Posted on 03/22/2016 2:16:17 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
In one simple sentence, Ted Cruz just advocated an American apartheid of Muslims in our country.
"We need to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized," the Texas senator said in a statement Tuesday, as news of the Brussels attack came out.
Sen. Ted Cruz's call to patrol Muslim American neighborhoods after the Brussels attacks is ridiculous and dangerous.
It is despicable.
It is xenophobic.
It is ridiculous.
It is dangerous.
To be clear, the attacks in Brussels earlier today were terrible. I say that without the slightest equivocation. ISIS has taken responsibility for the attacks. However, to make the illogical leap from ISIS inspiring or formulating an attack in Belgium to encouraging American law enforcement to "patrol and secure" Muslim neighborhoods in America is supremely ignorant.
It may have rolled off of Cruz's tongue very easily -- bigotry often works that way -- but what his statement implies, practically speaking, is an undue suspicion of imminent criminality and danger from millions and millions of Americans solely based on their faith.
American Muslims had nothing to do with the attack in Brussels.
American Muslims had nothing to do with the attack in Paris.
What we have here, though, are a billion people being held responsible for the actions of the tiniest minority of people who claim to represent the Muslim faith.
Dylann Roof, the white supremacist in Charleston who shot and killed nine African- Americans in a Bible study, was a baptized Christian. Does he represent the Christian faith?
Robert Lewis Dear, who shot and killed three people in the Colorado Planned Parenthood attack, was a "devout Christian" who "read the Bible from cover to cover." Should we begin patrolling Christian neighborhoods?
How about Eric Rudolph -- the Olympic Park bomber, who also set off bombs at health clinics -- killing two and injuring more than 120 people? He was very much a Christian fundamentalist. Shouldn't we make haste to secure our country from men like him?
Is Ted Cruz really interested in making our country safe or is he trying to win over an easily frightened electorate?
Why hasn't he mentioned all of the police officers killed by white men this year? If just one single officer had been killed by a Syrian refugee Ted Cruz would speak about it every other hour. White men? Not so much.
It's clearly easy for people like Ted Cruz to lump groups of people together when they don't actually belong to those groups, but what we're seeing here isn't just inconvenient, it's dangerous.
When a man who is one of the leading Republican candidates for President suggests before the nation that millions of Americans need an extra level of surveillance, he opens them up to harassment, ridicule, and even violent vigilantism. American Muslims do not deserve this.
Quite the contrary -- our Muslim sisters and brothers are among the most influential liberal and moderate Muslims in the world. Beyond the obvious fact that we are talking about American citizens here, we are talking about people who love this country, work hard for it, and have the ability to be a positive inspiration for their faith throughout the world.
What does Ted Cruz even mean when he suggests this extra level of surveillance? What does it mean to "patrol and secure" Muslim neighborhoods? From what? How? Where?
Again, this bigoted rhetoric may appeal to his conservative base, but when pushed to explain what such a thing looks like, it resembles South African apartheid. Are Muslim Americans going to have to go through checkpoints to get into their neighborhoods? Will they have curfews? Will their homes be bugged and monitored?
This is very much like what Donald Trump has suggested when he said he would "round up" over 400,000 undocumented immigrants every single month for 24 straight months until all 11 million undocumented immigrants are no longer in our country.
His supporters love how this sounds, but the logistics behind such an enterprise are Nazi-level ugliness.
I wish I could say, "But oh, that's Ted Cruz, the crazy Republican from Texas," but that's not really what we're saying. This man has won primaries in multiple states. He is now seen by the Republican establishment as the better alternative to Donald Trump.
It's no longer good enough to laugh this off. We are going off the deep end and some of America's most vulnerable citizens are already paying the price.
Ah wannabe black boy is now a wanna be Muslim
What?
To police Muslim neighborhoods is anti-apartheid. Because it leads to integration.
What is not acceptable is the current liberal apartheid policies of avoiding integration, encouraging segregation, encouraging no-go areas for the police or other citizens, and allowing self-rule and imposition of Sharia law in those communities. That is insane.
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