also been relentless on the subject. “To hell with
their culture!” he said of Muslims on Maher’s television show in November.
Ahmed Mohamed, 14,
met with President
Obama after he was
dragged out of school
in handcuffs in Irving,
Texas, where Mayor
Beth Van Duyne has
made a series of antiMuslim comments,
because teachers
mistook a clock he
built for a bomb. Jon
Ritzheimer (with
sunglasses) led an
armed anti-Muslim march outside
a Phoenix mosque,
while the so-called
Bureau of AmericanIslamic Relations
held a similar rally in
Richardson, Texas.
32 splc intelligence report
GETTY IMAGES/ CHIP SOMODEVILLA(MOHAMED); AP IMAGES/LM OTERO (MAYOR); AP IMAGES/RICK SCUTERI (RITZHEIMER); GETTY IMAGES/JOHN MOORE (RALLY)
The Candidates Join In
But increasingly as 2015 drew to a close, the loudest
Islamophobic voices came from Republican presidential candidates — most notably Donald Trump,
who had also suggested that Mexico was deliberately sending “rapists” and “drug dealers” over the
border, endorsed and publicized utterly bogus statistics about black crime that originated with an
apparent neo-Nazi, and even declined to condemn
the roughing up of a black protester by members of
the audience at one of his rallies.
In September, Trump seemed to endorse the
notion of expelling Muslims from America when
he responded to a supporter who claimed Obama
was a Muslim and asked “When can we get rid of
them?” by saying, “We’re going to be looking at that
and many other things.” Speaking of Syrian refugees
at a New Hampshire rally later that month, he told
supporters, “If I win, they’re going back.”
Also in September, GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson, Trump’s chief competitor for the
“outsider” vote, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that
he doesn’t believe Islam is consistent with the U.S.
Constitution and that “I would not advocate that we
put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely
would not agree with that.”
Trump and Carson were speaking to a like-minded
base. That same month, a survey by Public Policy
Polling, a Democrat-affiliated polling outfit, found
that 72% of North Carolina GOP primary voters
thought a Muslim should not be president and 40%
believed Islam should be illegal in the United States.
Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric amplified exponentially following the Nov. 13 Paris attacks, as he
endorsed the notion of a database or national ID
card for Muslim Americans, shutting down mosques
that support extremism, and vastly increasing surveillance of American Muslims. Asked how the idea
of a national Muslim registry differed from the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany in the mid-1930s,
Trump responded repeatedly, “You tell me.”
“We’re going to have to do things that we never
did before,” he told Yahoo News. “And certain things
will be done that we never thought would happen
in this country in terms of information and learning about the enemy. And so we’re going to have to
do certain things that were frankly unthinkable a
year ago.”