U.S. President Barack Obama on Tuesday angrily denounced Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric in the aftermath of the massacre of 50 people in Orlando, saying the Republican presidential candidate was peddling a “dangerous” mindset that recalls the darkest periods in American history.
“We hear language that singles out immigrants and suggests entire religious communities are complicit in violence,” Mr. Obama said at the Treasury Department.
“Where does this stop?” the President said of Mr. Trump’s approach. “Are we going to start treating all Muslim-Americans differently? Are we going to start subjecting them to special surveillance? Are we going to start discriminating against them because of their faith?” Mr. Obama said. “Do Republican officials actually agree with this?”
In a speech on Monday, Mr. Trump reinforced his proposal to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the U.S. “The bottom line is that the only reason the [Orlando] killer [Omar Mateen] was in America in the first place was because we allowed his family to come here,” Mr. Trump said.
Mr. Trump also gloated over his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton’s statement that she was willing to use the term “radical Islamism” to describe the terror threat against the U.S. She had earlier refused to use it, preferring to call it “radical jihadism”.
Terror terminology
“I have been hitting Obama and crooked Hillary hard on not using the term radical Islamic terror,” Mr. Trump tweeted. “Hillary just broke — said she would now use!”
Mr. Obama does not use the word “radical Islamic” or “Islamist” to describe terrorism. In an interview, Mr. Trump said of Mr. Obama: “He doesn’t get it or he gets it better than anybody understands — it’s one or the other, and either one is unacceptable.... People cannot believe that President Obama is acting the way he acts and can’t even mention the words radical Islamic terrorism. There’s something going on. It’s inconceivable. There’s something going on.”
In 2012, Mr. Trump had suggested that Mr. Obama was not born in the U.S., and that he could be a Muslim. This notion has significant following in the U.S. — a 2015 poll showed 45 per cent of Republicans and 23 per cent of all Americans believe that Mr. Obama is a Muslim. Also, Mr. Trump’s call for a temporary ban on Muslims was supported by 42 per cent of people, according to a Reuters poll in the first week of June.
Mr. Obama has no plans to change the way he talks about terrorism, said White House press secretary Josh Earnest. “It only gives the terrorists what they want, which is legitimacy, undermining relations with Muslims fighting terrorism at home and abroad. Many of those organisations pervert the religion of Islam to justify their murderous, nihilistic agenda,” Mr. Earnest said. ( With inputs from The New York Times )
