HE MAY have considered Muslims as undesirables and persona non grata for calling a ban on them entering the United States, but Donald Trump gained a host of names just as unflattering, for what the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights described as “grossly irresponsible” comments.
A “carnival barker” with “fake hair” was how White House spokesperson Josh Earnest denounced the leading Republican nominee. “What Donald Trump said yesterday disqualifies him from serving as President,” said Earnest, describing the anti-Muslim remarks as “offensive” and “toxic.”
Trump, the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, made the provocative remarks—just his latest on a range of topics on the campaign trail—after last week’s shooting that left 14 dead in California by a Muslim couple said to have been radicalized.
Less than 24 hours after the attack, Trump’s bombastic bid for the White House plumbed what critics called new depths and triggered calls for him to be barred from taking power after he urged a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”
‘Nowhere near as bad’
Tweeted “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling: “How horrible. Voldemort was nowhere near as bad,” she said, referring to the notorious villain in her blockbuster books. It was a theme quickly picked up by thousands of other Twitter users.
Trump was the “Isil man of the year,” thundered Sen. Lindsey Graham, referring to his belief that Trump was succeeding only in fueling the radical ideology of the Islamic State group.
‘Go to hell!’
“Do you know how you win this war? You side with people in the faith who reject this ideology, which is 99 percent,” Graham said, before invoking Trump’s campaign slogan—“make America great again.”
“And do you know how you make America great again?” asked Graham, who is lagging badly in the nomination race. “Tell Donald Trump to go to hell!” he added.
Similarly, Sohaib Sultan, Muslim Life Coordinator and Chaplain at Princeton University, drew parallels between Trump and the radical ideology of the Islamic State group.
Similar rhetoric
“ISIS is to Islam what Donald Trump is to American values: a complete distortion of everything that we as a country and a society stand for.” But Sultan also lambasted other Republicans. “I know a lot of Republican candidates are jumping on Trump about his latest comments, but a lot of Republican candidates have really been using similar type of rhetoric throughout the election cycle as well,” he said.
But other Republican contenders including Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Chris Christie and Jeb Bush, as well as Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan, swiftly rejected Trump’s proposal.
In a rare primetime speech to the nation from the Oval Office on Sunday, US President Barack Obama called the attack in San Bernardino, California, an “act of terrorism,” but stressed that it was not “a war between America and Islam.”
Unrepentant
The 69-year-old billionaire real estate mogul was unrepentant on Tuesday, even as criticism rained down from as far afield as London and Cairo, where Egypt’s official religious body Dar al-Iftaa denounced his comments as “extremist and racist.”
Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential front-runner, said Trump was playing “right into the hands of terrorists” and Rick Kriseman, the Democratic mayor of Saint Petersburg, Florida, tweeted: “I am hereby barring Donald Trump from entering St. Petersburg until we fully understand the dangerous threat posed by all Trumps.”
Muslims “are as much victimized by these groups as Christians or Jews or Hindus or Buddhists,” said Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
“The danger of classification and characterization is that it dehumanizes, it can lead to the victimization of the innocent,” Zeid added.
Such comments were “deeply worrisome,” the UN official said, adding that “the US is a republic founded on the dignity and the rights of the individual.”
Divisive, simply wrong
The British government was similarly unimpressed.
Prime Minister David Cameron “completely disagrees” with the remarks, which are “divisive, unhelpful and quite simply wrong,” a spokesperson for the Conservative leader said.
In Geneva, the United Nations refugee agency—though not directly responding to Trump’s remarks—warned that rhetoric in the US presidential campaign was threatening a key refugee resettlement program in the United States.
Trump showed little inclination to back down, however, and instead compared the proposed ban to actions taken by Franklin D. Roosevelt against Japanese and German “enemy aliens” during World War II, though he stopped short of advocating internment camps.
Asked in an interview on a morning TV program if his proposal went against treasured American values, he responded: “No, because FDR did it!” AFP