths it will go to in order to frighten its citizens into an irrational contempt for Muslims. It illustrates what legislated bigotry looks like.

Donald Trump would have us believe that banning people from certain predominately Muslim-practicing countries is an effort to make America safer—that the lives of our people are his priority.

That’s a steaming pile of political manure.

On the same night, Trump also offered this nugget of his infantile, intellectually starved version of common sense:

So let’s try to connect the dots here: The President is claiming that he needs to keep Muslims out of America to protect Americans—but guns are perfectly fine, and even merit a passive aggressive Tweet, while bodies are still being lifted from London’s streets. Apparently guns are not a safety concern for Donald Trump; a handful of Muslims with knives and trucks are—but not guns.

So despite the fact that there have been exactly zero terrorist attacks in the US by those from the countries Trump is attempting to ban, and despite the reality that 12,000 Americans are killed in handgun homicides by Americans each year—he is choosing to target the former and not the latter. Why do you suppose that is?

Not coincidentally, Donald Trump recently gave the keynote at the National Rifle Convention’s “Leadership” gathering in November, saying: “The eight-year assault on your Second Amendment freedoms has come to a crashing end. You have a true friend and champion in the White House.”

In the name of protecting Americans ( and despite the nearly 100 American handgun deaths per day), the President proudly declares himself “friend and champion” of a deep-pocketed organization vehemently opposing nearly all gun regulation —while persecuting members of an entire faith tradition, in countries who haven’t committed a single act of terror on American soil in four decades.

This called inconsistency.
It’s called hypocrisy.
It’s called deception.

It’s called misdirection.

Donald Trump is a failing and ineffectual leader, and failing, ineffectual leaders need an enemy. They need a wild dragon to slay. They need to instill terror in their people and to make them believe they alone can make that terror flee. In the absence of ideas and vision and virtue—they broker in fear at any cost.

This Administration, composed almost entirely of white, professed Christians, knows it needs a bad guy that looks as different from itself as possible in order to rally voters who look and believe the way it does. It needs a non-white, not Christian demon. It needs to craft a foreign monster lurking somewhere “out there”, so that we the people don’t realize how close and insidious the danger really is. 

In a related matter, Cancer and Heart Disease alone, kill well over one million Americans each year—yet the President and GOP leaders have spent the past four months vigorously attempting to strip 24 million of its citizens of healthcare. This doesn’t strike me as the work of men and women deeply burdened with people’s safety and well-being.

And that’s why Donald Trump’s Tweets, as reckless and ignorant and incendiary as they are—are helpful. They are instructive to those of us paying attention. They help the good people of the world of all faith traditions and those who practice no faith, to see what’s happening. They reveal to us an irrational witch hunt against Muslim believers, that is as blatant and lacking in morality as one can imagine.

As an American and a Christian, I’m far more terrified of this Administration than I am of the foreign, brown-skinned, Muslim threat they are trying to sell. I’m far more worried about people of color, the LGBTQ community, Muslim Americans, my Jewish friends, the sick and elderly, my own children being brutalized at the hands of this President and his cadre of malevolent white men claiming to speak for God. I see the damage they are doing in this moment. It’s not some imagined, possible, potential threat—it’s the actualized terror of the country we live in right now.

If Donald Trump was truly concerned about making Americas safer, he’d turn his attention and his Tweet-rage to the home-grown violence perpetrated by predominately white, Christians Americans. He would be as passionate about banning guns and illness and bigotry, as he is in banning invisible bogeymen.

Then again, if our elected officials was as committed to preventing terrorism against Americans as it would have us believe it is—it would strongly consider banning this President.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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