Obama’s Middle Eastern policies have created terrorist blowback, most of which lands in Europe, but some of which reaches America. Donald Trump is being blamed for hostility towards Muslims, but he gave voice to Americans’ concerns about the kind of Islamic terrorism plaguing Europe. From Darius Shahtahmasebi at the antimedia.org:
According to a recent FBI analysis, there has been an uptick in the number of hate crimes and racist and bigoted behavior in the United States, particularly towards people of Muslim backgrounds. This surge in hate crimes has been so prominent it forced Donald Trump to respond personally to these attacks in an interview with 60 Minutes, in which he urged these criminals to “stop it.”
Fears regarding the effect of Trump’s election on racial and religious divisions in the United States have been adopted by a number of celebrities, such as director Joss Whedon. The mainstream media has also voiced these concerns. Take, for example, an article published by the Guardian last week titled, “Claims of hate crimes possibly linked to Trump’s election reported across the U.S.”
As distasteful and disturbing as the president-elect’s rhetoric may be, claiming Donald Trump is responsible for America’s underlying racism and bigotry is giving Trump more credit than he deserves. One could potentially argue that racism has always been alive and well in the United States, and that Trump gave a voice to those who were too scared to say what they were feeling. In that sense, people would argue Trump is still ultimately to blame.
But one should take note of the groups of people Trump has been so keen on demonizing, particularly Muslims. It is not as if Trump decided Americans should ban all proponents of the Jainism religion. There is a reason his call to deport and ban a certain class of people resonated with a large number of Americans. The American people know the status quo has not been working to their benefit — even under the Obama administration. At the same time, Muslims have largely been demonized as responsible for the United States’ lapses in national security.
Americans have seen ISIS-inspired terrorist attack after ISIS-inspired terrorist attack on the news, and Trump provided them with a useful solution on the campaign trail: ban all Muslims (his team has since backtracked but the spirit of the proposed policy remains).
The underlying problem, therefore, is not that Americans inherently hate Muslims. The problem is that Americans desire security from terror threats, something the current administration failed to provide and clearly not something Americans could have looked forward to under Hillary Clinton.
There’s no point in beating around the bush on this issue. Obama’s policies in the Middle East – and to a large extent, Clinton’s policies – have made the world less safe.
The Obama administration bombed seven Muslim countries in a six-year period, a figure that could make Bush Jr. seem Muslim-friendly. According to Salon, Obama dropped 23,144 bombs on six countries in 2015, alone.
As Salon notes:
“As Salon stressed in a piece about the escalation toward the new war in Libya, the disastrous 2011 NATO bombing of Libya plunged the country into chaos. Today, in the aftermath, there is no functioning federal government, and large swaths of the country are now controlled by rivaled factions and extremist groups.
“There are presently estimated to be 5,000 to 6,500 ISIS fighters in Libya. There were zero before the U.S.-backed war.” (emphasis added)
Last year, four former U.S. air force service members wrote a letter to Barack Obama warning him that the single most effective recruitment tool for groups like ISIS was the United States’ use of drone warfare across the Muslim world, courtesy of the president himself. In fact, three former U.S. air force drone operators have even backed a lawsuit against the president and other government officials. It was brought by a Yemeni man who lost members of his family in a drone strike in 2012.
To continue reading: Here’s Why Trump Is The Perfect Scapegoat for Obama’s Failures
Reblogged this on behindertvertriebentessarzblog.