Joining many ignorant and intolerant right-wingers, Donald Trump has taken the position that all Muslims were responsible for the World Trade Center terrorist attack. Appearing on The Late Show with David Letterman, Trump responded to a question about the non-mosque that is not at ground zero:
Letterman: Does this suggest that we are in fact officially at war with Muslims?
Trump: Well, somebody knocked down the World Trade Center. […] Somebody’s blowing us up. Somebody’s blowing up buildings, and somebody’s doing lots of bad stuff.
Somebody knocked down the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma too. Are we therefore at war with all Christians? Somebody bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Alabama killing four girls. Somebody shot and killed a doctor in Kansas. Somebody’s doing lots of bad stuff in the name of Christ, so no more churches should be built in America. Right, Donald?
The Fox Nation (via NewsBusters) carried this story with a headline that asserted that Trump had “schooled” Letterman. They noted twice that Trump received applause from the audience for his remarks on the mosque. What they left out was that Letterman was also applauded when he disagreed with Trump and stood up for religious freedom. Letterman received more applause later when he explicitly said that we are not at war with Muslims, but that segment was cut out of the NewsBusters video. (The video above is not from NewsBusters. It contains the full exchange).
Even worse, the Fox Nationalist’s completely deleted the exchange where Trump said that we should never have gone into Iraq. He called the Iraq war a “bad move” and “incompetent,” for which he received additional applause.
What this proves is that Fox News, Fox Nation, and their pals at NewsBusters, are no more credible than the notoriously dishonest Andrew Breitbart. They will deceptively edit their videos to produce whatever conclusion best fits their agenda. Anyone who continues to believe what they see there is simply ignorant by choice.
And how, precisely, are we supposed to “win the hearts and minds” of Afghanis if we are at war with Islam?!
Trump says it would be such a good thing if they developers moved the site over and over. You know what would be a good thing? If people like Trump or Dean or anyone else making this point would say it is high time Americans started living up to their inner narrative about themselves. If we started being understanding, accepting, forgiving, responsible. If we started saying they don’t have to move because those opposing the community center are using false analogies, faulty logic and the grief of a minority to paint fellow Americans as unfit and suspicious. It is time to stop framing the question as being about Islam and start insisting it be about Americans and asking them to be better.
Good for Donald Trump. Still, he (David, too) needs to be updated on Islam so he can give solid reasons why standing against Islam is not against freedom of religion – it is against an expansionist, socio-political ideology with strict laws that govern virtually every facet of daily life. Islam is a totalitarian ideology and its intention is to replace our freedoms. Google Islam & France or Germany, or Netherlands, or Britain, or even Sweden & Canada and become informed.
So DDM, what are you saying when you say we should “stand up to Islam”? We should ban a religion from our country? And you believe that all of Islam is violent and totalitarian? There’s no violence in the Bible?
I did Google Islam and France. I guess my Google filter wasn’t set to right wing hatred mode, because I found a lot of positive articles.
DDM do you know what a “Reconstructionist” is? It’s a Christian movement in the U.S. to revoke the Constitution and replace it with Biblical law. They advocate killing children who do not respect their parents. They advocate taking all rights from Jews and eliminating Atheists.
I wonder too, if you know what a Suni is. If so can you explain to me why a Suni mosque was bombed by al Qaeda in Pakistan? And just for fun can you tell me why fundamental Muslims, American citizens at that, would chose to live in the U.S. where it is common knowledge the Constitution forbids establishment laws?
You create a strawman that could be true of any religion if we define every religion by it’s most fundamentalist members, from Christianity to Judaism to Hinduism to Muslim to Buddhism. Furthermore you confuse the actions of marginalized citizens in European countries who rioted against prejudice, hatred and poverty. So long as you use sweeping generalizations to define entire groups of people your comments will remain inane.
Why anyone cares what Donald Trump and/or David Letterman think is beyond me. We (our society) give way too much importance to people who have some kind of celebrity – what a waste of time….
you should read about Islam and then you can talk.
The ground zero community center issue is really pretty obvious. If Islam was a people of respect then the would move the community center elsewhere out of respect for the pain it causes this nation. Whether this iman committed the evil act of terror or not, it was still committed in the name of their people.