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| by Leila Yazdani: Over the past four years, the Trump’s administration has used widespread violence against Muslims domestically and abroad. From banning Muslims to endless wars in the Middle East, Muslim communities have been attacked in a variety of ways — including through rhetoric and harmful policies that separate Muslims for different treatment. While there have been many legal and political challenges to his policies and speeches.
Trump is an Islamophobic bigot and, spent much of his presidency pushing anti-Muslim policies. Upon taking office, Trump is using words to spread hatred. And deranged, unwell people have allegedly been inspired by those words to target the very people that Trump targets in his speeches and his tweets. Moreover, he surrounded himself with anti-Muslim bigots, Washingtonpost told. Appointments were part of a deliberate strategy of handing people with extreme anti-Muslim beliefs the levers of government power. Donald Trump rode a wave of bigotry into the White House and continued to spew anti-Muslim rhetoric, and put policies in place that discriminate against Muslim community.
In this era, Muslim communities have come under attack in a variety ways. Here’s just a few of them:
First, the Muslim Bans
Perhaps most famously, Trump began his presidency by fulfilling his campaign promise calling for the “complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” In fact, Trump’s travel ban was only the tip of the iceberg. His election resulted in an increase in anti-Muslim legislation initiatives not only federally, but also across more than 30 states and municipalities.
Riding this renewed wave of anti-Islamic, anti-immigrant sentiment, seven U.S. states passed “Andy’s Laws,” which allow Muslim businesses, houses of worship and religious leaders to be dragged into lawsuits relating to terrorism. After four years of anti-Muslim hostility, American Muslims are also affected by police brutality, racial inequity, lack of safety for essential workers during COVID-19, housing unaffordability, financial exclusion and lack of access to adequate health care, Crosscut mentioned.
Second, Rebranding ”Extremist” as “Islamic”
Trump’s Islamophobia didn’t stop or start with the Muslim Bans. Early in his administration, there were indications that Trump intended to rename the Countering Violent Extremism program to Countering Islamic Extremism — thus excluding white extremists and solidifying the “Muslim threat.”
Third, Brutal Wars Abroad
In all over the World, Muslims have fared no better. Not only did Trump increase the use of drones by fivefold over the already prolific Obama administration, he also dropped the “Mother of All Bombs” — the most powerful non-nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal — in Afghanistan, according to ips-dc.org.
He’s also indefinitely extended the conflict in Afghanistan, already the U.S.’s longest running war — and one based the conflation of the Taliban with Al-Qaeda. Elsewhere, the Trump administration continues to enable the Saudi government’s relentless airstrikes against Yemen, precipitating perhaps the worst humanitarian crisis on earth. That war is being facilitated by the most massive arms deal in American history, a sale of some $350 billion worth of U.S. arms to Saudi Arabia.
Denial of Palestinian’s basic human rights in contravention of international law
Donald Trump generally focused on making concessions to Israel’s ultra-nationalist government, weakening the Palestinians, and pressuring Arab states to end regional isolation of Israel.
Early in his term, Trump recognised Israel’s claim to the divided city of Bayt Al-Muqaddas and moved the US embassy there, taking a clear side in one of the most contentious issues in the Middle East. Then, Washington went even further by releasing a “vision for peace” that afforded Israel’s government the majority of its territorial demands by recognising vast swathes of the Palestinian territories as part of Israel. Trump has also recognised Israel’s claim to the Golan Heights – an area Israeli forces captured from Syria and that the country still claims sovereignty over, according to The Guardian.
In this framework, Trump has cut hundreds of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid that had gone to some of the neediest Palestinians. At the same time, he has isolated their leadership – for example, by shutting down Palestinian diplomatic offices in Washington. Moreover, US president hosted “peace deals” at the White House this summer between Israel, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. In Trump’s final years in office, Israel has been emboldened in its efforts to entrench the occupation.
Trump contributed to making Yemen into the largest humanitarian crisis
There can be no doubt that Trump has contributed to making Yemen into what Human Rights Watch has described as the largest humanitarian crisis in the world. After more than five years of war, millions find themselves on the brink of starvation in what was already one of the world’s poorest countries. Trump has been glad to oversee the intensification of this crisis, bombing and carrying out raids in the country periodically, as well as arming foreign states like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to aid in their own campaigns.
In Trump’s final days in office, US has announced it will designate Yemen’s Houthi a terrorist organisation, a move aid groups and diplomats have long warned will make getting assistance to people stuck in the “world’s worst humanitarian crisis” even harder. The sanctions will hamstring the ability of aid agencies to respond, and without additional safeguards and broader exemptions for the commercial sector, Yemen’s faltering economy will be dealt a further devastating blow, thenewhumanitarian.org reported.
A new report released by the independent monitoring group Airwars gives a clearer picture of the Trump administration’s devastating impact on Yemen. Called “Eroding Transparency: US counterterrorism actions in Yemen under President Donald Trump,” the report paints a picture of a war brutally waged over the past four years while quietly being nudged away from public attention. Trump administration’s bloody footprint in Yemen is just one example of how it has continued and even intensified the brutal legacy of U.S. foreign policy throughout the Middle East.
Trump’s ‘Maximum Pressure’ Campaign threatens the health rights of Iranians
Trump pursued a policy of siege warfare against the population of Iran as that country grapples with one of the worst virus outbreaks on the planet, denying civilians access to vital supplies as its health system comes under strain, Theintercept told.
Washington’s sanctions against Tehran have drastically constrained its ability to pay for humanitarian imports and are threatening the health rights of Iranians, Human Rights Watch said. Trump administration officials claim they stand with the Iranian people, but the overbroad and burdensome US sanctions regime is harming Iranian’s right to health, including access to live-saving medicines.
Trump has played role of both arsonist and fireman in Syria
Nearly a decade into a conflict defined by mass carnage and war crimes, Syria is suffering through what may be the worst humanitarian crisis in its blood-soaked civil war. Millions of people have fled Syria and millions more have been internally displaced. Trump has played the role of both arsonist and fireman.
The United States became directly involved in Syria early in the civil war. Complete, irreversible destruction of ISIS was ever a US objective, it was a profoundly unwise one. ISIS represents an ideology that cannot be completely extinguished by the application of military force. The focus then was on undermining the Bashar Al‐Assad administration by providing aid to various violent opposition groups, cato.org mentioned.
As conditions changed, the Trump administration adopted new objectives to justify a continued, and perhaps indefinite, US military presence there. The number of missions the US military has been tasked with in Syria have proliferated in recent years. It went from defeating ISIS to securing oil fields, protecting the Kurds, pushing back against Russian and Iranian influence in the country, serving as a buffer to protect Israel from regional enemies, and helping usher in a post‐Assad Syria.
Undermining the Assad administration and creating a power vacuum in significant portions of the country was probably the best way to generate more instability and enliven a dangerous rebellion, yet Trump continued to gently pursue this policy. Another sensitive issue is related to Syrians is that Trump’s response to this global humanitarian crisis was to restrict the entry of refugees to the United States. Furthermore, he violated international law by imposing restrictions on asylum seekers.
Intra-Afghan dialogue is not really making progress and the violence has intensified
Technically, the agreement the US struck with the Taliban and the joint US-Afghan declaration on a roadmap for a peace deal call for a full withdrawal of American forces by May 2021. At the moment, though, conditions on the ground are far from optimal. Rising insecurity, aggressive Taliban attacks on civilians and targeted assassinations show that Trump’s dreams of laying claim to a gold-plated “mission accomplished” plaque before he leaves office are just as fantastical as his unfounded claims about fraudulent American elections.
Delays in intra-Afghan negotiations between the government of Afghanistan and the Taliban, combined with horrific attacks by the Islamic State (such as the recent one at Kabul University) and the Taliban’s nationwide campaign, have diminished hopes that the talks will lead to reductions in violence and suffering of the Afghan people.
Trump declined to condemn India’s controversial new citizenship law
Trump declined to condemn India’s controversial new citizenship law, which discriminates against Muslims. Throughout his two-day visit to India, Donald Trump heaped praise on the nation’s leader, Narendra Modi, and ignored a spasm of violence against Muslims unfolding on the streets of the Indian capital, New Delhi, prompted by the Indian prime minister’s sectarian policies , Theintercept told.
Trump nevertheless hailed Modi as a champion of “religious freedom.” Amnesty International USA’s executive director, said in the statement. “For decades, the US-India relationship was anchored by claims of shared values of human rights and human dignity. Now, those shared values are discrimination, bigotry, and hostility towards refugees and asylum seekers.” It was referring to the Citizenship Amendment Act approved by Parliament on December 11 and Trump’s travel ban that targets prospective immigrants from countries that have Muslim-majority populations.
Forth, Extreme and Violent Rhetoric
On a more mundane level, Trump’s rhetoric about and towards Muslims has been extremely and consistently violent. Trump employed various discursive techniques to represent Islam and Muslims in a negative manner. To legitimatize his arguments, he deployed several rhetoric strategies, including victimization, presupposition, authority, number game, evidentiality, polarization, and populism.
Keeping the religious and economic context in view, Donald Trump has represented Islam and Muslims as a negative phenomenon and presented himself as an Islamophobe by negatively targeting Islamic components. In his prejudicial representation of Islam, most of the Islamic beliefs are represented as anti-women and anti-American, threatening the security of America and its very way of life, Mdpi reported. Moreover, Trump has continued to flame the fires of Islamophobia by, for example, tweeting anti-Muslim videos out from right-wing group in the UK called Britain First.
