New York State lawmakers belonging to Democratic Party have launched a campaign to have Donald Trump's name removed from a 435-acre park in Westchester and Putnam Counties in New York. This is to protest Trump's proposal to ban Muslim immigrants from the US. State Sen. Daniel L. Squadron, who is spearheading the campaign, says Trump has shown that “he is unworthy of having a New York State Park named in his honor.”
Unfortunately, ever-increasing numbers of white Americans think the billionaire politician is worthy of being the leader of the world's sole superpower. Trump is the leading Republican contender for president, with the crowds at his speeches building as days pass by.
When Trump announced his candidacy on June 16, he was dismissed as a “belligerent, loudmouthed racist.” But his popularity among Republicans has been rising steadily though everything he says in his campaign stops and appearances is said to be against America's core values. According to the results of a recent Monmouth University poll, surveying voters identifying as Republican or independents leaning toward the GOP, Trump earned 41 percent, nearly tripling the support of his closest rival, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who took 14 percent.
This surge in his popularity follows a controversial proposal about Muslims he made after a terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California on Dec. 2. Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”
During the 9/11 attacks, “thousands and thousands” of people in an unnamed “Arab” community in New Jersey, he claimed, “were cheering as that building was coming down.”
Muslims are not the only object of his venom. He continues to make inflammatory comments about African-Americans who he thinks are responsible for most white homicides, women and Mexican immigrants. He has vowed to build a 2,000-mile-long wall to stop Mexico from “sending people that have lots of problems.” Mexicans, he said, “are bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
Politicians the world over have targeted minorities, foreigners or women, especially during economic crisis or national emergencies. Thousands of Japanese Americans were displaced from their homes, jobs and livelihoods during the World War II-era internment. During much of the 20th century, there was a de facto ban on Catholic immigration to US and in the late 19th century a bar on Chinese. The Sept. 11 attacks and the war on terror have only reinforced this American tendency of treating the weak and outsiders viciously in supposedly frightening times and Trump is exploiting this to his advantage.
In his criticism of Trump's rhetoric, President Barack Obama says that this "is not who we are as Americans."
But unfortunately, crude demonization of Muslims has been going on unhampered ever since the Sept. 11 attacks. During the last presidential race, Newt Gingrich, right, who was the 50th speaker of the US House of Representatives, compared Muslim Americans to Nazis, insisting that they must be trying to infiltrate the US just as the Germans tried to do during World War II.
That is why many people in and outside America think that what Trump is doing is nothing but make explicit something a large number of ordinary Americans believe in. If anything, some of the official policies and actions have only reinforced their view. For example, thousands of Muslims have already been rounded up within the United States and deported. Every mosque in New York City has been placed under surveillance. Some 1.2 million people are on the terrorism watch list.
Even those who criticize Trump do so not on moral grounds but only because they fear that what he says might adversely affect America's diplomatic and commercial ties with Arab/Muslim countries.
People like Daniel L. Squadron should realize that the problem of Islamophobia in US is much deeper than can be cured by simply removing Trump's name from an undeveloped, languishing state park.
