Trump sees immigrants as invaders. White-nationalist terrorists do, too.
The president’s language sends dangerous signals
March 17 The massacre of at least 50 Muslims at two New Zealand mosques during Friday prayers is just the latest high-profile white-nationalist terrorist attack. From the January 2017 mass murder of six Canadian Muslims at a Quebec City mosque to the mass murder of 11 Jewish congregants at Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, there was one theme that tied together all of the terrorists in these cases: The suspected gunmen in all these attacks saw immigrants as invaders of their countries.
President Trump expressed his condolences Friday over the New Zealand attacks, and he called the slayings “a horrible, horrible thing.” But Trump also used language that made clear that he sees immigrants as a threat to the United States: “People hate the word ‘invasion,’ but that’s what it is,”
he said. The White House says it’s “outrageous” to connect the president to the New Zealand massacre. But when Trump’s rhetoric — about Central American migrants and about Muslims — is so ugly, it’s clear he’s not capable of discouraging radical racists who see his hostility toward immigrants as a welcome sign for their own xenophobia.
Trump has a long history of lies about Muslims. “I think Islam hates us,” he
famously told CNN’s Anderson Cooper in March 2016, before he ever entered the White House. He has insisted on telling a complete fabrication, that
thousands of American Muslims in New Jersey were cheering the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on television (such a thing never happened). “I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of [Muslim] people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering,” he said at a campaign rally in Alabama in 2015, in what PolitiFact
rated a “pants on fire” lie. Trump also picked up and enthusiastically pushed
the “birther” lie that Barack Obama was a Kenyan-born Muslim, which many white supremacists still believe.
His ban on travel by people from seven
countries, five with Muslim majorities, started out as a proposal to ban any Muslims from entering the United States, and he revised it to the
version that became law only after courts ruled that his language about Muslims showed the ban was improper.
Trump, obviously, did not pull the trigger in any of these recent acts of white-nationalist terrorism. But his lackadaisical response to them has been all the worse because many of the accused perpetrators say they find his rhetoric and success in U.S. politics inspiring.
The 28-year-old Australian who New Zealand authorities say brazenly live-streamed his mass murder on Friday
published a manifesto praising Trump as well as Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian white supremacist who murdered 77 people in Norway in 2011 because of his hatred of Muslims and multiculturalism. Like Trump, the alleged New Zealand shooter referred to immigrants as “invaders.” He said he admired Trump “as a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose,” though “dear god no,” not as “a policymaker and leader.”
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Originally Posted by Swordsmyth
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