Thoughts on Trump’s ‘Islam Hates Us’ Remarks (1 of 2) By Andrew C. McCarthy
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/432623/trumps-islam-hates-us-remarks-1-2
In an interview by CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Donald Trump was asked whether he thought “Islam is at war with the West.” He replied, “I think Islam hates us,” adding that there is such a “tremendous” and “unbelievable” amount of “hatred” that we must “get to the bottom of” it. But when Cooper pushed him, it became clear that Trump was far less interested in getting to the bottom of it than shielding the country from its consequences.
Cooper pressed Trump about whether this “hatred” was inherent “in Islam itself?” Trump answered, “You’re going to have to figure that out.” He went on to opine that the cause was less important than what we do to protect ourselves: “We have to be very vigilant, we have to be very careful, and we can’t allow people coming into this country who have this hatred of the United States and of people who are not Muslim.”
Cooper, however, continued homing in on the root cause of the hatred: “Is there a war between the West and radical Islam, or is there a war between the West and Islam itself?”
Trump responded, “It’s radical, but it’s very hard to define, it’s very hard to separate because you don’t know who’s who.”
Before I address Trump’s remarks on Islam (in this post and a second one that follows), let’s clear away the underbrush. I am a Cruz supporter. I also do not have a view about whether Trump’s comments reflect what he really thinks or what he thinks people want to hear. On the matter of Trump’s candor, I lean more toward Kevin than Camille Paglia, but for present purposes it is beside the point. My objective here is twofold: (1) to assess what Trump said; and (2) to urge other candidates not to condemn it just because Trump, who often says condemnable things, is the one who said it. Already, the usual suspects are attacking Trump as a bigot and demanding that other candidates do likewise. That would be a mistake. One needn’t be a Trump supporter to see that there is a lot more right than wrong in his remarks.
The stubborn fact is that mainstream Islam, particularly in the Middle East, is virulently anti-Western and anti-American. We like to tell ourselves that this Muslim hatred of the West is a “radical” interpretation of Islam, as if the Muslim mainstream were actually pro-Western. Now, it is fair to say that violent jihadism is radical in Islam, in the sense that only a small percentage of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims actually commits violent acts under the influence of Islamic doctrine (a percentage that computes to many more Muslims than Western opinion elites are willing to admit). But abhorrence of the West – whether or not it results in violence – is not radical in Islamic populations; it is common. (There is plenty of disdain for Western culture on our own university campuses, so why is it so hard to acknowledge that abhorrence of the West is predominant in a different culture – particularly one as confrontational as Islam is?)
Trump clearly did not want to go where Cooper was pushing him: to diagnose whether the hatred Trump (correctly) perceives is inherent in Islam. Perhaps he is insufficiently familiar with the subject, or maybe he was just trying to be less incendiary. Whatever the case, Trump was quite right to argue that the cause of the hatred is less important to the United States than the effect. Regardless of whether Islamic hatred for the West is “radical” Islam or inherent in Islam, we have to protect our country.
Understanding a threat is a worthy goal and is ultimately necessary to eradicating the threat. Protecting oneself from the threat, however, is the immediate priority. It is a mistake to permit a large influx of Middle Eastern Muslims who cannot be vetted, and a significant percentage of whom harbor anti-Western sentiment. And that’s not just because some small percentage of them are terrorists; it is also because jihadism takes root and thrives in insular, anti-Western Muslim enclaves. It is not just a matter of the terrorists who infiltrate; we must also worry about the the young Muslims who will eventually be incited to violence because they have marinated in the anti-Western hatred that pervades assimilation-resistant Islamic communities.
What about the ultimate question that Trump tried to deflect: Is the hatred inherent in Islam or caused by a “radical” construction of Islam? In fact, antipathy for non-Muslims is inherent in Islam in the sense that it is undeniably drawn from a literal interpretation of Islamic scripture. And it does undeniably manifest itself as hatred in millions of Muslims.
To be sure, there are other interpretations of Islam that attempt to nullify the belligerence in the scriptures. Great – we should welcome this. But let’s not confuse our hope that these interpretations will one day be predominant with the reality we confront. The existence of other, “moderate” constructions of Islam does not mean the literalist, belligerently anti-Western interpretation is wrong, false, or non-Islamic.
It is not for us non-Muslims to say what is the “true” or “false” Islam, or even whether there is a definitive “true” Islam. And what is the point of struggling with this unanswerable question? Upwards of 98 percent of Americans are not Muslim, so if there is a true Islam, we don’t believe in it anyway. Put another way, do you know or care what Muslim Brotherhood honcho Sheikh Yusul al-Qaradawi thinks “true” Christianity or “true” Judaism is? Would it make a bit of difference to your life or your self-perception if you did? Of course not. So what makes us think Muslims would or should be swayed by our views about their belief system?
The federal government’s job is not to define or promote Islam. It is to protect the national security of the United States. That means (a) understanding that a mainstream, doctrinally based interpretation of Islam endorses hostility and terrorist war against the West; (b) grasping that many Muslims are thus hostile to the West, and a subset of these Muslims is sure to act on the call to war; (c) taking sensible precautionary measures to protect ourselves, including understanding that the hostility to our culture and the threat of violence it breeds is promoted by unassimilated Muslim populations; and (d) treating jihadist organizations as a military enemy and denying them space to operate.
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