"Donald J Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on." - Donald Trump (Washington Times)
Donald Trump has the media buzzing once again because of his proposed plans to temporarily ban Muslims from entering into the country. The backlash from media outlets and organizations has called Trump a racist, a bigot, and even compared him to Hitler. Trump isn’t wrong in saying that we need to do something about the radicalization of Muslims, but you can’t stoop to the level of the terrorists with an equally radical idea like this. It is everything that America does not stand for.
First of all, how do you even ban a religion? For many people the word Muslim has become synonymous with, ‘those brown people in the Middle East’. Muslim people are simply just followers of the Islamic religion; Muslims aren’t a race or an ethnicity. Religion is as colorless as the pages of its religious text. Islam is the majority religion in the Middle East, but there’s also atheism, Judaism, and Christianity. How exactly do you screen someone for their religious beliefs if they are trying to hide them?
The NSA can run background checks on foreign individuals, which is an invasive necessity, but there’s always many who slip through the cracks in that process. Donald Trump realizes this fault and has reacted in the most extreme way; he advocates a complete ban of foreign Muslims in the country. If you could just kick all of the Muslim’s out of the country and keep them out, then yeah, it would keep us safe from ISIS (but not terrorists in general).
This country is founded on personal freedoms, and the stripping of the freedoms of the majority, the faults of the minority is un-American and un-Constitutional. This is coming from a man whose proposal to solve the problem of illegal Mexican immigration is to just build a wall. Prohibition didn’t work when they banned alcohol, it isn’t working with the war on drugs, and the banning of an ideology definitely isn’t going to work.
“If your very own brother, or your son or daughter, or the wife you love, or your closest friend secretly entices you, saying, ‘Let us go and worship other gods’, do not yield to them or listen to them. Show them no pity. Do not spare them or shield them. You must certainly put them to death.”
The fact of the matter is, that it isn’t the religious text that causes the radicalization of the individual – but rather it is the environment and mental health of the interpreter of the text. The previous quote might sound like it’s from the Quran (due to the content in the article and Muslim’s infamy for terrorism), but it’s actually from Deuteronomy in the Christian Bible. Two lines after the quote is this line, “Stone them to death, because they tried to turn you away from the Lord your God”.(Deuteronomy 13:6-10)
We don’t need to ban Muslim people from the country because ISIS exists, just like we didn’t need to ban Christians from the country when the KKK was lynching African Americans and Jews in the streets. Even if there was some magic button you could press to wipe out all religious beliefs and texts, these people would just find other excuses to justify their horrid actions.
Donald Trump is a smart man; he’s likely aware of everything I’ve typed in this article. However, he is playing off of the post-911, Islamophobic, and fear driven society that we live in to gain more public notoriety and media coverage. Trump thinks that, “A Nation without Borders is not a nation” (see wall hyperlink), but we can’t just close ourselves off from the rest of the world because it’s scary. We need to continue to help other nations that are in need, fight only the religious groups that are radicalized, and combat this state of fear that Trump is using with education.
