The flagrant comments like Mr. Trump's and even Dr. Ben Carson's who proposed a religious test for the US presidency (anti-constitutional due to the No Religious Test Clause) only acts to insidiously spread misinformation and hatred.
Source/Credit: The Huffington Post
By Ahmed Khan | February 22, 2016
The battle for the presidency of the United States is drudging up a serious issue leading America on a dangerous path that it has traveled down before. It relates to a slow but growing trend of anti-Islamic and anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States. The current bigotry and ignorance towards Muslims will create a domino effect that will eventually spiral into targeting other minorities.
A glimpse of where this is headed is being played out in the political landscape. A couple of months ago Mr. Trump proposed to ban all Muslims from entering back into the United States as a counter-measure to protect Americans from the so-called "Islamic" terrorism. Now, in the recent New Hampshire primary election 66% of the GOP voters wanted to support something similar to his proposal.
If a policy like this were ever implemented by the United States, it would have the consequences to create a domino effect, which would subsequently create similar policies towards other minority groups. This is not something hypothetical, Mr. Trump has proven that this can happen with his own rhetoric where he attacked Latino-Americans. He proposed to deport all undocumented Mexican-Americans while labeling them as "rapists" and "drug-dealers."
The history of the United States is, unfortunately, riddled with many examples that are evidence of this. The Smithsonian.com explains that in 1942 the FBI prosecuted a man by the name of Herbert Karl Friedrich Bahr, a refugee escaping German persecution, as a paid Nazi spy. This subsequently led to thousands of Jewish refugees to be painted with a broad brush as a threat to national security and were denied visas seeking asylum.
The worse part of that situation was that it was the same-old anti-Semitic rhetoric that existed before in US government. In June 1939 a Jewish refugee ship, the St. Louis, carrying 937 passengers was turned away. The tragedy was that a quarter of them were sent back to German controlled areas where they died in the holocaust.
PBS had done a series on American anti-Semitism called "The Jewish Americans" by David Grubin, which elucidated the origins of American anti-Semitism. It was a single prominent incident in 1915, the mob-led lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish businessman who was wrongly accused of murder. It brought on the resurgence of the Klu Klux Klan, which claimed 4 million members at the time. The anti-Semitic rhetoric also affected influential personalities like Henry Ford who blamed Jews for everything.
The anti-Semitic attitude then shifted to anti-Japanese. President Roosevelt in 1942 used the same reason of the so-called hidden refugee spy theory to create Japanese internment camps that encamped thousands of innocent Japanese living in America. According to a documentary called "Children of the Camps: Internment History" 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry living on the west coast were incarcerated, many of them were U.S citizens.
The resurgence of the KKK in the 1920s due to anti-Semitism actuated a bigger and more brutal hateful assault against the African-Americans. The David W. Griffith movie "Birth of a Nation" in 1915 depicted African-American men as "lecherous" that were dishonoring white women. In the years following this movie there were mob lynching of innocent African-Americans, rape, murder, and burning down African-American churches all carried out by the KKK.
The point is that it's 2016 and that was the past. We know what hate can do to us as a nation. The flagrant comments like Mr. Trump's and even Dr. Ben Carson's who proposed a religious test for the US presidency (anti-constitutional due to the No Religious Test Clause) only acts to insidiously spread misinformation and hatred.
It is no wonder why white supremacist groups that operate websites like "Infostormer" support Mr. Trump's rhetoric and campaign. This was one of the comments on this site that caught my eye "Now only if someone would be able to wake up America to the Jew problem." The misinformed and bigoted mind lumps this as a minority problem in general, blaming them for everything.
The only way to fight back against this dangerous trend of hatred is with knowledge. I would like to remind the GOP voters in the New Hampshire primary that Muslims are not the enemy of this nation and certainly Islam is not either. Islam teaches Muslims to be loyal to their nations, for example in a well-known and oft-quoted saying of the Prophet Muhammad, "Love of the homeland is part of your faith." The Quran reiterates a similar tone by saying; "O ye who believe, obey Allah, and obey His Messenger, and those who are in authority over you (Quran 4:60)."
If you (GOP voters who want to ban Muslims) or any other American voters who are genuinely concerned about Islam and want to know more about what Islam teaches Muslims then follow and endorse the True Islam campaign by the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community USA: Muslims who believe in the Messiah, Mirza Ghulam of Qadian.
The True Islam (www.trueislam.com) campaign substantiates 11 points of Islamic teaching that any person can view and support without being a Muslim. The number one point in the eleven points is that Islam completely rejects terrorism in all its forms. And this should suffice as enough consolation that Islam and its adherents (Muslims) are not a threat to the security of this nation.
We as Americans know from experience that we do not want to follow the dangerous path of hatred anymore. It will only leave millions of law-abiding Americans feeling insecure and marginalized or in a state far worse. And that is not the America where any of us would like to live.
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Ahmed Khan is Computer programmer, speaker, and writer. Follow Ahmed Khan on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Islam4Americans
Read original post here: Perspective: Current Bigotry Against Muslim-Americans Is a Dangerous Path to Follow | Ahmed Khan
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