By Alleyn Diesel
The attack on the Berlin Christmas market on December 19 fuelled the racist xenophobic rantings of president-elect Donald Trump, and his vow to ban entry of Muslims into the US, reinstituting a Bush-era registry, enabling the tracking of Muslims in the country.
This authoritarian, bigoted scheme assumes that all terrorists are Muslim, and that all Muslims are potentially terrorists, resulting from the conviction that Islam is inherently violent.
The dangers of such assertions, eagerly taken up by those seeking scapegoats for the perceived ills of society, is to encourage witch-hunts, tracking down and persecuting Muslims suspected of some ill-defined threat to security – ominously reminiscent of the yellow star in 1930s Germany.
We must remember that extremist Christians have killed doctors and nurses working at abortion clinics, bombed churches and schools expressing views differing from their own, attacked offices of critical publications – acts of terror denying others their free exercise of religion and speech.
Categories: Islam, Religion, The Muslim Times