Hillary Clinton signed a fundraising email Monday that warned against “inflammatory anti-Muslim rhetoric” and called for “more than prayer” in the wake of Sunday’s terrorist attack in Orlando that killed 49 people and wounded even more. The likely Democratic nominee said that what America “absolutely cannot” do at this moment is “demonize Muslim people.”
“So many of us are praying for everyone who was killed, for the wounded and those still missing, and for all the loved ones grieving today. As a mother, I can’t imagine what those families are going through,” Clinton writes. “But we owe their memories and their families more than prayer. We must also take decisive action to strengthen our international alliances and combat acts of terror, to keep weapons of war off our streets, and to affirm the rights of LGBT Americans—and all Americans—to feel welcome and safe in our country.”
The email continues:
Clinton hit on similar ideas in a speech in Cleveland Monday, while also calling for the United States to defeat “radical jihadists” and groups like the Islamic State. But the fundraising letter contained no such calls for fighting against radical Islamist terrorists, only asking for Americans to “stand together” and be “proud together.”
“There is no better rebuke to the terrorists and all those who hate,” she writes.
The shooter at the nightclub, Omar Mateen, is an American-born Muslim whose parents immigrated to the United States from Afghanistan. Mateen had expressed support and allegiance to various Islamist terrorist and militant groups, according to FBI investigators.
Mateen’s father, Seddique Mir Mateen, has expressed pro-Taliban and anti-gay positions, some of which the elder Mateen has said his son likely adopted.
Critics might wonder why Clinton seems more concerned—in this fundraising letter, at least—with possible hate crimes against American Muslims rather than actual hate crimes committed by them.
