Moustafa Bayoumi in The Nation:
A lot of Trump’s politics runs on his own anti-Muslim guano. In 2015 alone, he endorsed the idea of registering Muslims in a national database, said he would “strongly consider” closing down mosques in the United States, and campaigned on barring all Syrian refugees. He promoted the batshit theory that a quarter of US Muslims believe that violence against Americans “is justified as a part of the global jihad.” (In fact, Muslim Americans reject violence against civilians at a substantially higher rate than the general US public, according to the Pew Research Center.) And he called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”
Trump’s defenders insisted that this was all just “campaign-trail rhetoric,” as if exploiting bigotry were any different from bigotry itself. But by the end of 2015, hate crimes against Muslims in the United States had rocketed to what was then their highest point since 2001. Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at the University of California, San Bernardino, told The New York Times that the anti-Muslim violence in this period seemed to escalate immediately following Trump’s flamethrowing comments.
And the situation did not ease after 2015; instead, it got substantially worse.
More here. [Thanks to Corey Robin and Najla Said.]
