Trump Plays the Radical Islam Card The GOP candidate forces Hillary Clinton to address language she has avoided.By William McGurn

Posted By on June 14th, 2016

http://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-plays-the-radical-islam-card-1465859454

“I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God granted it.”

The author is Voltaire but it could be Donald Trump. Because in this election year, the people who most object to Mr. Trump appear to be doing the most to boost his popularity. Their latest contribution comes as America is still reeling from the ISIS-inspired massacre at an Orlando nightclub.

On Sunday morning, the nation awoke to the news that nearly 50 innocent people had been murdered by a gunman at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando. Soon they would learn the shooter was 29-year-old Omar Mateen, born in America to parents of Afghan origin.

In other words, a heavily-armed man with Afghan parents and a Muslim name had targeted a gay nightclub for his bloody rampage. And yet as the American people watched those Sunday press conferences on their TV sets, they were treated to a parade of officials, including the obligatory imam, all reluctant to connect the killer with anything suggesting Islam.

At 1:59 p.m. it was the president’s turn.

Though he did call the slaughter at Pulse an “act of terror,” anyone relying on Barack Obama for a read of the situation would have had no idea that the killings at a Florida nightclub might have been inspired by the same ideology behind the forces still confronting American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Now ask yourself: Does this undermine the Trump message or fuel it?

On Monday, after a security briefing, President Obama conceded the shooter was “inspired by various extremist information” online. His sole reference to what this might be was a line about the “perversions of Islam that you see generated on the internet.”

Characteristically Monday found Mr. Trump repeating his call for a temporary ban on Muslims. Let’s stipulate this call is all his critics say it is: overly broad and not well thought out, given, for example, that to defeat the Islamists making war on America we will need the full assistance both of Muslim nations and individual Muslims, not least Muslim Americans.

But Mr. Trump’s comments are not received in a vacuum. They come in the context of an Obama administration and a Hillary Clinton campaign that, 15 years after al Qaeda hijackers flew civilian airliners into buildings in New York and Washington, still have trouble acknowledging radical Islam as a motivating force. CONTINUE AT SITE

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