We’re already used with Donald Trump surprising declarations, but the latest really managed to stir up the media and the public attention, as the Republican candidate declared that it would be a good idea to block Muslims from entering the United States, according to The New York Times.
It wouldn’t be a first, Trump claims
The measure would be taken as a temporary move in response to the recent San Bernardino shooting, considered a terrorist attack, but Trump also went back in history, invoking President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s actions, towards Japanese, German and Italian citizens, during World War II, as a precedent.
“Paris is no longer the same city it was,” he said. “They have sections in Paris that are radicalized where the police refuse to go there. They’re petrified. The police refuse to go in there. We have places in London and other places that are so radicalized that the police are afraid for their own lives.”
Like mentioned above, in order to sustain his idea of forbidding Muslims’ access to the United States, Donald Trump invoked Roosevelt’s classification of thousands of Japanese, Italians and Germans living in the United States during WW2 as ‘enemy aliens’. He claimed that he’s not sustaining such a drastic idea as the Japanese interment camps, but he wanted to emphasize the fact that there’s a precedent in authorizing government detainment aliens. It’s very curious to see how many people will start comparing this idea to what Hitler did during the Holocaust, though.
“This is a president highly respected by all; he did the same thing,” Mr. Trump said. As the nation was at war in the 1940s, he said, it is now “at war with radical Islam.”
U.S. citizens shouldn’t worry about this
Still, Donald Trump wanted to mention that his proposal wouldn’t apply to U.S. citizens. “If a person is a Muslim, goes overseas and comes back, they can come back,” he said. “They’re a citizen. That’s different.But we have to figure things out.”
Donald Trump is currently leading the Republican race for the White House in polls, but his opinion isn’t shared by fellow party members or Democrats, many of them responding in to his proposition in a negative way.
The reactions didn’t cease to come
Jeb Bush, for example, expressed his disapproval, while Senator Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, called the Republican a “Xenophobic, race baiting, religious bigot.” Also, his remarks went global, as in London, one of Prime Minister David Cameron’s spokeswomen called them “divisive”, as stated by The New York Times. French Prime Minister Manuel Valls also reacted, posting on Twitter that Donald Trump is using a language that “stokes hatred: our ONLY enemy is radical Islam.”
Still, despite these opinions, Donald Trump insists that this worldwide fear of terrorism made policing difficult in places like London and Paris, the latter being the latest target of an ISIS attack, on November 13, killing 130 people.
