This is the moment I want to see from one of the Republicans facing off against Donald Trump Tuesday night:
“Mr. Trump, right now there’s a brave Afghan interpreter named Sami Kazikhani who spent years risking his life serving side-by-side with American troops. Today Sami and his family are targets of the Taliban and its Islamist allies. The American soldiers he served with are fighting the Obama administration’s bureaucracy to bring him to the U.S. and safety right now.
“Mr. Trump, could you please look in the camera and explain to Mr. Kazikhani, his wife and their infant daughter—not to mention the American families of the servicemen whose lives he saved—why you are banning this hero of the war against jihad from setting foot in the United States, simply because he’s Muslim?”
I want a Republican to throw down that gauntlet because Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims is both a bad terror-fighting strategy and an un-American embarrassment. But there’s another aspect that’s been largely overlooked: It’s cowardly.
Fear is at the center of the Trump storyline. It’s not just the poll showing Americans are more fearful about the likelihood of a terrorist attack than any time since the weeks after 9/11. It’s also the fear demonstrated by President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the left in their unwillingness to confront the nature of the enemy.
When you’re so afraid of being “Islamophobic” that you make ridiculous statements like Muslims “have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism,” the American people notice.
Is it true, as a Department of Homeland Security whistle-blower now claims, that the Obama administration ended a surveillance program that could have prevented the San Bernardino attack? It’s too early to say. But his claim that the program was killed by the Homeland Security Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties over fears of appearing Islamophobic certainly fits the narrative. Particularly when two weeks after the attack the White House is still calling it a “mass shooting.”
If you’re more afraid of an accusation of Islamophobia than you are deaths of your citizens at the hands of Islamists, you’re unfit to be president. But so is the man who would abandon the fundamental American principles of freedom and religious liberty.
Trump and his supporters point (approvingly!) to FDR rounding up Americans during WWII and Lincoln abandoning habeas corpus during the Civil War. Even if you think those presidents did the right thing, can any rational person believe that ISIS or al Qaeda present the same threat as Hitler’s Luftwaffe, or the Soviet’s nuclear arsenal? Please.
We ask our soldiers to kick in doors in dangerous places like Mosul and Mogadishu to defend our liberties, but then we abandon them here at home over a handful of small-scale attacks? We follow cowards like Trump who run from the sound of the guns, and straight to the big-government “security” of religious registry lists and “closing down parts of the internet.”
Trump hopes you don’t notice that the same government that can “register” Muslims in the name of security can register gun owners—and for the same reason. He hopes you don’t realize that lists of all Muslims go in the same file as lists of, say, anti-same-sex-marriage Evangelicals.
And now Trump wants to turn away Muslims from our shores who fought on the front line of the war against jihad. These brave men and women have risked far more for America than he ever well.
And over what? San Bernardino, Chattanooga, and Ft. Hood? Is our love of liberty so faint? Is our cowardice so craven? Will we let the deaths of a few Americans at the hands of terrorists scare us into submission?
As Sami Kazikhani demonstrated, defending liberty when it’s under fire takes courage. Obama refuses to admit our values are under attack, while Trump wants to abandon them out of fear.
