“Rightist governments in Hungary and Poland are already cheering Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric” warns Washington Post editor Jackson Diehl; “the more moderate of the two leading candidates to become France’s next president, François Fillon, authored a book titled Conquering Islamic Totalitarianism. Even Germany’s Angela Merkel, the most prominent remaining defender of liberal democratic values, felt obliged to strike an anti-Islamic pose last week, proposing a crackdown on the minuscule number of German women who wear a burqa.”‘
President-elect Donald Trump’s national security adviserappointee, retired General Flynn, calls Islam a political movement masquerading as a religion and the product of an inferior culture: “I don’t believe that all cultures are morally equivalent, and I think the West, and especially America, is far more civilized, far more ethical and moral.” Chief strategist and senior counselor Steve Bannon suggests that people living in the U.S. “all hold hands and sing ‘Kumbaya’ around capitalism.”
Diehl expects Trump’s crusade-against-Islam team to continue ongoing offensives against the Islamic State in Iraq, Syria and Libya. But the immediate consequence of an American war of terror will be experienced by average citizens across the Muslim world. “They will see it in the ‘extreme vetting’, if not an outright ban, they will be subjected to in seeking to enter the United States. And they will feel it in the ramping up of U.S. support for dictators and monarchs who are judged by Trump to be tactical allies in the civilizational war.”
“‘Deus Vult’ — or ‘God wills it’ or ‘it is the will of God’ — has become a kind of far-right code word,” writes reporter Ishaan Tharoor of the hashtags proliferating around fascist social media. “Whatever his own beliefs, Trump will arrive in the White House with the backing of myriad people crying out for a holy war.”
We don’t have to accept this. Cultural critic Edward Wadie Said rebuked political scientist Samuel P. Huntington’s hypothesis on the ‘clash of civilizations’ in a 2001 article, calling the theory an example of “the purest invidious racism, a sort of parody of Hitlerian science directed today against Arabs and Muslims.” Massive mobilization can create political conditions which stop a Trump regime in its tracks.
Answer the Call to Refuse Fascism: On MLK weekend, there needs to be massive demonstrations of many thousands in key cities, including Washington, D.C., that grow to millions over the next week, protests that don’t stop . . . where people refuse to leave and more and more people stand up with conviction and courage demanding:
NO! We Refuse to Accept a Fascist America!