Loading ...Clinton, Trump spar over Islamophobia, Syrian refugees
Todd Spangler
Detroit Free Press
Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton criticized Republican Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric on Sunday night, saying it’s been used to undermine coalition efforts to fight the Islamic State.
Speaking at the second presidential debate in St. Louis, Clinton, the former secretary of state, said Trump’s remarks have some coalition partners “wondering why we should cooperate with the Americans.”
Clinton also criticized Trump’s past suggestions that Muslim immigration be curtailed, asking: “Are we going to have religious tests when people fly into the country?” Michigan has resettled nearly 1,400 refugees from the Syrian civil war in the last year — more than any state other than California.
The back-and-forth came as Trump was asked by an audience member at the town hall-style debate what he would do to battle anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S.
Rather than answer the question, however, Trump said Islamophobia is “a shame,” and then went on to say Muslims in America must do more to report potential terror.
Muslim-American organizations — including those in metro Detroit’s large Arab-American community — have worked extensively with law enforcement and denounced acts of violence committed in the name of Islam.
“We are not at war with Islam,” said Clinton, saying Muslim-majority nations in the Middle East are key to the coalition of nations fighting the so-called Islamic State, otherwise known as ISIS or ISIL.
Trump was then asked about earlier statements to stop Muslims from immigrating into the U.S.
While he had moved off those remarks somewhat in recent months, he seemed ready to defend them again Sunday while calling for a system of “extreme vetting” to determine who can seek refuge in the U.S.
Trump has said such a system is needed to ensure that potential terrorists are not resettled in the U.S. and reiterated — correctly — that Clinton wants to increase the resettlement of Syrian refugees by 550%.
“This is going to be the Trojan horse of all time,” Trump said. “I don’t want to see hundreds of thousands of people from Syria coming in when we know nothing about them.”
But while Trump’s calculation is correct — Clinton has called for increasing the number of refugees from the Syrian civil war resettled in the U.S. from what had been expected to be 10,000 in the last fiscal year to 65,000 this year — it ignores that millions have been displaced by the war there, and nowhere near “hundreds of thousands” have been resettled in the U.S.
While the FBI and other law enforcement organizations have said they can only look into the backgrounds of refugees when documentation is available — as is sometimes not the case in Syria — the White House, Clinton and others have noted repeatedly that vetting of potential refugees is strict and thorough, typically lasting 1 1/2 years or longer.