Commentators this week decided that Donald Trump’s call for a ban on Muslims entering the U.S. is a message that will help the Islamic State achieve its goals.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was the latest to make that charge against Trump on Wednesday.
“Trump, by alienating the Muslim world with his call for a ban on Muslims entering America, is acting as the Islamic State’s secret agent,” Friedman said. “ISIS [an alternate name for the Islamic State] wants every Muslim in America (and Europe) to feel alienated. If that happens, ISIS won’t need to recruit anyone. People will will just act on their own.”
Trump called for the ban on Monday in response to two recent terrorist attacks, one by the Islamic State in Paris and another by a married man and woman in California who authorities believe were inspired by the group.
“It feeds into the extremist ideology,” said author and commentator Harris Zafar on CNN Tuesday, “which is why I’m beginning to wonder if Mr. Trump is in cahoots and in filiation with ISIS because everything he says is fodder for the recruitment that they use in their videos to try to prove to Muslims that America is against Muslims. They’re vilifying Muslims and you should join us to get retribution.”
Kathleen Parker, conservative columnist for the Washington Post, said that if Trump were elected president, he would be “the most dangerous man on the planet.”
“[O]ur best defense against radicalization of Muslim-Americans is inclusiveness,” Parker wrote Tuesday. “By marginalizing our own Muslim community through rhetoric, we vastly increase the risk of radicalization and recruitment.”
Her Post colleague Ruth Marcus, a liberal, wrote also on Tuesday that Trump “presents a clearer, more present danger to U.S. interests than the supposedly threatening Muslims he seeks to exclude. He is a one-man recruiting tool for the Islamic State.”
USA Today’s editorial board does not make presidential endorsements, but on Monday, the paper said that Trump “belongs nowhere near the White House” and that his proposed ban shows he “apparently doesn’t care about turning himself into a threat to national security.”
It’s unclear if Trump’s latest incendiary comments about Muslims will affect him in the polls, which consistently show him leading the GOP field despite other controversial statements he has made related to immigration and radical Islam.
The Trump campaign declined to comment for this story.
