Islamophobia, anti-semitism, demagoguery and Donald Trump
I watched a documentary on Netflix the other day called “The Goebbels Experiment.” It was a filmed history leading up to and through the end of the Nazi regime. The interesting thing was that the narration was all Goebbels’ own quotes from his regularly kept diary.
The holocaust and extermination camps did not start out that way. It started more with somebody like Trump trying to exclude Jews: Mentioned distaste for Jews. Talking about evicting them from the country and increasing anti-semitism.
Trump does, in fact, remind me very much of how Nazis began. He is a fascist.
The sad thing for me, and I know this is “not politically correct” to say, but the truth is that vast numbers (not just small numbers) of Muslims throughout the middle east and Africa have extremely anti-semitic views and also believe in the death penalty for blasphemy and/or apostasy. There are definitely weird things going on in Islam which are widespread – not just within a tiny minority of terrorists. In Obama’s oval office speech the other night he even said the Islamic community has to deal with that problem. It should not be ignored.
But none of that justifies Trump’s outlandish, unhinged (to use Jeb Bush’s description) demagoguery and hate-mongering. Hillary Clinton is quite correct when she point out that plays right into the hands of ISIS propaganda. Discrimination based on religion is un-American – even if other countries (such as Saudi Arabia) do discriminate based on religion.
I agree on both points. Legal immigration should never exclude a particular group. We’ll see what happens with Trump when he has to start winning primaries.
Just as importantly, Muslims who just say “this is not me” or “this is not part of my religion” need to come to terms with the fact that it is part of their religion and need to work at dealing with it.