March 8 As an American Muslim, I feel that by even proposing the ban on Muslims and immigrants, the administration of Donald Trump has slapped the values of America in the face. Tolerance, justice, mutual and equal liberty are the values that our founding fathers fought and shed the last drop of their blood for. Yet the recent policies of the Trump administration are of no surprise to me given the corrosive nature of our current political discourse. It seems like every day, politicians are blaming refugees, minorities, and immigrants for the problems facing our country. This had become the alarming reality of the recent presidential elections. It has been most present in the policy proposals and rhetoric of Donald Trump since the first day of his campaign.
When I first became fine tuned into the nature of the 2016 presidential elections and I became more familiar with the Trump campaign, like millions of Americans, I dismissed his words as those of a petty blowhard. Yet as the campaign went further and more reports surfaced of Trump’s vile incitement of violence against political opposition, racist remarks, and unhinged behavior, I began to realize that Trump is an even more dangerous man than I thought.
Here is a man who has consistently smeared the character of judges, Muslims, disabled people, veterans, and women. He has crossed every limit of indecency and has managed to divide this country along lines and boundaries of ethnicity, race, color, and creed, just when it is most important for us to show unity of purpose.
There are those who dismiss the idea that Trump is a threat to civil liberties in the United States and that he can have any effect with this new policy. Yet they forget that even Hitler did not kill the Jewish people in one day and he did not establish his dictatorship in one day. Every day I hear reports of vandalisms and desecrations of Mosques and holy sites of Muslims as a direct result of the rhetoric of the Trump administration. This compels me to take a stand as a man who believes in the rights of all mankind. There are those who say that silence is the best answer to the rants and ravings of the common ignoramus. Yet they overlook the fact that silence is the best friend of tyranny because it is tantamount to legitimizing and accepting the sort of totalitarian kleptocracy which Trump represents.
By an Ohio Muslim