As the dead and wounded still lay in the streets of London after the jihad rampage Saturday night, CNN’s Reza Aslan identified the problem in no uncertain terms: President Trump.
With the news breaking worldwide that Islamic jihadis murdered seven people and critically injuring at least 21 more, Trump had tweeted:
We need to be smart, vigilant and tough. We need the courts to give us back our rights. R need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety!
In response, Aslan tweeted:
This piece of s*** is not just an embarrassment to America and a stain on the presidency. He’s an embarrassment to humankind.
Reza Aslan has never used such strong language about jihad terrorists, such as the ones who struck in London on Saturday night. Apparently, as far as he is concerned, Trump is much worse — indeed, so much worse that I, as a human being (although Reza may accord me the title only reluctantly), should feel embarrassed at his statement.
Unfortunately, Reza didn’t bother to explain why Trump is such an embarrassment to the United States and humanity at large. Is Reza against being “smart, vigilant and tough”? He is certainly against Trump’s travel ban, and found it particularly offensive that Trump brought it up in connection with the London jihad attacks.
On Monday afternoon, the British government identified two of the jihadis; one was from Pakistan and the other from Morocco or Libya. Only Libya is among the countries covered by Trump’s temporary moratorium on immigration, but that was besides the point: Trump tweeted about the ban before the identities of the jihadis were known, and the point he was making did not hinge on their identities or ethnicities.
What Trump was implying by tweeting about the travel ban in connection with the London jihad massacre is most likely what drove Reza Aslan around the bend: that jihad terror in the West has been enabled by the large-scale immigration of Muslims in the United States. Even if the attackers had turned out to be British converts to Islam, they were likely converted by immigrants. If Britain, and the West in general, ever want to get serious about forever ending the possibility of innocent civilians being massacred by jihadis while out at concerts or taking an evening stroll, authorities will have to restrict that immigration.
In the last court-ordered block on Trump’s travel ban, Judge Roger Gregory wrote of Trump’s executive order:
[It] speaks with vague words of national security, but in context drips with religious intolerance, animus, and discrimination.
This was Leftist cant, not legal analysis. In reality, the stated reason, and the only reason, for Trump’s executive orders ordering travel bans was national security.
Leftists generally deny that there is any connection between Islam and terror; recall Hillary Clinton’s infamous reality-challenged tweet:
Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.
Similarly, on the night of the London jihad attacks a Muslim leader in Britain, Mohammed Shafiq, tweeted:
Real Muslim Were fasting and praying in Mosque tonight not killing innocent people. We will not give in to terrorism. #londonBridge
That is the prevailing view on the Left. Apparently Shafiq and Reza Aslan believe that if a Muslim stabs someone while saying “This is for Allah” or “This is for Islam,” as the London attackers did, by virtue of doing that he immediately ceases to be a Muslim. And so President Trump, when he makes clear his preference for inconveniencing some Muslims who are harmless by preventing them from entering the U.S., rather than allowing some Muslims who are harmful to enter the country (and those, in the final analysis, are really the only two choices), is committing an unpardonable sin.
Trump is acknowledging the manifest, obvious, but absolutely forbidden fact that jihad terror is something that comes from Muslims. Therefore, for Reza Aslan, he is a “piece of s***” and an “embarrassment to humankind.”
Trump is upsetting the established order, which involves an indefatigable denial that Islam has anything to do with terrorism (that was, after all, the official policy of the Obama administration). Aslan would apparently prefer that Americans get killed in jihad attacks, as they were killed in London on Saturday night, than that anything be done to prevent such attacks if those preventative measures involve identifying the perpetrators of such attacks as Muslims.
For Reza Aslan, death is better than political incorrectness. He is the one who is an embarrassment to humankind.
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