The biggest threat to Americans these days, according to Republican politicians: Refugees from Syria
By Patrick
The attacks in Paris, the shocking mass murder of innocent people is a tragedy in many different ways. While families and friends mourn the dead, and a city is under shock, the fallout is dramatic in other ways as well: The vicious extremism of the "Islamic State" (IS), or "Isis", as it is usually called in the USA, is also a gift for the extremists in our own Western countries: For the bigots, the haters, the right-wing extremists.
The situation especially in the USA has been bad enough before the Paris attacks. While the USA is by far not the only Western country where right-wing extremism is on the rise, or "right wing populism", as it is sometimes called, there is hardly another place where it has become more "mainstream." The Republican Party has become a cesspool of bigots and haters, with Donald Trump as their most prominent face. It is virtually impossible to imagine how the USA would be transformed, if the GOP would win the presidency, because the radicals within the party seem to be the unchallenged leaders these days.
So the party of moronic solutions, like "We need more guns to fight gun violence", "The best health insurance is no health insurance (because "government dependency", naturally), "The best strategy against war is to start more wars", now has a new idea: "The best way to protect ourselves from IS/ISIS is to reject refugees from Syria, and to punish Muslims living in America."
In the words of Donald Trump, who has little interest in things like "logic", "truth" or "facts":
Before the fight broke out, Trump had already warned the audience that Islamic State fighters might recruit their children online and called for an impenetrable wall along the southern border, prompting the crowd to chant: Build a wall! Build a wall! Build a wall! In his nearly hour-long speech, Trump listed graphic details of murders committed by people who had entered the country illegally, promised to bar Syrian refugees from living in the United States because they might be terrorists and called for heavy surveillance of "certain mosques."
"I want surveillance of these people that are coming in, the Trojan horse. I want to know who the hell they are," Trump said. “I don't want the people from Syria coming in, because we don't know who they are. We don't know who they are. And I don't want them coming in." Trump also said he watched as "thousands and thousands of people" cheered the fall of the World Trade Center on 9/11, which gave the impression that he was talking about Muslims being happy that so many Americans died. Officials have repeatedly debunked rumors that Muslims in New Jersey were celebrating the attacks at that time.
What "fight" was Trump talking about? Well, an incident at the rally which was not surprising at all:
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. -- A white man punched and attempted to choke a black protester who was thrown on the ground at a Donald Trump rally in Birmingham on Saturday morning, as an onlooker yelled, "Don't choke him! Don't choke him!"
The protester, identified by local media as well-known activist Mercutio Southall Jr., started shouting during Trump's speech and could be heard yelling, "Black lives matter!" A fight broke out around him, prompting Trump to briefly halt the rally and demand removal of Southall.
"Get him the hell out of here, will you please?" Trump said.
The crowd alternated between cheering and booing as security officers pushed their way through the crowd of several thousand. Southall fell to the ground and was surrounded by several white men who appeared to be kicking and punching him, according to video captured by CNN. A Washington Post reporter in the crowd watched as one of the men put his hands on Southall's neck, and heard a female onlooker repeatedly shout: "Don't choke him!"
CNN has the ugly video from the event.
More pictures and video from the incident here.
Trump is by far not the only Republican politician who came out against accepting refugees from Syria, as Stephen Colbert noted:
From "Salon" (two years ago, one would have thought that this is from "The Onion"):
But Donald Trump says that Syrians are not going to want to come here anyway. Right now the United States is entering winter while Syrian refugees are probably more accustomed to higher temperatures. Trump wants to know why the hell they’d come to Minnesota where it’s under 40 degrees.
“It’s a tough call for refugees,” Colbert said. “Do I want to stay in a war zone where my family faces almost certain death or do I want to go somewhere where I have to put on a jacket before I go to the mall? I mean you’re walkin’ around, you’re carrying your coat. You get all sweaty. You go outside and forget to put it on and then you get a cold. I’ll take my chances with ISIS.”
A few days ago, Donald Trump agreed that the USA needs a "National Registry of Muslims", and seriously, I would expect that Donald Trump will soon agree that the country needs camps to intern suspicious Muslims. I guess it will only take a few more weeks for such a proposal...
Trump's remarks about the database prompted harsh criticism:
Quote:
The Muslim Public Affairs Council’s Hollywood Bureau says it’s received dozens of phone calls from people offering support Donald Trump’s statement on Thursday that he would “absolutely” institute a mandatory Muslim registry has sent a shudder down the spine of the Hollywood Muslim community, worried that the GOP frontrunner’s rhetoric is getting out of hand.
“My heart breaks,” veteran screenwriter Kamran Pasha told TheWrap. “The American people are better than this.”
Trump’s statements — as well as those of GOP rival Ben Carson, who on Thursday compared the risk of allowing Syrian refugees into the U.S. to having “a rabid dog running around your neighborhood” — drew harsh criticism from both Muslim and Jewish members of the Hollywood industry.
“This is utterly offensive and so antithetic to the founding principles of America, it would be almost funny if it weren’t so disturbing,” Democratic political consultant Donna Bojarsky, who is Jewish, told TheWrap. “Civil liberty is something that’s important to the Hollywood creative community and the Muslim community, so there’s definitely a common cause to be made here.”
In an interview with Yahoo News, Trump said that he would consider requiring Muslim-Americans to register with the government and giving them special identification identifying their faith. On Friday, the GOP frontrunner tried to walk back his remarks, which had been recorded on camera. “I didn’t suggest a database — a reporter did,” Trump tweeted. “We must defeat Islamic terrorism & have surveillance, including a watch list, to protect America.” But many felt Trump’s suggestions resemble Nazi laws imposed on Jews during World War II, including requiring them to wear a gold Star of David on their clothes.
“The rhetoric is getting to a kind of place where we’re talking about the equivalent of putting yellow stars on Muslims,” Pasha said. “Muslims are very easy targets in this country.”
Some American Muslims are not willing to accept their new stigma as potential supporters of terror, like Marwa Balkar in her message to Donald Trump:
It is not surprising at all that the terrorists from the IS want nothing more than to alienate, to separate Muslims from the Western societies they live in. The rhetoric of Donald Trump and many others plays straight into the hands of the terrorists:
Quote from "The Intercept":
IN A STATEMENT PUBLISHED in its online magazine, Dabiq, this February, the militant group the Islamic State warned that “Muslims in the West will soon find themselves between one of two choices.” Weeks earlier, a massacre had occurred at the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. The attack stunned French society, while bringing to the surface already latent tensions between French Muslims and their fellow citizens.
While ISIS initially endorsed the killings on purely religious grounds, calling the murdered cartoonists blasphemers, in Dabiq the group offered another, more chilling rationale for its support.
The attack had “further [brought] division to the world,” the group said, boasting that it had polarized society and “eliminated the grayzone,” representing coexistence between religious groups. As a result, it said, Muslims living in the West would soon no longer be welcome in their own societies. Treated with increasing suspicion, distrust and hostility by their fellow citizens as a result of the deadly shooting, Western Muslims would soon be forced to “either apostatize … or they [migrate] to the Islamic State, and thereby escape persecution from the crusader governments and citizens,” the group stated, while threatening of more attacks to come.
But what else can you expect from the "Party of boundless stupidity", the party that proudly presented Sarah Palin to the world, who makes a very happy impression these days, as she sees her dreams come true:
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin thinks a President Donald Trump is “a very real possibility.”
“I think it’s a very real possibility because people are really tired of professional politicians who, you know, won’t call it like they see it and maybe don’t have life experiences that allow them to prove a track record of success,” the former vice presidential nominee said in a radio interview with WBT Charlotte’s News Talk radio on Thursday.
“That’s refreshing about Trump," she said. "He’s a fighter. We know he’s gonna put America first, and he really nailed it early on what the main problems are in America right now, so it’s a very real possibility.”
But Trump isn’t the only one Palin can see in the White House.
“There’s also of course a possibility that people are going to recognize in, say, Ted Cruz, that he knows what he’s doing and he’s a great guy. He could certainly help put the country back on the right track,” she said. “Thankfully, we have a strong, competitive primary … as opposed to the other side of the aisle.”
Really, Trump or Cruz, that's it? The first wants to transform America into some sort of fascist state, the other wants to transform America into a Christian fundamentalist state, basically into the "Iran of the Western World." That's some choice indeed!
Yes, Americans are better than that - but will sanity prevail against hysteria and bigotry in the end?
The IS (or "Isis") surely hopes that Donald Trump will win.
+++
BONUS:
The excellent liberal website "Addicting Info" reports about a new article in Vanity Fair, where experts confirm that Donald Trump is a "textbook case" for a "narcissistic personality disorder" (I can think of another "textbook case" as well, LOL).
Quote:
A striking number of leading mental health experts are concerned enough about the possibility of a Trump presidency that they’re willing to speak out, publicly, about the candidate’s “Textbook narcissistic personality disorder.”+++
During a recent interview with Vanity Fair, developmental psychologist Howard Gardner, a professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education, referred to Trump as “remarkably narcissistic,” while clinical psychologist Ben Michaelis used the term “Textbook narcissistic personality disorder,” to describe Trump.
Michaelis went on to explain,
“In the field we use clusters of personality disorders. Narcissism is in cluster B, which means it has similarities with histrionic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, and antisocial personality disorder. There are similarities between them.”
Going on, Michaelis described Trump’s constant belittling of other people as a ‘symptom’ of a deeper problem.
“To degrade people is really part of a cluster-B personality disorder: it’s antisocial and shows a lack of remorse for other people. The way to make it O.K. to attack someone verbally, psychologically, or physically is to lower them. That’s what he’s doing.”
Michaelis expressed his concerns about a Trump presidency, saying,
“He’s applying for the greatest job in the land, the greatest task of which is to serve, but there’s nothing about the man that is service-oriented. He’s only serving himself.”
Indeed, narcissism is characterized with by an exaggerated sense of self-importance, as well as a lack of concern or empathy toward others.
BONUS 2:
SNL explains how to survive your bigoted relatives at Thanksgiving:
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