10 December 2015 - Outrage as Donald Trump calls for Muslim ban

Utterly repellent and malignant: world reacts to Trump's anti-Muslim tirade
Joanna Walters (The Guardian, 08/12/2015)

Donald Trump’s call for a sweeping ban on Muslims entering the United States prompted howls of protest around the world from national leaders to ordinary citizens – even provoking calls for him to be banned from Britain.
Prominent politicians make a general habit of not interjecting with partisan comments during other countries’ election cycles. But Trump’s enduring frontrunner status in the run-up to the start of Republican primary voting, and the escalation in his inflammatory remarks, persuaded some to break cover.
Britain’s conservative prime minister David Cameron said in a statement that he “completely disagrees” with Trump’s comments and regards them as “divisive, unhelpful and quite simply wrong”.

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#You Ain’t No American, Bro
Thomas L. Friedman (The New York Times, 09/12/2015)
Two weeks ago, I was in Kuwait participating in an I.M.F. seminar for Arab educators. For 30 minutes, we discussed the impact of technology trends on education in the Middle East. And then an Egyptian education official raised his hand and asked if he could ask me a personal question: “I heard Donald Trump say we need to close mosques in the United States,” he said with great sorrow. “Is that what we want our kids to learn?”
I tried to assure him that Trump would not be our next president — that America’s commitment to pluralism runs deep. But the encounter was a bracing reminder that what starts in Iowa shows up in Kuwait five minutes later. 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. ISIS 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. ISIS and Islamic extremism are Muslim problems that can only be fixed by Muslims. Lumping all Muslims together as our enemies will only make that challenge harder.
But if Trump is wrong, is President Obama right? Partly. He’s right that the only way you can sustainably defeat ISIS is with a coalition. We need moderate Sunni Muslim forces to go house to house against ISIS in Iraq. We need Sunni spiritual leaders to go heart to heart and delegitimize the ISIS message everywhere. And we need Iran to make clear it supports an equitable power-sharing agreement in Iraq between Sunnis and Shiites, so moderate Sunni Arabs will fight ISIS rather than seeing it as their shield against Iran.
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Donald Trump Is Now America’s Marine Le Pen
John Cassidy (The New Yorker, 07/12/2015)
On Saturday, Donald Trump took his rabble-rousing Presidential campaign to Davenport, Iowa, and, naturally enough, he addressed the attack that took place in San Bernardino on Wednesday, and the fact that the two perpetrators appear to have been inspired by the Islamic State. “That shit is not going to happen any more,” Trump told a cheering crowd. “We’re going to be so vigilant. We’re going to be so careful. We’re going to be so tough and so mean and so nasty.”
Just how mean and nasty? Trump didn’t say. He did, though, point out that his support has grown since last month’s terror attack in Paris—a fact confirmed by a new poll, released on Friday, by CNN, that shows him more than twenty points ahead of his nearest Republican rival, Ben Carson. “Every time things get worse, I do better,” Trump said. “People want strength.”
That might be true, but the number of people who respond positively to the windy brand of toughness that Trump is offering shouldn’t be overestimated. About forty per cent of voting-age Americans identify themselves as Republicans or leaning Republican, and the latest polls show him garnering about thirty per cent of their support. This suggests that perhaps twelve per cent of the American electorate can be counted as members of the round-’em-up/put-’em-on-a-watch-list/send-’em-back brigade. (It should be noted, however, that the poll was carried out before the attack in San Bernardino.)
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