Beinart: Donald Trump, Frank Gaffney, and the Looming Threat to American Muslims
For years, Washington conservatives ridiculed these arguments and stigmatized Gaffney for making them. In 2003, after Gaffney attacked two Muslim staffers in the Bush White House, anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist banned him from his influential “Wednesday meeting” of conservative activists. In 2011, according to sources close to the organization, the American Conservative Union informally barred Gaffney from speaking at CPAC, the ACU’s signature event. In 2013, the Bradley Foundation, which had backed the Center for Security Policy since 1988, cut off funds. That same year, Gaffney lost the Washington Times column he had been writing since the late 1990s. As late as December 2015, The Daily Beast declared that, “Frank Gaffney has been shunned by pretty much everyone in conservative intellectual circles.”
Yet less than 18 months later, America is led by a president, Donald Trump, who has frequently cited the Center for Security Policy when justifying his policies towards Muslims. Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, has called Gaffney “one of the senior thought leaders and men of action in this whole war against Islamic radical jihad.” Trump’s Attorney General, Jeff Sessions—who has said “Sharia law fundamentally conflicts with our magnificent constitutional order”—in 2015 won the Center for Security Policy’s “Keeper of the Flame” Award. Trump’s CIA Director, Mike Pompeo, has appeared on Gaffney’s radio program more than 24 times since 2013. Sebastian Gorka, who runs a kind of parallel National Security Council inside the White House called the Strategic Initiatives Group, has appeared on Gaffney’s radio program 18 times during that period. He’s called Sharia “antithetical to the values of this great nation” and recently refused to say whether he considered Islam a religion.
From: Donald Trump, Frank Gaffney, and the Looming Threat to American Muslims – The Atlantic
I don’t recall the Trump admin trying to do anything to American muslims, do you? I guess this piece is just a warning of things to come?Report
The initial travel ban applied to lawful permanent residents.
Let’s imagine this scenario: candidate Obama runs on the position that Catholicism is incompatible with the US (as evidence he points to the various child sex scandals, the bones of babies being dug up in Irish churches, etc etc.); he repeatedly says “Catholics hate us” in debates; he promises a ban on Catholics travelling to/from the United States; once in office he issues – on a Friday afternoon – a travel ban from majority Catholic countries which applies immediately, with no guidance on how the ban is to be applied, and jets off to his Hawaiian summer home for the weekend; lawful permanent residents from Ireland are detained at airports for hours, not allowed to access lawyers or contact family, intimidated with threats of deportation; videos surface of Republican congressmen presenting customs officials with a court order to cease enforcement and being stonewalled.
In this scenario, do you think congressional Republicans would wait for impeachment proceedings or just put Obama in the stocks that day?Report
Who really knows what would happen. To play along and make you happy, I’ll assume the worst.Report