Scott Walker: US Presidential candidate for the Republican party
By of the Journal Sentinel
A coalition of interfaith leaders is calling on Gov. Scott Walker to clarify his recent remarks implying most Muslims are extremists, saying such incendiary rhetoric endangers American Muslims in Wisconsin and across the country.
About 30 religious leaders — Muslims, Christians, Jews and others — have signed onto an open letter sent Friday by the president of Wisconsin’s largest Islamic organization to the governor and presidential candidate.
In it, Ahmed Quereshi, who heads the Islamic Society of Milwaukee, cites FBI intelligence suggesting that homegrown “militia extremists are expanding their target sets to include Muslims and Islamic religious institutions in the United States.”
Quereshi said Walker’s failure to personally clarify his statement effectively fuels “a new kind of McCarthyism” that singles out followers of Islam.
“As you know, there is an ‘Islamophobia industry’ in this country that seeks to vilify all Muslims and their faith, Islam,” said Quereshi.
“Allowing your statement to stand ‘on the record’ without a personal and direct correction by you poses a safety risk to the lives and property of American Muslims, including residents of the State of Wisconsin and their places of worship,” he said.
Walker drew criticism last month when he asserted during a campaign stop in New Hampshire that there are a “handful of reasonable and moderate followers of Islam.”
In an email to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel over the weekend, Walker’s campaign staff reiterated spokeswoman AshLee Strong’s August comments clarifying the candidate’s remarks.
“The Governor knows that the majority of ISIS’s victims are Muslims,” Strong said at the time. “Muslims who want to live in peace — the majority of Muslims — are the first target of radical Islamic terrorists. Under the Obama-Clinton foreign policy doctrine, we’ve been abandoning our traditional Muslim allies in the Middle East and allowing ISIS, al Qaeda, and Iran to fill the void,” she went on to say.
Walker’s campaign staff did not say whether he intended to apologize or to address the issue himself.
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